Audrey’s Door (15 page)

T
hey walked down the fifty-foot hall. Though they’d never met, Saraub took Jayne’s upper arm and helped her as she limped.

“Jayne,” Audrey heard her say, and he answered, “Saraub Ramesh. Pleased to meet you. Do you live in the building?” He sounded flustered, but polite.

When they got to the den, he helped Jayne into the fold-out chair, seeming immediately to understand that she required kid gloves. Jayne grinned, delighted by the attention.

“That was, indeed, bananas,” he said to Audrey.

She smiled. “Yes, but could you have taken Marty?”

He shook his head, like she was incorrigible. “Funny girl.” Then he picked up the mostly empty bottle of wine and pointed it at her. “Liquid dinner?” His eyes followed her shape from turquoise pumps to coffee-
stained blouse, and the slack belt that cinched nothing, in between. “Looks like too many liquid dinners.”

She shrugged. “The breakfast of champions.” She was out of breath as she spoke. Surprisingly nervous. Surprisingly happy. What if he’d come here to apologize? What if she left with him right now and never had to breathe the depressing air of this apartment ever ever EVER again?

“You should know that my phone got stolen by a band of roving dwarfs. I hope you didn’t call and get hung up on by one of them,” she added.

“Oh, I just thought that was you, being a bi—” he didn’t finish, and looked down.

“Bird?” she asked.

He shrugged. “Something like that.” Their eyes met. She willed herself not to look away.

Jayne grinned ear to ear like a kid, and Audrey felt a swell of affection for her, and Saraub, and even for herself. They were all pretty okay people.
You make me happy,
she wanted to tell him, and Jayne, too.

Saraub sighed, as if just then remembering something. “I came here for a reason. Can we talk alone?” he asked.

Audrey nodded. “Yeah, but Jayne’s my friend. It’s fine.”

A car alarm resounded, beeping and thrumping like a siren getting closer, then farther away. He closed the turret window. Doubled birds became single. The room got darker, and the air thickened. She hated this apartment, she really did. She hated everything it represented, too.

“It’s bad news. You should sit down.” His grin had gone from tense to rictus. She noticed that he was wearing a suit instead of his usual corduroys. A job interview? Had
Maginot Lines
finally gotten backing?

“I tried to get you at work, and here, too. I stopped by a few hours ago, but you weren’t home yet.”

“What?” she asked, still without sitting. She tried to sound natural, but her voice had a frog in it. Was he leaving town?

Saraub squatted, so that they were eye to eye. “The hospital’s emergency contact was the landline at our apartment,” he said. “I didn’t give them your cell-phone number. Maybe I should have, but I wanted it to come from me.”

Something clicked. It took her a second, her mind raced forward, then back. At first it was a possibility, then she knew without a doubt. There was only one thing it could be.

“There was an emergency at the Nebraska State Psychiatric Hospital?” she asked.

Saraub nodded.

She got breathless. In her mind, the birds flapped their wings inside the stained glass but couldn’t break free, and the rotted floor under the piano opened along broken, uneven lines. Something intelligent, but not sane crept out. She looked down at the wood, and thought about how high up she was—the fourteenth floor. What hubris to believe that men could erect buildings in the clouds and trust that they didn’t collapse into ashes. What hubris to believe that she’d escaped the Midwest, when all along, it had only been biding its time, waiting to snap her back. Clever Betty.

Her knees buckled, but Saraub clamped his hand around her upper arm and held her steady. Crippled Jayne reached up from her seat, and held her other arm with an ice-cold claw.

She knew what had happened. Betty had gone AWOL, just like in Omaha, and Hinton, and Sioux City. “Have they looked in the bars nearby? That’s usually the first place. I’ll need them to come up with a list. Or maybe you guys could help.”

Saraub pushed her down into a chair, and then knelt in front of her. His skin had gotten sallow since she left.
Drinking? Eating every meal out? The man was good at taking care of other people but terrible at taking care of himself. She regretted that it hadn’t occurred to her to worry about him until now.

“Audrey,” he said.

She nodded, to let him know that yes, she was ready for this. She was prepared.

“Your mother tried to kill herself. She’s in a coma.”

I
t didn’t hit her. She didn’t believe it. “You’re sure? Betty Lucas?”

Saraub nodded. “Positive. Betty Lucas. Nebraska State Psychiatric Hospital. An overdose. She’d been hoarding her pills, they think.”

