The Tides

by Melanie Tem

  Alarmed, thinking he must have wandered away from the group, Rebecca looked at Colleen, who shook her head. 'He was right with us the whole time,' she said brightly. 'He was just fine.'

  'You weren't lost, Dad,' Rebecca assured him. 'We all knew where you were.'

  'I'm sorry. I'm sorry, Becky. I got lost.'

  'You weren't lost, Dad,' she repeated. Marshall knew full well he deserved the rebuke. 'You were on an outing with other people from this facility, this nursing home, where you live. You went for a bus ride to the mountains. Everybody knew where you were. You weren't lost.'

  'I didn't know where I was, young lady. Why wasn't I told?'

  Rebecca set the disinfectant and cloths on the nurses'-station counter and reached to button up his shirt, wondering how long it had been open like that, wondering if it ought to matter to her since it obviously didn't matter to him. The fact that he'd always taken pains with his appearance was often given both as rationale for paying attention to it now in his stead and as tragic evidence of how he was no longer himself. But he was himself, here

  and now: a man who didn't care whether his shirt was buttoned right or not.

  He flinched and drew back, then saw what she was doing and allowed it, even smiled. 'Mom's coming for lunch today,' she told him cheerily. 'It's eleven o'clock now, so she'll be here in an hour or so.'

  'Who? Mom? My mother?' Eagerly he glanced from one side to the other in an arc constrained as much by limited imagination as by muscle constriction or vertigo.

  'My mother. Billie.' It was hard to call her parents by their names. When he still looked blank, she tried, 'Your wife.'

  His face stiffened and his knuckles whitened on the bars of the walker. 'Here? Where? My wife, you say? Where is she? What is her business here?'

  'She'll be here in about an hour to have lunch with you, Dad.' Rebecca was ashamed of her own impatience, but Sandy had paged her for another call, hopefully Mental Health intake, who wouldn't wait long. 'Go with Colleen down to your room now so Mom will know where to find you.' She patted his arm and turned away, ashamed, then, of the patronizing tone used to mask and make up for the fact that she didn't want to talk to her father anymore.

  She went around the counter to pick up the phone and was relieved to hear someone with whom she'd had at least cursory contact before. Rummaging for Mickey's chart - out of place because it had been in such recent and hurried use - she described the situation again, listening to Mickey's renewed shouts now every minute or so. 'I'd like you to look at his meds.'

  'I'm sure he's organic. Not amenable to treatment.'

  Rebecca closed her eyes. She'd heard this with every referral she'd made to the Mental Health Center. Again she said, 'I'd like you to review his meds. Just in case he's over-medicated or is experiencing side effects from long-term use of anti-psychotics.'

  'We can look at the patient and determine whether a medication review is indicated,' the intake worker said. 'You do have an SI194?'

  Rebecca flipped through the chart and found no such form. She gritted her teeth. 'No.'

  'Well,' said the intake worker, 'we can't do anything without an SI194.'

  'How do I get one of those?'

  'It should have come with him from the State Hospital.'

  'It didn't.'

  'That's because you didn't go through us on this admission. Every psychiatric admission to every nursing home in this county is to come through us.'

  'I had no idea.'

  'We can initiate the paper trail here.'

  'Good,' Rebecca said warily, waiting for the catch.

  'That's another department, so it will have to wait until Monday.'

  'We can't keep him over the holiday weekend like this.'

  'That's the best I can do.'

  Angrily Rebecca summarized the conversation in the progress notes and slid the chart back into its slot on the rack. The top hinge loosened, riffling the contents onto the floor. She bent under the desk to retrieve the papers, then sat crosslegged on the floor arranging the flimsy, multicolored sheets behind their proper tabs.

  'Call the doctor,' she told Diane, too frustrated to make the instruction sound like a suggestion. 'Tell him what the bozo from Mental Health said. Tell him we need to get Mickey admitted to a hospital.' She expected an argument and was ready, even eager, but the Director of Nursing picked up the phone without a word.

  By the time Rebecca had reassembled the chart, Diane had reached the doctor's office. 'She won't put me through to him,' she told Rebecca, not covering the receiver with her hand. 'She says he's already spent all the time he's going to on this patient.'

  'Goddammit.' Rebecca took the phone. 'This is Rebecca Emig, administrator of The Tides. You tell Dr Pratt it's essential I talk to him.'

  Obviously reluctant, the woman muffled the receiver and said something in the background. Before long the doctor came on the line, sounding bored. 'Pratt here.'

  'Dr Pratt, we have or real emergency here with one of your patients.'

  'Which one is it anyway?'

  'Mickey Schipp.' Rebecca spelled it. 'He transferred from the State Hospital yesterday afternoon'

  'Look, it's your nursing home—do what you want.'

  'What I want is to have him hospitalized so his meds can be evaluated and he can have a complete physical. We can't do that without a doctor's order.'

  'Well, I won't give you an order. How's that?'

