Descending Son

by Scott Shepherd

  “What was the name of your town?”

  “Santa Alvarado.”

  Shock spread on Jess’s face. His hand darted to his jacket pocket.

  He began to pull out the well-worn picture of the very same Mexican town.

  Then he heard his mother screaming upstairs.

  6

  Kate’s screams echoed through the house as Jess bolted up the stairs. He had just reached the landing when he heard a second person yelling. Only this voice was intelligible—with repeated protestations of “Mom… It’s all right… I’m sorry.” When he burst into his mother’s room, Jess found that Kate was out of bed. She was near the balcony window in a long white nightgown, her entire body shaking. Sarah had her arms wrapped around their mother, trying to calm her down.

  “I’m sorry, Mom.” She gently stroked Kate’s back, thrust into the peculiar position of a child comforting their parent. “I didn’t mean to scare you.”

  “What happened?” asked Jess. Lena came up behind him in the doorway.

  Kate screamed before Sarah could answer.

  “Walter!”

  This prompted another series of “it’s okay” from her daughter and a sinking feeling in Jess’s stomach.

  “She had a nightmare,” Sarah said. “She thought she saw Dad outside on the balcony last night.”

  “That’s ridiculous,” Jess said quickly, suspecting this was more than likely the truth. But he also knew there was a proper time and place for expounding vampire theories, and this didn’t seem to be it, not with his mother hanging on the edge of hysteria. Jess could feel Lena’s eyes boring into the back of his head. He turned around and gave a “not now” stare. Lena took the cue and backed off a step.

  “That’s what I told her,” said Sarah. She turned toward her mother. “Mom, we’re all upset about Dad. I know you’re not sleeping well. Nobody is. You shared a bed with him for over thirty years. I’m not surprised you’d wake up in the middle of the night thinking he was here.”

  Sarah might have been a royal bitch dealing with Jess but she had a way of handling their mother that he could never match. Maybe it was the fact that she was the only girl, or the special love-hate bond that especially exists between mothers and daughters. No matter what came out of Sarah’s mouth, Kate usually took it at face value and didn’t read anything more into it. This bothered Jess to no end growing up, because there was usually a duplicitous side to whatever Sarah would say to her mother, some self-serving need to which Kate would be blind. But this was one of those rare times when Sarah’s only agenda was to make her mother feel better, and Jess was grateful for that.

  “Maybe you’re right,” muttered Kate. She looked at her son and Lena. Her face flushed with embarrassment at standing in the middle of the bedroom in her nightgown. She let Sarah ease her back toward the bed. “I couldn’t fall asleep. I’ve had so much on my mind, so much to take care of.”

  “Of course,” Sarah soothed as she peeled back the sheets and helped her mother get tucked back in.

  Kate pointed at a vial on the nightstand. “I took a couple of the pills that Edward gave me. It took them forever to work. I was just drifting off when I heard this scratching sound.” She pointed toward the balcony. “It was coming from the window. I looked over and that’s when I saw him.”

  “You thought you saw Dad,” Jess said.

  Kate nodded.

  “It was just the pills, Mom,” said Sarah. “Maybe you should only be taking one or we should get Edward to lower the dose.”

  “Perhaps,” Kate replied. She gazed back to the window. “I guess I finally passed out. Then the dreams started.”

  “What kind of dreams?” asked Sarah. Jess didn’t need to be a mind reader to predict his mother’s answer. He knew what lurked in the darkness and would have whispered his mother’s name.

  “I dreamt Walter was alive, that he was stuck outside and had no way of getting in. He kept calling my name but I wouldn’t answer.” She broke off a moment, stifling a sob. “But it didn’t sound like him.”

  “Dreams always mess things up. You know that,” Sarah said. “God knows you’ve been under a ton of stress. Now try and get some rest.”

  “I suppose I should.” Kate leaned back on the pillow and let out a heavy, sad sigh. “It just seemed so real.”

  That’s because it was, thought Jess.

