Lineage (28 page)

Lance exhaled.
Another dead end.
He had been hoping that the man could’ve possibly answered some more questions that would inevitably pop up when all this
sunk
in. “So is my grandmother buried next to my grandfather?” Lance asked.

John stared out of the darkened window in the kitchen before swallowing and gazing at Lance. His eyes looked strange, and it had nothing to do with the broken vessels surrounding the pupils. Lance could see a wavering there, like a candle held before a breeze.

“She’s still alive.”

Chapter 9

“A man’s conscience, like a warning line on the highway, tells him what he shouldn’t do—but it does not keep him from doing it.”

—Frank Howard Clark

Riverside Serenity Home sat several miles to the south of Stony Bay and was tucked off the road so that all one could see when passing was a corner of the main building and several cars on the edge of the parking lot. Lance vaguely recalled seeing it on his drives to and from the house during the buying process and the move. Several acres of manicured lawns rolled against one another, dotted here and there with strategically placed hardwoods. The building itself hid behind multilayered rows of towering pines that swayed in the early-morning wind.

An overcast sky greeted Lance that morning when he
rose
, the trip already a surety in his plans for the day. As he stepped from the Land Rover onto the paved parking lot before the nursing home, he appraised the clouds that hung just out of the pines’ reach.

The visitor parking area looked small to him; only three short rows were designated, and when he gazed at the building, now that it had come into full view, he thought he could see why there wasn’t any need for more spaces.

The word
depressing
, he decided, described the facility best, as he strode toward the double doors that were two dark outlines in the shadow of the structure. The building was a rough rectangle, and no one had made an effort over the years to dress up the outside walls, to make them seem more inviting, so stained concrete met his eyes as he examined its two stories. The windows were onyx squares that, upon closer inspection, revealed wire interweaving within their panes. There were a few smaller outbuildings set off to each side, not big enough to be living areas and not small enough to be storage sheds.

The door swung open easily as he stepped through an archway and into a small waiting room that ended in a counter protected by Plexiglas from the waist up. A mouse-like woman in a pale blue uniform sat behind the glass tapping at a keyboard. She looked away from her computer screen reluctantly as Lance approached, and eyed him warily.

“Can I help you?” she asked.

“Yes, I wondered if an Annette Metzger still lived here.” Lance scrutinized his choice of words.
Lived
seemed a bit too friendly in the current atmosphere.
Existed
would have been a better choice. The nurse’s eyes
narrowed,
and he began to wonder if she would answer.

After a few seconds, she said, “Family or friend?”

Lance considered it for a moment before he replied.
“Family.”

The nurse appraised him once more and then motioned with one hand toward a swinging door next to the desk. Lance walked through the door, which opened up into a wide hallway lined with speckled white tiles that were surprisingly clean under the harsh light of the fluorescents. Each side of the hall held five doors, and he could see the far end branched off in a T. A door directly to his right opened and a middle-aged nurse with piles of curly gray hair stepped out of what he assumed was the back of the office he had been looking into.

“Hello, here to see one of the residents?” she said, stepping toward him, her voice considerably higher when compared to her sturdy build.

“Yes, Annette Metzger,” he said.

“Ah, I see. Are you a relative?”

“Yes, I, uh …” Lance faltered. Uttering what he meant to say took actual concentration. “I’m her grandson.”

The nurse’s eyes couldn’t have gotten larger if they were pried open. Lance imagined her bringing her hands to the sides of her face and screaming as she backed away, but instead, she only raised her gray eyebrows and blinked a few times.

“Well, this is a surprise. She’s never had a visitor since I’ve been here. We’ll see if you can get her to talk.”

Without another word, the nurse spun on a flat-heeled shoe and marched away from him, down to the end of the hall. He followed, now noticing the smell that had eluded him near the front desk. Urine and something muskier hung in the air, and as he passed each room, he couldn’t help but peer into them. Several of the rooms were empty, but as they neared the corner and the nurse hung a hard right, he spotted an old man sitting at the window that looked out onto a courtyard, which sat secluded in the center of the building. Drool trailed in a slim line from the man’s chin to his lap, and when Lance looked down he saw that the man’s pants were soaked—whether from the saliva or another bodily fluid, he couldn’t tell.

Lance quit looking into the rooms and pulled up short behind the wide backside of the nurse, who stood awaiting an elevator at the end of the short T. The doors slid open and they both stepped inside. The nurse hit the backlit number
2
and crossed her hands over her belly as the car hummed around them.

“Just want to warn you, she’s not responsive. I’ve never heard her say a word. I’ve got to stay just outside the door, with it open—facility rules.”

Lance frowned. “Why’s that?” The elevator yawned open to another hallway, this one running straight away from them without obstruction.

The nurse stepped out. “The second floor houses more-aggressive residents.”

Lance peered past the nurse just as a gaunt man shuffled out into the hallway from a room, a uniformed woman following behind him. When Lance looked at them, he didn’t see a caring protector watching over her ward. Instead, he saw the blank expression of someone taking a dog for a walk on the nurse’s face. The man seemed to be running from something only he could see but wasn’t able to make his legs cooperate. His feet slid along the ground, hindering his progress. His vacant eyes bulged as he glanced over his shoulder and a terrified look was etched across his face.

“Mr. Metzger?”

Lance turned and realized that the nurse had continued on while he was transfixed. “Sorry,” he said, catching up with her a few doorways down.

The nurse stood by a thick wooden door with a small rectangular window set in its middle. A tangled mass of keys hung from one pudgy hand.

As he watched her extricate the right key from the group, Lance asked, “What exactly did she do to get locked up here, away from the other residents?”

The nurse grunted. “We had an orderly get bitten once—she doesn’t like men much.”

