Journals of Eleanor Druse, The (Digital Picture Book) (7 page)

Outside, Michael Baxley was shaving my noodle into sheets of transparent color, like stained glass, to be studied by computer networks, but here inside, I was exhaling one gorgeous infinite universe after another.

I could hardly wait to tell Bobby all about it, and I was careful not to move and spoil the photos they were taking of my big event.

Bobby is not the toughest page to read in the book of humanity. When he came in my room and took a seat near my bed without bringing the newspaper with him, I knew something was up.

Words weren’t necessary. I looked at him; he looked away. Then he reached inside his coat and pulled out two sheets of paper he’d stuffed into his pocket.

“I had a beer with Ray Kruger.”

“Good boy, Bobby. You got Madeline’s suicide note, then?”

Outright success has never been in his repertoire. He squirmed and looked away again.

“Ray says his big sis, Hilda, is the executor of his mum’s estate. When Ray asked about any notes his mum left, Hilda got pissy and said their mum was a writer, and she was always writing crazy stuff, horror stories and whatnot, including stories about characters who wrote notes and killed themselves.”

“I see. Then ask Hilda if we can read her mum’s last tale about a character named Madeline who wrote a note about a person named Sally Druse and then killed herself. ”

“Mum, they’re Catholics. You can’t talk suicide to them because it’s like telling them their mum is in hell. Plus, Ray said he would never let anybody see the whole note. He said it’s too disturbing. His mum was a walking psychodrama when she wrote it.”

“I’m not saying she killed herself or is in hell or is a walking psychodrama. I just want to see what she wrote to me in the note.”

Bobby smiled. “My argument exactly, Mum. I asked him for the parts about you. Ray’s sister let him see the note, and he tried to copy down the parts about you when she wasn’t looking. He says he can’t be sure he got it all, but he tried. He also says you can’t tell anybody, or Hilda will cut him out of the will money.”

“Good boy, Bobby. I won’t tell a soul. Read it to me while I hunt for my glasses.”

“Let’s see, here,” Bobby mumbled. “He’s right about one thing, Mum. It’s three-headed weird. Flowery, too. I’d leave it all alone. She’s missing a few buttons on her remote if you ask me. Okay, she says:

By the time Bobby had finished reading, I’d found my glasses and was trembling all over. I felt the same coldness swelling inside me that I’d felt the night Madeline tried to take her own life. Some dreadful nameless memory walled off from the rest of me tried to erupt into consciousness. Even though it was inside of me, I felt outside of it and trying to break in, as if I were feeling my way along a black wall in the dead of night,searching for an opening of some kind so that I could discover what was on the other side.

My hands were shaking when Bobby handed me the paper, and I read it over carefully.
Sally’s memory more merciful than mine…We were children when Evil touched us…

Again the terrible sensation that a memory was just out of reach, but there on the threshold of remembering, I paused and wondered if I should stop probing blindly in the darkness, because what if I disturbed some ghastly thing better left alone?

Bobby still had the second paper in his hand.

“What’s that one, Bobby?”

“This one Ray gave me outright, because she wrote it to you the very night she died. After she woke up in the hospital and started talking nonsense about you, they asked her did she want them to give you a message, and she wrote you this note. Nobody knows what it means. She must have been gaga on the pills. That’s when I called you from the hospital.”

Bobby handed me a sheet of Kingdom Hospital letterhead stationery of the sort they keep in drawers at the bedside. Scrawled in large letters with ugly jagged downstrokes and lightning bolts for cross strokes were the words:

At the bottom of the page, she’d signed it in what looked like a schoolgirl’s hand:
MADDY KRUGER,
November 2nd, 1939.

Again, the queasy sensation that I was on the verge of coming into a clearing in memory’s dark forest, but I didn’t know what I would find there. A witch? A goblin? A shallow mass grave?

“In case of fire, break glass,” I said.

Bobby stared at me and frowned. He looked like a Jersey bull chewing a pinch of Red Man instead of his cud.

“What are you saying, Mum?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “I don’t know why I said that. I thought it the other night.”

