Specter (9780307823403) (4 page)

“How about that! Red Jell-O!” I try to sound enthusiastic. “Everybody likes red Jell-O. Right?”

Julie picks up a spoon. “I like Jell-O. But what’s that stuff?”

“Broccoli. Haven’t you ever eaten broccoli?”

She shakes her head.

“Well, try some. I think you’ll like it.”

“No.”

“You can’t just eat the Jell-O,” I tell her. “You have to eat the chicken and the broccoli and the lettuce salad because it’s good for you.”

I sound like a mother, and I cringe. What am I doing, taking on this little kid?

She obediently takes a mouthful of broccoli, and I climb back in my own bed and eat my lunch before it gets any colder than it was when it was brought in.

Maybe now is a good time to tell her. So I talk about what my doctor said about leaving the hospital, and what I said to him.

She studies me carefully. I can feel her tension.

“It’s going to work out all right, Julie,” I say. “My doctor’s a good guy, and he’ll really try to get us a home together.”

“When?”

“I don’t know. It depends on who they can find. Someone has to want us.”

I flip on the television again. I can see Julie trying to keep her eyes open. When the orderly comes in to pick up the trays, I point to Julie’s bed, and he slowly rolls it down again.

In a few moments she’s asleep. Mrs. Cardenas sticks her head in the door, looks at us both and winks at me. “
Pssst
,” she says, crooking her finger.

I put on my robe and join her in the hall. She’s going to retire soon because she says being on her feet so long makes her back hurt. I’m going to miss her.

“I’ll walk with you,” she says.

“I’ve been strong enough for a while to walk by myself,” I tell her, surprised that she doesn’t remember.

“I know,” she answers, and she looks both ways before she continues in a conspiratorial voice. “But I got some news about that little girl. The police checked on the driver’s license. They found out that William Kaines served time eight years ago in Illinois for assault and rape.”

I stop walking and stare at her. “That’s awful!”

“For the last few years there wasn’t anything on him, and there was nothing left in the car because it burned.”

Mrs. Cardenas squeezes my elbow and pilots me down the hallway again. “They may have been the kind who keep one step ahead of the people they owe money to.”

It makes me think. “Or ahead of someone who is after them,” I say. I look at Mrs. Cardenas, whose round cheeks are red with the excitement of the story she’s telling me. “Where did you get this information?”

She begins to look huffy, so I quickly say, “I mean, did the information come from newspapers or the radio news or where?”

She chuckles, her good disposition restored. “Straight from my brother-in-law, Arturo.”

“The policeman.”

“He ought to know what he’s talking about.”

“Then, listen. Could he find out something for
me?” I glance down the hall, and one of the nurses is staring at us, head cocked like a banty hen. I grab Mrs. Cardenas’s arm and say, “Come on. Keep walking.”

She does, leaning close to me. “Find out what?” she asks.

“Could your brother-in-law find out the name of the woman who William Kaines had raped? Could you find out if her last name was Sikes?”

Mrs. Cardenas falters, her mouth a rosy O. “I heard about that Sikes name,” she says. “Lorena said the girl had a nightmare last night and that you gave Dr. Paull a bad time.”

“Maybe it wasn’t just a nightmare. Julie insisted that someone named Sikes was in the room.”

“Did you see him? You were in the room, too.”

“No. I didn’t see him. But I felt someone was there. It was weird.”

Her forehead wrinkles up like a pleated collar. “But nobody was in the hospital who shouldn’t have been.”

I shrug. There’s no use arguing. Just because they didn’t see anyone leave the room, they don’t believe Julie. They didn’t see me sneak into the old lady’s room either. Not seeing something doesn’t mean it didn’t happen. After what Mrs. Cardenas has told me, I’m beginning to guess why Julie is so terrified of the man Sikes.

“Well? Can you find out the information I want?”

“Why not?” Mrs. Cardenas says, smiling. “I can usually find out anything.”

We’ve reached the end of the hall and have doubled back, and I haven’t noticed. We’re close to my room when a scream smashes the air. Someone bursts out of the storeroom and dashes through the door to the stairway. A nurse flaps out of the storeroom screeching that a man had been hiding in there. People begin running toward the stairs and into each other.

I flatten against the wall, pulling Mrs. Cardenas next to me. “Did you get a good look at him?”

