The Man in the Window (12 page)

Iris closed her eyes in fatigue and took comfort in her father’s exasperating talk. His words were welcome after listening to her own crazy thoughts. “You ever consider a hearing aid?”

“A what?”

Iris smiled. “A hearing—”

“Aid,” he said triumphantly, and loud enough to cause Duke to hop up out of his sleep. “See? I heard you. You health people are always trying to push some goddamn device. Bifocals, and pacemakers, and super wee-wee pads for dribblers.” He waved his hook at her, to no great effect since her eyes were still closed. “Well, I got my device. This is it. This is all I’m getting, and I’m never getting a hearing aid even if you have to shout at me through a bullhorn.”

“The neighbors should enjoy that,” said Iris.

“Ah, the hell with the neighbors. We ought to move out of this town, you know,” said Arnie. “I’m getting the old itch again,” he said sleepily.

Iris stiffened. “No,” she said suddenly.

But Arnie didn’t hear her. He was nodding off against the porch column. “No,” she said again to the still figure, as if trying to plant the word in his subconscious. She didn’t want to leave Waverly. I’m thinking of a man, and he lives in Waverly.

“Oh my God, Iris,” she whispered. “It’s time to get your fat ass into bed.”

CHAPTER SEVEN

A
WEEK
later the Tube Man died. He died on night shift, when Iris wasn’t there. She came in for day shift, chewing her morning Three Musketeers bar, and walked past his room on her way to the staff refrigerator to store her two Pepsis. She walked by his room again on her way to her locker, and it wasn’t until she hung up her jacket that the Tube Man’s absence registered in her sleepy brain. She poked her head around the corner and stared at his room. When the Tube Man had been alive, the curtains were always half-drawn and the lighting was dim. Now the curtains were open wide, the lights glared, and Lionel from Housekeeping was swabbing the walls with green antiseptic. They did total room cleanings after the death or departure of an infectious patient or a patient who’d occupied the room for more than a month. The Tube Man had made it to six months.

Lionel, his disposable protective cap cocked jauntily on his head, saw Iris looking in and waved to her through the window. Then he mouthed the words, “Two
A.M.
” in anticipation of her question. Iris felt weak. When she’d taken care of the Tube Man yesterday, he’d seemed stronger, or at least less moribund. She should have known. They always did that, veered in the opposite direction to throw you off the scent, and then tricked you and died hours later. She’d taken care of him every day for the last week, bathing and turning him, performing all the rituals, and each time, at the end, she’d speak to him. “Tell me,” she’d whisper, keeping an eye on the door to make sure no one would walk in on her. “
Is
. Tell me who the man in the window is. Is who? Is who?” she’d repeat, the rhythm of her urgent words falling into the rhythm of all the Tube Man’s machines, the beeps and blips, the hisses and sighs that filled his interminable hours.
But her words seemed to penetrate no deeper than the sounds of his machines and mean no more to him. Nothing arose from his breathing tube other than the mechanical exhalations that were a response to the breaths he received from the ventilator, 12 a minute, 720 an hour, 17,280 a day. If she’d had time, she’d have listened between each of those breaths for the word that would complete the Tube Man’s sentence.

“Yeah, last night. How about that?” came a familiar voice from behind her.

Iris turned away from the window and looked at Shelley, the big charge nurse on night shift. “He’s dead,” Iris said.

“Yeah, hard to believe. I look at the room and still see him lying there. A permanent fixture, you know? But they finally beamed him up.”

“Did you have him?” Iris could hardly stand the pounding in her chest.

Shelley gave her a look. “No. Paula had him.” Shelley’s eyes suddenly moved past Iris to another room. “Oh shit.” She rushed past Iris. “Get back! Hold on there, Mr. Petrie, you get back in that bed.” Mr. Petrie, the patient in bed 5, was half out of bed, having wiggled free from his wrist restraints. He had a grip on the rubber Foley tube inserted in his penis, stretching it a foot or two and tighter than a bowstring. Iris winced. Shelley slapped his hand away and the Foley twanged back into place. Then she lifted him off the floor and plunked him in bed. You didn’t mess with Shelley, who, like most night nurses, was built big for trouble.

