The Fall of Never (6 page)

“It’s okay.”

“It’s
not.
I think…this sounds crazy, Josh, but I think something inside me has been expecting this. You know? Like how a mother just knows when something bad has happened to her child? It’s like that, I guess. I think that’s why I’ve been feeling this way…or maybe not…Jesus, I don’t know.”

“When does your flight leave?”

“Tonight. I should be at the airport no later than nine o’clock.”

“How long will you be staying there?”

Her eyes trailed off into space, unfocused and facing the far wall. “I don’t even know yet.” Then she faced Josh. She looked half-asleep and dreaming, lost in her own mind. “I haven’t seen my sister in years. I haven’t even been back to the compound in so long.” Surprisingly, she broke out into choked laughter. “Compound,” she muttered. “Sounds like a fucking military base.
House.
That’s all it is. Just a big fucking
house.”
She took a long drink from her glass.

Josh thought,
Plainly, Miss Rich, your sister was brutally attacked and nearly killed.

“It’s such a cold place,” Kelly went on, “and I haven’t been there in years. My parents are not the warmest, fuzziest people, in case you didn’t catch that from the message on my answering machine. Thank you, Mr. Kildare, whoever the hell you are. You are my hero. Good luck and good-bye, Bobby Jean.”

“I’m sure your sister will be all right,” he said, realizing as soon as the words were out of his mouth just how ridiculous he sounded. “I mean…I’m sure if it was very serious your father—or this Kildare guy—would have left you more information. Or at least a phone number. I mean, I would think…”

She nodded, but Josh could tell she didn’t agree with him and he didn’t say anything more about it. In his head he could still hear that cold, mechanical voice issuing from Kelly’s answering machine:
I have taken the liberty of securing you a plane ticket for tomorrow evening from JFK to Burlington International. You can pick up your ticket at the counter, and a driver will be at Burlington when your flight comes in to take you to the compound. I apologize for the brevity of this message, but there is much to attend to here. Your parents look forward to your arrival.
How could a human being be so cold, so formal? And what kind of parents have some personal assistant make such a telephone call in the first place? It was utterly ridiculous. Josh hadn’t necessarily grown up in the most nuclear of households, but such estrangement between family members seemed absurd to him.

“That poor girl,” Kelly whispered and finished off her vodka. “I should have taken her out of there when I left.”

“Christ, Kell, don’t start blaming yourself for all this.”

“It’s no way for a kid to grow up…”

“Still—it’s not your fault. I don’t care what you say, but I’m not going to let you believe that, you understand? Don’t be that way.”

“I just…” She rested her face in her hands again. She’d set her empty rocks glass at her feet and now she accidentally kicked it with the toe of her left foot, knocking it on its side and sending it into revolutions across the floor. “My childhood was a very unusual one, Josh. My parents were very cold, unforgiving people and I think that if I stayed there with them I would have turned out pretty cold and unforgiving too. I was sent away at fifteen. I married Collin at eighteen and moved to New Hampshire. I was running away, I knew it even then, but it was just something I had to do. I don’t expect you to understand.”

“What was so horrible back home?”

The rocks glass at her feet had stopped rolling. Now, she stared down at it as if it held all her answers. “I don’t know,” she said. “That’s the most difficult thing of all. I can’t remember. But I
do
think it has something to do with the way I’ve been feeling lately. And maybe with Becky, too.”

“How is that possible?”

She just shook her head slowly. “I don’t know. Maybe it’s not. Maybe it’s not possible at all.”

“I’m sure everything will be fine,” he said and threw a clumsy arm around her shoulder. He thought of Nellie at that moment and was suddenly surprised at how promptly the old woman had slipped from his mind. He wouldn’t bring up Nellie’s stroke now. It would just have to wait until Kelly came back from the—
compound,
he thought and shuddered. It was just so damned
institutional.

What if Nellie Worthridge is dead by the time Kelly comes back?
a small voice deep inside his head spoke up. And on the heels of that:
What if Kelly never even comes back at all?

