by Aaron Dries
“Crystalline.”
Woods scrutinized her with a tilt of the head for a few moments before saying, “Okay, then let’s get started. Welcome aboard.”
The stink of the hospice followed her home.
Emily washed her hair three times, her scalp scratched and raw. The water was hotter than it should be. Steam cloyed, as strangulating as grief. There was no other option—she had to get out or faint. Emily sidestepped from the stall in her bathroom and toweled off. Finished, her hand rose to the mirror and carved a palm’s width through the condensation.
I’m boiled. Boiled, but clean. That’s all that matters.
It was nine in the evening and Emily wondered where the remainder of her afternoon had gone. It was only as she took inventory of her tired red-rimmed eyes that the weight of the day revealed itself. After leaving work, everything had become a series of events she’d walked through as though in a dream. The resulting fatigue was deep. It was in her bones, and the hot water in those pipes couldn’t remedy that.
She remembered picking Lucette up from school, which was located two blocks away from their house. Convenient. This memory stuck because Emily had pulled up in her car with the awful fear that her daughter wouldn’t be there waiting for her.
Due to the early starting time of her shift at the hospice, Emily had no choice but to let her ten-year-old take the bus from their shit-box, ground level apartment to Saint Mary’s. Sure, she didn’t have to walk far to catch a ride, the bus picking her up right outside, but that did little to curb the anxiety. Just crossing the empty lot between their front door and the stop could be a dangerous journey. Why? Because the world had claws. Complacency killed.
But Lucette had been waiting there for her, of course, backpack dangling from one shoulder, a smile from ear to ear. She was so tiny in her bulky snow jacket. Emily’s relief had been instantaneous. Yes, this arrangement might just work.
Her daughter had leapt into the car and told her about her day, only parts of which Emily could recall now. Something about a new substitute teacher, a man who had spent time in Japan and was teaching them how to make origami cranes. Lucette had been beaming over this, a surprise.
Oh—origami, then. Not what I’d anticipated as your newest phase, but okay.
Lucette was a lot of things, gregarious and easy to anger, not the kind of girl who would find the folding of paper fun. Generally speaking.
Well, what do I know? It’s so hard keeping up with it all.
Time ticked by on autopilot.
They then went to the grocery store, where Lucette pushed the trolley, as she loved to do. Before Emily knew it, they were back home, cooking up a pot of spaghetti, the news playing in the background, the reporter saying something about a bone eater that had been wandering around the city dockyards and killed a tourist. Dishes washed, packed away. A boiled kettle. A teabag bled in the mug. Warmth. And finally, all that scouring in the shower.
The mirror fogged over. Emily turned away and sat down on the bathroom stool, her knees cracking. Had a truck hit her at some point? It felt as though one had.
Tomorrow will be easier. The next day always is.
She wrapped herself in a nightgown and walked into the hall.
Lucette was lying on her stomach in front of the television, head propped in her hands, feet in the air. “Okay, darlin’,” Emily said. “Time for bed.”
“Five more minutes?”
“Nope. Big day tomorrow. For both of us.”
Her daughter relented after the usual push and pull, and switched off the set. Lucette was getting taller by the day and beautiful in a tom-boyish way, despite the pig-tails and legs made for dancing. Emily smiled. She’d never thought it possible to love someone so much.
Lucette slinked into her arms, smelling of soap and bubblegum. “What’s the matter, Mom? You seem sad.”
“Just exhausted, darlin’.”
“Is your new work good?”
“Doing a good thing rarely feels good. I’ll earn my sleep, let’s put it that way.” Emily planted a kiss on the crown of her head. “I’ll be fine.”
“Will you tuck me in?”
“Of course.”
After prayers, and after promises to not let the bedbugs bite, Emily left Lucette in the dark. There had been a time when there had to be a nightlight in the room at all times, but things had changed somewhere along the line. Unlike her mother, Lucette seemed to be growing braver by the day. Emily was almost envious, and mourned the steel of her own resolve. Sure, she presented as hard-nosed to others—and damn it, she had to be at times—but by night, as she tiptoed through the house and extinguished every bulb, she knew better.
