The Tides

by Melanie Tem

  But that man from the nursing home was behind her. There was no reason to think he was following her; she knew he often went out to the liquor storein fact, she'd had him bring her a tiny bottle of brandy once or twice. Beatrice had felt a trifle guilty about that, a tad adventurous, a woman her age sneaking brandy, but she would not think about brandy or about this man or about the rain. She would not think about anything but going home, for that was who she was: a woman, an old woman, on her way home. Satisfaction from that image of herself filled her, warmer than brandy, much steadier.

  A woman was with the man. A younger woman, by the looks and sound of her. Beatrice wondered—dangerously, for it was such a distraction—whether he had a daughter. She'd never thought of him as a family man. The woman had a light step, and Beatrice could bear her laugh. It ought to have been a happy sound, but it made her shiver. She turned off 12th Avenue at Ford Street, and the familiarity of the neighborhood swelled in a way most gratifying. She was definitely on her way home. Behind her, that man and that young woman turned onto Ford Street, too, and they were coming faster, catching up. There was no liquor store down here. The woman's laughter trilled, pretty waves over a deadly undertow. Beatrice kept her mind on what she was about.

  'Where do you think he might be trying to go, Mom?'

  'Oh heavens, who knows?' Billie gestured in expansive frustration.

  'If we could just think the way he might be thinking'

  'Becky, be realistic. Your father doesn't think anymore, not the way he used to, not the way you and I think. Not normal thoughts.'

  Rebecca's mother had stopped looking out the windows, didn't seem now even to be making an effort to search. Old anger attached itself to this new affront, and Rebecca bit back sharper words than she spoke. 'Maybe it has something to do with this Faye person,' she suggested deliberately. 'Where would he go if he was trying to find Faye?'

  Without hesitation her mother said, 'To hell.' It was such an uncharacteristic thing for her to say that Rebecca guffawed. 'Faye's dead,' her mother added flatly.

  'Did you know her?'

  'I wouldn't go so far as to say I knew her. I don't think your father knew her. I was in her company a few times, a few times more than was to my liking.'

  'So she was still alive and around here when you and Daddy were married?' No answer. 'And when I was born?'

  'Yes.' Her mother shifted in her seat, managing to turn herself even more thoroughly away from Rebecca while still facing nominally forward. 'Why are you wasting time talking about that woman? We're supposed to be looking for your father.'

  Rebecca had a sense, though, that her mother could be pushed a little farther, and, suddenly, there was more she wanted to know. 'I take it you didn't like Faye very much.'

  Her mother snorted. 'That woman was the closest thing to a demon I ever want to meet in this world.'

  'Wow,' Rebecca commented mildly. 'That's pretty strong stuff.'

  'She would do anything to anybody to get what she wanted. And what she wanted never amounted to anything - some trinket, some bauble, a ring, a scarf for her hair. She was especially vain about her pretty blonde curls.' That was clearly the end of a sentence, but Billie's tone didn't lower for the period; instead, she seemed to cut herself off, as if she'd had more to say but thought better of it, as if she'd already said too much.

  Rebecca put her hand to her own blonde curls. 'Besides being blonde, what did she look like?'

  'Small. Like a fairy.' Her mother snarled the word, an apparent quote from Marshall or from Faye herself. 'Perfect skin. Perfect figure. Perfect nails. Perfect clothes. She spent a lot of time and effort and your father's money on appearance. Appearance was real important to her.'

  'What did Dad see in her? Just that she was pretty?' Then, taking a chance, 'He loved her, right?'

  Silence. Then, to Rebecca's astonishment, her mother said quietly, 'I loved her, too.'

  Rebecca took her eyes off the street long enough to glance sharply at her mother's face. Directly illuminated at that moment by a wash of blurry amber from a streetlight, it did not seem like the face of anybody she knew. 'You did? I thought you hated her. I thought you said she was evil, a demon from hell.'

