She gave him the room number, watched him scan down a chart in a crinkled plastic sleeve.
“Theurer?” he asked. He pronounced it with a soft “th” and an “ew.” Thewer.
“Yes,” said Lyndi.
“No guard listed today,” he said.
“A policeman’s been there every day,” said Lyndi.
“No guard listed today,” the nurse said again, and turned the chart facedown.
Lyndi hurried back to the room. She sat on the edge of the chair, regarding Rudd. She took from her wallet the card the detective had given her, picked up the telephone beside the bed. She tried dialing the number, but the line clicked after the first four digits, suddenly dialed.
“Podiatry,” a voice said.
She hung up the phone quickly, stood looking at it. She went back to the nurse’s station.
“Is there a phone I can use?” she asked.
The nurse reluctantly uncradled a receiver, handed it across the desk. He punched in a nine. “What number?” he asked.
Lyndi gave him the number. She held the receiver to her ear, staring down the hall where Rudd’s door was, just out of vision.
“Lyndi,” the detective said when he realized who it was. “I’m sorry. Still no leads.”
“No,” she said. “It’s not about that. It’s about Rudd.”
“Rudd? What about him?”
“Where’s the guard?”
“Lyndi, you have to understand there’s only so much we can do. He may never wake up.”
“But the killer,” she said. “He’s still loose.”
“I’m sorry,” he said.
“But there was always a guard here before,” she said. “Just a few more days.”
“Lyndi,” he said. “I sympathize. I really do. But I answer to the taxpayers.”
She took the brakes off the wheels of the bed’s casters. With a case shucked off a pillow, she tied the I.V. stand to the bed rail. Pushing the bed close to the door, she left it there while she went out and scanned the hall.
Nothing there, no one coming. Dragging the bed down the hall, she wheeled it toward the elevator. She pushed the button and the elevator opened immediately and she wheeled the bed in.
An old woman was inside, in the corner, wearing a checkered bathrobe. Around her neck was a chain with glasses on them, no lenses in the frames.
“Johnny?” the woman said.
“What?” said Lyndi. “No, not Johnny. This is Rudd.”
“Johnny?” the woman asked again.
“What floor do you want?” asked Lyndi. “This floor? Were you looking for this floor?”
The woman said nothing, stayed in her corner. Lyndi reached out to press a button, felt the elevator lurch upward before she could do so. The wound on Rudd’s throat was wet with blood, weeping slightly. The doors opened, and she saw before her two white-suited interns.
“Johnny?” the woman asked.
“There you are Mrs. Baetz,” one of them said. “We’ve been looking for you.
“Excuse me,” said Lyndi. The interns moved aside without even looking at her, one of them holding the elevator door back with his hand as Lyndi pushed the bed out.
“Come on out, Mrs. Baetz,” one of the interns said.
“Johnny?” she said.
“No, Mrs. Baetz, I’m not Johnny,” Lyndi heard him say and then she was down the hall, around a corner. Outpatient, a sign read. She heard shouting behind her, a high pitched voice. She moved toward a set of double doors that swung open on their own accord. She passed a deserted nurse’s station, kept on down the hall, looking into each room until she found an empty one. Wheeling the bed in, she shut the door.
She turned the light off. A streetlight outside gave a pale and brittle quality to what she could see of the room. She undid the I.V. stand, checked the tube for kinks. Putting down the rail and sitting on the edge of the bed, she undid the restraints on Rudd’s hands as well. She folded his hands on his chest, the I.V. tube drawing tight, its terminating needle bulging slightly beneath his skin. She kept her hands on his hands.
She stroked his cheek. He was not unattractive, she told herself, though emaciated now. She was used to his face, at least. Her hand slid down his jaw and onto his throat, felt the smooth, dribbled scar, the dampness of the weeped blood. She could feel the slow pulse in his neck.
She got out of the bed and went to the other side, took down the rail. Slowly and carefully, she tugged him over, the bed sliding on its casters. She set the brakes, pulled him over until his shoulder hung off the edge.
Going to the other side of the bed she tucked herself under the I.V. tube and climbed in with him, stretching her body next to his. She carefully stretched her arm over him, letting her hand rest upon the sharp carriage of his hips. She stayed like that, listening to his shallow breathing, speaking softly to him. Soon she fell asleep.
When she awoke, she was uncertain of where she was. There was someone beside her and a hand on her shoulder. She shrugged and the hand slid off. She lifted her head and saw the face beside her in the dim light. Its eyes were fluttering open and closed.
“Rudd?” she said.
“No,” he said, and closed his eyes.
She said his name again, but he said nothing. She wondered if she had dreamt it. She shook him, nothing happened.
“Rudd?” she said again.
She got up out of the bed, wandered the room. Maybe she should call someone, she thought. But if it were just a dream?
She went to the window, looked out. Below, the hospital parking lot was lit dimly by streetlamps. She found her car, parked near one of the lampposts. Perhaps it was nothing, she thought. Perhaps she had imagined it. She went back to the bed and climbed in. She looked into Rudd’s face, waiting.