The door swung inward with a thrust of her hand, and Lance stepped past her and into the room. The living space crowded his senses. The walls were beige, which had most likely been selected to calm the patients, but instead looked lifeless and bland in the wan lighting. A lower-concentrated blend of the smell he had encountered on the floor below hung in the room. A bed, thin and carefully made, stood against one wall. A heavy desk sat below the only window in the room, which shone a dim gray from the clouds outside.

The light filtered onto the humped figure that sat at the desk, its back to the door. Lance studied the woman, her shoulders so rounded by time that they seemed like afterthoughts on her body. Her hair hung at her shoulders, a shade beyond white. The stick-like arms were shrouded in the folds of an overly large sweater that was an ugly color of olive. She made no movement when Lance stepped into the room, his footsteps overly loud in the close quarters.

“I’ll be just outside,” the nurse murmured as she sidestepped out of view.

Lance barely heard her as he approached his grandmother. Her face gradually became visible in the dim light. Her eyes didn’t register him as he neared, but instead they stared out the window—which was much too high to reach even by standing on the desk—at the marbled sky that rolled across its view.

He didn’t know how to begin. Each sentence that came to mind was inane or alien. He stood
there,
the knowledge that in the chair a few feet away rested his last living relative was not lost on him. The urge to turn and bolt out the door pushed at him, but he forced it away, grabbed a straight-backed chair, and sat.

His first impression of Annette being very old was incorrect. She was ancient. Her eyelids hung loose over sunken eyeballs that were glazed, a fog of years covering them. Her cheeks were lined with the loss of fat that had no doubt filled them full, and resembled two sails hanging limp on a windless day. Her toothless mouth was ajar, but surprisingly, no spittle dripped out of it.

“Hello, my name is Lance,” he began. “I know you don’t know me, but … I’m your grandson.” The words were out of his mouth before he had computed them. The emotion that clung to them stunned him. The longing for a family he had felt while growing up alone came rushing back to him in an instant. The feelings of envy and resentment at seeing other kids with parents and grandparents over the years surfaced from deep within him, and then submerged once again, pushed below by the questions that had drawn him here. “I wanted to ask you about some things. Would you like to talk with me?”

Annette didn’t move. Her eyes remained locked on the window. Lance frowned and leaned closer to the old woman, the smell of aged skin cloying the air around her.

“Annette, do you remember your house?
The one at the lake?
Do you remember what it looks like?” He thought he saw a movement beneath the sweater, a shiver. “Do you remember where you lived with my father?
With your husband?”
He stared at the side of her face, examining the lines there. Her jaw shifted, up a fraction of an inch and then back down. Lance blinked. Had she tried to say something?

He continued, hoping his voice would spur her on. “I moved there a little while ago. I didn’t know it was yours.”

The events that had transpired over the past weeks replayed in his head. In this dark room, they seemed all too real.
Strange and otherworldly, but real.
That was really why he had come to see this catatonic woman.
To see if she could tell him why these things were happening to him.
To give an explanation other than what his mind kept creeping toward like an open grave.

“I’ve been seeing things,” he started, his voice much lower than before.
“Strange things in the house.
I don’t know why, and I’m beginning to worry that nothing’s really there. That it’s just me. It’s always been me, and it’s something that’s broken inside my mind.”

His breath came in short bursts and he felt the
clawings
of anxiety. He sat back in his chair and tried to calm himself. The atmosphere of the building pressed upon him. He felt its institutional presence like a hand on his shoulder that waited to steer him into a room of his own in some quiet, dark corner. Maybe someday he’d see what the man in the hall saw. Maybe someday he would run from it too.

Lance tried to shake the thoughts and calm the panic that threatened to spew out of his chest. Annette still hadn’t moved, her arms resting at her sides, her face slack. What was he doing? Sitting here in a room with a woman he didn’t know, asking her questions about his own sanity when she hadn’t spoken a word since the day she had seen her husband’s gray matter sprayed across the floor of their home.
Tell her the stain is still there,
the voice intoned evilly.

Lance almost stood from his chair and left the room, knowing that his present location and his thoughts were terrible company, but something stopped him.

The surface of the desk before Annette held a folded piece of paper and a short nub of a pencil. He hadn’t noticed them before. Lance leaned forward, squinting in the dim light of the room. He realized that a crossword puzzle lay before his grandmother, its small boxes completely filled with letters. He reached out toward the puzzle, half expecting the old woman to lunge at his outstretched arm and tear at it like a snarling beast. Annette remained motionless as he slid the paper toward him with a soft scraping sound.

It took a moment for him to understand what had been written in the blank spaces of the puzzle. Most of the boxes overflowed with letters, their harsh outlines scratched deep into the page outside of the boundaries by the worn pencil. There were only two words on the page:
WULF
and
RHINELANDER
.
Names,
he corrected himself as he read them. The two names were repeated everywhere, scrawled by the unsteady hand of the woman beside him.

Lance looked at his grandmother, her hair floating weightless around her shrunken head, her eyes still staring at the growing storm outside. “Who are they?” he asked, his eyes locked on her face, looking for any signs that she’d heard him. “Can you tell me who they are?”

Nothing.
No recognition. She was a husk, hollowed out by time and tragedy.
The leavings of a mind all but eaten up, her last thoughts echoing out of an eroded memory and onto the page before her.
And nothing that served as answers to his questions.

Lance stood from the chair, giving his grandmother one last look. He crossed the room and stepped into the hall, where the nurse stood staring at an alarming brown stain on the floor near one of the other doors.

“Thank you,” he said.

The bulky woman pulled the door shut and locked it. She grunted in reply and led the way back to the elevator. As the floor hummed its descent beneath them, Lance turned to the nurse.