The Ghost, the Girl, and the Gold

by Scott William Carter

  "Oh. Well, I was just gonna say that the nurse in that movie—"

  "Nurse Ratched."

  "Yeah, her. Nurse Ratched. I was just gonna say that our Nurse Bello makes Nurse Ratched seem like a girl scout in comparison. Mean son of a bitch—pardon my French."

  "Sounds like we really need to talk to this Nurse Bello."

  "This is so weird," Alesha whispered. "I mean, I know I said that already, but … you're looking right at me saying this stuff, but I'm only getting half the conversation."

  "I'll explain in a minute," I said to her. Then, to Willy even though I was still doing my best to look at Alesha, I said, "How about people on, um, your side of the aisle? Anybody in the hospital we should talk to? Somebody who might really know what's going on?"

  "I don't think so. Like I said, I don't know much about what goes on in here. Wish I did. Sorry."

  "Don't be sorry. You've been a big help."

  "I hope so. You just have to be careful around here, okay? I mean, you've probably already noticed, but, well, this place has a lot of strange folks. Both living and dead. I wish I could have had you keep your firearms. Sorry about that. Not much I can really do, you know." He raised his hands in a helpless gesture. "Being what I am."

  "It's no worry. Hey, can I ask you something?"

  "Sure."

  "Why do you keep working here?"

  "Huh?"

  "It's something I often wonder about—why people keep doing certain things even after they're ghosts. This place, forgive me, but it doesn't seem like the sort of place someone would want to spend … eternity."

  "Oh, I'm not going to stay here forever. It's just something to do for now. I'm saving for college, you know. Got to save up a lot of money. Want to make something of myself. Make my parents proud." He flashed a weak smile.

  I didn't know what to say. There was something in his eyes, a sad sort of glimmer, which made me think he knew on some level that what he'd just said didn't make logical sense, not anymore. Looking increasingly antsy, he told me he had to get back. I thanked him for his help. He told me I could find the Intensive Care Ward two flights up on the north wing, then he was gone. Alesha and I took the stairs.

  "What did he say?" she asked. "You know, about why he was here?"

  "He told me he's saving up to go to college."

  "He said that?"

  "Yep."

  "Does he know he can't really go?"

  "I don't think it matters."

  "Now you've lost me."

  "Exactly. Feeling lost—that's probably what he's trying to avoid."

  "Okay, now I really don't get it."

  I laughed. "You've only been part of my world for a day. Just wait until you've been a part of it for a week."

  Chapter 21

  The joking feeling didn't last long. Ascending the staircase, with its scuffed tiles and high, cavernous ceiling, I had this foreboding that Victoria Gath was waiting for us somewhere upstairs. We passed a couple of orderlies, a nurse, and a police officer in uniform. The police officer gaped at me the way a lot of ghosts do, and looking at him closely, I noticed that he was packing a Smith & Wesson Model 10—a service pistol that hadn't been standard since the seventies. I nodded to him and he stumbled down the stairs, hurrying away.

  In between floors, I whispered to Alesha what I'd learned from young Willy, bringing her up to speed.

  "Should we split up?" she asked. "I'll talk to Bello, you talk to some ghosts?"

  "I don't think splitting up would be a good idea right now," I replied.

  "You're probably right."

  The second floor was the psych ward. A big metal door blocked most of the sound, but we still heard people shouting, a woman wailing. Alesha said she heard the shouting but not the wailing. The third floor was as quiet as the second floor was chaotic. It had a similar, if smaller, waiting room as the second floor, but the hall was empty except for an orderly in a green uniform pushing a cart with a squeaky wheel. The air had a faint antiseptic odor, as if the floor had been recently mopped.

  A nurse behind the counter, a middle-aged Hispanic woman, peered at us through the open glass partition, smiling with teeth only, her eyes sad. With her badly wrinkled clothes, she made me think of a paper airplane that had been crushed into a ball before someone had attempted to return it to its former glory. A shirtless boy, maybe eight or nine, his skin the same reddish brown hue, his hair the same jet-black color, stood behind her playing with a neon-green yo-yo. He wore acid wash jeans cut off at the knees. I heard classical music, maybe Beethoven, maybe something that just sounded like Beethoven, playing faintly from her computer.