Of course she would be back. Why wouldn’t she?

His mind shifted from Nellie to Sampers, He of the Greasy Hair and the Chapped Lips. Sampers had had a first name—was it Kenneth?—and had a father and a stepmother and a little sister and lived in a house and probably had a dog and maybe some old skin magazines hidden under his bed and maybe his old man beat him and maybe his stepmother was a degenerate alcoholic and maybe all those things came together and, in the end, created a monster out of Kenneth Sampers. Or maybe none of that was true and Sampers—the
monster
Sampers—was just birthed that way by nature. Josh recalled an intensity in Sampers’s eyes in the mere moments before the trigger was pulled, and it was a muddled, alarming intensity, brimming with questions and confusion. As if his brain was flying solo and his actions, no matter what drove his desires, were inevitable. Maybe sometimes, Josh thought, bad things just happen for no reason and without provocation. And what could you do?

Nothing,
he knew.
We can do nothing.

He comforted Kelly and let her fall asleep on his shoulder until it was time to leave for the airport.

Doctor Carlos Mendes, a fresh smattering of chalky vomit on the front of his white lab coat, washed his face and hands in the men’s room of the Intensive Care Unit at NYU Downtown Hospital. He was thirty-seven, looked fifty, and felt like he was seventy. He hadn’t seen the underside of his eyelids in roughly forty hours, hadn’t curled up behind Marie, a single arm draped over her slumbering form, in what seemed like weeks.

He dried his face and hands with paper towels from the dispenser, then proceeded to rub off as much of the vomit from his lab coat as he could.

There was much traffic in the hallway of the ICU. Three gunshot wounds, eleven auto accident victims, a dozen heart attacks and embolisms, a plethora of near-suicides—pill-poppers, jumpers, inhalers, and a variety of creative self-inflicted gun wounds and knife mutilations. The ICU could beat you to hell and back, if you only let it—Mendes knew this and accepted it the way a fireman tolerates heat, and never allowed it to overwhelm him. A little vomit on a lab coat meant nothing in the whole scheme of things. Sleep, in essence, was the same. Really, what did sleep mean? Shut your eyes for five minutes in the cafeteria then jerk awake again seconds before you planted your cranium in a bowl of rice pudding. It was a perpetual process, a revolving circus carousel.

Mendes checked his watch and saw that it was late enough to have missed dinner but still early enough to make love to his wife. He grabbed a cup of canned fruit and a plastic fork from the nurse’s station, popped the top and forked some chilled pear cubes into his mouth. Deborah tossed a few clipboards on the desk and smiled wearily at him.

“You about closing shop?” she asked him.

“Got about ten more minutes,” he said, flipping through the clipboard charts. “I’ll make rounds, grab a burger from the cafeteria, then head straight home. I feel like I could sleep for a month.”

“You and me both,” Deborah said, disappearing behind a wall of thick files wedged into flimsy manila folders.

A clipboard under his arm and the can of diced fruit up to his face, he moved down the corridor, absently avoiding traffic. He stopped outside Room 218 and peered down at the chart—Nellie Worthridge. Cerebral thrombosis. Still unconscious.

He pushed open the door and stepped inside, the hiss-and-pull of the old woman’s respirator the only sound filling the room. Her stunted form beneath the bed sheets reminded him of her handicap, and he thought,
Yes, that’s right, you’re the poor old thing with no legs.
It was clinical, yes, but it was too impossible to remember everyone by name. Particularly the unconscious ones.

Setting his fruit up on the table beside the bed, he checked the old woman’s blood pressure and examined her papillary response while thinking about the smooth brown slope of Marie’s back as she lay in bed, and the perfumed scent of her thick, black hair. How long had it been since he’d crept up behind her and nestled his face in that hair?

Tonight,
he promised himself, checking off Room 218 on the clipboard chart.

The old woman’s eyes flipped open. The blood pressure monitor above the bed began whirring. The woman’s mouth began working silently while her spotted and bony hands clutched blindly at the bed sheets. Startled, Mendes backed up a step and stared down at the woman who had been completely unconscious two seconds before.

