The Tides

by Melanie Tem

  'Poor Ernie,' Sandy sighed. 'You heard about his daughter' Rebecca shook her head. Sandy nodded knowingly. 'She disappeared. About a month ago. Not a sign.'

  'Oh, God'

  'Poor Ernie. I don't see how he can work. I guess we take his mind off his own troubles' She giggled.

  Ernest Lindgren saw his daughter everywhere. On a street corner on his way to The Tides this morning; he'd had to go around the block and pull over and talk to the young woman, who'd been downright hostile, to make sure it wasn't Kim. In the window of a passing city bus last night, late, when he'd been out all but hopelessly searching for her, as had become his nighttime habit. He'd flagged the bus down, and it had been empty except for the sympathetic driver, a young woman who, fleetingly, he'd thought might be his daughter in imperfect disguise. In the background crowd of a local TV news shot; the station had finally provided him with the name of the photographer, but the man had not been very cooperative. So far, all his sightings had been false, but he couldn't afford to ignore any of them, because he knew as much about where Kim was as anyone, which was nothing.

  So now, when he heard her voice in the dining room of The Tides, he didn't think twice about investigating. It wasn't Kim, of course; the figure he was sure he saw turned out to be only a blur of reflections from windows and overhead lights off floor and tabletops and stainless-steel fixtures. He wasn't even disappointed anymore. In a way, he welcomed the deceptions, since they gave him something to do for Kim. Now that he was in the area, he flipped his survey sheet to the Food Services section and started his part of the inspection there. Already he could tell that this was going to be a long day, and that, for him, was just as well.

  It was Beatrice Quinn's ninetieth birthday, and she was giving things away. Her granddaughter Mary Alice had brought items from her house as instructed. It had made her teary to pack up her grandmother's things, and she'd had to rent a U-Haul, but she was relieved that, finally, the house would be closed up and there'd be no more talk of going home. No need, either, for the chemical or physical restraints legally allowed by the mental health workers' determination of her incompetence; Mary Alice would have hated to see her grandmother sedated or tied down, but it would have been better than having her trying to go home all the time.

  Beatrice reached out a hand in no particular direction and held up a shoebox. The lid slipped off and a few curled photographs fluttered out. 'These are pictures of my family,' she announced. 'Colleen. Mary Alice. Come here, girls.'

  The Activity Director made her way through the crowd, and the granddaughter moved closer, looking anxious and already hurt.

  'Some of these pictures are to stay in the family,' Beatrice told them. 'Some of them we to stay here. We'll frame them and put them up on the walls, don't you know. I always thought that big wedding picture of Great-Aunt Nan and Great-Uncle Charles would look fine over the fireplace there.'

  Colleen frowned. 'But, Beatrice, what about everybody else?

  'We talked about it at Resident Council, little lady,' shouted Dexter. 'Don't you worry your pretty little head about it. We're all for it. Some of us don't have family, let alone family pictures'

  'But they won't mean anything to anybody else,' Colleen persisted.

  'Sure they will. Not what they mean to her, maybe, but I'm ninety-two years old and I bet I can come up with something.'

  This lamp is for Mr Marek.' Beatrice indicated a rickety floor lamp with a stained satiny shade and a tassle on the pull cord. 'For all the nights he stays up so late, don't you know. It was a wedding present to Mr Quinn and myself, so you treat it with respect, you hear me, Mr Marek? Rebecca thought the old voice, already rough with age, broke.

  'Are you sure you went to part with that? Mary Alice asked.

  Beatrice looked at her. 'It's only a lamp, my dear.'

  Gordon had obviously been drinking since Rebecca had danced with him; her heart sank as she watched him prance around the piles and boxes of Beatrice's belongings, snapping his fingers and singing. He stopped more or less in front of Beatrice, bent unsteadily, and nuzzled her ear. Her small white hands went up to either side of his dark head and she held him there for a moment, saying something to him that no one else could hear. When she let him go he almost fell, but steadied himself enough to bow to her. Head cocked, he fingered the ridged brass pole of his lamp as if calling a tune out of it, then carried it off, weaving, the cord trailing dangerously between his feet.