  "You're the ghost dude," the boy said. He didn't say it with either fear or reverence, just stating a fact.

  I didn't answer. It was a good thing, because neither the nurse nor Alesha reacted. The woman asked if she could help us, no trace of an accent. We introduced ourselves and told her we wanted to speak to Nurse Bello about a few of her long-term patients. She said she was Nurse Bello and asked to see our identification, intoning it the way the Gestapo might have demanded to see someone's papers. We showed them to her. She asked what our business was and we told her the names of the three patients, saying we wanted to know if there was anything that linked them.

  "Linked them?" she said, speaking only to Alesha. "What would possibly link them, Detective Stintson?"

  "We're not sure," Alesha said. "Anything you can tell us would be helpful."

  Down the hall, behind a closed door, a man screamed. The boy flinched, but neither Alesha nor Nurse Bello reacted at all.

  "That's Freddie," the boy said to me. "He's in Anna Klondike's room. He's one of the ones they cut his brains out, you know, a long time ago. Most of the time he just wanders around mumbling, but sometimes he screams like that. I think it's when he suddenly remembers them doing the brain cutting."

  "We don't normally get police up here," Nurse Bello said. "This is all highly unusual."

  "It's an unusual case," I said.

  She ignored me. The boy, however, was fascinated.

  "What's the case about?" he asked.

  "I wish I could say more right now," I said, flicking him a glance. "But anything you can tell us about those three people would be very helpful."

  "Detective Stintson," Nurse Bello said, still refusing to look at me, "I'm afraid there are certain confidentiality protocols, doctor/patient privileges, that sort of thing, which must be adhered to except in the most extreme cases. They also can't be questioned without attorneys present. It would take quite a bit of advance notice. I do have a few forms you can fill out, if you'd like to start that process."

  "Attorneys?" Alesha said. "They're vegetables. What good would attorneys do when they can't even speak?"

  "That is not a term we use here, detective. They may be temporarily nonresponsive, but their rights still must be recognized."

  "This is ridiculous," Alesha said. "I'd like to talk to your supervisor. What was his name? Holbroke?"

  Nurse Bello sighed. "Rick Holbrandt is out sick today, I'm afraid."

  "Well, someone else, then."

  "If you'd like to file a complaint, I can give you a form."

  "Oh, Jesus."

  "Please don't take the lord's name in vain, detective. It upsets the patients."

  Alesha shook her head and turned to me. I looked at the boy, who shrugged.

  "Sorry about that," he said. "Sis has been like that ever since I … well, since I fell into the river and she couldn't save me. I wish she was nicer. All she does is work here and go to church. She got even meaner after Mama and Papa died."

  The resemblance between the boy and Nurse Bello was so obvious I knew it couldn't be coincidental, but I'd been thinking he might be a son, not a brother. I'd also been thinking there was some sort of tragedy there, something that might at least partially explain her cold demeanor. She could have murdered him, and maybe the world didn't know, which would be a piece of information I could have used as l
everage.

  But guilt over a brother's long ago death? That was a tougher nut to crack. If I even brought it up, she might slam the emotional door and refuse to talk to me at all. But the boy was here. Nurse Bello dealt with crazies who talked to invisible people all day long. What was one more? I decided to take a chance.

  "What's your name?" I asked the boy.

  "Excuse me?" Nurse Bello said.

  "Ignacio," the boy said. "It's after Abuelito—I mean, my grandpa. But everybody just calls me Iggy."

  "You already know my—" Nurse Bello began.

  "You want to talk to her?" I asked Iggy.

  The boy's eyes widened. He looked at me, at his sister, and back at me again, as if this possibility had only now just dawned on him. Both Nurse Bello and Alesha were staring at me.

  "Oh, man," Iggy said. "Can I?"

  I looked at Nurse Bello. "Iggy is here. He'd like to talk to you."

  The effects my words had on her were immediate and severe. She gaped at me as if I'd lunged through the opening in the window and ripped off all of her clothes. I watched a double-time movie of emotions play across her face: shock, disbelief, anger, and, just a flicker, a bit of hope. I was counting on that hope. I needed her to cling to that hope if I was to get her on my side.

