by Melanie Tem
'I'm sorry to disturb you in the middle of the night.'
'What is it?'
'Well, you know that guy? That maintenance man?'
'Dave.'
'Yeah. Dave.'
'What about him?'
'He's here.'
'What do you mean, he's there? What's wrong?' The heat again, or another broken pipe. Maybe that was where the water was coming from. Rebecca groaned and began considering ways to readjust the budget, which wouldn't be easy.
'He's been in the basement for a couple of hours. I don't know what he's doing down there. I keep hearing him talking to somebody, or talking to himself.' Linda paused. 'Is he, you know, all there?'
'Oh, Jesus.' Rebecca sat up. Dave was the third maintenance she'd had, and all she knew about him, really, was that he could hammer a nail and wield a paintbrush better than she could, which wasn't saying much. From his red-rimmed eyes and constant dry sniffing, she'd surmised a cocaine habit, and his reliability left something to be desired, but he was better than having nobody to make the myriad repairs around The Tides. 'Go get him,' she told Linda. 'Tell him I want to talk to him.'
Linda hesitated. "Then he'll know I called you.'
'It's your job to let me know about unusual things on your shift.'
'I called Diane. She said it wasn't a nursing problem and I should call you.'
'She's right. Go get Dave.'
'I'm afraid of him. Somebody that weird, you don't know what they'll do.'
'Then call the cops. Or I will.'
'He'd still know it was me. Oh, wait.' From the sound of it, Linda turned from the phone, then back. 'He's gone.'
'Are you sure?' Was she telling the truth?
'I just saw him leave. I can hear his truck now.'
'Okay.' Rebecca let her breath out. 'Make sure the back door's locked. I'll talk to him in the morning.' If he comes in, she thought unhappily, but there was no point in saying that to the nurse.
'There's something else.'
'Tell me.'
'Well, I'm the only one here.' Rebecca had a sudden, extravagant fantasy of The Tides completely emptied of all life but this one nurse. 'The only staff,' Linda elaborated helpfully.
Still half-asleep, Rebecca couldn't compute the scheduled staffing pattern. 'Aren't there supposed to be three aides on with you?'
'Two. Since Larry Diane hasn't found anybody. But Edie and Nancy were scheduled tonight.'
'Neither one of them showed up?'
'They showed up.' Of course—she'd seen them both. She rubbed her eyes. 'They walked off. Quit.'
'Just like that? Did something happen?'
'They said the place is haunted.'
'Haunted? By somebody besides Dave?'
'Supposedly they saw a ghost.'
'I don't think I've ever heard of a haunted nursing home. Where did they see this ghost?'
'Nancy said she caught her in bed with Paul.'
'This is amazing. Did Paul mind?'
'Edie saw her in your dad's room.'
Rebecca was speechless. Finally, she found her voice to ask, 'Are you okay? Is Dad okay? Should I come in? Not that I can help much with anything medical.'
'Diane said she'd come in if I needed her. But it's only a couple of hours till the day shift come on. Everybody's fine.'
'As long as you don't have an emergency.'
'As long as I only have one emergency at a time.'
Rebecca replaced the receiver and set about the task of retrieving some of the blankets from Kurt, who had not stirred again. She ought to go in. Linda shouldn't be there alone. She ought to see about her father. She fell asleep.
Chapter 11
Naomi awoke trembling, a tide of fire in her throat. She hadn't heard Dan come in, but here he was asleep beside her. What else was in her house that she didn't know about? What else that ought to be here was not? Hands were at her, sharp thumbs in the hollow of her throat, bones pressing hard against her gums. But the pain of them was small and she could still breathe with no trouble, so it was not enough.
Naomi listened. Nothing was amiss in her morning house. She would get up soon and search every room to be sure, as she always did, but she knew everything would be the way she'd left it last night. Everything would be fine. No one taken out while she slept. No graves filled in.
She reminded herself that cancer could be spreading in her body right now without her knowledge. A secret spark could have taken hold in the attic. Just before the Gestapo knocked at the door (why would they knock?) her mother might have come awake like this, checking to be sure everything was all right.
But that horror was not hers. Suffering, which made a life authentic by defining it, was not hers. She flattened her face against her pillow, but she could still breathe.
Naomi missed Myra. Myra, with her shrieking and her opaque, reflecting eyes and her sinewed throat that vibrated like a distant alarm. Naomi missed Myra and was assaulted by a flood of guilt like excrement, like her own feces, cramping, tearing.
The feeling passed, as strong emotion and physical sensation always did. This was no more her guilt than were her memories of killing Myra, of nudging the willing breath out of the wizened mouth, then of lowering her hands, damp from Myra's spittle. Over the years Naomi had come to realize, despite her own vivid perceptions to the contrary, that very little of what she experienced actually belonged to her.