  Two men Rebecca hadn't seen before appeared at the edge of the crowded room. Black, conservatively dressed, one with a briefcase. More surveyors, Rebecca thought tiredly, and didn't get up to go to them although she should have. She saw Lisa greet them, then turn to scan the room. Rebecca hoped they were not looking for her, but if they were she wouldn't be hard to find.

  When Sandy burst breathlessly into the conference room, arms laden with policy book pages in white sacks from the copy place, Ernest Lindgren was standing at the windows that looked out over the back field. His hands were clasped behind him; she could see how hard the fingers were gripping each other. His shoulders were tense, and he seemed to be staring at something. Sandy stood on tiptoe for a minute to see if she could see what it was, but the empty field looked the same as it always did, desolate, neglected and sort of a mess, scooped out in the middle.

  She dropped the copies onto the table, careful not to

  spill them or mix them up, and said to him in her most cheerful voice, which was pretty cheerful, 'Here you go, Ernie. Better you than me. Can I bring you another cup of coffee? Looks to me like you'll need it.'

  He didn't seem to hear her at first. Worrying about his missing daughter, she guessed; poor Ernie. If it was her, she'd be just beside herself. She marveled that he was so calm. She repeated her offer, and this time he shook his head. 'Not right now, thanks.'

  Now Sandy didn't know what to do. Was she supposed to stay and go through the policies with him? Wasn't that Rebecca's job? Should she offer him a Coke or something? Thinking about Petra's Thorazine, she put a hand over her mouth to keep from chuckling aloud. That had been kind of an adventure, actually, a great story, especially since nothing bad had happened. She was really tempted to tell it to Ernie. He wasn't a bad guy. She bet he'd think it was funny.

  She stood there uncertainly for a minute longer, then said, 'Call me if you need anything. Coffee or anything' He might have nodded. Sandy shrugged and left. She had work to do, and she wouldn't mind going to the party for a little while.

  Lindgren stirred himself. He'd caught a glimpse of movement out the window, but when he'd got up from the chair where he'd been waiting, with growing impatience, for the policies, which should have been bound in an orderly fashion for him to review, he'd been able to see nothing in the field outside. He could not imagine why approval had ever been given to construct a long-term care facility on the shores of a lake in the first place, and he could not imagine why the owners didn't do something with that unkempt field. This girl, this Rebecca, was way over her head. Kim, in any of her manifestations, was not out there, though he had thought she was. Sighing, he slid a stack of pages out of the nearest sack, and set to work.

  Something was different about the mural.

  Rebecca stood and wended her way among people, packages, chairs to the back wall of the lobby where the mural, her first major project at The Tides and still a source of considerable pride, was the first thing you saw when you came in the front door. Something had changed about it, and before she got there she had realized what it was.

  Someone had painted tiny faces here and there among the other designs, versions of the same face, round, blue-eyed, with shoulder-length blonde curls. One of the faces slid, disembodied, down the lightning bolt Paul had scrawled in yellow paint. Another had been superimposed onto one of Beatrice's impressionistic flowers. Another pecked out from between two points of the biggest of Petra's stars.

  She put her fingertips to the wall, drew them across the new paint. It was still tacky. Then she sa
w that it was not only faces; other body parts, too, had been addedhands with long pearl-pink and crimson and bright black polished nails; legs with pretty rounded knees, some bare and some with fancy stockinged designs; graceful mounds that could only be breasts with brown areoles at their peaked centers.

  'Looks just like you, Princess.' Rebecca swung around, ready to be incensed, certain Gordon was being lewd. But he was admiring one of the perfect little faces, this one at the heart of the rayed sun Bob had slopped into the high corner, and when she followed his gaze she was shocked by how much it did, in fact, resemble photographs of herself, although the couldn't have said for sure that it looked like her because, outside of mirrors and photos, she had no real sense of what she looked like. 'Who did this?'