Iris found Paula in bed 8 setting up a nitroglycerin IV drip. The patient was stretched out, still as death, squinting in pain.

“Hey, Paula,” said Iris.

“Hey, Iris.” Paula shook her head. “Can you believe it? This guy’s been having chest pain since five
A.M.
, and I told the docs the sublingual nitro wasn’t working. I told them then the morphine wasn’t working. I must have called them six different times for orders, and it wasn’t until just now they let me hang a drip. I
mean, Jesus, this guy could have died before they got their asses in gear.”

The patient squinted even more and let out a frightened groan. Paula had a habit of talking too much in front of the patients. Iris patted his arm, and he grabbed her hand in relief.

“What a night, I’m telling you,” said Paula. A monitor beeped. “Mr. Bleary, lie still. You’re setting the alarms off when you jiggle like that.”

Mr. Bleary wasn’t jiggling, he was trembling. Chest pain scared the shit out of patients. Nothing taught the mortality lesson like heart trouble.

“You feeling any better, Mr. Bleary?” said Iris. “The nitroglycerin should be kicking in.”

“A little,” he whispered. “Maybe just a little.”

“You’ll be fine,” said Paula. “We’ll be back in a few minutes to check on you, okay?”

They left the room. Paula said to Iris, “
You’ll
be back to check on him. I’m going the fuck home to bed.”

Iris stopped her. “You had the Tube Man last night?”

“Yeah, how about that? The Tube Man’s finally gone up to the fifth floor.” There were only four floors in Barnum Memorial, and the fifth floor was the nurses’ slang for heaven.

“Were you there?” said Iris, trying to control the shakiness in her voice. “I mean, how did he go?”

“You getting a cold?” Paula said, stepping back. “You sound a little hoarse.” Paula had been handling patients with hepatitis, rampant bacterial infections, and even an old guy with active TB. But a cold, now that was something else. “I don’t need a cold, let me tell you. Not this weekend. Larry and I are going away. Poconos,” she whispered confidentially.

“The Tube Man…”

“Oh, yeah, well. You know, nothing much to it. Cardiac, like we all knew it would be. He went from a brady into a complete heart block. Then from there basically into a flatline. It didn’t take long after he started blocking down.”

Iris stared at her, obviously wanting more.

Paula paused. “And then we wrapped him up, after we took all his tubes out. He was a mess. Leaked from about ten different places. And then we called the orderly, and—”

“Did he speak?” Iris said suddenly. “Did he say anything?”

Paula brightened. “Yeah, you mean like he’d been doing? I never believed any of that, you know. Shelley said she heard him once, and a couple of the others, but I never did, so I wasn’t paying that much attention and all. And I was busy all shift, so it wasn’t like I could stand around waiting for him to speak. But…”

“But?”

“Jeez, Iris, I didn’t know you were so into it.” Paula stepped back again, because Iris had moved too close. “But anyway, maybe he said something, but I think I’m stretching it. It was probably just a
sound
he made, not a word, but you guys said he was speaking, so I listened for a word, too. But I’m not sure it was. Probably just air leaking around his tube.” Paula tilted her head like she was listening again for the sound. Then she spoke. “It was just before he went flatline. I went in there to check on him, like you do, and I was leaning over him fiddling with one of his monitor leads…” She hesitated, then went on. “Now this is weird, but I was leaning over him and the room went real quiet. There was this moment between all the little noises the machines make, the beeps and the ventilator breaths and stuff, like everything in the room paused for a second… and that’s when I heard him.”

Iris held her breath and squeezed hard on the Three Musketeers bar she’d been holding in the palm of her hand.

“It’s kind of disappointing, really,” said Paula, “if it really was a word. But this is what the Tube Man said: ‘Loose.’”

Iris looked down at the Three Musketeers bar she’d mashed between her fingers, then back up at Paula. “Loose?”

“Loose,” said Paula, heading for her locker. “If it was a word at all, which I’m not betting it was. Loose.”