He rolled his eyes and looked back at me, as if he was waiting for me to grow another head.

“Bobby, what does it mean? ‘The little girl who saved us?’ What can it mean?”

“It means Mrs. Kruger was section eight, Mum. Certifiable. Squirrel food.”

“The fire did not kill her? What fire, Bobby? What little girl saved us? Why can’t I remember? It’s Alzheimer’s, I know it. If I get that, just go on and feed my bones to Skipper, will you promise me that?”

“Says November 1939,” he grunted, “and she’s talking about a fire. When did the old Kingdom Hospital burn down, Mum? Around then, wasn’t it? Hell, I could look at the cornerstone on the new one when I go back to work on Monday.”

“I was in that old hospital,” I said, “right before it burned. With Madeline, in fact. We had whooping cough. But I can’t remember it, Bobby. I’ve never been able to remember it. They say high fevers and such will do that to you. Just kind of wipes out the old data banks.”

The little girl who saved us is still lost?

That evening Nancy Conlan’s husband, Dave, came for a visit and brought his mother with him for reinforcement. They showed up just after the dinner hour with fresh flowers, a comforter, more cards and letters to arrange on Nancy’s tray table, and another snapshot to add to the collection of photographs on her nightstand—all of them featuring Nancy with her three kids.

Dave Conlan had rolling shoulders and bulging arm muscles and was hunched in a perpetual half crouch, as if he’d spent most of his life lifting and hauling. He had an old-style flattop and empty eyes that shone a steady, unblinking blue, like panel lights indicating their owner was on autopilot—probably had been since around the time his wife didn’t wake up from routine surgery to remove an arachnoid cyst near her brain stem.

Dave’s mother, Virginia, was in her fifties and wore a black beautician’s smock and an ID badge that said
HELENA’S HAIR HOUSE
in pink with a matching pink hairdo logo and pink 3 scissors. She had sculptured nails that were too long and too red and the overtinted, overdone ‘do of somebody in the beauty salon business.

She showed me a photo of Nancy and the three kids gathered around a picnic table somewhere in the irretrievable past, a golden retriever frolicking in the mix of little kid legs. The three children were waving bubble wands, and several well-wrought specimens drifted overhead. Nancy’s smile was incandescent, her eyes laughing, as she stretched out her hand, the summer sun shining in her lustrous hair, her slender fingers reaching out to touch a big wobbly one with rainbows swirling all over its skin, a fleeting diaphanous thing of intense beauty floating just out of reach.

It’s why God gave man the genius to invent photography: So there could be tangible proof that happiness is more than something we remember; it actually happens sometimes.

When I shook Dave’s huge calloused hand, it was like sliding my fingers into a catcher’s mitt. I shuddered to think of those three small children at home, and wages earned by the labor of those big rough hands going to sustain the barely breathing husk tied to the bed, a pathetic memorial to some horrible catastrophe.

Virginia added the photo to the bedside collection, and an awkward moment intervened, because I could tell she wanted to draw the privacy curtain in case she had to sit down for the not uncommon good long cry. But she caught my eye and thought it might be rude to shut me out, I suppose, so she left the curtain open. A situation I could not improve by inviting her to close it if she wished.

She and Dave lined up on either side of Nancy and watched her breathe for a minute or two. Then Virginia brushed Nancy’s hair and complained about how the poor girl’s complexion was getting even paler, and how it was all because they couldn’t take her outside in the wheelchair anymore, because she was stiff as lumber, and because of that feeding tube sewn into her stomach.

“She’s getting that white stuff in her mouth,” Virginia said to Dave. “Look there,” she continued. “Remind me to ask the nurse about that medicine we used to swab in her mouth. There, Nan, that’s okay. Davy’s here.”

After that, Nancy’s parents showed up, Renn and Margie. Margie was a squat, round, feeble, and tentative woman in a peasant skirt, with a polyester sweatshirt that read “Falmouth on Old Cape Cod” and red hair pulled back and rubber-banded in a haphazard fashion. Renn was a florid, portly gent in a tight red rayon bowling shirt that barely covered his prodigious belly. Over the left pocket of his shirt was written
RENN,
and across the shoulders in back
RENN’S RAIDERS.