Emily’s room was tidy. Tomorrow’s uniform slung over the back of a chair. Sneakers on a piece of newspaper. A place for everything and everything in its place—except for one thing. There was a new baseball bat on the bed. Emily had bought it yesterday for twenty-nine dollars. Lucette would love it, she being the kind of girl who didn’t care much for dolls—not anymore, not since the Raggedy Ann she’d nicknamed Natalia. The Dodgers, on the other hand, were legendary. And her daughter had quite a swing on her, too. This made Emily proud.
Maybe I should get her a book on origami for Christmas as well, considering how psyched she was about it today. After my first paycheck.
Earthquakes, the weather, a ten-year-old’s whim—none of these could be predicted, not really. No matter what people said. There were always variables, and those variables kept Emily on her toes. Not necessarily a bad thing.
She was convinced the bat would be a sure-fire hit on Christmas day in two weeks’ time. Tomorrow after her shift, she would pick up some wrapping paper from the corner store, something with reindeer on it or little Santa Clauses. It would be gift numero uno under this year’s tree—an artificial cheapie with bent branches. Mother and daughter had erected it the prior weekend.
Her fingers curled around the bat. Gripping it made her long for summer. She hid it in her walk-in wardrobe and eased the door shut. A little groan of exhaustion escaped her. The mattress called and she had every intention of answering.
Emily thumped down and the bedsprings sang their lullaby. Silence.
The streetlight outside her window lent just enough peace of mind. Emily studied it now, watched all those snowflakes falling in straight lines like a rain of dead things. There was no wind. No stars.
Reality dissolved at some point. In her dream she stood at the windowsill, hands flush against the glass. She looked out at the empty lot next door. The ground should have been flat as dead calm water with all that virgin downfall. No. There were corpses upon corpses there; frozen hands pitched this way and that. Their smiles wide enough for all of Chicago’s rats to make homes from their mouths.
INTERLUDE ONE
Take a square piece of paper. Fold the top corner to the bottom. Crease, open again, and then fold the paper in half, sideways this time. Turn the square over, crease diagonally, open, and then fold in the opposite direction.
His voice like honey, as it always was.
“Did you grab the card, babe?”
SMOKE BREAK WITH MAMA METCALF
Emily met Mama Metcalf her third day on the job.
Three hours in and overdue for her first break, Emily sought refuge in the courtyard accessible through the break room. Although ‘courtyard’ seemed too fancy a description for the space, which she could tell from peering through the staffroom window was empty except for a weathered picnic table and the woman sitting at it. Emily gripped her fourth coffee of the morning in one hand and gripped the handle with the other.
She closed her eyes and in the dark imagined warmer weather greeting her. Sunshine on her face. The smell of wafting barbeque. Yes, the outdoor setting might even pass as halfway inviting mid-year, so long as she ignored the enclosing nine-foot wall, the one fringed with bales of razor-wire.
Ignored the dead pigeon snagged in the barbs.
The door creaked open. As expect
ed, the day was bitter, but Emily found the frigid air preferable to the antiseptic foulness she was leaving behind, if only for fifteen minutes. Potential pneumonia was preferable to staying a single unpaid minute inside the hospice.
The past three days had been a blur of soiled sheets, vomit clean-up duties, sponge baths, assisted feeds—work normally performed by the unpaid volunteers. She suspected Woods was testing the elasticity of her dedication, giving her all the shit chores to see if she would stick with it.
Woods doesn’t know anything about me if she thinks I’ll be scared off that easy.
Emily pulled her coat tight around her. Though it wasn’t currently snowing, a fresh layer of white covered the ground. Her footsteps crunched as she crossed the courtyard.
The woman at the picnic table was short, had brown hair streaked with gray, and wore a white set of scrubs. Her back was to the building, the vapor of her breath drifting up like smoke signals. If she heard Emily’s approach, she didn’t react.
