by Tim Poland
HER personal loss had been commemorated by Sandy’s own impromptu private ceremony at the river. Now she had to turn Edith’s remains over to the clinical practices of standard procedure. She wanted nothing more to do with it, wanted to be shut of it all as quickly as possible. Such business had nothing to do with the old woman for whom she grieved. She accorded no thought to matters of delicacy or discretion, but pursued her course with robotic efficiency.
Her shorts and top still damp from the river, her skin tightened again into goose bumps when she entered the starkly cooler temperature of the air-conditioned interior of the nursing home. The lobby was momentarily empty, and she passed through it without noticing. She commandeered an empty gurney, abandoned down one of the hallways, and pushed it back toward the entrance. At the nurses’ station, Joyce Malden was holding forth, as usual, on the saga of the disappearance of Randy Mullins.
“Can you believe it? All these months now, and they still can’t find him. Or I should say, can’t find what’s left of him, if you know what I mean. And poor Rhonda. They say she’s selling their house and moving back to Kentucky with the kids. To live with her folks. Bless her heart, poor thing.”
Sandy heard none of it, nor did she notice that Joyce, continuing to talk, was watching her passage out into the parking lot, where Edith’s body was slung up by the seatbelt in the cab of her truck.
At the river she had handled Edith’s body with care and devotion; here in the parking lot, there was a corpse in her truck, and she removed it, carefully but quickly, laid it on the gurney, latched the strap around the body, and rolled it toward the entrance.
By the time Sandy rolled the gurney back through the entrance, a small crowd had gathered. Joyce and the two nurses’ aides she’d been regaling with her latest version of the Mullins family’s woes stood just inside the entrance as Sandy rolled through the automatic doors. Death they had seen here, so the shock that registered on their faces was not from that. It was from death being wheeled into, not out of, the nursing home. Death being wheeled through the doors in a damp blue dress and a gray shawl. Sandy pushed directly past Joyce and the others. To her left stood two of the housekeeping staff—gray-haired, work-worn women. One stood with her eyes wide, a hand held over her mouth; the other stood with her head bowed, eyes closed, hands clasped, and her lips moving silently. To the other side of Sandy, the nursing-home manager stood with a middle-aged couple, the family of a prospective resident, apparently. All three watched Sandy pass with their jaws hanging open.
Sandy gave notice to none of it as she rolled Edith’s body down the long hallway to her room. Joyce followed behind, the two nurses’ aides a few steps behind her. The manager lingered in the lobby, trying to placate the couple. Joyce caught up with Sandy just in time to help her lift Edith’s body from the gurney to the bed.
“My god, what happened?”
Sandy finished arranging Edith’s body on the bed. She spread out the skirt of the dress, smoothed the gray hair back from the forehead, and laid each arm flat on the bed.
“Heart failure.” Her voice was cold and thick, like a lump of lead in her throat. “Time of death . . . a little before noon.”
“Oh, the poor dear,” Joyce said. The two nurses’ aides stood just outside the door to the room. The clack of the manager’s high heels could be heard approaching in the hallway. Sandy couldn’t bear another syllable of Joyce’s particular version of empathy. She stared down at the old woman’s face for one more moment, ran her hand over the forehead and hair, then turned away and left the room abruptly. She brushed past the nursing-home manager as she walked quickly back up the hallway, but didn’t stop, didn’t alter her stride in the slightest. Still startled and confused, the manager called after Sandy.
“Wait just one minute. You can’t just waltz out—” She paused when Joyce grasped her arm.
“They were very close, poor thing,” Joyce said, as if taking the manager into a special confidence.
Sandy paid heed to none of it.
IT struck Sandy as somehow odd, perhaps even inappropriate, that she could be so hungry at this particular time. She’d left her fishing gear and the lawn chair in the bed of her truck, tossed in on top of the wheelchair she’d rolled Edith out in that morning. Edith’s shoes, with the stockings still stuffed into them, remained on the floor in the truck’s cab. All she carried into the house was her canvas purse and the tote bag containing the uneaten picnic lunch. Stink rose out of his tractor tire to greet her when she got home, but she barely noticed him. The screen door nearly swung shut on his hindquarters when he slipped through into the kitchen, following at Sandy’s heels.