  Another silence. Rebecca turned another corner onto another blank street, empty sidewalk. Then her mother said, 'Once Faye got lost in the woods. She was gone all night. I don't know why she went out there in the first place. Maybe she was meeting somebody. Maybe she was just wandering. I was the one who found her. For a long time before I found her, I could hear her singing and crying. Then I came around a bend in the path and down a steep little hill, and there was a pond, the same color as all the green leaves around it so you could hardly tell it was water except by the way it moved' Here Billie made flowing, rising and falling motions with her hands, like the tide 'and there she was, naked, dancing in the water, singing and crying. When she saw me she came running. She threw herself into my arms, wet and small, voluptuous, not like a child, not like a grown woman, either.' Billie paused for breath. 'That's why I loved her. That's why your father loved her, too.'

  Rebecca was afraid to say anything.

  Now Billie made an impatient sweep of the dashboard with the flat of her hand, knocked a map onto the floor. 'I do not want to talk about Faye. What's the point in talking about Faye?'

  'I - I thought it might give us a clue as to where Dad could have thought he was going.'

  'Oh, good heavens, there's no telling.'

  'Why was all this such a big secret?'

  'Becky, what did I say?'

  For now, Rebecca gave up. Stiff with trepidation, she slowed for a heap in the road, which turned out to be a soggy cardboard box, and then, hating the randomness of all this, just kept going.

  The lady with Gordon talked to him about his dog. He didn't know her, didn't know how she knew about his dog, but he was used to that man, when you lived in a goddamn nursing home, people came and went all the time and you didn't know them from Adam and they knew everything about you, or thought they did. She had a voice like dark molasses, like a trumpet in a blue smoky club, working on him just like that molasses trumpet until it was coming from the inside of him out.

  'Love,' she whispered, crooned, and wailed, high and sweet as that trumpet could be played, higher, low in the basement low in his groin. 'You loved that little dog, and he loved you. They had no right to take him away.'

  'No right,' Gordon agreed, heartbroken like singing back the blues. 'I loved that pup they had no right no right no right,' like scat.

  The lady had on some kind of filmy thing that sometimes looked purple and sometimes looked pink and sometimes had mean silver shot through it, and he could see her body. He could see her boobs. She meant him to see them. He could see her pussy. He wasn't wearing underwear, and his hard-on pushed against the inside of his zipper, hurting a little, itching, goading him.

  'They hurt you,' the lady told him. 'They screwed you. So you get to hurt somebody back.' Gordon had been hurt and screwed over a lot of times in his life and he'd never had any urge to hurt anybody back, but this message came from inside him and Gordon knew it was the truth.

  'That little blonde boss-lady cunt,' he muttered. 'Rebecca. Princess.'

  But the word came to him like a cymbal riffed in his inner ear, making him wince and hold his head. 'No.' And then, 'She's mine.'

  Now Gordon realized he was following the crooked-walking old lady with the splitting paper sacks, was closing the distance between them even though he hated being rushed, man, don't rush me! Trudging through the rain, holding his dick in one hand while the other one he stuck out to the side for balance, he was starting to get a glimmer of why.

  For Marshall, everything glimmered. His vision and hearing glimmered; the nerve-endings at the surface of his skin glimmered. His memory glimmered. Faye and Billie and Rebecca and his mother all glimmered, in and out of each other, gauzy layers, superimpositions and double exposures, auras. His body shivered, glimmered, tingled. His mind
glimmered in and out of consciousness, back and forth through exceedingly permeable boundaries between dimensions of experience, carrying with it his ideas of who he himself might be.

  Billie said, 'It's so hard to see.'

  Rebecca said, 'I'll stop at that phone booth and call the facility. Maybe they've heard from the police.'

  Billie said grimly, 'The police. To think it's come to that.'