“No!” she says. She tugs me toward the nurses’ station. We can hear one of the nurses on the phone.

“How should I know?” she’s saying. “He was probably looking for drugs, like that creep on the second floor last month.”

We hang around, scooping up little pieces of information, until we find that whoever it was has got away, and there are no witnesses—including the nurse who had surprised him in the storeroom, because he had thrown a pillowcase over her head before he shoved past her and ran from the room.

I tell them I think he was tall and had on a blue shirt and pants. The nurse at the desk says she’s sure he was wearing dark brown slacks. An orderly who nearly collided with him on the stairs didn’t see his face but insists he saw navy blue slacks and a plaid shirt.

“The world is full of strange people,” Mrs.
Cardenas says to me. “You go back to your bed for a nap, and I’ll call my cousin Carmen, who will want to know all about this.”

So I go back into the room. But I stop at the door when I see Julie. She’s sitting in the middle of her bed, shaking as though she’s naked in a snowstorm.

“Did you see him?” she gasps. “Was it Sikes?”

“No,” I say, “it couldn’t have been Sikes.” And I wonder if I’m lying as I try to soothe away her chattering fear. I know fear. I’ve watched it flicker behind the tears of kids new to the home in those first days, in which all they knew was that they weren’t in control of their lives any longer.

And I knew the gasping, throat-scratching fear that came when my body confirmed what the doctors had told me—the retching, aching fear that lasted until it turned into anger.

“The man in the storeroom was some pot head after drugs,” I tell Julie. “Forget him.”

She leans back and stares at me with eyes that are cold. “Are you telling me the truth?”

“No one saw him. It all happened too fast.”

“Sikes is a murderer,” she says. “He killed my father.”

I can’t go this route again, so I try to change her direction. “Tell me about your father.”

Her eyes become softer, and her thin, little face picks up a glow. “My father was tall. He called himself a beanpole. He’d put me on his shoulders and run, and I’d bounce up and down and we’d laugh and laugh. I’d hang onto his chin, but it was prickly. Once my father grew a beard, but it was so light my mother said he looked like a blond Santa Claus, so he shaved it off.”

“Did he have the same color hair as you?”

“Yes, and blue eyes, too.” She pauses. “Every time my mother said we looked alike, my father would laugh and say, ‘How can you think that, Nancy, when Julie is short and doesn’t have muscles?’ ”

She’s looking back into another space, and I’m with her, visualizing this tall, young father with the pale hair who looked at the world through eyes like Julie’s eyes.

Then I ask the wrong thing. “Julie, how did you get the bruises on your arms?”

She closes up like the petals of a flower in time-lapse photography, shutting me out. A wall of tears, ready to spill, is between us.

“I want to watch television,” she says.

I climb on my bed, turning on the controls. It’s the afternoon movie, something left over from the
forties. Two people have just met at a party and are nose to nose, gulping each other with their eyes. Instant love.

I had liked being in love and in love and in love with some of the boys at school, especially with Rob. The feeling I had for him was a step beyond the early, giggly romances at sweaty school dances with guys with damp hands and the kisses behind the gym before the bus came to take some of us back to the home. Rob had a creative mind, and he gave me copies of the poems he wrote, which I’d read to Holley Jo.

Holley Jo. I think about the way we whispered about our dates after we’d finally settle down to sleep. Sooner or later we’d drowsily slide into our own private daydreams before the night dreams took over, because we knew that someday we’d be women and get beyond the boys to the men, and the love would be for real. Someday.

The familiar exhaustion creeps through me, and I give in to it, unable as ever to fight it. Sleep is a healer, they told me; but sleep is also a private place to hide when thoughts become too hard to handle.

I awake to hear voices. Dr. Lynn Manning is sitting next to Julie’s bed. She doesn’t look the way a psychiatrist ought to look. I guess I’ve been influenced by those solemn, bearded pictures of Dr. Sigmund Freud. Dr. Lynn has lots of freckles and a snub nose and reddish hair that curls in every direction. When she smiles, she means it. And when
I talk to her, she really listens. In spite of that white coat, sometimes I forget that she’s a doctor.

If anyone can get through to Julie, it will be Dr. Lynn. I’m so glad she’s here talking with Julie that I lie on my side and listen in. Dr. Lynn doesn’t seem to mind.

