by Laura Wiess
I did, setting down the tray and then going around the room pulling the shades. When I was done I turned and got my first real look at Margaret Boehm and the sickroom.
It was a woman’s room, an elegant, magnificent private garden. The beige carpet over the cherry flooring was patterned with pink roses, violets, and blue forget-me-nots. The wallpaper was cabbage roses against a baby blue background with deeper blue morning glory vines twining throughout. The ceiling was high, the chandelier crystals twinkling in the thin February sunlight, the furniture a rich, glossy mahogany. There were old bisque dolls and lace scarves on the bureaus and the vanity was covered with cosmetics and an elegant rainbow of perfume bottles with stoppers. The vanity stool was pleated satin with clawed ball feet and the bedside lamp was pink with beaded glass fringe.
The bed was a double like the one my mother and I had shared, only instead of having room for two, one side was piled with novels and magazines, an ice pack, a hand mirror and brush, and a pile of white sheets waiting for decorative embroidery.
What struck me hardest at that moment was how everything in the room seemed to be flourishing except the woman supported by the mountain of flowered pillows, the small, pale, shrunken figure whose bony shoulders seemed too slight to support even the lacy straps of her nightgown. She gazed back at me, blue eyes rimmed with dark hollows and braided ash-brown hair slightly mussed from sleep. Bruises dappled the crooks of her arms, and the skin at her throat looked…withered.
“So you’re the strapping young orphan come to distract me from my misery,” she said, taking in my hand-me-down woolen skirt and the white blouse straining slightly at the buttons. Sighing, she picked up her fork and toyed with the runny soft-boiled egg. “I have no appetite for this.” She tasted the tea and set the cup down with a faint grimace. “Chamomile cannot hold a candle to Earl Grey, especially without sugar. Dreadful.”
I waited, not knowing what to say.
She nibbled the buttered centers of her toast and sipped her grapefruit juice, shuddering with each swallow, and then asked me to help her to the bathroom. I did, sliding a supporting arm around her hot, trembling frame as we crept across the carpet, and then waiting outside the door while she completed her toilette. I helped her back into bed, where she lay back, pale and sweating, closed her eyes, and didn’t speak again.
For the next week, this became our morning routine.
Lunch and dinner, however, were very different stories.
By noon her pain had eased some, thanks to her medication, and she was relaxed, awake, and lonely enough to want to talk. She didn’t require anything from me at first, speaking generally about the approaching spring and how the long, dark months of winter always seemed so ominous. She showed me some of the books on the bed, novels she’d bought years ago that were now helping to pass the hours.
“Talk to me, Louise,” she said one afternoon, smiling slightly at my surprised look. “For this moment at least, I’ve grown tired of hearing my own voice.” She eased herself up against the pillows, wincing, and pulled her long braid out from behind her and laid it over her shoulder. “My forehead aches so from the weight of the braid but I can’t seem to convince Nurse that the pain is real. She believes I only complain for attention.”
“Would you like me to brush out your hair?” I heard myself offer. “I used to do it for my mother and she always said it was very soothing.”
She gazed at me a moment, as if searching for something, and finally nodded. “That would be nice, yes. Please.”
I moved a wooden chair with a tapestry seat over to the window and then helped her out of bed, into her robe, and over to the chair. “Are you all right?”
“Yes,” she said breathlessly, wincing. “I’m just sore.”
I waited until she was settled, then untied the blue ribbon from the end of the braid and spread the clumsy weave. When I was finished, her hair hung to her waist.
“Oh, that’s lovely,” she murmured as I brushed. “I don’t know how anyone can choose to avoid human contact. I find myself hungering for it constantly, and of all that’s out of reach for me now, I believe being touched is what I miss the most.” She leaned forward to peer out the window. “Look at all this snow still on the ground. It feels like winter will never end and I did so want to see one more spring.”