  Beatrice said, 'Oh, good evening, Mr Marek. Not a very nice evening for a walk, is it?' She was nervous. Any minute she was likely to drop her things in a puddle. Her hip ached. She had to admit she wasn't absolutely certain where her home was from here. And she didn't like the looks or the odor of this man. 'Are you giving that cute puppy of yours a nice long walk?' she asked pleasantly, then saw that he didn't have the puppy with him, then saw that he was touching himself in a decidedly obscene manner, then felt him grab her shoulder and tear the sacks out of her hands. 'Oh,' she said.

  Ebullient girlish laughter danced out of Gordon's mouth as he pushed Beatrice Quinn into the ditch beside the railroad tracks and went down after her. A soft, insistent grasp brought his arm down, and he covered almost the whole of Beatrice's face with the flat of one hand. One of her paper bags had landed upside down right beside him, and he looked and saw silky underthings and a dried bouquet of flowers he'd brought her one time; remembering those flowers, remembering the nice brass lamp with the tassles on the shade, he tried to stop, tried to pull himself away and even to help the old lady up. He was sorry. He was sorry she fell. He could help her. He wanted to go home, too.

  She lay on her back crooked, bent to her left, just the same way she walked. When Faye guided him hard and mean and laughing between Beatrice's legs, they were crooked, too.

  Hanging up the phone and folding the glass doors awkwardly outward to extract herself from the booth, Rebecca heard the strange laughter. But she was intensely preoccupied now with worry for her father and with the news Sandy had relayed to her from The Tides. Both Gordon and Beatrice were missing. Something was wrong with the furnace, and Jerry, the new maintenance man, wasn't answering his pager. The intake worker from the Mental Health Center had called twice since five o'clock, wanting a decision tonight as to whether they'd readmit Mickey Schipp. Dexter had gone into a diabetic coma and been rushed to the hospital; Diane had told Sandy to be sure to tell Rebecca that, given the amount of sweets he'd been allowed to consume, this had been inevitable. The laughter didn't mean anything to her, and it scarcely registered.

  Waiting in the car with the window rolled down, Billie was getting cold and wet. It was worth it, though, if she might catch sight of Marshall, if he might just be wandering around out here in the cold somewhere and not with Faye. She was just chiding herself that that was silly, that wasn't possible, when she heard the laughter and froze.

  Marshall heard it, too, and it wasn't a surprise; he'd been, hearing Faye's mean, musical laughter off and on for much of his life. But now a determination settled over him. He must fight Faye off. He must destroy her. He must protect Rebecca.

  The enormity of what he was called to do energized him. Shaking with passion, he set off again. The firm surfaces he'd been walking on disintegrated, and after a while it came to him that he must have left the street and the sidewalk. That seemed a foolhardy thing to have done, a glorious thing, but he didn't think he'd done it; it had been done to him.

  He must hurry.

  Why was it that he must hurry? Marshall attempted to slow himself in order to ascertain whether, in fact, he was required to hurry. But the headlong (literally; his head was stretched out long ahead of his body and even longer ahead of his stumbling feet) rush in which he found himself was taking place well outside his control. Hurry.

  The ground suddenly sloped downward, and he slid. First on his feet, soles slick, then on his hands and knees, belly, face, down into a depression full of Faye's fragrance and Faye's laughter, not a very deep depression but one from which he could not imagine escape.

  Chapter 15

  'No! No! Don't send me away to die!'

  The cry—vibrant as a sustained high note, horrifyingly full-bodied—came from Viviana Pierce's room. Viviana Pierce, who had been trying to die ever since Rebecca had known her, quietly and with such dignity that the people who loved her could take pride in the manner of her dying.

  Now something had gone wrong. 'I want to die! You know I want to die! Why won't you let me die?' Sitting by her father's bedside in the room across the hall, Rebecca looked up sharply, half-rose, then as if there were hands at her shoulders, sank back onto the hard vinyl-covered chair, which was too low and had angular arms parallel and perpendicular to the bedrails to suggest a cage.