  Jess asked Sarah if they could talk for a few minutes. She said she’d meet him in the living room but wanted to get Kate properly situated first. On the way down the steps, Jess could see that Lena was busting at the seams.

  “I know you’ve got tons of questions, Lena, but I really can’t answer them right now.”

  “I just want to ask one.”

  Jess felt he owed her that, especially after everything she’d downloaded in the kitchen. “What’s that?”

  “Señor Walter? Is he Civatateo?”

  Considering Lena’s stories about the Mexican vampire and what she had just heard firsthand upstairs in his mother’s bedroom, Jess realized it would be hard to offer a flat-out denial.

  “What if I said I don’t know?”

  Lena’s response was to cross herself again.

  “You know how ridiculous this sounds when you say it out loud, don’t you?” asked Jess.

  “But you wouldn’t have asked me about it unless you thought it was happening, no?”

  Lena had him there.

  “Is it true they cannot enter someone’s home unless they are invited in?”

  “That’s what we were always told,” said Lena.

  “You can do me a big favor. Do whatever you can to make sure the family stays in at night. Tell them they can’t open the door and let in anyone they aren’t expecting.”

  Lena nodded and Jess suppressed a smile. He’d love to meet the person who wouldn’t be surprised when their dead father came-a-knocking.

  Sarah was pouring herself a drink when Jess entered the living room. She saw his disapproving look and held up one hand as she took a big sip from a cocktail glass with the other.

  “You get the shit scared out of you by Mom screaming her head off and tell me you wouldn’t want to calm your nerves.”

  Jess refrained from mentioning it wasn’t even noon. He already knew he was going to punch a few of Sarah’s buttons—no sense upsetting her until absolutely necessary. “What happened exactly?”

  “You know how the balcony wraps around the south side of the house, goes past my room, then Mom and Dad’s?”

  “I did grow up here, remember?”

  Sarah chose to gloss over that barb. “I was having a cup of coffee out there. I’d heard from Lena that Mom had a rough night. I was worried about her, so rather than pound on her door or squeak my way in to check, I wandered down the balcony and peeked in the window.”

  “And she saw you.”

  Sarah took another healthy gulp. “She must have thought it was somebody else, because she started screaming bloody murder.”

  “Sounds like she thought you were Dad.”

  “Which makes no sense whatsoever,” Sarah said.

  “Maybe your boyfriend needs to dial back the medication a bit.”

  Sarah slammed the glass down on the table. “Wow. That was what, two minutes? I would’ve thought you’d make a little more small talk before slamming Edward.”

  Consider the buttons pushed. “I’m just voicing concern for Mom.”

  “Yeah, right! After seven years of radio silence, you’re speaking for the family? Just because you’re now the oldest living male doesn’t give you that right!”

  “I never said it did, Sarah.”

  “What do you have against Edward anyway? You never met him before two days ago.”

  “Completely true,” said Jess. “But you have to admit it’s bizarre coming back and finding him so deeply involved with the family.”

  “I love him, Jess. I’d tell you to get used to it, but I don’t expect you to actually stick around.”

  “I migh
t surprise you.”

  “Nothing surprises me about you anymore.”

  “Is this feeling reciprocal between you and the good doctor?”

  Sarah let out a hearty laugh. “Oh my God. You’re going to hate this. You’re starting to talk just like Dad. ‘Is it reciprocal?’ You make it sound like some kind of business contract.”

  “It wasn’t meant like that.”

  “I don’t give a shit. But for your information, the feeling is more than ‘reciprocal.’ Edward has asked me to marry him.”

  Suddenly, Jess felt like he could use a drink.

  “When did this happen?”

  “Last night.”

  Jess could have uttered a protest. He could have lambasted Edward Rice as an opportunist who was after the Stark fortune and saw Sarah as an available and vulnerable meal ticket. But Jess knew that would fall on deaf ears.