When she awoke again it was light, sun streaming into the room through the window, the fluorescent lights on above her as well. There was a doctor just beside her and a nurse too, and Rudd’s mother as well, looking stricken.
“There you are,” said the doctor. “We wondered what you’d done with him.”
“I was saving him,” she said. “The killer.”
“She was kidnapping him. Call the police,” said Rudd’s mother.
“Now, let’s think a minute,” said the doctor, turning toward her. “There’s no harm done, really. No need to bring the police in, is there?”
Lyndi climbed out of the bed. “I was protecting him,” she said. “He woke up.”
Rudd’s mother looked at her. “I want her arrested.”
“Now, now,” said the doctor, smiling. “Let’s have none of that.” He reached out, took the boy’s face in his hands, examining it by holding it still and moving his own face frenetically about. Rudd’s eyelids fluttered.
“He was doing that before,” said Lyndi.
“Was he now?” said the doctor. “Rudd, can you hear me?”
Rudd opened his eyes and looked up, looked at Lyndi. He held her gaze, quiet. His expression was placid, almost not an expression at all. He stayed looking at her, until his mother elbowed Lyndi aside, and, effusive and enveloping, embraced Rudd’s suddenly terrified face.
4
After a while she was back to her real life—the end of classes, her few school acquaintances leaving for the holidays, scattered phone calls from her aunt, occasional visits from church members and neighbors, late night television until she fell asleep on the same couch she had been sitting on when she first received news of her family’s deaths. She was alone.
Over break, she woke up in the early morning and pulled herself off the couch, turned off the TV, and stumbled upstairs to sleep a few more hours in her own bed. When she awoke, she showered in her parents’ bathroom; afterwards, a towel wrapped around her head and another knotted just above her breasts, she went slowly through her parents’ closet, just looking. She rearranged the drawers of the kitchen, put them back to how they had been before her aunt had arrived, and then spent four or five days opening the wron
g drawers until her body was trained again.
A neighbor tried to set her up with her nephew, a pouting fraternity brat who had few interests outside of skiing and bubblegum rap. She started going to church again, made it through the immense pressure of attention on her first day back.
“Where are your parents?” Sister Woolsey, a cantankerous and catheterized widow in a wheelchair bellowed. “Why didn’t you bring them along?”
“They’re dead, Mother,” Lyndi heard Sister Woolsey’s granddaughter whisper.
“Good thing she didn’t bring them, then.”
She was going on, she was getting along. She took a job gift-wrapping for the university bookstore, found herself the only gift-wrapper under fifty. Come out and visit for Christmas, her aunt suggested to her answering machine, if you can afford it. She didn’t bother to return the call. There was a singles congregation locally, the bishop let her know—maybe you’d prefer to attend church there? Perhaps you’ll find this book interesting?, offering her The Seven Habits of Highly Successful People. There was a picture of a bald man on the front. She thanked him, and fled his office as soon as she could.
At first, through the windows, she could see a fine snow, tiny flakes drifting in the air without settling, the air bitter cold. Quarter to five. She tore another piece of tape off the roll, creased the paper, folded it. “Next,” she said.
When she had finished wrapping—board games, scriptures, inspirational tapes, even a book or two, lines from nine in the morning until six when the bookstore closed—she walked out through the Wilkinson Center, past the theater, down the stairs and past the flower shop, under the awning and out into the open air.
She crossed the street to her car, one of the few left in the lot. She got in, turned on the car, then sat there. Snow was coming down quicker now and gathering on the glass. She could not bring herself to drive. What’s wrong with me? she wondered. The snow gathered until she could see nothing, the car enclosed and silent, the whole of the world outside blotted out. There was nothing but herself and the interior of the car. She found the thought alarming and flicked the windshield wipers once, the snow scraping back. Yet the glass was so fogged within that it was still difficult to see. She brought her hand to the gear shift, but already the snow had begun to fill in the windshield and, as it did so, she was again unable to bring herself to drive.
Why is it? she thought. And then, What is it about parking lots?
And, What if he comes after me?
Who?
The one who came after my family.
And who was he?
I don’t know.
She had been worried for Rudd because he had seen the killer. Rudd knew. Or might know. But what of her? She was the only member of her family left. If the killer had meant to kill her father and mother and sister, if this was not some random crime or accident of fate, then there was every reason to believe he might come after her. Yet the police had immediately assumed the crime was random, had never given her a guard, had done nothing, not a thing, to protect her. Anyone could kill her at any time.
She remembered, in the other parking lot, the odd procession of the dead she had seen—her father, her mother, her sister, and finally Rudd, not dead, lagging behind, though when she had first seen it she thought it meant that Rudd too had died. Were she to open her door here, in this parking lot, would she see them again?
She tried again to drive the car, again could not bring herself to do so. A white haze hung before her eyes and even when she cleared the windshield again it was still there, and she was uncertain whether it came from outside or from within, or somehow both. She could hear, through the wind, the voice of her father, slight, almost indiscernible, yet somehow there. Or was it her father? Perhaps it was not him at all but the killer, or maybe just the wind. She raked the windshield wipers along the windshield again, saw nothing. There was nothing out there, she told herself, though she was uncertain as to whether she meant nothing to be afraid of or nothing at all. She put her hand against the windshield, felt the cold. She managed to engage the gear and then, unable to see, disengaged it again. Setting the defroster on, she steeled herself, threw open the car door.