“Hello there,” Emily said when she was close enough to reach out and touch the woman’s shoulder. She turned around; her creased face lit up in a smile.
The woman had to be in her 70s, at least. Emily also noted that it hadn’t been the woman’s breath she’d seen before; rather smoke from the crudely rolled cigarette pinched tight between her lips. “Oh, hey sugar. You must be new here.”
“Yes, I started earlier this week,” Emily said, walking around to sit on the opposite side of the picnic table. “I’m Emily Samuels. I don’t think we’ve met.”
“I’ve been out with a stomach bug, this is my first day back in a couple weeks. You don’t want to bring sickness in this place, sugar. It’ll only end up killing these folks quicker, and that’ll just leave us with even more work to do. Name’s Brenda Metcalf, but you can call me Mama Metcalf. Everybody does.”
“Nice to meet you.” And Emily sincerely meant that. There was something about the woman’s presence that made her feel at ease.
Is there a trace of a southern lilt to her accent? Yes, I think there just might be.
Sounds like the home place.
“I roll my own,” Mama Metcalf said when she noticed Emily eyeing the cigarette. “It’s cheaper to buy the loose tobacco and papers than getting a carton these days.”
“I see. So this is the smoking area?”
“Not really. Ain’t supposed to be no smoking anywhere on the property, but Woods looks the other way so long as I don’t leave my butts lying around. I put ‘em in a sandwich baggie and take ‘em with me when I leave. You want one?”
Emily shook her head. “I used to, but my husband made me quit when I got pregnant with our daughter.”
“Yeah, my oldest son’s always after me to shake the habit, so I tell him it’s my only real pleasure in life. Besides, I don’t usually finish a cigarette, just take a few puff-puffs.”
Emily sipped her coffee and wondered what life must be like for all the old women of the world whose sole pleasures came in the form of cheap hand-rolled cigarettes. But then her mind turned to the bottle of gin she had stashed away in her rental and decided she was in no position to judge.
“You’re not wearing a wedding ring,” Mama Metcalf said.
Emily thought of herself as a person divided into three parts. There was the Old Emily, the part that had quite happily existed up to the day she forgot the card. Then there was the part of her that would have suffered through Mama Metcalf’s question, a question that would have made her hands draw onto her lap, tucked away and hidden, curled up like wounded animals ashamed of their scars. Not anymore. She was Emily the Third—a mother who would never allow herself the disgrace of ever missing a beat.
“I’m not married anymore.”
“I hear ya. Finally divorced my old man about five years back. Straw that broke the camel’s hump was when he beat me with the Christmas tree.”
Emily was so stunned by the comment that she didn’t know how to respond. She was still trying to think of something to say when the door to the building opened and the male nurse she was working with earlier popped his head out. “Hey, New Girl.”
Emily stiffened, her lips stretching into a rictus of a smile. “Just a reminder my name’s Emily, not ‘New Girl’. All good?”
“No need to get your panties in a bunch, honey. It’s a revolving door of nurses around here, so I don’t bother learning names ‘til I’m sure they’re gonna stick around.”
A sharp retort rose to her lips. Swallowed it down. She’d only just met Mykel (“Pronounced like Michael but spelled M-Y-K-E-L,” he said when they first met, though Emily doubted that was the spelling on his birth certificate) and her tolerance for him was already waning. Emily hoped they wouldn’t have to work together too often, but considering how short-staffed the hospice was, she had a feeling she was fresh out of luck.
“I gotta get back inside, almost time to give out meds,” Mama Metcalf said, stubbing her cigarette on the heel of her shoe, and then placing it inside a Ziploc bag. She sealed it up and stuffed it in a small black purse on the bench next to her. “Also wanna see what they got good in the vending machine. I forgot to pack a lunch today.”
“Well, it’s not much,” Emily said, “but I brought a couple of bananas from home and left them on top of the staff fridge inside. You’re welcome to them.”
“Thank you but I can’t eat bananas no more,” Mama Metcalf said, scuttling back across the courtyard. “I had my gallbladder took out a couple years ago, so I can’t filter the seeds.”