  Instead, he offered up his congratulations, which he could see floored his sister. Jess wasn’t going to give her the satisfaction of telling him to go to hell or that they didn’t need his blessing to spend the rest of their lives together.

  Besides, he was too busy thinking about the fact that the doctor proposed to his sister the day after Jess was buried alive.

  In a grave that he was certain Edward Rice had helped dig and thrown Jess in.

  Convenient.

  7

  As Jess drove up the curved driveway to Meadowland, he saw the same gardener fussing with perennials in the courtyard. Once again, the man straightened up and waved at Jess, then bent back down and continued to move plants around. Jess was reminded of the automatons he had seen as a child at Disneyland: Abe Lincoln rising from his chair to deliver the Gettysburg address on the hour or the Pirates repeatedly setting fire to the Caribbean. He wondered if the gardener was similarly programmed—always there day after day, in that exact spot, waving at visitors while he rearranged the same batch of plants. Jess had the odd feeling this warm greeting was meant to ensure welcoming comfort; new arrivals would love it and people wouldn’t feel horrible when they left their loved ones behind to slowly wither and die.

  He parked the SUV in the visitors’ lot and walked toward the main building. The muted yellow pueblo structure proved the perfect backdrop for colorful desert flora and eternal blue skies, but Jess could only focus on the blandness of the walls themselves. Did the patients really appreciate the manicured grounds or did they feel doomed to a tasteful desert prison where they’d eventually just blend in and fade away?

  The staff parking spaces were closest to the entrance and Jess was happy to see Edward Rice was actually working today instead of sneaking in thirty-six holes, or worse yet, lurking around the Stark family. He was headed for the double-glass doors when a female voice called out to him.

  “Mr. Stark?”

  A hefty nurse in tropical pink scrubs stood in the teensy-weensy designated smoking area forty yards off the entrance. Jess would have placed her on either side of fifty but could have been off ten years either way. She had the well-worn look of someone who had spent too many years changing bedpans, shoving wheelchairs, and walking beneath fluorescent lights.

  “Yes?”

  “I just wanted to express my condolences about your father.”

  “Thank you very much. Nurse…?”

  She stubbed out the cigarette in an ashtray and wiped her hand against the scrubs. Then she extended it toward Jess. “Blake. Velma Blake.”

  “Nice to meet you,” Jess said.

  “I took care of your dad while he was here.”

  “Really?” Suddenly Jess was interested and not just answering by rote.

  “I was so hopeful he was going to take a turn for the better when he was discharged. But sometimes they just want to go home and be with their family. If you get my meaning.”

  Jess nodded. “Absolutely.”

  “I heard the dreadful news about how he died. That must have been so awful for you.”

  “It was.”

  He was increasingly impressed by how forthcoming Velma was. “Can I buy you a cup of coffee?” Jess asked.

  The lunch rush was over in the cafeteria; a few staff members were huddled in the back playing cards. Jess bought two cups of coffee and settled down at a table with Velma. He made sure they had isolated themselves out of anyone’s earshot while keeping an eye on the cafeteria entrance. No sense in letting one particular doctor sneak up on them.

  “Thank you,” said Velma. She took the coffee and poured an inordinate amount of sugar into it.

  As Jess doctored his own cup, he thought about how to get as much information as possible. He figured he would start with an element of truth and see what flowed from there.

  “I’m really happy to have run into you. By the time my mother called me back to Palm Springs, my father was really sick. He died the next day and was pretty uncommunicative beforehand.”

  “That’s such a shame.”

  “I didn’t know he’d spent any time convalescing here. I thought he was at home during his entire illness.”

  Velma wiped some sugar granules off her lip and shook her head. “He was here almost two months. He really went up and down. Every time we thought he was improving, he’d go into a tailspin and we’d ship him into the ICU until he was out of the woods.”

  Jess knew one of the great things about Meadowland was its on-property surgery center and small hospital unit between which many long-term residents regretfully spent the last parts of their lives shuttling back and forth.