“Our little girl waking up yet?” asked Renn.

Nobody answered him, and nobody took offense. I sensed it was just something he said whenever he came here, and would always say as long as they kept what had been his little girl alive.

Nurse Tiffany came in and removed a thermometer from Nancy’s armpit.

“How’s she doing?” asked Renn.

“Her blood pressure is back to normal,” said Tiffany. “No fever. Her electrolytes are better with the new tube feedings. She’s putting out more urine, and that’s good.”

“Her sores better?” asked Virginia.

“They debrided her sores today. The dermatologist says there’s improvement.”

“They do any more tests on her brain?”

“I don’t think so,” said Tiffany. “I don’t think any were ordered.”

“Well, somebody said something way back in the beginning about maybe going back in there and seeing if they could fix things,” said Renn. “There any more talk of that?”

I could see Virginia take a big here-we-go-again breath; Dave just stared at Nancy with those autopilot blues.

“That’s something you should talk to the doctors about, I think,” said Tiffany smoothly, “maybe one of the neurologists? Dr. Cantrell or Dr. Mayfield?” Then she slipped into a playful, scolding tone. “Have you been keeping that list of questions for the doctor I told you to make? So you’ll remember your questions when you see them?”

“Aw,” Renn said and shuffled his feet, and I could see him blushing in the radiance of Tiffany’s effortless vitality, her good looks, her absolute self-confidence when it came to handling painful inquiries about death and terminal illness. Despite her tender years, these grim affairs were already routine for her. Brain damage was as familiar to her as a run in her stocking or spoiled fruit.

“Has he been keeping his list?” she asked Margie in a just barely chiding tone.

Margie shook her head. “He talks. Eats. Drinks. That’s about it. Bowls on Thursday nights.”

“She t’ain’t woke up, even once?” Renn asked Tiffany.

“Well,” said Tiffany, “she wakes up. But I haven’t seen her respond to anyone yet.” She tilted her head and lifted her shaped eyebrows. “I’m sorry.”

“See?” Renn said to Margie. “She wakes up. That’s not the problem. So there’s some hope then,” he added.

Margie started in a quiet cry.

Virginia reached out and took Dave’s hand.

Tiffany started out the door, but Renn called after her.

“Tell the doctors I want to talk to them, then. And I’ll make a list. Okay?”

“Yes, sir,” said Tiffany. “I’ll tell them.”

I tried to give the family privacy, even though the curtain was half open. I rummaged in my bag to find my channeling crystal. When I have a problem I can’t solve by using my deteriorating powers of reason, I reach for a good channeling crystal and use it to prospect for knowledge deep inside myself, calling upon resources within me but beyond my reasoning.

A good pendulum provides a link to the subconscious, the Jungian unconscious, and all the other unmapped realms of the interior, which operate outside the feeble flashlight beam of mere consciousness. When one asks a question of the pendulum, the answer comes from one’s own inner vibrations. I held the crystal in my hand, touched the termination points with my index fingers and thumbs, and closed my eyes. I let the voices of Nancy’s family come and go, along with any images. I asked for guidance and listened.

“What you got there, lady?” asked Renn.

I opened my eyes and introduced myself to Renn and Margie.

“What’s that you’re holding there, ma’am?” he asked. “If you don’t mind me prying.”

I showed him my channeling crystal.

“Look at that,” said Renn and motioned for Virginia and Dave to come have a look. “What’s it do for you?”

“Oh, it helps me focus my mental energies. If I close my eyes and meditate while I’m holding it, it helps channel energy from my unconscious.”

“Wow,” said Renn. “Lookie there, it makes rainbows on the walls.”

“Can you see into the future with it?” asked Virginia.

“Only in bad movies,” I said. “If you have the proper crystal on a string and use it as a pendulum, you can sometimes receive guidance, but the information comes from within. Not from the future or from the spirits.”