“A suicide,” Audrey heard herself say. Her tongue was dry and flopping in her mouth. “She cycled again.”

Saraub let out a breath. “That’s the word they used, too…They said you needed to get out there right away if you want to see her before…”

She nodded and touched her throat, which was dry. “Did they tell you what pills, or when?”

He shrugged. Only one bulb in the ceiling was working, so the room was pretty dark. The television still played, but someone had turned down the volume. His shiny face and the water in his eyes reflected the miserly light. “I don’t remember what pills. But I checked the
airports—there’s a flight out of JFK tomorrow morning through the Twin Cities, to Omaha.”

“Lithium? Depakote?”

He nodded. “That’s right. Lithium, I think.”

She let out a breath. Bad sign. Most people don’t wake up from lithium comas, and even if they do, the brain damage ruins them.

“They said…she’s dying. So if you want to see her, you’ll have to leave first thing.”

“Dying,” she said. In her mind she rearranged. She placed dishes atop one another, stacked papers and topiaries and engraved mourning walls. (How many dead over the years, the centuries? They piled and piled, the ghosts of this world. There weren’t enough living to mourn them.)

“Yeah. That’s what they said.”

In her mind, she repeated all the things he’d told her, and heard him. Her mother and best friend had tried to kill herself.

It was then that her thoughts kaleidoscoped into discrete segments of shock, pretty and fragile as stained glass. She looked around the room, and like a compound-eyed insect, saw each shard clearly:

There was the green Parkside Plaza, whose design was too cold. For the first time, she understood why she’d never liked the feel of grass between her toes, or dogs, or countertop clutter; she was frightened of them because they were unpredictable, like her mother.

There was yellow Jayne, who’d played cheerful for so long now to mask her sorrow that even she could not distinguish the woman from the act.

There was blue Saraub, holding her hand. Like her mother had predicted so many years ago, she’d broken the heart of a man she hadn’t wanted.

There was the black Breviary, which she knew right then, without doubt, was haunted.

The center of the kaleidoscope was red, and in it she saw weeping Betty Lucas. An abandoned wretch in a backless hospital gown, no family save the daughter who never called.

The kaleidoscope narrowed until there was only Betty, and for a moment everything around her went red, too. The air, the floors, Saraub’s shirt, Jayne’s gauze bandage. All like blood.

Saraub knelt at her chair. “It’s okay,” he said, with his lips so close to her ear that she could feel their warmth. The sound of his voice echoed at first, then went dead, like something in the walls was stealing his words as they reverberated. She knew in that moment that Edgardo and the movers had been right. She was too emotional. Her heartbreak, first from Saraub, and now this, had roused something terrible.

Her grief made all these things clear, and fleeting. They existed as a distraction, flitting about the memories of Betty that were too painful to bear.

Her eyes watered, and to steel herself from a crying jag, she thought about the broken promise Betty had made to her, so many years ago. That lost photo. Thought about the lines on her wrists, unacknowledged. Those bullshit coveralls with holes in all the wrong places.

Her eyes dried, and in the place of tears, a slithering thing radiated from her stomach to the edges of her skin. It unfurled as it grew like a vine. Black spores of rot in berry clusters hung from its branches. It filled first her chest, then her limbs, and the space between her ears, and then her eyes, so that she lost the knowledge of color, and finally, her mouth, so that even her appetites were gone. The spores of fury were dry and bitter. They shriveled her insides, smaller and smaller.

“A nurse found her early this morning,” Saraub said. “I called all day…I came to your apartment before, too. But you weren’t home yet.”

She thought of Betty in a bed, all by herself. One moment an angel, the next, a villain. And the thing is, do you blame the sickness, or its host?

The spores thickened. The mold overtook her until she was dry and bitter, too. There were others trapped here with her. Four children and a woman. They opened their eyes, cornflower blue that coalesced, like running ink, into black. Their mouths opened, too.

Build the door
a voice whispered. The man in the three-piece suit. Did they hear him, too?

She turned a cold eye on her visitors. Drunk, ugly Jayne, who reeked of cigarettes and stupid decisions. Saraub, a doormat. He’d told her she was a ghost, and she wondered at the irony, if she slit his throat right now and trapped him here forever.

Would you like that, Breviary?
She wondered as she watched them.
Shall I cut them for you?

