Living Witness (22 page)

“I want them here,” Judy Cornish had said. “Shelley wants them here. I'll make some phone calls this afternoon. I'd bet anything I could get a good dozen parents who want them here.”

“Shelley” must be the Niederman woman, Alice thought. They all looked alike, these people. They all carried around the same big pocketbooks. Alice looked at Dick Henderson. He looked uncomfortable as Hell. He ought to look uncomfortable as Hell.

“You can't start any club like that,” Alice said. “It's against the rules.”

“It's not against any rule,” Judy Cornish said.

“It will be against the rules,” Alice said. “We'll pass a rule. Wait and see. You're not in charge here. I'm on the school board. I'm the boss.
We'll make sure you can't bring that kind of thing in here to contaminate our kids—”

“You
can't
pass a rule,” Judy Cornish said triumphantly. “There's a law called the Equal Access Act. It says that any school that gets federal funds has to allow any school club that any student wants to form without engaging in viewpoint discrimination. It says—”

“Oh, shut up,” Alice said. “You can go on like that all day and I won't listen to it.”

“If you try to stop our club, we'll complain to the federal government,” Judy said, “and then they'll make you let us or they'll take away the federal money we get around here and we get a lot of it. I've looked it up. We can start any kind of club we want to and you can't stop us. We could start a Wicca club if we felt like it—”

“It isn't legal to have Satan worship in schools,” Alice said. “And don't you try to tell me it is.”

“Wicca isn't Satan worship,” Judy said. “We can start any kind of club—”

And on and on. On and on. Alice stopped in her forward march and looked around. She had left the schools complex on foot, without her car. She had no idea why she had done that. She had just been so damned steamed up, so damned furious, at Judy Cornish and all the rest of them, and at Catherine Marbledale. Who did any of them think they were? She was Catherine Marbledale's boss. She kept pointing that out. Catherine Marbledale didn't seem to care.

“It's that tenure,” Alice said, to the air, to the birds, to the cold, to nothing. She'd only learned about tenure since she'd been on the school board. Apparently, it meant that if a teacher had been around long enough, you couldn't fire her, no matter what.

Alice stopped and tried to catch her breath, and that was when she realized she was almost all the way back to town—so maybe she wouldn't walk all the way back to the schools complex. Maybe she'd have Lyman come out and fetch the car later. But she wasn't just almost back to town. She was right there where the worst thing had happened, right in front of Annie-Vic Hadley's house. It sat back
from the road behind a high hedge, looking like something out of a horror story.

“Damn,” Alice said.

She was suddenly very cold, and she didn't like being here. She really didn't. She had never liked this house, even before all this trouble started. It was dark in a way she couldn't define. It was made of dark wood, for one thing, and its bricks were brown instead of red, and the windows had slats what went sideways, as if they belonged in a monastery somewhere. Alice had never seen a monastery except in horror movies, and she was pretty sure she didn't want to see one. This house always made her feel as if it were haunted. Maybe that's what old Annie-Vic did in her spare time. Maybe she hung around and talked to ghosts.

There was a big gate in the hedge, but it didn't have an
actual
gate. There was nothing to bar anybody's way. Alice went up to posts that defined the entry and looked in. Some of Annie-Vic's family had been staying in the house for a while, but they must have gone. Alice couldn't see any sign of them. She edged right up to the opening. She'd never been so much as up the walk here. She wasn't the kind of person Annie-Vic deigned to notice, except when she came into the diner, and then she treated everybody like they were fools and peons. Alice wondered what it was like in there. Maybe Annie-Vic was like those old women you heard about, the ones who collected things, bits of paper, lengths of string, cats. They piled everything on top of everything else and died in the garbage one night when it got too much for them to handle.

Alice looked behind her. There was nobody there. She looked to one side and then to the other. There was nobody anywhere. She was out here all by herself.

Alice looked back at the house. It was blank, the way empty houses were. It was much too big. She took a step on the flagstone entry path. She was standing right between two lines of hedges. She took another step. She was in the front yard. There was nothing much in the front yard. There were no lawn ornaments, and no flowerbeds. There was
no lawn furniture for people to sit on when the weather got warm. People like Annie-Vic didn't sit in their front yards when the weather got warm. If they did, they might have to talk to people who came walking by.

There really was nobody around to see her, and she didn't mean to do damage or cause harm. It wouldn't hurt to see what it was like, just this one time. Alice had always wanted to get herself into that house.

She took a deep breath. Then she looked behind her again, and from side to side. There was still nobody in sight.

It really
wouldn't hurt
just to go up on that front porch and look in through the front door.

 

Ann-Victoria Hadley knew that time was passing, out there, somewhere, where she was not. She knew it because people came and went from her room. The problem was, too many people came and went from her room. There was Tom Willard, who seemed to be her doctor. He wasn't local, but she knew him from hospital benefits and that kind of thing. There was Gary Albright, who kept coming back and coming back. At least, Annie-Vic thought he did. It turned out that when “time stood still,” that didn't mean it just stopped, so that you were alive in an eternal present. No, that wasn't it at all. Instead, time
meshed
, all the times in your life. There were so many people coming in and out who had nothing to do with her life in Snow Hill, or had something to do with it, but something that was long over. There was her father, looking as if he'd never passed the age of forty, pacing up and down in front of the window that looked out on the cemetery, smoking a pipe. They didn't let you smoke pipes in hospitals any more. There was Miss Gardham, who had been her professor in Russian literature at Vassar, still looking twenty-two, or whatever she had been. She had been new Annie-Vic's senior year, and the girls had all teased her. It was because of Miss Gardham that Annie-Vic kept thinking of that line from Chekov, from one of the short stories.

It was a tiny town, worse than a village, inhabited chiefly by old people who so seldom died, it was really vexatious
.