  For the moment, though, anger won. "What kind of sick game is this?" she shot back. "Who put you up to this?"

  "No one," I said. "This is real."

  "Is this Rick's idea of a joke? I'll sue him for harassment, I swear. I thought he knew better than to mess with me."

  I looked over her shoulder at Iggy. "Tell me something only you and your sister would know."

  "Stop this!" Nurse Bello shouted.

  The boy started crying. "I don't want to make her mad."

  "It's okay," I said to him. "Trust me. This will all work out. Just tell me something only you and she would know."

  Nurse Bello launched to her feet, banging against the desk. Her face, which had been pretty in a bare, austere sort of way, swelled and bulged in odd ways. "I've had enough of this! You leave right now! You leave this instant, or—or I'm calling security!"

  She reached for her phone. Down the hall, I saw people emerge from the rooms, and since those doors were locked and closed, I assumed most of those people were ghosts. I got a sense of strange, misshapen things, lots of deformities, lots of blood and bruises, but I didn't look at them. I kept my gaze fixed on Iggy, nodding at him, waiting patiently.

  "The Crooked House!" he said finally. "Tell her about the Crooked House—about her promise. Tell Rosita about that!"

  I did. I saw her undergo another rapid evolution of emotions, even faster than before, shock, bewilderment, anger, then hope again. Hope, stronger. When she was hopeful, all that severity she carried on herself like armor disappeared, and she looked kind and beautiful, a woman who was still the girl Rosita inside. She sank back into her seat.

  "I don't understand," she said.

  Alesha said, "He has a gift."

  "Tell her I don't want her to be afraid no more," Iggy said. "We used to go to the Crooked House at Bush Park and pretend—pretend we had a different life. Tell her Mama and Papa are gone now, and I keep them away from her. They were mean and I don't let them hang around Rosita. It's just the two of us. Tell her I'm seeing after her just like she saw after me." He was crying so hard I could barely understand him. "Tell her. Just tell her, will ya? I want her to be happy. I don't want her to end up mean all the time like they was. She wasn't mean before. She shouldn't be mean now."

  I told her all of this. In a low, soothing tone, leaning in close so the approaching ghosts couldn't hear, I told her everything the boy had said. It wasn't long before both of them were crying. They told each other they loved one another, and I explained to them I'd be happy to visit again down the road, so they could talk more, but the situation was urgent and I needed their help. It was an offer I didn't make lightly, since I hated acting as a medium, but I was glad to do it in this case.

  "Of course," she said. "Of course I'll help you. Let me—let me just pull up their files. And I'll take you to them. I'll take you to them myself."

  Some of the ghosts crowding around us drifted away. Others, seeing me, ran the other direction. After Nurse Bello had gathered herself, using up half a tissue box to dab at her eyes and blow her nose, she did some typing on the computer. She kept glancing over her shoulder as she did so, smiling faintly, not quite looking at Iggy, but it still seemed to make him happy that she was trying to make contact. How little it took for most people, how little they needed from others to bring them back into the light. It never ceased to amaze me.

  If Nurse Bello was Victoria Gath's alter ego, I couldn't see it. She had to be someone else, either on the inside or out. She told us about the three patients Jak had given me, enough to see that they were all very different. Jennifer Barnes, age sixty-two, in and out of institutions all her life because of severe schizophrenia. One day nearly three years ago they found her by the television, completely unresponsive, and she'd been that way ever since. Kathy McCormick, age thirty-nine, bipolar, severe diabetic, also no reason for her coma, she'd been here for over twenty years after strangling her therapist. Not long after Jennifer Barnes fell into her coma, Kathy slumped over one day during dinner and planted her face in the middle of her meat loaf. The last was the saddest, Mia Irving, only twenty-three years old, a street girl who'd been in and out of prisons for petty crimes her whole life, highly suicidal. One day about a year ago, she just didn't get out of bed. No response to stimuli.

  "When did that happen exactly?" I asked. Thinking Mia's coma had been the most recent, I thought I'd focus on her first.