My hand jerked and the brush grazed her scalp. “Oh, I’m sorry, Mrs. Boehm, but of course you’ll see spring! My goodness, why would you even say something like that?”
She never answered, only gazed out the window at the workshop until she could no longer sit comfortably, and then I helped her back to bed and pulled the shades so she could sleep.
“I have hired a new handyman,” Dr. Boehm said that afternoon in passing. “Don’t let me catch you fraternizing with him, Louise.”
I stopped, openmouthed, and gazed at his retreating figure. He was listing slightly, and his hair, normally so thick and neat, seemed sparser and almost moth-eaten.
I sniffed the air but there was no alcohol scent, only the faint smell of chemicals and rotting meat.
I did Mrs. Boehm’s hair every day after lunch. If she felt strong enough, she would sit in the chair by the window; if not, she would shift slightly and lean forward just enough for me to angle around behind her. Sometimes she sang old songs like “I’ll Never Smile Again” or “Only Forever,” her voice soft and wistful, almost a whisper, and on those days I would brush as gently as I could while her gaze followed the path Dr. Boehm’s footsteps had made from the house to the workshop and back.
Dr. Boehm shot a doe and dragged her straight to his workshop. Although afterward he said he’d plugged her orifices with rags to prevent her bodily fluids from leaking out and staining her hair, I could still see the blood trail, scarlet-black smears against the snow, beginning at the tree line, where she’d come for the salt lick and had taken the shot in the abdomen, gone down thrashing and convulsing, and finally died, and ending at the workshop door, a scant hundred yards away.
One afternoon when a fresh snow was falling and Mrs. Boehm thought the sky too bleak to look at, she said, “How old are you, Louise?”
“Fifteen,” I said.
“Fifteen,” she murmured. “Would it surprise you to know that I would give anything to be you?”
My hand faltered in midstroke. “You don’t want to be me, Mrs. Boehm,” I said finally, resuming my task.
“Why is that?” she said.
To my extreme mortification, that’s all it took, the slightest show of interest, the merest polite question, for the floodgates to open.
I told her how worried I was about being a good companion, that I’d been warned she was of fragile health and was not to be upset for any reason or I might get sent back to the state home where I was nothing but one of a thousand unwanted and meant nothing to anyone, where kids were dying of influenza and everyone at the high school never let me forget I was a bastard and how I hated that word, loathed it like nothing else because it reminded me over and over again that the story of my parents’ marriage was false, a fairy tale, and that my mother, who I loved more than anyone on Earth, had lied to me and then died and left me to learn the truth from strangers. She died before I could ask her what really happened, if she and my father had loved each other even a little or if it had just been the endless champagne or—
“Wait,” Mrs. Boehm interrupted. “Who said I wasn’t supposed to be upset for any reason? Was it my husband?”
I blinked, dazed at being pulled so abruptly out of my story. “Yes. He said you had a very fragile constitution and weren’t to be upset for any reason.”
“A fragile constitution,” she echoed, leaning back against her pillows and smiling a cold little smile. “Oh, that’s priceless. It makes me sound like a gardenia, something frail by nature rather than by interference and explains my decline so neatly, don’t you agree?”
“I don’t know what you mean,” I said, hurt by her complete disregard of my story.
�
�No, I don’t suppose you do,” she said, sighing.
I could feel her watching me but became very busy polishing the hairbrush handle with the hem of my skirt.
“Louise.” She touched my wrist, stilling my busywork. “Did you have a special beau before you came to us, someone who held your hand and told you he could never live without you and now is doing exactly that?”
“No,” I mumbled.
“I thought not. A female moves differently after becoming the object of male attention. She becomes more…aware of herself.” She fell silent a moment, fingers rubbing absently at the edge of the quilt, and when she spoke, her voice was low and careful. “I would like to tell you something important, something I believe your mother might have shared had you been a little older when she passed.”
I glanced up, but her gaze had shifted and she was staring at the heavy gold band too big for her finger.
