by Julia Keller
Dr. Salvatore had been blunt with her last week: I’m not trying to be an alarmist here, Mrs. Topping. But unless something changes—by which I mean making a pretty drastic change in your husband’s lifestyle—it doesn’t look good for the long run. I know you love him and that’s why I’m saying these things.
Dr. Salvatore didn’t know it, but he’d told her what to do. How to help.
And now she was ready.
When Tyler returned from wherever it was that he’d gone this time, she would do it. She would do it before she had time to think about it or change her mind.
She would do it, that is, the very next time she saw him.
She heard a noise from the first floor: a click, a rasp. She felt a faint shimmy in the walls as the vibration was transferred up the framework, moving from floor to floor. She knew what that meant. It was the heavy front door, opening and closing.
Tyler was home.
Chapter Five
A few miles away, across a town now bathed in a faint blue wash of moonlight—or at least that share of moonlight able to slip in between the mountains—a woman stood at a sink in the far back corner of a busy room.
The sink was bolted to the wall, which meant that her back was to the room. The room was filled with expensive-looking medical equipment, most of it arranged between three rows of cribs.
Each crib bristled with IV lines, and with wires attached to tall stacks of monitors. The monitors featured jagged scribbles of green and orange and yellow that traveled across black backgrounds.
Lights had been turned low. The only regularly occurring sounds were the beeps and chirps and hums of the monitors, and the carefully muted footfalls of nurses as they moved between the rows, bending over to attend to the infants nestled in the cribs.
Other sounds flared up irregularly: brief, sharp cries from a fitful child, and then another and another, before they were soothed and quieted by the nurses, or, if the nurses’ efforts were unsuccessful, finally by fatigue.
Bell finished rinsing out the bucket. She set it upside-down in the other side of the sink to dry. She’d rinsed out the mop first, twisting the strings one way and then the other way, squeezing out the excess water with steady pressure from her joined fists. Then she had propped it next to the sink and tackled the bucket.
By now her hands were red and cold, her knuckles swollen. She’d forgotten—again—until just this minute about the yellow rubber gloves back in the storage room.
Well, next time. And she was sure there’d be a next time. The night was shaping up to be a long one, filled with lots of messes and repeated cleanups.
“Hey, Bell.”
She turned.
It was Glenna Stavros, the night nursing supervisor. The chunky woman looked uncomfortable in the blue scrubs that fit too tightly across her butt and belly. She was easily six feet tall—Bell had never asked for the specific measurement, figuring that Glenna had been answering that question for most of her adult life—with a froth of reddish hair that wafted from her scalp like strawberry meringue. She had a round, open face, a face that would have been mildly pretty had it not borne the cuneiform marks of ancient acne.
“Hate to ask,” Glenna went on, frowning to prove her displeasure at being the bearer of this news, “but we’ve got another spill. You mind?”
“No problem.”
“You sure? You just cleaned that mop.”
“’Course not.” It’s my job, Bell would have added, except that it would’ve sounded sassy, petulant. Which wasn’t how she meant it.
“Okay.” Glenna still frowned. She’d thought she was well past her discomfort at ordering Bell around. Tonight, though, after all these weeks, Glenna was backsliding. Maybe because the clock was winding down on Bell’s last few days.
Yes, cleaning up spills was definitely part of her required duties. So was swabbing the toilets and washing the windows. And yes, Glenna was technically her supervisor.
But sometimes, well …
“Really,” Bell said, still trying to put her at ease. “I don’t mind.”
“Thanks. But I just don’t feel right about it. I mean…” Glenna hesitated. “It’s just…” She shrugged, letting her big shoulders hover up around her ears for a good long time before dropping them again. “You’re totally sure it’s okay?”
“Yeah.” Bell, bucket in one hand, mop in the other, started to move past her. “Excuse me.”