Other people had often understood this before and better than she did. When she and Dan were first married, she had tried to tell him a little about the camps, but he had never known what to say and it had ended up embarrassing them both, because, of course, she wasn't any closer to the concentration-camp experience than he was; it didn't belong to her. She hadn't been there, not even in the womb. For a long time she'd tried to adjust her personal chronology so that that might have been true, so that she might really remember the absurd terror of knowing you'd done something so terrible that it was punishable by being in this place but never knowing what it was you'd done, the oozing of human slime between your palms, the sharp cold in your fingertips and the backs of your knees, the chitter of machine-gun fire, the rancid smoke, the swelling of Wagner to the doomed rhythm of marching feet.
'I am Joan of Arc and they are burning me at the stake
'I am Pocahontas and they are selling me to the white man
'I am Faye. I am Faye.
'I am going to the concentration camps. Take me to the concentration camps'
None of that suffering was hers, even now. None of it had been Myra's, either. Taking great pains not to touch Danny, Naomi crawled out of bed.
When Alex woke it was the middle of the night. He couldn't see the clock; no matter how many times he told them, housekeeping could not seem to understand the importance of placing the clock where he could see it. But he could tell by the quality of the air and by the nature of his own consciousness that it was the middle of the night, and somebody was in his room, and Alex was inexplicably afraid.
He tried to whistle for help but his lips were too dry. 'Abby!' He cried out for her with all his strength, trusting that she would come when he called, despite - because of - the fact that she'd lost control with him and would, by nature, be blaming herself. But he managed only a low groan and there was no answer.
That was inaccurate. There was an answer. Not from Abby, but from the figure dancing around him, leaving trails of multicolored spangles like a vicious pinwheel.
The spangles came closer, surrounded him, and there was a sweet odor that made his head reel. A soft pressure parted his lips, and something flicked into his mouth. Nausea and sexual arousal swelled.
His vision blurred, his throat caught, and his head began to thrash. The motion was out of his control, back and forth on his pillow, and there was an enormous clatter and thump in one ear and then the other, inside his head, faster and faster. Terror and pain rose in his throat, and he was so aroused he could all but feel the throbbing of his penis, the swelling and straining of hi
s scrotum, which he had not felt for most of his life.
Soft strong hands, a woman's hands, on his shoulders, on either side of his head, holding him, saving him from falling off the bed, restraining him from flying out of this body and away. Tears of relief filmed his eyes and he couldn't wipe them. 'Abby.'
It wasn't Abby. It was a woman he didn't know whose pale blonde curls were bright and deceptive as a cloud around her piquant face, whose lips and eyelids were painted bright as a Mardi Gras mask, whose breath reeked of roses. He fought the hands at first, or tried to, but they were too much for him and before long he felt himself subsiding. He coughed and choked; something yellow and gauzy, a soft roughness, was brushed across his face, then fed into the pulpy back of his throat.
He was coughing, choking. Vomiting; he would drown in the tides of his own vomit. The woman had slid down his body and was, he knew, squatting between his legs, where he could neither constrict his muscles to draw her down onto him nor flex than to fling her away. He heard a wet thick sound, the spurt of his own ejaculate, the gluey rivulets of it waxing and waning. He heard her exuberant cry.
He was wailing now, howling, and astonishing himself. Was it an expression of dread or of desire, of surrender or of triumph? It was quite unlike him not to know his own mind and heart.
But he did know. His mind focused. The pumping of his heart steadied. He turned his head to the right as far as it would go, farther, the entire right side of his face buried in the pillow, his neck straining. Then he gathered himself, more determination and will than strength, and flung his head hard and fast to the left, as far as and farther than it would go.
Anyone watching would have seen that Alex's body shifted hardly at all, the mass of it from the neck down too much dead weight for only his head to move. But Alex knew otherwise, and so did Faye, who left with that part of him she'd been able to take in.Alex waited. Then he moistened his lips and began to whistle. No one heard him, though, and eventually he fell asleep, until someone—not Abby—came to get him up in the morning. He was glad it wasn't Abby, though he missed her. He hadn't decided whether to tell her anything of what had happened to him in the night, because he hadn't decided what to make of it, so he had planned to behave as he would on any other morning. She'd have bathed and dressed him as usual, and the slowing of her hands over the crusted spots on his upper thighs and lower abdomen would have been imperceptible to anyone but Alex, who would have smiled. As it was, the aide who readied him for the day was, though not a stranger, also not someone who tested his abilities to remain charming and distant, and so the interaction was blessedly uncomplicated.
When the two women stopped at the nurses' station and announced they were there to see Beatrice Quinn, the pool nurse scanned the charts, looking for the room number. 'Two two one,' shouted Dexter McCord from his place in the old men's row against the wall. 'Down there on the south end, next to the last room, cattywumpus from that wall they painted. Can't miss it. Oh, hell, follow me, little ladies, and I'll steer you right. Come on, come on.'
The young women exchanged indulgent smiles. The nurse shrugged. Finally one of them said, loudly and sweetly, 'Why, thank you, sir. That's very nice of you.'