  'I don't know. Wasn't me. I thought you knew.'

  'How come you're not Santa Claus? You haven't backed out, have you?'

  'Suit's too tight. She's gotta sew it.'

  Rebecca patted Gordon's belly. 'Poor Colleen. Just what she needs.'

  'Dad?'

  Gordon didn't respond to the hesitant voice from beside him; just mother communication that didn't concern him. But Rebecca looked past him and saw the two black men she'd thought were more surveyors, with Lisa smiling and reaching for Gordon's arm.

  'Gordon.' the social worker fairly crowed. 'Look who came to see you'

  Ponderously Gordon turned his bulk in their direction. He was beaming at the prospect of company and saying, 'Hi, there,' before he had seen who it was. When he did, though, he just said, 'Hi, there,' again, with no change in inflection or emphasis.

  'Dad, it's Robert and James.'

  'Your sons,' Lisa added helpfully.

  'Hi, there.' Gordon repeated.

  Rebecca saw Dan stride into the lobby, followed by Odette McAleer, and for the first time noticed that the party was blockin' a fire exit. Readying her notebook, McAleer said to Dan, 'You know, just once, I'd like to find this place looking like a nursing home.'

  'It's her birthday, little lady,' Dexter hollered. 'She's giving things away. She's not but ninety, nothing but a kid. Me, I'm ninety-two years old. Do you believe that?'

  'I hope,' said McAleer, 'a lawyer has been consulted'

  Beatrice hadn't seen them. She was thumbing through a stack of magazines and books in her lap. At her feet were half a dozen more boxes, their sides bulging with Saturday Evening Posts, Reader's Digests, comic books. 'From my comic-book phase, don't you know. We'll put all of these in our library.'

  'We don't have a library,' Colleen pointed out.

  'Then,' said Beatrice, 'it's high time we did'

  'Beatrice,' said Colleen, 'these old comic books are worth a fortune. You should sell them to a collector'

  'Nonsense.' Beatrice squinted straight at the visitors by the door, and Rebecca wondered if she'd known they were there all along. 'It's my birthday. On your birthday you may give anything to anyone you choose, and they may not refuse. Because you're giving of yourself, don't you know.'

  'It's highly improper.' Odette McAleer declared, 'for a facility or any of its employees to accept a gift from a resident. The regulations specifically prohibit gratuities'

  'Hell, little lady, they ain't gratuities,' Dexter informed her. 'They ain't even what you'd call gifts. She's putting her house in order.'

  The pages of the policy book had not been collated, and Ernest Lindgren could not make head or tail of it. He'd managed to find a few policies—Infection Control: Nursing wasn't in bad shape, but the Personnel Policies section, as far as he could determine, needed a lot of work, and he couldn't find Admission and Discharge at all. He was close to giving up and declaring the entire Policies and Procedures Condition out of compliance when his daughter Kim appeared at the window.

  He capped his pen and inserted it into the holder in his inside pocket. He closed his notebook and put it into hisbriefcase. He locked the case. He stood up. 'Kim?' he said aloud, to fix her there. She floated in the window, beckoned to him, receded.

  In all likelihood, she was not actually there. He would discover a nursing-home patient outside the window, or no one at all. But he would investigate. Searching for Kim was in his basic nature by now. He found the back door unlocked, a safety violation but to his personal advantage at the moment, and let himself out.

  Dan said grimly, 'Odette wants to show us something,' and Rebecca accompanied them into Dexter's room.

  'Look at this, Dan. You know better than this.' McAleer was striding around the room, back straight and face set, fists in the pockets of her suit jacket. Somehow, the fact that she wasn't taking notes now seemed ominous. Take a look at those windows. You can barely see through them.'