“I have gathered a handful of pearls, each begun as a tiny, irritating fleck of instance that slipped past the shell and settled in to sully the bed of the oyster. They’re my pearls, my hard-won, misshapen little treasures, and no other living soul on Earth knows I’ve collected them. Up until this moment I believed they would go to the grave along with me and no one would ever benefit from them, but now…” Her gaze met mine. “I’m going to share them with you, and when you have them all, you will have the beginnings of your own strand.”
“Mrs. Boehm, really, that’s very generous of you,” I said, uneasy at the strange light in her eyes. “But I’m not sure I’m allowed to accept such an expensive gift—”
And then she laughed, harsh and sudden, and when she looked at me again, there was no humor in her eyes, and the intensity had been replaced with compassion. “Oh, my dear,” she said softly, shaking her head, “don’t you know that you have no choice?”
I paused the CD and glanced over at Gran, glad to see she was still awake. “You know, I don’t know if I like this lady or not. Want to hear one more chapter?”
She blinked once, so I hit play and settled back to listen.
How It Ends
She went on to tell me, as I brushed and brushed, about the day she and Dr. Boehm first met. As she spoke, her voice lightened, grew girlish and ultimately eerie in its unconscious parody of youth.
“It was May, and only Nanny, Cook, and I were at home. Nanny was upstairs resting and I was in the parlor putting the first spring lilacs in a vase when I heard the front door open and my father speaking to someone.
“I couldn’t imagine what he was doing home in the middle of the day, as on Wednesdays he always made free house calls to the less fortunate and they always kept him so long that he never even came home in time for dinner in the evening!
“Naturally I became alarmed and hurried out to the foyer only to collide with…” She paused, as if expecting me to say something, perhaps guess, so I said, “Dr. Boehm?”
“Yes!” she cried, clapping her hands. “Only he wasn’t a respected doctor back then, Louise, he was just plain Thaddeus Boehm, a filthy, skinny boy all spotty with scabs and splotchy from crying.” She leaned closer to me, eyes gleaming. “And, oh, my dear, he smelled just terrible. Believe me when I say that if I hadn’t brought the lilacs in with me, I most certainly would have gagged.”
“Really,” I said, pulling back slightly.
“Yes, but all I said was, ‘Father, are you well?’ before burying my nose in the bouquet. When I spoke, the boy lifted his head and looked at me, and when he did, his eyes grew round as saucers, and I promise you this is true, he looked at me like I was an angel,” she said, and her voice began to tremble. “He did, even though I had on my third best blouse and my hair bow was slipping. He didn’t see any of that, Louise. He didn’t see any of my faults first that day.” A tear slipped down her cheek. “Now despite all the years I’ve spent struggling to please him, my faults are all he sees, and since they’re unforgivable, he chooses not to look.”
“Oh, I’m sure that’s not true,” I said, alarmed by her tears and the rise in her voice. “You’re ill, Mrs. Boehm, and naturally he doesn’t want to excite you—”
“You don’t know,” she said, turning her face away and swiping a hand across her cheek. “Fix my hair now, please. Braid it neat and tight in the event he does decide to visit, and then please leave me.”
I did as she asked because I didn’t know what else to do.
Late that night I heard the rumble of a truck, loud in the country quiet. I rose, went to my window, and craning my neck, followed its headlights around the back of the house, down the snowy stone driveway to the workshop, where, unless my eyes deceived me, a man met with Dr. Boehm and led two large, slow-moving deer out of the truck and into the workshop.
I mentioned it to Nurse the next morning and received a sharp “Mind your business.” After that it seemed wiser not to ask.
Dr. Boehm continued to disappear each day into his workshop or the woods or walked the tree line outside, talking animatedly and occasionally waving his arms while the new handyman Peter stood listening without expression.
An unpleasant smell has pervaded the house, not all at once and not everywhere but in pockets, sometimes strong, sometimes faint, sometimes early in the morning when I first step out of my room on the way to the bathroom and less often late at night, when I’ve finished the kitchen work and am on my way up to bed.