Like a mechanical puppet, Nellie Worthridge snapped upright in bed, her eyes suddenly very wide and glassy, the sclera of each eye tinged egg-yolk yellow. The machines above her head continued to whir while the respirator sped up to double-time. Before Mendes could react, the old woman shot her right hand out (Mendes had time to catch a glimpse of the loose flap of dangling skin swing out from her upper arm) and blindly grasped the fruit cup from the table beside her bed. Syrupy juice spilled across the table as she shook the contents out and yanked the plastic fork from the cup. With a speed uncommon to someone of her age (not to mention a recent stroke victim), she brought the fork up in front of her and, without looking at it, proceeded to break the plastic tines off the fork with her other hand.

Carlos Mendes snapped back into reality, dropped the clipboard, and rushed to her bedside. He rested a hand on both her shoulders and gently began easing her back down onto the bed while yelling for a nurse. With all the commotion in the hallway
someone
had to hear him.

Pupils dilated and staring straight through Mendes and at the ceiling, the old woman’s hand shot out again and sent the plastic fork sailing across the room. It clattered against the door just as it was swung open, two young nurses rushing in.

“Let’s get her down,” he called to them, the old woman already becoming docile beneath his grip. Her eyes eased closed again. “Her blood pressure just shot through the roof.”

One of the nurses plunged a syringe into the old woman’s arm but by that time, Nellie Worthridge was already out, her respiration slowly returning to normal.

“The hell happened?” one of the young nurses asked.

Mendes didn’t answer her. Massaging his forehead with one hand, he bent and picked up the dropped clipboard, then slowly moved across the floor toward the door. Looking down, he saw the broken fork by his shoe. Three of the four prongs had been busted off, and he had time to think,
How incredibly bizarre is that? I swear, with everything I’ve ever seen in all my working years, that was one of the most bizarre things I’ve ever witnessed.

He stared down at the fork for longer than he should have, perplexed by it on a level that he shouldn’t have been. It made no sense.

How strange.

Yet by the time he got home and made love to his wife, he had forgotten all about it.

Chapter Five

It had started to rain when Josh put her into a cab to send her off to the airport. Before closing the door on her, he said, “Will you make me a promise?”

“What?” she said.

“Will you give me a call at some point while you’re away? Just, you know, so I know you’re doing all right.”

She smiled wearily. “I’ll find a phone if I have to.”

Josh shut the door.

The cab ride to JFK felt too long. She watched the cool evening rain splash against the windows of the cab while the cabdriver listened to a news radio show, the volume turned low. To keep her mind off her sister (and off the unexplainable tumult in her gut) she flipped through one of the art books she’d taken off her bookshelf and brought with her. But the distraction didn’t last long, and soon she found herself trying to summon the image of her childhood home in her head, to picture it as it had been before she went away.

And why did I go away, anyhow?
She couldn’t remember.
It was something, and something big, but I can’t remember anything about it for the life of me.

Becky had been only five years old when Kelly finally left the house to stay at the hospital. Her stay was only supposed to be temporary, until she was able to regain her composure, but she had wound up staying for three years. In fact, thinking back, she found it easier to recall her stay at the hospital than her childhood at the house.

Oh, what a bunch of garbage. Let’s just call a spade a spade. The “hospital” was an institution. Just like the “compound” is really just a house.

Alabaster mortar and puke-green cinderblock walls. Fluorescent tube lighting and gray linoleum hallways. Wire-mesh windows and uniform bedclothes, where every bedroom looked like a carbon copy of each other. Three years. She was eighteen when she finally left, legal adult age to sign herself out. And after that, she didn’t go back to the house, to her parents’ compound. No—after that, she went out on her own, fell into a hasty marriage that ended in divorce, and spent the last few years of her life in Manhattan with very little memory of her childhood and the events that led her down such a path. And that was fine, because until a month ago she had no desire to recall her childhood, her parents or even Becky. She’d even kept Collin’s last name
.