  'I can see through them fine, little lady,' Dexter protested from the doorway. 'I'm ninety-two years old and I can see through them just fine. Got a birdfeeder out there, see it? Birds come. Jays.'

  'Dexter,' Rebecca asked him in a daring undertone, 'when are you going to be ninety-three?'

  Next month, little lady, the fifth of the month'

  'Good' He looked baffled. Rebecca just shook her head.

  McAleer went into the bathroom. Dan followed her and Dexter motioned impatiently for Rebecca to push him in, too. 'Look at this. Clothes all over the floor. An open toothpaste tube on the sink. A dirty washcloth wadded up on the back of the toilet. This is against any commonsense standards of cleanliness, let alone infection-control regulations.'

  'I can't reach things if they put them away,' Dexter

  shouted. 'If they put things away like that I have to get somebody to help me all the time.' Nobody acknowledged that he'd spoken.

  McAleer pushed past him to get out of the bathroom. 'Look at the accumulation of dust on the horizontal surfaces. This room hasn't been thoroughly cleaned in weeks. I'm surprised at you, Dan. We have had our differences, but I never expected to find one of your facilities in this shape.' She ran her hand along the window sill, peered with disgust at the dust on her fingers, and wiped it off on the sleeve of Dan's custom-tailored white shirt.

  Ernest Lindgren was a big, bulky man, and he had arthritis in both knees, so when the lake-bed slope began he was almost at once in considerable pain. It was cold, and he'd left his topcoat on the back of the chair in the conference room, there not having been a coat-rack, but he was still wearing his black wool stocking cap, which he often didn't take off indoors because his bald head got cold easily. He hadn't seen or heard his daughter since he'd come out here, and he told himself this was probably another false lead.

  But he had a feeling this time that he hadn't had before, an intuition as strong and specific as a personal message. Kim was somewhere close by.

  He hadn't spent much time with any of his children since the divorce when Kim was—what?—nine or ten years old. Two weeks in the summer, until they'd started having better things to do; every other Christmas, until they'd wanted to stay home with their friends. His life had been uncomplicated, unburdensome, not noticeably lonely but flat. In a way that took him by surprise, he felt closer to this vanished daughter than when the distance

  between them had been more ordinary; his desperation and determination to find her allowed her more points of entry.

  As slowly and painfully he let himself down the incline, he actually could feel her inside him, begging him, daring him on. It might not even be Kim poking around in there; he knew full well that she was probably as distant as she'd ever been, as unwilling to supply him with substance.

  But the scent of her rose perfume filled his head, made him giddy. He'd had no way of knowing Kim was wearing rose perfume these days, but it seemed to suit her. It lapped up around him like a rising tide, coming to meet him rather than insisting that he enter it. It took him in. It was not Kim.

  At the end of Wing 2, the Life Safety Code surveyor was busy sawing a hole in the ceiling. Rebecca gaped. 'Just checking to see if your fire wall goes all the way up through the attic,' he called.

  'As far as I know nobody's ever asked about
fire walls before.'

  'This is the first time I've surveyed here,' he answered with satisfaction. 'Regulations require that the fire wall go all the way to the roof. There's no access hole, so I'm making one.'

  Rebecca stood helplessly as plaster dust spattered down around her, pocking the high finish on the floor. The saw stopped.

  'Well,' said the surveyor, climbing down and dusting off his hands. 'It's just as I thought. Your fire wall stops at the ceiling. You'll have to rectify that throughout the building.' He nodded pleasantly to her and went off to write it up, folding the ladder against the wall but leaving the pile of debris on the floor and the gaping hole in the ceiling.

  'Are you aware,' demanded Odette McAleer without prelude, rounding the corner from the Wing I corridor with Dan in her wake, 'that you have dog feces in this building?'

  'No, I wasn't. Where?'

  'In the soiled utility room. Fecal material is a rich breeding ground for all kinds of bacteria. I'm sure you're aware of that.'