Sandy emptied the contents of the tote bag onto the counter. Plates, forks, plastic cups, corkscrew, and paper napkins. A full bottle of red wine. Two chicken salad sandwiches, with the raisins Edith was so fond of. A small plastic container full of the little gherkin pickles of which Edith was equally fond. Two other plastic containers, each containing a homemade blueberry fry pie, which Sandy had purchased at the Citgo in Damascus. Sandy pushed the plates and forks aside and ate with her hands as she stared out the kitchen window into the waning afternoon light. She ate everything. All of it, ravenously. If there had been more, she would have eaten that, too. Still chewing the last chunks of fry pie, she wiped her hands and mouth on a paper napkin, unplugged the telephone on the kitchen counter, and took an old mug from the cupboard, dark green with a rising trout etched into the ceramic. With the corkscrew, she opened the bottle of wine and poured the mug full. She downed a large gulp of wine, topped off the mug again, and pushed through the screen door to the little concrete stoop outside. Stink held back, unsure if he’d been noticed yet, and the door slapped shut, leaving him inside. He watched Sandy through the screen as she sat down on the stoop and swallowed another gulp of wine.
The concrete stoop beneath her retained the heat of the day. Sunk only halfway behind the ridge that rose up from Sandy’s little house, the sun cast long shadows down the slope. The air was flat, still, and warm. In her belly, the mass of food she’d wolfed down began to shift and grumble in her stomach as the wine worked its way through.
So this was grief. The occasion for such deep sorrow had certainly entered her life before, at least according to conventional standards. A mother whose passing seemed the fulfillment of her existence. A husband whose violent death she witnessed, in which she was, in fact, complicit. She had cried for both. And for both, what she had felt in the wake of each demise was something more like relief, perhaps release. A mother who had shaped her life around a private grief that offered scant space for Sandy. A husband whose greedy love for her offered scant space for anything but his private version of Sandy. Neither had pierced her skin to the pulpy center where the pain of loss might set its hook in the way the old woman had. Loss had transected Sandy’s life, but never this palpable density of intractable absence, like a limb hacked away but still throbbing at the end of the stump. She thought, perhaps, she understood something of what Tommy had mentioned that day, of the deafening clamor generated by emptiness. She wanted Edith back.
The screen door rattled behind her. Stink sat on the other side of it, watching her, pawing at the door to be let out. She took another swallow of wine, leaned back, and pried the thin metal door open enough for her dog to slip out.
“Sorry, baby,” she said. The dog sat on the stoop beside her, watching with her as the last of the sun slipped beneath the ridge. Sandy drained the rest of her wine, set the mug down, and slid her arm around the dog’s shoulders. He turned toward her, looked into her eyes, thumped his tail twice on the stoop, then turned his gaze back to the deepening glow on the horizon.
It started as a churning in her belly, as if she might vomit, but her stomach clutched tight to the food it held. Straining against the stirring in her gut, the moan rose slowly in her throat, as it had earlier at the river. But now, rather than leveling off into a hum, it continued to rise, until it exploded from her heaving lungs, rollin
g up the slope before her. She pulled Stink closer and sunk her face into his fur, sending the last of the moan into the flesh of his neck. And she wept.
10
THERE WOULD LIKELY BE HELL TO PAY. AND SHE COULDN’T blame anyone but herself if there was, given the way she’d run out yesterday after, for all intents and purposes, dumping a dead body. At the very least, she’d owe Joyce an apology. Then again, she would be amply compensated for her trouble, as Sandy would once again be providing grist for Joyce’s gossip mill.