  “Dr. Rice told me they really never got to the bottom of his disease,” said Jess. And why would he? It was a safe bet turning into a Civatateo wasn’t in any medical text the Meadowland staff would have read. Or in the case of Edward Rice, ever admit to. “Severe anemia, right?”

  “That was the diagnosis. We never found the root cause.”

  “Did you notice my father having a particular aversion to extreme sun or even ordinary daytime?”

  Velma put down her coffee cup and stared at Jess in amazement. “I can’t believe that you just brought that up.”

  “Why’s that?”

  “I was the nurse assigned to your father during the day. I’d come on duty in the early morning and the night shift nurse would tell me how well Mr. Stark had done the night before—how they had long conversations about the history of Palm Springs, how he was just full of vim and vigor. I started to believe she was making it all up because your dad was practically catatonic during the day. He refused to go outside; he said the daylight was actually hurting him. It wasn’t until the other nurse’s car broke down one day and I worked a few hours overtime that I noticed the change come over him.”

  “What kind of change?”

  But he knew what she was going to say. He’d seen the dramatic difference the day his weak father fought being pushed toward the sun off the lanai, and how much like his old self Walter was that same night at his birthday bash. The byproduct of this “disease” was their ultimate confrontation in the desert dawn where Walter fled from the emerging sunlight as it burned through his heavy coat. He couldn’t tell Velma any of that, but he was certainly interested in her perspective.

  “He really rallied when night came around. On that one evening, I talked more to your father than the entire two months I took care of him during the day.” She finished off the coffee. “The strange thing?”

  Oh, if you only knew the real strange thing, thought Jess.

  “Yes?”

  “That night. He acted like it was the first time he ever met me. I’d been working with him for over a month at that point. It was as if none of that ever registered on him.”

  Her eyes lowered. Jess could tell this woman had been deeply disappointed. Obviously, Velma Blake took her work very seriously and her patients to heart. She was the kind of nurse one would want taking care of someone near and dear. To keep the conversation going, Jess offered up an amateur diagnosis that he didn’t believe for one instant.

  “Maybe he had
some kind of inverse sleeping disorder?”

  “I actually said the same thing to Dr. Rice. He dismissed it out of hand, which I was surprised about, considering the others.”

  And suddenly, there was the door Jess had been looking for. He slid it open slightly with a simple question. “What others?”

  Velma’s professional demeanor immediately took over. “I’m really not at liberty to say.”

  “I’m not asking you to name names. And if you’re worried I’m going to file some class action suit against Meadowland, forget it. My family owned the place for years. Why sue myself?” Seeing the doubt in her eyes, he knew he had to push it over the top. “Besides, as co-owners we could always get access to medical records, so this is really just to satisfy my curiosity more than anything.”

  Whether or not he could get this access, Jess didn’t know. But it seemed to appease Velma, who was anxious to unburden herself.

  “We treated five or six other cases over the past few years that suffered from the same disease.”

  “The disease you could never nail down.”

  She nodded. “Identical symptoms—severe anemia, extreme lethargy during the daytime, regaining of strength at night. They reminded me of a night-blooming desert flower. You know, the kind whose petals open after sundown and spread their fragrance through the air? But if you walk by the same flower at high noon, you can’t distinguish its smell or appearance from a normal cactus.”

  “What happened to those patients?”

  “They were up and down for months, just like your father. We’d run a battery of tests but couldn’t come up with anything conclusive. Eventually, their hearts just gave out.”

  Jess was dying to ask if any of them were seen walking around town after that. But he knew the chitchat would end right there and Velma would commit him upstairs. So, he tried a different track.

  “Were any similar cases reported outside of Meadowland?”

  Velma shook her head. “That was the scary thing. We checked all the hospitals in the area. It got the medical staff wondering if the disease was circulating through the facility like some bacteria strain or those super bugs you read about hitting big-city hospitals. We actually spent the money to close down the hospital wing and residential sections after that to run a diagnostic sweep, but nothing came of it.”