In her mind she covered them with mold. It grew over and inside them, through their mouths and ears and noses, until all was black. Until the vine wore their skin, and used them dry, and they became dust. Everything, like dust. The whole world a barren place.

“Do you need a glass of water?” she heard Saraub ask from far away, as if beneath a bathtub full of water.

“I have cheese. I could cut the freezer burn off,” Jayne volunteered. “Do you want some cheese? Or half a pita pocket?”

Audrey shook her head. She grinned at her stupid friend. A mean grin. Saraub stroked her neck with too-warm fingers.

“It’s cheddar or American, I can’t tell the difference,” Jayne said, then reached down under her bandage and began to scratch.

Audrey looked at the woman. “No, thanks,” she said. The mean grin left her face. Jayne was crying. Saraub’s eyes were wet, too. Here she was, numb and furious,
and here were her friends, crying for her. The vine got smaller.

“Or tea. I could make a cup of tea…What can I do?” Jayne pleaded, still scratching. Her sore broke open and began to bleed.

“Stop picking,” Audrey said. “You’ll hurt yourself.”

“Oh, right. Sorry,” Jayne said.

“Don’t be sorry. It’s just, stop hurting yourself,” Audrey told her.

Jayne’s face crumbled as she closed up the gauze. She squinted to keep from crying. Audrey reached over and squeezed her shoulder. “Hey. It’s okay. Thank you. You’re helping. Really.”

Jayne nodded, wet-eyed, and smiled heartbreakingly. The vine curled itself small again, a worm that lay in wait. Audrey turned to Saraub, and though she didn’t yet feel the sentiment, she knew that soon, she would. “You were right. It’s better it came from you.”

Saraub leaned in, and said probably the only thing she wanted to hear. “I love you.”

She scooted off the chair, and onto the floor, where she buried her wet nose in his chest. He put one arm around her back, the other around her bottom, so that he held her whole body. There, finally, she cried. Soft sobs. “I hate her. But I love her, too.”

“You don’t need to explain,” Saraub answered.

“I know what you mean,” Jayne said. “It hurts more because you wish it could have been different. And now it might not ever be.”

Audrey nodded. “She was bad, but when I look back, I wasn’t so great either. I blamed her for everything. Even when I was thirty years old. She was practically a vegetable, living in a group home, and I wanted her to tell me I was pretty. I wanted her to cook me dinner and make up for all those years she’d screwed up. I blamed her for everything. I held it over her head that I was a
waitress, because she needed me in town to help her, and there weren’t any jobs in architecture in Omaha. But the thing is, there were jobs. If I hadn’t been high all the time, I could have applied for one. I just…it was easier to hate her than do something about it.”

Jayne nodded. “Isn’t it funny? When you have to raise yourself, you never really grow up.”

“I guess we can grow up now, if we want. Can’t we?” Audrey asked.

Jayne shrugged. “Good luck with that.”

Audrey smiled.

Saraub cleared his throat, and she could tell he was uncomfortable. He’d never been big on discussing feelings, or, for that matter, criticizing loved ones. “Is there anyone I should call?” he asked.

She wasn’t sure she liked the question. Did it mean he wanted to leave? “Well…” she said.

“Are you seeing someone?” Saraub asked.

“Like a shrink?” she asked.

He tried to hide his amusement when he answered by looking down. “No, like a dude.”

“Of course not.”

Suddenly, Jayne jumped up. “I’m going to leave you guys alone, but I’ll be next door if you need me.” She winked, not at all subtlely, at Audrey.

“Okay,” Audrey said. Then she added, because she knew Jayne would be pleased to hear it. “I had…it was fun, Jayne. I had a nice time with you.”

Jayne’s entire face brightened. She lingered before hopping away on her crutches. “Me, too. So, I know this is bad timing and all, but if you’re in town, you should come to my act. It’ll cheer you up. Also, I’ll need the moral support. And then I’ll give you support back, too. That’s what friends do. I’ll buy new cheese and cook for you.”

Holding her crutches for her, Saraub came to Jayne’s side and took her arm.

“It’s a deal,” Audrey said as she rose, and walked with them.

“I’m sorry about your mom, Addie. It hurts my stomach to think you’re sad…but don’t forget about my act. She grinned widely at Saraub, then back at Audrey. Both of you!” Jayne said as she waved good-bye.

They waved back at her, new acquaintances tried by fire into friends.

If they had known the circumstances under which they’d see Jayne again, they might not have let her go.