Sandy had sat on the stoop with Stink until well past dark, until she had exhausted herself with weeping, with navigating the deep channels of genuine grief for the first time in her life. By the time she dragged herself into bed, fully drained, she fell into a black, profound sleep and woke with barely enough time to make it to work. When she walked through the lobby to the nurses’ station, pushing the empty wheelchair, only a couple minutes late, her hair was carelessly yanked into a ragged ponytail, her eyes were swollen, puffy, and red, and Joyce Malden was already standing behind the desk.
“Oh, you poor thing.” Joyce strode out from behind the desk and consumed Sandy within her ample embrace. “I was so worried.”
“I’m sorry.” Sandy mumbled, struggling to speak against the press of Joyce’s chest.
“We tried to call you all afternoon and couldn’t get you.”
Joyce released Sandy and looked into her swollen eyes. Despite what Joyce would inevitably do with this episode, Sandy could see that just now her sympathy was sincere.
“I think I unplugged the phone. Sorry.”
“Poor thing. I know you thought the world of her.” Joyce pulled her in close once more. Sandy’s gratitude for Joyce’s concern began to turn to embarrassment. She gently freed herself from the embrace, walked into the nurses’ station, and set her purse on the counter, only then collecting herself enough to realize that Joyce’s presence here at this time of day was out of the ordinary.
“Why are you here now, Joyce?,” Sandy asked, but she didn’t need to wait for an answer. There would indeed be hell to pay.
“What’s-her-name told me to come in,” Joyce said. “I’d guess to cover for you, just in case.” Managers flowed fairly regularly in and out of the nursing home from the corporate offices in Roanoke and had little to do with the day-to-day operations, from a nurse’s standpoint. The woman currently holding the position had been there only a week, and neither Sandy nor Joyce had yet had much contact with her. At least until yesterday.
“I really am sorry, Joyce. I owe you,” Sandy said. “But I suppose you can leave. I’m here now.”
“And a good thing you are, too,” Joyce said. She walked in behind the desk of the nurses’ station with Sandy, appearing not at all inclined to leave, and began her narration of the remainder of yesterday afternoon at the nursing home after Sandy had fled.
According to Joyce, not only was the manager new to the nursing home, but she was also new to the company, to the sorts of facilities it owned and operated, and certainly new to one of the more delicate aspects of managing such facilities. As it turned out, she had, in fact, never even seen a dead body before and most assuredly had never seen one wheeled by in front of her, newly deceased and damp with river water. After Sandy had rushed past her and Joyce had tried to calm her a bit, she’d stepped into Edith’s room, taken one closer look at Edith’s body laid out on the bed, and fainted dead away. Joyce said if she hadn’t been there to catch her, she would have likely cracked her skull on the tile floor.
Once Joyce had revived her and walked her back to her office, she’d settled into a mix of anger over Sandy’s behavior and anxiety about how to clean up the situation before contacting her dead resident’s family. She had apparently found solace in the large three-ring binder containing the company’s operations manual, then retrieved the file for one Edith Moser from one of the tall filing cabinets in her office. The new manager’s face had shown a curious mix of confusion and relief when she discovered that Sandy Holston was herself listed as next of kin.
“Poor silly thing didn’t know whether to shit or get off the pot,” Joyce said.
“Me?” Sandy lowered herself slowly into the desk chair behind the nurses’ station.
“Yes,” Joyce said. “I was looking through the files with her. Form was dated almost three years ago. I assumed you knew.”
“No.”
Edith had apparently taken care of everything, well in advance, Joyce said. The file also contained the contact information for the lawyer who had drawn up her will and the funeral parlor where her remains should be taken, both up in Sherwood. Once transport had arrived and Edith’s body was removed, the new manager slipped quickly back into prescribed procedures. She gave instructions for Edith’s few things to be gathered up and for the room to be thoroughly cleaned. Then she checked her files again to see who was next in line. Edith had been living in one of the few private rooms in the nursing home, which came at a premium, and a few of the residents who could afford it were on a waiting list.
“Poor thing not even cold yet, and she’s already looking at the bottom line,” Joyce said. “Oh, speak of the devil.”