“Sorry.” The nurse took a step sideways. Bell went by her, conscious of Glenna’s eyes on her back. She could pretty much guess the nurse’s thoughts. She knew Glenna was struck by the simple, telltale symbols of a situation she still occasionally found incongruous: the baggy sea foam–green jumpsuit Bell was required to wear, the clunky, skid-proof shoes. The hairnet. The mop and bucket.
As Glenna had explained to Bell on her first day of working here, she was uncomfortable telling her when to show up, when to take her break, when she needed to gather the soiled, stinking linens and put them in the bin.
You were a prosecutor, Glenna had added. You have a law degree from Georgetown. And I’m telling you to bundle up the shitty sheets?
Bell’s reply had come swiftly and forcefully: Get over it. Or I can’t do my community service here.
And so Glenna did get over it—mostly. She had to, because there was always something to clean up. The clinic was suffused with chaos. It was a low-level, everyday chaos, but it was chaos all the same, and it could not be otherwise. Too few staff members were charged with taking care of too many desperately ill infants in a too-small facility. The result was a constant churn of crises alternating with—mercifully—some random, compensatory minutes of fragile-as-glass calm.
At the center of everything were the rows of cribs. In them, babies born to drug-addicted mothers flailed and thrashed, their tiny bodies wracked by the spasms of withdrawal.
This was the Evening Street Clinic, named for the dusty, run-down side street in downtown Acker’s Gap where it was located, in a former tobacco warehouse donated by a good-hearted local businessman who had watched the steady uptick in the number of afflicted infants and thought, Oh my Lord. Back when Bell was still prosecuting attorney, she had volunteered at the clinic. She’d arrive here after a long day of work filled with many frustrations and find, in the midst of ostensible hopelessness, a different kind of hope—a flinty, battle-tested, hard-won optimism. She’d hold an infant against her chest while she rocked gently back and forth, back and forth, in one of the big oak rockers, humming and cooing to the tiny, white-capped person in her arms.
When it came time for the community service portion of her sentence, Bell asked to be sent to Evening Street. The judge agreed, but stipulated that her service would be the same kind assigned to any other felon under court supervision. No special treatment. Her job would not involve rocking and cooing.
No. She would dust and sweep. She would scrub and rinse. She would dump trash cans and bundle up medical waste for secure disposal. She would replace lightbulbs and wipe down countertops and disinfect sinks. Bell had nodded at the judge, with no comment. She would do precisely as she was told to do by the court, for precisely as long as she’d been told to do it, because this was the fate she had chosen.
She had not shared her reasons for so doing with another living soul.
* * *
“What’s next?”
Hearing the words, Glenna looked up from the paperwork on the chest-high rolling cart that served as her desk. Her pen hovered over a thick tablet of printouts of lab reports. The pages were crowded with boldface numbers and ruled lines and polysyllabic words typed in neat rows.
“What?” she said.
“Finished mopping. What do you need me to do now?”
“Oh. Well—let me think about it. Just relax for a bit.”
“Okay,” Bell said. She made it three steps away from the cart.
“Hey.”
She turned back.
“It’s getting close, right?” Glenna sa
id. “Your last day, I mean.”
Bell nodded. “End of the week.”
“Wow. Went by fast.” Glenna shook her head. “What am I saying? It probably didn’t feel that way to you. I bet it seemed like forever.”
“Sometimes the shift goes by really quickly. Other times—not so much.”
Glenna waited expectantly, clearly hoping she would say more. Bell knew how much the nurse wanted to have a personal conversation with her. She could sense that Glenna was fascinated by her, by her dark past and by the height from which she had fallen. Glenna knew only bits and pieces about what had happened to bring Bell to this highly unlikely point in her life—the same basic information that everyone else in Acker’s Gap knew—but it was enough to make her yearn for more.
“The work you do here,” Bell said, filling in the gap because she knew Glenna wanted her to say something else, “is so important. I’m glad I could help. Even in such a small way.”
“It’s not small.”
“You know what I mean. You’re what these kids need. You and the other nurses.”