  Various obscenities sprang to her lips, but she only asked, more or less evenly, 'Why not?'

  'Tell me, young lady, are you a physician?'

  When she didn't answer, he repeated the question. 'No.'

  'Then kindly allow me to practice my profession. This is nothing more than a chronic psychiatric patient. Just restrain him and sedate him and he'll be fine.'

  'I don't like'

  'If you can't handle patients like this, don't take them in the first place. Now, it's Thanksgiving weekend and I'm going home. I suggest you do the same. Good day, Miss' He hung up before he had thought of her name.

  'He can't hospitalize him,' Diane told her, a bit smugly. 'Pratt lost all hospital privileges years ago.'

  'Then why does he still have patients here?' Diane shrugged.

  Rebecca hurried away to call Kurt and tell him she'd be late again. He wasn't home, and she was just as glad. She hated hearing the message she'd recorded on the machine; it sounded just enough like the voice she heard when she spoke to be eerie. Holding the receiver away from her ear until the beep, she left a message, hoping it was sufficiently contrite without encouraging him to call back. She really didn't like it when Kurt called her at work. He was going to his brother's tomorrow for Thanksgiving and she would have dinner here with her parents, so they'd planned, somewhat vaguely, to mark the holiday together tonight. Now, she wasn't sure she'd get home in time.

  Not for the first time, it occurred to her how much more real work was to her than home. While she was at work, she found it hard to imagine home - the house, the neighborhood, even Kurt. During the increasingly brief and infrequent periods when she was at home, work was almost always on her mind. Often there were phone calls from The Tides. If not, she called in every hour or so. Often she'd intend to be concentrating on something else - television news, conversation or lovemaking with Kurt - when an idea about some work problem would percolate to the forefront of her consciousness, far more vivid than whatever activity she might currently be engaged in and demanding immediate action.

  In theory, this was distressing; probably she ought to have a more balanced life. But The Tides was endlessly fascinating, endlessly frustrating and gratifying, and because of it she felt better—more directed, more sure of herself, more together—than she ever had. She could not imagine herself anywhere else.

  She supposed Kurt must be unhappy. He complained that she was never home, objected when the phone rang during a rare dinner together or in the middle of the night, once had gone so far as to take it off the hook while they had sex and l
ashed back at her when she protested. She supposed she wasn't being fair to him. But Kurt's displeasure—Kurt himself—was easy enough not to think about. It was The Tides that claimed her attention, refused to be set aside.

  Retrieving the cleaning supplies, she went into the bathroom Ernest Lindgren had used. It didn't stink, which was a pleasant surprise. She set the mop down and turned on the light.

  At first she thought, foolishly, that someone had papered over the dingy off-white paint without telling her; at first, naively, she rather liked the colors. Great loops and, she saw as she inspected more closely, tiny slashes and dots adorned all four walls and the ceiling, using the entire red end of the spectrum - hot pink, scarlet, peach, tangerine. Lipstick, she realized, and the scrawls were not random, but were full-fledged graffiti spelling out words. Spelling out her name again and again, Rebecca and Becky and Rebecca again, and the repeated phrase like an invective: 'You're mine!'

  Gordon, she thought, incensed. This was the sort of thing Gordon might do, to prove his 'love' for her. But she dismissed the idea almost as soon as she'd thought it; she really couldn't envision him putting this much energy into anything.

  Could her father have done this? The prospect chilled her; could he be this far gone already? Unpleasant as it was to contemplate, it was not inconceivable that he might be mentally capable of something so bizarre, but surely he didn't have the physical stamina or steadiness - or reach; there were squiggles and swaths of the garish color in the highest corners.

  Hastily Rebecca filled the bucket with water from the sink, sloshed in more than an average amount of the potent cleaner, and saturated the mop. As she wrung it damp and brought it up firmly against the opposite wall, she found herself casting about for anyone else she might be said to belong to with such a vengeance: 'You are mine!' Certainly not Kurt. Her mother, maybe; her mother had such a claim on her. But Billie Emig would never make a public spectacle like this. Oddly, Rebecca almost wished she would.

  The disinfectant fumes in the tiny enclosed space made her eyes water and her head pound, but the waxy graffiti were impervious. To be sure, she scrubbed a few times at the wall, moved the mop to the wall behind her, beside the sink. And saw on the mirror, scrawled in iridescent black lipstick, the name: 'FAYE.'

  That, she was abruptly certain, was the name her father had been saying, and Paul—and, now that she thought about it, other residents. She'd heard Gordon singing a song about Faye, and last night, in between tales of the Mafia and aliens from outer space, Petra had mumbled at least once that Faye had killed Larry.

  Faye. Rebecca didn't think she'd ever known anybody named Faye. Was the FAYE slashed across the mirror the signature of the perpetrator, or another name, like hers, scrawled in a bathroom like a dirty word, and on a day when a Health Inspector was in the facility? Anger shook her, then fear.