The new manager had just rounded the corner from the lobby and approached the nurses’ station. She wore a taupe pants suit with a satin sheen. Her hair was carefully styled and cut short. Across her shoulder, a bright paisley scarf, affixed at the shoulder with a gold brooch.
“Ms. Holston, would you come with me, please?” the manager said.
“About yesterday—” Sandy started.
“Just come with me.” The manager turned and walked away toward her office.
Sandy scooped her canvas purse from the desk and rose from the chair. Here was the hell to pay, but whatever the tally, she would have, could have, done nothing differently yesterday.
“Thank you again, Joyce.” Sandy patted her shoulder, gave it a brief squeeze, and followed the manager.
As Sandy approached the office door, she thought she recalled the new manager’s name was Paulson. Something like that. She had no clue about the first name, and there was a perfectly good chance it had never been given. There was no name plate on the desk to help, and in the end, Sandy couldn’t have cared less. She was empty, cored out, from Edith’s death and the previous night’s indoctrination to grief.
The manager sat at her desk, fingering two file folders that lay before her. She motioned Sandy toward an empty chair in front of the desk. Sandy slung the strap of her purse over the back of the chair and sat.
“I should think it would be rather obvious why I’ve called you in here this morning.” From under her carefully styled hair, the manager looked directly at Sandy. Her fingers still played around the file folders on the desk.
“Got a pretty good idea,” Sandy said.
“It’s been explained to me that you had a close relationship with the Moser woman, so. . . .”
“Her name was Edith.” Sandy felt the skin on the back of her neck tighten.
“Yes, yes. Edith, of course.” The manager shifted in her seat, glanced down at the folders, then back at Sandy. “As I was saying, I can understand that you were close to Mrs. Moser.”
“She was never married.”
The manager visibly bristled and sat up rigidly.
“Ms. Holston.” The manager deliberately drew out the Z sound at the end of the title before uttering Sandy’s surname. “Such details hardly matter at this time.”
“It mattered to Edith.”
“If you don’t mind.”
Sandy guessed the new manager was at least five, maybe even eight or ten years younger than her. With the cut of her clothing and hair, it was hard to tell. Sandy kept quiet and looked knives through the younger woman.
“Given that we have a signed waiver on file for these times off the premises and given that you are designated as Ms. Moser’s next of kin, the usual issues of liability that would be of concern here don’t really apply, which is fortunate. Howe
ver . . .”
The manager leaned back into her chair and brought her hands up in front of her, the fingertips of each hand steepled together.
“To bring a dead body right into the building in that fashion, to just roll it in, right in front of everyone, including potential customers, who were shocked and horrified, I might add, and whose business we’ve certainly lost, well . . . Your behavior displayed unbelievably poor judgment, an utter lack of professionalism.”
“No, I don’t suppose it was very professional,” Sandy said.
“To say the least. Though I can understand you may have been upset, given your personal relationship with the woman, that in itself, excessive personal involvement with the residents, hardly falls in line with the professional standards our company requires.”
Excessive. The word rubbed over the raw ache in the center of Sandy’s chest like coarse sandpaper.
“Despite your relationship with Mrs. Moser, despite the fact that you’ve been on the staff here for several years, I simply can’t run the risk of another lapse in judgment like this one. Irresponsible and unacceptable.”
Sandy sat still in the chair, waiting for the payoff.
“I’m terminating your employment here, effective immediately. You’ll leave the premises following this interview and not return. Your final paycheck will be mailed to the home address we have on file for you.”
The manager removed a sheet of paper from one of the folders and slid it toward Sandy, along with a pen. “Initial that beside the mailing address listed there to indicate that it’s current, and sign at the bottom to indicate that this situation has been explained to you.”
Sandy leaned forward and picked up the pen. Her face showed no expression as she signed the form. This was, in the end, not a surprise to her.
The manager retrieved the signed form and placed it back in the folder. From the other folder, she removed a few other sheets of paper.
“I’ll need your signature a couple more times, as next of kin.” She slid the next form to Sandy. “This states that the resident died of natural causes and that the company is in no way responsible for her death.”