“Sure. Us—plus a freakin’ miracle.” Glenna let her pen drop so that she could rub the back of her broad neck. She was tired and she was frustrated, and she didn’t mind if it showed. “We all know what’s going to happen to these kids. And it’s not a pretty picture. Their lives are compromised from the start. All the health problems—respiratory, cardiac, neurological—and we send them home to families that can’t or won’t care for them in the ways they need. But what can we do? The foster system’s overwhelmed. It’s a mess. Sometimes I think about these children and all they’re going to need and I just…” Glenna shook her head. This was not where she’d wanted one of her last conversations with Bell to go. “Anyway,” she said, recalibrating, “I really just wanted to say thanks. This can’t have been an easy thing for you. Being here, I mean. Doing menial labor. You handled yourself with a lot of dignity.”
“Wasn’t too bad. But thanks.”
“And I wanted to say good-bye.”
“Say it on Friday. I still have a few more days to go.”
Glenna picked up her pen. “I’m off until next week. Took some vacation time. My granddaughter’s in a beauty pageant up in Parkersburg. I gotta be there, too, because I do her hair. She likes the way I put in the sparkly barrettes. So—this is it. Next time I’m here, you’ll be gone.”
“Oh. Right.” It occurred to Bell that she knew nothing at all about Glenna’s personal life. Granddaughter? Grandchildren? Other people’s lives were a hazy blur. The thing about catastrophe—the kind Bell had gone through, with everything familiar being ripped up and tossed away—was that it made you selfish. Or self-centered, maybe: That was a better word for it. It wasn’t that you valued yourself above others; you just didn’t think much about others, period.
There was you and your pain. And little else.
“Right,” Bell repeated. “Well, then—yeah. It’s been nice getting to know you.” They both knew that wasn’t true—they hadn’t gotten to know each other—but it seemed like the right thing to say, and so Bell said it.
“Same here,” Glenna said. “Absolutely.” And then, emboldened by the fact that these were likely the last few minutes they would ever have for a private conversation, Glenna added, “Any idea where you’ll be living? Or what kind of job you’ll get?”
“My house needs a lot of work—it sat empty for two and a half years. But it’s okay for now. So that’s where I’ll stay.”
The answer to Glenna’s second question—the one about what sort of work she’d do—was more complicated and so she ignored it.
“Okay,” the nurse said. “Well—good luck.”
Glenna was disappointed. Bell could feel it in the neutral sound of her words, see it in the slump of her shoulders. But she couldn’t do anything about that. She couldn’t make Glenna feel better. No more rescues. Her days of taking care of other people were over.
That duty had ended some three years ago, when her sister Shirley died.
“Before I forget,” Glenna said. She reached into the front pocket of her uniform. “I want you to have this.” She drew out a business card. “It’s got the clinic’s number. My number’s on there, too. My cell. Maybe we can grab a cup of coffee one day.”
“Thanks,” Bell said. “Maybe we can.” She looked around. “Thought I might step outside for a minute or two. Get some air. That okay?”
“Of course. You don’t need to ask my permission.”
Bell looked directly into her eyes.
“Yes. I do.”
She was right, and Glenna knew it, and the reminder caused a flush to spread slowly up the side of the nurse’s pale doughy face. It was easy to forget the line that separated them. A custodian didn’t have the same privileges that a nurse or a doctor would have. Or the freedom that a prosecutor, here to volunteer to rock babies to sleep, would have.
“Okay, well—fine,” Glenna said. “Just be careful. It’s late. And cold.” She had more to say, and she couldn’t resist saying it. “Look, I—I hope you end up staying in Acker’s Gap, okay? And that we actually have that cup of coffee one day. But I know—well, I can guess—that after all you’ve been through, you might want to get away from here. For good, I mean.” A weary smile. “And I get it. I really do. West Virginia in your rearview mirror—that might be the goal.”
It was, Bell thought.
And then one day—it wasn’t anymore.