With that quizzical statement, she walked through the door Mykel was holding open for her and disappeared.
“She’s a hoot, but I’m confused,” Emily said.
Mykel walked over to the picnic table. “Confused by which part? The part where she thinks those little black things in a banana are real seeds, or the part where she thinks the gallbladder’s job is to filter seeds?”
“Both actually. She’s a nurse?”
“Oh no, Mama Metcalf is one of our non-medical volunteers.”
“But she just said she was going to be giving out meds.”
“Yeah, well, truth is this place is barely scraping by with what little funding we get, and private donations are one step up from zilch. Rules get bent.”
“Great, so I’m using my BSN degree to clean shitty sheets while some senior citizen off the street is giving meds.”
“You’re just going through your initiation period, but you must be moving up in the world, New Girl. Woods wants you in her office pronto to observe an intake interview.”
Emily stood. “Intake? I didn’t know we were expecting any new guests today.”
“We weren’t. We had a drop and run this morning. A kid. Looks like we’re going to be cramming a new zombie on the hall.”
Emily frowned at Mykel as she passed. “It’s against facility policy to call them ‘zombies’. You know that, right?”
“New Girl,” Mykel said as he followed her into the building, “you’re not going to last here very long if you don’t lighten up.”
INTAKE
After stowing her coat in the break room, Emily found Woods outside the door to her office, holding a bottle of Yoo-hoo chocolate in her hands. At first glance, her supervisor’s face was stoic. A second pass proved otherwise.
Emily detected shards of unease in Woods’ expression, the pointy ends driving in, causing noticeable pain. And she wasn’t doing a good job of hiding it, either. Emily almost asked if she was okay, but snatched the words from the tip of her tongue and tucked them away as though she’d been caught red-handed with something humiliating.
What an awful revelation. Discovering someone you’re obliged to respect is human.
No matter how passive the mask someone wore, emotions lurked beneath the surface.
In some alternate reality, Emily suspected robots must be the ones delivering this line of work. Machines programmed to express dignity and empathy on cue, deflecting care’s heartbreak. Maybe th
e hospice workers of the future were coin-operated things, little profit contrivances—boy-oh-boy would the taxpayers of America love that. These corridors would ring with SERVICE REQUIRED alerts, a symphony of turning cogs, whilst beneath it all, beneath that surface, weeping went unheard. But this wasn’t the future. This wasn’t science fiction. They were only human after all—tender beings in slipping masks.
“Emily, I wanted to have a word with you before we go in.”
The door to Woods’ office was closed, but Emily could see a head capped with curly black hair through the window. “Mykel said it was a kid.”
“I’m afraid he’s right.”
“How old?”
“Twelve.”
“Oh, Jesus.” How could she not think of Lucette, who was only two years younger? There but for the grace of God, assuming He, or She, existed.
Emily had her doubts, as she figured any sane person would in this unforgiving world. Sure, she insisted her daughter recite prayers before bed, but it was impossible to tell if anyone was listening. Emily’s Catholicism had been drilled into her by her parents, two big-boned Southerners who took their religion ‘straight up’ right until the end when God repaid their devotion with a set of His and Her’s matching heart attacks. However, from an early age Emily harbored doubts. The Bible stories they told at Mass just didn’t make sense. How could two of every animal in the world fit on one boat, and where did they all go to the bathroom? How could someone be their own father, or their own son? Why would Jesus have to let himself be killed in order to forgive all people of their sins, couldn’t he just say “You’re forgiven” and be done with it? Why was Adam and Eve’s desire for knowledge something to be punished? And the standard answer she received when she posed these questions to her parents, “You just have to have faith”, seemed a convenient way of not having to give an answer. Once her parents were gone, she’d stopped going to church altogether, part of her belief sealed in those caskets. Despite this, Emily found herself passing on some of the traditions to her daughter and scouring the sky for answers among the satellites and shooting stars. Religion was a drug after all, one she hadn’t realized she was dependent on until she was almost free of it.