It’s different from the scent Dr. Boehm normally carries, and one I regret to say I’ve almost become used to. That’s more a wild smell, bloated decay mixed with the panicked musk of a dying animal, feces, and urine, often threaded with the garlicky scent of arsenic or the sting of chemicals.
This scent is fainter yet fresher at the same time, the terrible sweet smell of infection, old blood, and bad flesh, and it scares me enough that I don’t bring it up, that I catch my breath and pass through it swiftly like it doesn’t exist because I’m afraid to think of what it could be and what it will bring.
I paused the player and looked at Gran.
Sleeping.
Damn it. We would have had time for one more chapter.
Sighing, I turned it off and went and got the food ready for the cats and the deer.
And when I slipped outside to collect all the old, used paper plates from the ground and lifted the lid off a garbage can that had been sitting in the sun, I got a noseful of the smell of old, rotting cat food and almost freaked out.
Seth told me to dress up because he was taking me out to dinner for our anniversary, so me and Sammi went to the mall after school and I found a really sleek little black dress and high heels.
My father looked askance at the dress and was like, “Where’s the other half?” and my mother, who usually runs interference for me said, “What about with lower heels?” and I got all freaked because I wanted to look like I had legs a mile long, but I just griped some, went into my room, put on lower heels, and stuck my high ones in my purse to put on in the car on the way down.
Seth showed up ten minutes late, which annoyed me (he’s late a lot, which sometimes I don’t mind, but on our anniversary you’d think he would have made a better effort) and wouldn’t you know that instead of walking in and whistling or something, he just raised his eyebrows at the dress, cleared his throat, and said, “Ready?”
And I was like, Oh, you’re kidding right? But of course I didn’t say it, not in front of my parents, so we left and of course I looked stupid trying to climb up into the SUV and keep my dress down at the same time but I finally made it.
Now, granted, he’d already said Happy Anniversary to me at school and given me a red rose that I had at home in water now, and maybe his family didn’t make a big deal out of anniversaries, but this was our first one and where was the romance?
“Are you okay?” I asked when we got onto the highway and I was busy changing shoes. “You haven’t even said anything about my new dress.”
“Yeah, I’m a…” He made a face. “It’s a little short, isn’t it?”
“I mean, I’ve been thinking about your reputation and all—”
“What?” I said, astounded. “What reputation?”
He shrugged. “I don’t want all these guys thinking like that about my girlfriend. You know?”
I just sat there staring at him, still too shocked and, yeah, insulted, to say anything.
“So maybe you should just tone it down a little,” he said, signaling and switching to the middle lane. “And maybe dress like that only when we’re alone together because, yeah, you definitely look hot.” Smiling, he reached over and took my hand, not seeming to notice my silence. “So, you hungry? They have great crab legs here and tonight’s the all-you-can-eat buffet. Do you like crab?”
“Sure,” I said, staring out the window at the passing scenery and trying to reason my way through this, because in a way, I understood what he was saying, but in another, that was really hurtful.
“Hey, when do you want your present?” he said, reaching into his pocket and flashing me a little foil-wrapped box. “Now, at dinner, or after dinner?”
“Surprise me,” I said with a forced smile. He smiled back and leaned over a little so I could kiss him, and then put his hand on my leg and, teasing, said, “So what do you have on under there, anyway?” and I gave him a very wicked look and said, “That’s for me to know, and you to find out…”
“Here, you go first.” I gave him his gift, the one I’d spent days searching for online, rummaging through endless vintage car sites and auctions, scrabbling desperately to unearth just the right classic MG key ring for the year of the car he was trying to buy and he loved it. He gazed at it, jaw slack, and then laughed, held it up, and looked at me like I was amazing. “Holy shit, I can’t believe it! Where the hell did you find this?”
“It wasn’t easy,” I said, laughing as he hugged me. “Do you like it?”