Chapter Six
Ellie listened.
It wasn’t like Tyler to come all the way up to the doll room but he was doing just that. She could tell.
She knew the house so well that she could follow his progress, based on the volume and rhythm of his footsteps.
Maybe he’d come home to demand more money from her. Sometimes he even threatened her with violence. The drugs messed with his brain, turned him into someone he wasn’t. God help me—that’s not Tyler anymore, she had said once to Brett, after an especially terrible encounter. That’s not my little boy. That’s somebody else. A stranger.
Tyler broke her heart, over and over again.
Listening, she held her breath as long as she could. She took a brief sip of air and then held her breath again, the better to hear, to track, his movements. To visualize his ascent.
So that she’d be ready. Forewarned is forearmed, she reminded herself. And she was armed. Her hands weren’t shaking at all. She was resolute.
There was a brief hesitation in his steps—maybe he had stopped to refashion his grip on the handrail, or to listen to a noise from somewhere else in the house—but then the steps continued.
Steadily.
Relentlessly.
She could tell that he’d just arrived at the landing between the first and second floors. Now he embarked on the second half of that staircase, the one that ended up on the second floor.
Now he was on the second floor.
She heard him moving across the hall toward the steps to the attic. It was a not a long hall, and it took him no time at all. She heard the hinges sing out as he opened the door, the one leading to the attic staircase. It wasn’t the dreaded, drawn-out crea-eeeeeeek you heard in horror films, or anything silly like that; it was just the ordinary sound of an ordinary door being opened in an ordinary way. Not slow, not fast. Just opening.
She waited.
In seconds he would be at the door at the top of that steep staircase. At the threshold of her special place. For an instant she felt intensely vulnerable—there was no lock on the door, so Tyler could just twist the knob and enter—but then she reminded herself that she had the upper hand.
Because she had the gun.
He was blundering into an ambush and he didn’t know it. It wouldn’t even occur to him that she might fight back. He trusted her to be the same old weak, ineffectual person she’d always been with him, the pushover, the easy mark.
Good old Mom.
Her first instinct had to be right, she told herse
lf: He was coming up here for money. He needed more of it. Always.
He’d spent what he had taken from her purse last night and once again he was tapped out, and she was his best chance. They would dance the same dance they always danced: He’d ask, she’d say no; he’d beg, she’d say no; he’d wheedle pathetically, she’d say no; he’d insult her and berate her and curse at her and then he’d switch tactics and moan, You never loved me, that’s why I’m the way I am, it’s your fault, YOUR FAULT, you’re a cold heartless bitch and you know it, and she’d say:
Yes. Here, take it. Take all of it.
Funny. He didn’t really have to steal from them, because she always ended up giving in, anyway, and handing him the money, and he knew that, but stealing was always his first impulse. Steal first, beg second. Was it pride? That must be why he had to sneak around at the outset, pocketing what he could, before he finally broke down and just said: Gimme.
Yes, it must be pride. Some small particle of pride remained, perhaps, even in the midst of the ruins of his soul.
All of that was going to be irrelevant, however. In minutes it would be over.
Her mind had quieted down. At first, when she’d heard the front door open and realized it was Tyler, she was overwhelmed by panic. She was, in fact, quite dizzy from it. She was sick to her stomach. She felt a heave and a clench in her bowels. Something black moved in front of her eyes.
Was she actually capable of this? Could she really do it?
Yes, she could.
Because she had to.
The steps stopped. He was right outside the door.
Ellie’s heart was pounding so wildly that she feared it might tear itself right out of her chest, leaving the arteries and veins dangling and sparking like downed power lines.
She was standing now, facing the door. The gun was raised and aimed, secured with both hands, her arms slightly bent, the way her daddy had taught her.
Would her daddy approve of this? Family, he believed, was sacred. You protected your loved ones. But Daddy had died when Tyler was ten. Still cute and earnest and loveable. Daddy never had a chance to meet the New Tyler.