What a thing to remember. Annie-Vic was sure that Miss Gardham was not a ghost, and that her father was not one either. She also did not think that they were properly hallucinations. It was as if they had been locked up in her head in some alternative form nobody yet knew anything about, and now that she couldn't control anything about herself, they had come out.

She really
couldn't
control anything about herself. She wanted to toss and turn in bed. She wanted at least to turn over on her side, because she slept on her side. She much preferred it to sleeping on her back. She just couldn't make her body move, to her side or anywhere else. She couldn't make her eyelids open, either, even when she could feel the light on them, and even see it, more or less. She couldn't reach out her hand to any of the people who came and sat beside this bed.

For a little while—there was really no way to judge how long; the human person is not provided with a biological mechanism for telling ordinary daylight time—she was so frightened she thought she might have trouble breathing. She couldn't count the number of times she had told various members of her family that she would never want to be left in a “persistent vegetative state.” She had railed on and on about it during the Terry Schiavo thing, when her grandnephew Cameron, who was a doctor, had been
adamant
that it was never permissible to remove a feeding tube.

“Artificial life supports, yes,” he had said. “If you've got her heart pumping by machine or her lungs breathing that way, of course you can remove those. But a feeding tube. Food and water. You have no right to remove food and water.”

Annie-Vic had made some remark at the time that Cam's view was a result of his newly minted Catholicism. Cam had converted to the Catholic Church during his residency in oncology. She felt bad about that now, about what she'd said. She'd been so annoyed at Cam for converting. There hadn't been a religious person in the Hadley family for generations, and they'd been proud of the fact, but there was
Cam, reading Walker Percy and going to Mass. She should have had more respect for his opinion.

“I don't think you should never starve someone to death because I converted to Catholicism,” he had told her at the time. “I converted to Catholicism because I don't think you should starve people to death. Sorry, Annie-Vic, but on questions of life and death, it looks to me like the Catholic Church is the only sane institution on the planet.”

Catholic Church. Sane. Who would have thought it, in her own family? What about birth control? What about censorship? They'd had a fight, that evening, but Annie-Vic didn't think of it as having ruined her family dinner. The Hadleys always fought about things like that at family dinners. It didn't stop any of them from staying at the table for the key lime pie.

Annie-Vic wanted to turn her head from side to side, but she couldn't do that any more than she could do anything else. She wanted to scratch the side of her nose with the tip of her finger. It was as if some vital link between her body and her mind had been severed. Sensations came to her, but her ability to react did not. At one point, Tom Willard had pricked her with a needle. It had hurt like Hell, and under any other circumstances Annie-Vic would have jumped half a foot and cursed him, but she could make no response at all.

“She's not responsive,” Tom Willard had said, at the time, to somebody in the room who might have been Cam, or Cam and Lisa both. Lisa down from Vassar. Annie-Vic was pretty sure she hadn't imagined that.

“Of course, she's not deteriorating,” Tom Willard said.

Annie-Vic had felt a great relief at that. She wasn't deteriorating, which meant that this problem might work itself out in time. It might not, but at the moment, that didn't seem to be all that bad. Being dead would be worse, Annie-Vic was sure. She didn't know why she was sure. She was glad Cam was here. He would refuse if the rest of them tried to talk him into allowing the hospital to let her die. Or to kill her. It wouldn't be just letting her die, under the circumstances, would
it? They'd have to take the tubes and things out. They'd have to take the feeding tube out. They'd have to actually
do
something.

The door to the room opened and a nurse came in. She came over to the bed and fussed with things. She checked the tube and then went to work changing the bag at the top of it. Annie-Vic knew nothing about hospitals. In spite of her age, she'd never spent much time in them. She had always been a healthy person. The nurse leaned over the bed and put her hand flat on Annie-Vic's face. Then she yanked up Annie-Vic's left eyelid with her thumb. It hurt like Hell, and the light hurt even more. The nurse let the eyelid drop. Annie-Vic wondered why she could see people in her room, the real ones as well as the memory ones, when her eyelids were always closed.

The nurse made a notation on the chart at the foot of Annie-Vic's bed. Then she went away. There was nothing in this room to keep a mind working. There was no music. The television was never on. Annie-Vic didn't like television much. There was Poirot and Miss Marple. She liked those. She'd taken a mystery tour once, gone on a cruise where the guests were given parts in a murder mystery and then were supposed to solve it. She'd liked that cruise, even if it had only gone to the Bahamas, which she did not like. She needed something to keep her mind moving, so that it wouldn't atrophy. She imagined her mind as a big balloon with the air slowly leaking out of it. She wished they would play some Bach harpsichord piece, or even one of Beethoven's more triumphal symphonies, anything. She wished she could hear her memory people talking.

Every once in a while, time did a loop, and she was back there—not in this hospital room—but there, with that thick aluminum thing coming at her face. She always saw it in motion. She always concentrated on the metal. She always remembered herself thinking that it was all wrong. You thought you knew people. You thought you understood how the town worked, how the people in it thought and felt and acted, and it turned out that you had it all backwards, you didn't know what really mattered at all.

Years ago, Annie-Vic had been a prisoner of war in the “Asian theater,”
as they'd put it then. She'd been a prisoner of the Japanese. It was more than sixty years ago now. It was so far in the past that she should never feel it was more real to her than the last five minutes, but she did. She hadn't understood anything then, either, and it had taken her years after her release to come to terms with how wrong she had been.

If she could only get back the ability to sit up and talk and make herself understood, she could explain it all to them. She could tell them not only what had happened, but why.

Annie-Vic had the distinct feeling that they didn't know what had happened yet. If they did, Gary Albright wouldn't be parking himself in her room every day like a cold that refused to go entirely away.