  "Oh, I remember it was around Thanksgiving."

  "Did anyone come to visit her?"

  "I can check the logs, but I don't think so. Mia didn't get visitors."

  "Did she have any friends inside? Anyone she hung out with?"

  "No. She was a loner."

  "How about the others? Family? Friends? People on the inside or out?"

  "Kathy had a lot of friends in here—or at least people she thought of as friends. She was friends with everyone. That was part of the problem."

  "What do you mean?"

  "Well, if she didn't think you wanted to be her friend back, she could get quite violent."

  "And Jennifer Barnes?"

  Nurse Bello read the computer screen in front of her, face thoughtful. "Jennifer was … nosy. Always snooping into other people's business. Always spreading gossip. People tended to use her if they wanted to spread lies about someone, but I wouldn't say she had many friends. She has some family listed here. A brother who visits maybe once a year. Some cousins who occasionally send birthday cards."

  "All right," I said. "Do you think you could print their files for me?"

  "Oh, I don't think so. Not without a court order."

  "That's too bad."

  She looked genuinely distressed, a far cry from the stern countenance she'd been presenting us earlier. "I do want to help you. It's just, I could lose my job—"

  "I understand."

  "But I suppose, if I were to walk down the hall to use the restroom, and I happened to leave their files open on these three tabs here … Well, there would be nothing stopping you from taking pictures of the screens with your cell phones, I guess. I wouldn't have any way of knowing."

  I smiled. She smiled back. It was a nice smile. It was a shame she'd spent so many years hiding it. I hoped it was a permanent change, but I sensed that at some point she'd slip back into her old ways, at least a little bit. Habits were hard to break, especially when they came to the ways we dealt with the world, and especially when they had decades to fortify.

  Nurse Bello told me that when she returned from the restroom, she'd take us to see the patients. I told her that would be wonderful. She left and we took our pictures, leaning through the window and swiveling the monitor around for a better view. An old man wearing a white terrycloth robe an
d matching slippers emerged from the stairwell, saw me, and turned back the other way. Some orderlies in blue uniforms pushed a woman on a gurney past the window, a woman mumbling about how Elvis Presley was coming to see her tomorrow.

  It would have been a crazy thing to say, except knowing Elvis the way I did, it was the sort of thing he might just do.

  When Nurse Bello returned, she took us to the unit's long-term care wing. Iggy, telling us those people made him too sad, waited behind. It was up another floor, on the north side, through doors that only opened with a keycard. The whole place was full of harsh contrasts, deep darkness and bright lights, somber, shuffling patients and hysterical wildness, the smell of disinfectant followed immediately by the rank odor of someone who'd just shit their bed or their diaper. This was no Holiday Inn, that was for sure. For now, I was grateful Nurse Bello still had her battleaxe reputation. Patients, staff, and ghosts—and there were plenty of ghosts—all scurried to the side at her approach.

  A young man who looked fifteen staffed the front desk of the long-term care wing. As soon as he saw Nurse Bello, he blushed and stammered a hello. I expected a cavernous, gymnasium-like space, with row after row of beds, but it was more like a honeycomb, a maze of private rooms branching off tiny corridors with pastel-blue walls. We visited all three patients in turn, and there didn't seem to be any surprises. All three were totally unresponsive. None looked even remotely like Gath. All three were fairly bland, no one that would have stood out in the crowd. Jennifer and Kathy were pretty standard Caucasian fare, Mia with just a touch of Asian in her background, mostly in the shape of her eyes.

  We ended up in Mia's room last. There was a barred window next to her bed, the tan curtains open. Weak winter light cast faint shadows of the bars on her tiny body—so tiny, hardly more than a paper doll in the enormous bed. She may be in her mid-twenties, but she had the same youngish look as the kid at the front desk. If someone had told me she was twelve, I would have believed them. It made me sad, seeing her there, all alone, no family in the world. It made me think of Olivia.

  Unlike Jennifer and Kathy, whose eyes were open but unresponsive, Mia's eyes were closed. In fact, I had to stare at her a long time before I saw that her chest was indeed moving up and down.