'Ninety-two years old and I'm just a kid.' Wheeling his chair energetically though not very fast, he boomed over his shoulder: 'You believe I'm ninety-two years old, missy?'
One of the women said at once, 'You certainly don't look it.'
'Damn right. Just a kid. What do you want with Mrs Quinn?'
At first they didn't answer, but when he said, 'Eh?' and stopped his wheelchair in the middle of the hall and laboriously turned it to face them, one of them said cheerfully, 'Oh, we're just here to ask her a few questions, that's all.'
'What kind of questions?'
'Just questions.'
'Where you from?'
'I'm from Pennsylvania originally and my friend here is—where are you from, Harriet?'
'No, goddammit,' said Dexter. 'Where do you work?'
A pause. 'We work for the county.'
'Which office?'
They gave up then and told him. 'The Mental Health Center.'
'The funny farm, eh? Thought so. That granddaughter sic you on her, did she? And that nurse, that Diane? I been expecting you. She kept saying that granddaughter wouldn't do a thing like that, but I knew better. Well, let me tell you something, little ladies, save you some time. Mrs Quinn is crazy as a bedbug, that one, but I don't think it's your kind of crazy.'
During this speech he'd maneuvered his chair around again and continued down the hall. They followed, Harriet thinking how she'd been so fond of old people before she took this job and how nice it was to run into one who, though probably diagnosable, was not overtly hostile.
'This here's her room.' He stopped and motioned them impatiently around him like a traffic cop. A man with a walker edged between them, muttering under his breath. 'Just hold your horses, mister,' Dexter told him. 'You got no place to go that won't wait. We none of us do.'
Petra Carrasco insinuated herself between the two women, put her hard hand on the arm of the one not named Harriet, and leaned close. 'I got a nest of red ants in my rectum, did you know that?'
There was a beat of silence. Then the mental health worker said evenly, 'I'm very sorry to hear that.'
Petra pulled herself up on tiptoe, reached to tweak the woman's cheek, and rasped, 'Hey, no, they're my friends, know what I mean? We look out for each other.' Then she let the woman go and moved off, looking for somebody else to tell about the red ants.
'Don't fret your pretty little heads over her,' Dexter advised. 'The time to worry is if she ever shuts up.'
Petra was intercepted by the pool nurse with her med cart. Almost graciously she accepted the cup of orange juice in which her Thorazine was contained, then raised it over her head and threw it. Involuntarily the women from the Mental Health Center stepped back. The sticky liquid splattered across the mural and the white waxed floor. Thin body bent back on itself like a paper clip, Petra jigged in a half-circle around the baffled pool nurse and jabbed one forefinger and then the other in her direction. 'Devil!' Petra screeched at the nurse. 'Murderess! Try to poison me! Try to poison my little friends!'
Quietly Naomi entered her kitchen. Somebody else was them. The light was odd, a soft lavender hue, sinister for all its prettiness, like musical accompaniment to the ovens, like variegated gray smoke from them against blue sky. She stood in the doorway, waiting, but the presence didn't reveal itself; in fact, it vanished.
A piercing need drove her to the door without a coat, though the cold assaulted her. She had to get to The Tides. She had things to do there that could not wait.
These were not her thoughts. This was not her need. But Naomi was used to responding to urges that she didn't own, understandings that she could not claim, and she allowed herself to be rushed.
When the mental health workers knocked on the open door and entered Beatrice's room, she was sitting on the edge of her bed, leaning sharply leftward, ruminating about home. About herself at home and away from home; was it the same self? How would it change her if she gave her things away? How would it change home? 'Mrs Beatrice Quinn?'
In a sense, Beatrice didn't know. But of course, really, she had the answer. 'Yes,' she said pleasantly. She turned around slowly and ran her fingers distractedly over her hair, bringing her thoughts back to this time and place. 'Good day, girls. I am Mrs Beatrice Quinn. May I help you?'
'Yes, Mrs Quinn. My name is Gina and this is my friend, Harriet. We're from the county Mental Health Center. Your granddaughter, Mrs Byrne, and your nurse Diane asked us to come and see you.'
'My granddaughter Mary Alice? That was nice of her. Why did she ask you to do that?'
'Oh, she's a little concerned about you, that's all. We
have a few questions to ask you. Is there someplace we can go that's more private?'
'Mental health?' Beatrice regarded one and then the other, mindful not to stare.
'She says you keep trying to leave the nursing home. Is that right?'
A smile caught at the corner of Beatrice's mouth, though she was also a bit frightened now. 'I see. Well, you girls just make yourselves to home.'
The two women sat down awkwardly on the edge of the bed, their knees humped over the lowered siderails, and put their clipboards in their laps. Because the bed was pushed against the wall on one side, all three of them were now sitting in a row, which made conversation awkward. Beatrice folded her hands in front of her expectantly. One of the workers cleared her throat. 'I wonder if you can tell me, Mrs Quinn, what day it is?'