But Julie is holding back. These are the same shut-out answers she has given the other doctors. Dr. Lynn gets up and stands at the window, looking out. I’ve been at that window so many times I can see the scene as though I’m standing with her.

The hospital is built on a hill at the west edge of San Antonio in the medical center. Beyond it are sloping hills that roll one into another, and in the springtime the grass is long and green and shivers in the wind. The hill country stretches out to meet that flat, bright Texas sky, dotted with white globs of clouds that look as though an amateur painter had slapped them there. It’s a beautiful country, the only country I’ve ever known.

“Tell me about your mother,” Dr. Lynn says. “What did she like to do?”

Surprisingly Julie responds. “She could sing and dance. She told me she used to work in a nightclub. A long time ago she was in a play.”

“A long time ago?”

“When I was little. My father took me to watch, only it was at night, and I fell asleep. So the next morning my mother put on her costume and put me in the big chair in the living room and sang ‘As Long As He Needs Me.’ She sang it just to me.”

Dr. Lynn gives Julie that warm, supportive smile. “Was she in other plays?”

“Maybe before that one,” Julie says. “But that was the last.”

“Do you know why?”

“No.” Her voice becomes tight.

Dr. Lynn sits on the chair by Julie’s bed and takes her hand. “It’s all right to miss your mother and father. It’s all right to cry.”

Julie’s voice is not much more than a whisper. “I cried for my father. It didn’t help. It didn’t bring him back.”

I can’t stand it. There’s something she has to tell Dr. Lynn. “Julie,” I interrupt. “Tell her about that man you’re afraid of.”

But Dr. Lynn shakes her head at me. “We’ll let Julie take this at her own pace,” she says. “Is there anything else you’d like to talk about, Julie?”

“No,” Julie says. She slithers down in her bed and pulls the blanket up under her chin.

“All right.” Dr. Lynn smiles at her again and moves toward the door. Then she pauses, picks up my robe, which I’ve left on the end of my bed, and tosses it to me. “Want to go for a walk, Dina?” she asks me.

I really don’t, but I climb out of bed, fumble for my slippers, and put on the robe. “Can we walk just as far as the waiting room? I’m tired again.”

She puts an arm around my shoulders. “Dr. Cruz tells me that you’ll gradually get back much of your energy. He’s enthusiastic about your progress.”

Before I go through the door, I turn to look at Julie. She’s watching me intently. “I’ll be back soon,” I explain.

Dr. Lynn steers me into the little waiting room. No one is in it at this hour. No one is usually in it.

“I wish Holley Jo could visit me.” It comes out without warning and startles me.

“If she can’t visit you, maybe you can visit her,” Dr. Lynn says. “You’ll be out of here soon.”

My breath catches as though someone had just popped me in the stomach. I hadn’t thought about being able to see Holley Jo again. The idea is so welcome, so exciting, so unexpected that I cling to it, wanting to shout with it; and I think,
This is what it feels like to be happy
. I had honestly forgotten.

Dr. Lynn sits on one of the hard plastic chairs, and I plop on the brown vinyl sofa, which lost its springs generations ago.

“Maybe I could drive you there on my day off,” she says. “I’d love to see some of the hill country. This part of Texas is new to me.”

She adjusts the green skirt that pokes out from under her white coat.

“Thank you,” I say. “Oh, thank you!” And tightly wound in this crazy ecstasy of joy, I say something as insanely foolish as I feel. “In that green skirt, with your white coat, you match old grasshopper legs.”

Her eyes widen. “Who in the world is old grasshopper legs?”

“Dr. Paull. He’s got the weirdest green plaid slacks.”

“Oh,” she says. She blinks rapidly a few times and stares at a spot over my head.

“It’s just a private joke. If you saw those green slacks, you’d agree with me.”

“Not necessarily.” There’s a lot of pink under those freckles.

I suddenly catch on. “Dr. Lynn, is there something between you and Dr. Paull?”

It’s funny to see someone who is usually so self-controlled look embarrassed. “I don’t think we want to discuss my private life.”

“He’s not good enough for you.”

Her chin lifts. “What do you mean by that?”

“He’s kind of a pill. That’s what I mean.”

“He’s a dedicated doctor. He’s serious about his work.”