The parking lot was covered with snow, her car the only one visible, everything else snow-bundled and shapeless, utterly silent. She didn’t know whether to be relieved at not seeing the dead or terrified of being alone. The snow fell thicker and thicker. She climbed back into the car, turned on the headlights. A moment more and the windshield cleared and she could see out, her headlights cutting a few dozen feet into the snow, the flakes flurrying all about her. She forced the car into reverse and drove.
At home, a message from the detective involved with her parents’ case. No news, he was sorry to report, but the boy, Rudd, had been deemed sufficiently stable and noncomatose, I’m sorry, I’m reading off notes here, and was now ready to be interviewed. Would she perhaps like to come as well? Perhaps he would say something to trigger something for her, a phrase the police might not catch. It would be a help if she came.
When she arrived, they led her to the interrogation room. The detective was inside, Rudd as well. She stood with several other officers behind the mirrored wall, looking in.
“You’re the one who …” said one of the officers, a pudgy man holding a clipboard, as he pointed at her. “Your family was …”
“Yes,” she said quickly. “That’s me.”
The sound out of the speaker was grainy, off-kilter. “And the last thing you remember?” the detective said.
“There isn’t any last thing I remember,” Rudd responded.
“Do you know him?” the officer beside her asked.
“Sort of,” she said.
“Don’t be silly. There has to be a last thing.”
“I can’t explain it. I was there on the slope, crouched, could hear voices but saw no one, and then some other things happened but I can’t quite remember what they were. But I remember them happening. It’s all a haze.”
“A haze?”
“You know what I mean?”
“Sorry, it just sounds like something from TV. Would you be willing to be hypnotized?”
Rudd hunched his shoulders. “Sure,” he said.
His voice was not what she, sitting beside his body in the hospital, had imagined it would be. Maybe it was just the loudspeaker. But his movements, too, were more nervous, jerkier than she had imagined. In the hospital, in her one-sided conversations with him, she had imagined certain gestures and sounds sitting like an armature on the template of his stilled body, but she had been wrong about them.
The detective asked Rudd if he knew Lyndi’s father.
“No.”
They showed Rudd a picture of her father.
“No.”
“Ever see him before?”
“No.”
“Not even the day they were killed?”
“Not even then.”
“What about during the things you remember happening but you don’t remember what they were?”
“I don’t remember, but I don’t think so.”
“You saw who killed them?”
“No.”
“You saw who tried to kill you?”
“No.”
“Did you see anyone at all?”
“I saw no one.”
“The voices you heard when you were on the slope: what were they saying?”
“I wasn’t close enough to hear what they were saying.”
“And that’s your last memory?”
“I told you—there isn’t any last thing that I remember.”
It went on a while, circling always back to the same question and Rudd’s odd refusal to acknowledge a final event. They would fetch a hypnotist, the detective said. But an hour later when the man was brought in, he couldn’t get Rudd to go under. They tried a few more times in other ways, then he went away.
“Why were you up in the mountains?” the detective asked Rudd.
Rudd shrugg
ed. “Recreation?” he suggested.
“But your mother says you’re afraid of heights.”
“My mother still thinks I’m five.”
“You’re not afraid of heights?”
“They take a little getting used to.”
She herself, Lyndi thought, had once been afraid of heights. Once, when she was eleven and her father had stopped the car at a lookout going through the mountains on the way to Colorado, she had refused to get out of the car. She had lain flat on the back seat, a blanket over her head, shivering.
“Why do you think he chose you?”
“He who?”
“The killer.”
“I don’t know,” Rudd said, pushing his hair back from his forehead. “How should I know?” There was a certain pained expression to his face. “Probably because I was there.”
They kept talking. There was nothing, nothing, Lyndi thought. Sometimes the police around her would look at her after Rudd had said something, mentioned a name or a place, but each time she shook her head. The detective came out of the interrogation room, spoke to her briefly. She did nothing but shake her head. The detective sighed and went back in. Through the glass she saw Rudd take a handkerchief out of his pocket and begin wiping his neck. It came away bloodstreaked. They were wrapping it up, the detective’s voice slower and more relaxed, Rudd claiming he wished he could have been of help. The policemen were moving off and down the halls, except the pudgy one, who asked her,
“You know the way out?”
“I think so,” she said, and pointed around a corner.
“Go this way,” he said, pointing in a different direction, “and you won’t risk bumping into him.”
“I don’t mind running into him,” she said.
The policeman saluted her with his coffee cup and left. She circled round the corner and down the hall. Behind her she heard a door open, then the sound of the detective and Rudd’s tentative conversation. She half-turned, waved.
“Lyndi,” said the detective.
She stopped, waited for them to catch up. “What is it?” she asked.
“Nothing,” he said. “I was just saying hello.”
The Open Curtain Page 12