  She plunged the mophead back into the bucket and leaned the handle against the wall. It slid down, bringing the dripping head up, and water splattered. Rebecca swore and left the room, shutting the door behind her. She swung by Sandy's office to tell her to post an Out of Order sign on the bathroom door and to find Tillie right away to figure out whether the lipstick could be cleaned off. Sandy, wide-eyed, wanted to talk about it. Rebecca kept her instructions terse and did not stay.

  Still seething, she determined to finish the damn October month-end books today no matter what else happened. On her way back to her office, she glanced into Myra Larsen's room to see Naomi Murphy feeding her. Thoroughly absorbed in each other, neither woman acknowledged her presence, and Rebecca lingered before she turned the corner to inspect the room Dave had painted that morning.

  Myra, of course, was talking, trying on life-stories, spinning identities, and she was swallowing one spoonful after another without interruption in her monologue. Naomi was rapt.

  Rebecca just stood and took them in. This, she thought with a catch in her throat, was the pay-off; this was the reason she did this work. Fleeting and based on the only approximate intersection of disparate realities, this contact between Myra Larsen and Naomi Murphy lit up the place.

  'My name is Myra Larsen and I don't belong here. Everything I've ever done I've done on my own, without a speck of help from anybody, and you can bet your life nobody's going to help me now. Sit down, girlie, listen and you might learn something.

  'My name is Myra Larsen and I taught school for forty years, over forty years, and I was a good teacher, too, my students learned. But I had enough of the classroom, and I retired early and I took a cruise around the world. By myself. It was lovely.

  'Oh, I've had some experiences, girlie, some experiences worth listening to. You just sit there and listen for a while, you might learn something. If you're going to keep me in this hellhole you might as well know something about me.

  'Ohh! Ohh! They're killing me! They're killing me! Ohh!'

  Suddenly and for no apparent reason, Myra's head rolled on her shoulders and her eyes bulged. Naomi waited patiently for her to be finished. The first time this had happened she had been badly shaken, but it hadn't taken long for her to become accustomed.

  'I spent everything on myself, everything, and I made a pretty penny in my lifetime, too, for a woman. Why should I save it? Hah! Let my daughter do for herself like I had to do, the greedy little bitch.'

  'Don't leave me, girlie, stay with me just a few minutes and you might learn something.'

  Myra's sharp hands closed around Naomi's wrist, spilling the applesauce on its way to her mouth, and the hollow eyes stared right at her. Naomi separated the clutching fingers and studied the dry cracking flesh between them, riveted by the undeniable physical reality of the hand in hers and the stale breath in her face, listening to Myra's shape-shifting story and trying, in fact, to learn something.

  'My Papa was a well-respected man, and his death was the tragedy of my life, the touchstone of my life. Mama couldn't cope. Mama was frail. I detest frailty in a woman. I've never been frail in my life. My sister took me in, fed me and clothed me till I was eighteen and married, but it was out of Christian duty, never out of love for me. Nobody's ever done a thing for me out of love. Understand that, girlie, and you might learn something?

  Again Naomi nudged the laden spoon against the pale lips, and finally, as if against Myra's will or beneath her interest, they parted and accepted the food. Naomi was pleased, as if she'd accomplished something. There wasn't much time before they would come to take the tray away, whether Myra had eaten or not.

  'Hey, babe.' Dan Murphy hailed Rebecca. With him was Ira Goldberg, Naomi's father and one of the owners of The Tides. 'What's happening? Ira's here to take Naomi to lunch.'

  'The state's here,' she told him, sorry to sum up everything that was happening in such a reductionist way, but aware that that was what he'd want to know.

  His small eyes narrowed. 'About that oven-cleaner shit? Don't tell me they're already moving on that orderly's suicide last night.'

  'Primarily to investigate a complaint about patient mix.'

  'Patient mix.' His lip curled. 'You know something? I'm getting fucking sick of hearing about patient mix. Who's here?'

  'Ernest Lindgren.'

  'That figures. Ernie loves crap like patient mix. Where is he? I'll just go say howdy. Pay my respects. Ask about his daughter. She just got herself knocked up by some sleazebag and flunked out of Harvard?' He strode off down the hall, raising a hand to Diane as he passed the nurses' station, clapping Dexter McCord on the shoulder.

  Myra was allowing Naomi to feed her another bite, this time not from a spoon but a bit of bread and butter directly from her fingers. Still watching them but unable now to lose herself in the beauty of the tableau, Rebecca said to Ira, 'She's so good with her.'

  Scowling, Ira relit his pipe. 'Better she should work with young people. Children. Where there's hope. Where there's life. Where the present and the future are not already decided. Look at that. She wastes her time.'

  Wanting to protect the delicacy
of the interaction between Naomi and Myra from his cynicism, Rebecca made herself a decoy. Regretfully she moved away, and Ira did come with her.