  She didn't know whether it was her place to go find out what was wrong in Viviana's room or to stay here with her father. Her mother was here, on the other side of the bed, which was on the other side of the small room, not looking at her, not looking at him. Did her mother's presence, the fact that he would not be alone and probably wouldn't know anyway who was here with him, mean it was all right for her to leave? Nursing staff were on duty to care for Viviana; Diane was here to take charge. And there was always, night or day, at least one family member in attendance. Did that absolve Rebecca of responsibility, or merely alter the nature of it from the professional end of the spectrum toward the personal?

  There were innumerable things she had to do. Departmental mid-month budget reports were stacked on her desk; she'd instituted this system to get a better handle on expenses, and it seemed to be having some impact, but it wouldn't work if she didn't study them and get her comments back to the department heads quickly, and at this point she didn't even know whether all the reports had been turned in. She had an appointment with a hospital discharge planner this afternoon, to solicit admissions to The Tides; she wasn't going to make it and hadn't called to reschedule. Tomorrow was Kurt's birthday; her total lack of gift ideas—if truth be told, her total tack of interest—was, in theory, appalling.

  She would far rather worry about all of that than think about any of a host of other, terrible things toward which her thoughts kept swinging. Beatrice, found this morning raped and strangled off the entrance ramp to the highway, half-obscured by her belongings from two tattered paper sacks, more than a mile away from The Tides in the opposite direction from her home. Gordon, still missing; he would have had no identification on him, so they might never know what had happened to him, and nobody knew even his sons' names—Lisa thought she'd heard them say John and some other common name when they'd showed up at the Christmas party, but she couldn't be sure—let alone how or whether to contact them. Rebecca missed Gordon and Beatrice acutely, and guilt filled her like a marijuana haze, a nasty high, warping everything out of true.

  And her father. She and her mother had searched for him well into the night, until finally Billie's objections to being driven home had subsided to pale exhausted protests, easy to override. Rebecca had been torn, an increasingly commonplace experience; she hadn't wanted to leave her mother alone, but she'd been frantic to find her father. Hating to impose, she'd called Kurt for help, but he hadn't answered the phone and, curiously relieved, she'd had to settle for leaving a message on the machine telling him there was an emergency and she'd be late.

  For a long time then, hours, she'd driven and walked almost aimlessly, having no way of guessing where he might be, gradually losing track of where she'd already looked and how long ago, crazed by the recurring image—which came to seem emblematic of her life as a whole, and of human life in general—that her path might be intersecting with her father's and intersecting again without her knowing he was anywhere nearby and, certainly, without him ever perceiving or recognizing her.

  Well after midnight, the sleet had stopped and the temperature had perceptibly started to rise. Spring, she'd thought, extraordinarily moved; the advent or the premonition of spring. As she got out of her car behind The Tides again, she'd even taken off her coat and left it on the seat.


  Abruptly, then, the randomness and hopelessness of her search for her father had dissolved, and she'd known where he was, as if she'd been informed. She'd looked there earlier in this endless evening, and she would never know whether she'd overlooked him or whether he'd come there after she'd left, been deposited there. Either possibility was too awful to contemplate for long and made no difference anyway, for there he was now at the bottom of the dry take-bed, lit from all. sides as if by vibrating variegated stage lights, and he was not alone.

  Rebecca couldn't tell how long she'd stood on the rim of the bowl, mesmerized. Fervently she hoped that it had been no more than a few seconds, and that her delay hadn't allowed more harm to come to her father, but there was the persistent suspicion that a long and hurtful span of time had passed before she could rouse herself to go in after him.

  He was naked from the waist down. Rebecca could hardly bear to see him, and couldn't tear her eyes away. His thighs were no bigger than his calves except for the flesh that drooped behind them like something sewn on, and his buttocks strained and contracted and puffed out as if they had no underlying form or structure, as if they were being roughly kneaded. His genitals stood out in relief against the soft pallor of the rest of his flesh. He was moaning, pleasure and horror and pain all plausible sources of the chilling arrhythmic noises, or maybe just awe.