Iris turned and stared into the Tube Man’s old room. “
The man in the window is loose
.” Lionel scrubbed the floor as Iris watched blankly. That was the Tube Man’s sentence? What did it mean? Loose?
What
man in the window? Loose where? Was the man in the window some kind of escaped crazy? She’d waited so long, and now the Tube Man’s final word meant nothing. The whole sentence meant nothing. If it was a sentence, if they really were words the Tube Man had been speaking. Maybe Paula was right. Maybe it was all sounds, meaningless noises misinterpreted by a bunch of tired, overimaginative nurses. She was suddenly angry—at the Tube Man, at herself for going so far on so little, at Paula for not hearing a magical final word. She glared at Lionel, who was standing with his mop, waving her into the room.

“Come here. Hey, Iris, come on in here,” he called out to her.

Iris didn’t want to go into the Tube Man’s room, but she did.

“Hey. Look down there.” He pointed at a square of linoleum with a red splotch in the center of it. Blood. Nothing unusual on a hospital floor.

“Blood. They pulled out his tubes. He leaked. So what?”

“You’re a pain in my ass, girl,” Lionel said. “Bend down, take a look at that. That’s some funny spot of blood.”

Iris squinted at the spot. She saw it then. The blood was in the shape of a heart, an almost perfect valentine heart.

Lionel nodded. “How about that shit?”

PART THREE

WIDOWS AND WIDOWERS

CHAPTER ONE

T
HE WIDOW
Gracie Malone. Widow Malone. Old Widow Malone. Gracie walked alone in her yard on a late December day, trying on names like hats. A silly thing to be doing, just as it was silly to try on hats, as if there were such a thing as a perfect hat, one that truly suited and defined her above all the others. She rarely wore a hat, and she would never call herself the Widow Malone, though she’d been trying it on for months. No one was called the Widow anything anymore. When she was young, every other house seemed to be occupied by a widow—Widow Bunting, Widow Dalton, Widow Pitts. These were women who wore their widowhood well, who seemed, almost, to be born to it. As a child, that’s what Gracie assumed, that just as there were parents or brothers and sisters, there were widows, women who had always been as they were—alone, white-haired, and possessors of some undefined, scary, and magnificent secret. The secret, Gracie knew now, was grief, which was indeed scary, but in no way magnificent.

Why hadn’t the grief, the missing, shown on the faces of Widows Bunting, Dalton, and Pitts? How had they concealed it? Or was it that she’d been too young to see it? She saw it now, on her own face in the medicine cabinet mirror each morning, and each night before she went to bed. She had stood before that mirror a thousand thousand times, and often Atlas had stood behind her, brushing his teeth as she brushed hers. The mirror seemed out of whack now, capable of revealing only half the team of Gracie and Atlas, and Gracie often whirled around in the bathroom, hoping to suddenly see her other unreflected half, Atlas, absently flossing his teeth, or combing his hair behind her.

Had Widow Bunting whirled in her own bathroom, sixty years ago when Gracie was only ten? Gracie imagined herself as a child, standing at night at her open bedroom window, listening to a faint rustling sound coming from a small window on the second floor of the house next door. It was Widow Bunting, in her dry petticoats, whirling round and round in her bathroom, trying to catch a glimpse of her long-dead husband.

Gracie walked in her yard and wondered what hidden child was observing her at this moment, the Widow Malone, the strange new widow of Waverly. Well, guaranteed at least one child watched, her own, Louis, just behind some curtain or shade. She looked back at the house, scanned each of the windows, but didn’t see anything. Which only convinced her he was there, crafting the unnaturally perfect stillness that revealed nothing. She waved, then began to walk the yard again. Louis would be watching only in the sense of watching over her; he didn’t spy. His was a protective gaze, she knew. He cleared the way for her with his eyes.

He protects me now, Atlas, but do you remember when it was you and I who protected him? It was a lovely time, wasn’t it, the years when we thought we could protect him. Gracie looked around her, and for just an instant, the winter brown gave way to a shimmering green, the green of a summer in the backyard. Atlas was there, young, holding tiny Louis in his arms.

Gracie saw herself, her brown hair in a ponytail, rushing toward Atlas. “Don’t drop him!”

Atlas grinned and dipped his arms as if he were about to toss Louis into the branches of the horse chestnut tree.

Gracie froze. “Atlas.”

But Atlas only lifted Louis high enough to bring him to his lips. He kissed Louis’s cheeks once, and then again, before surrendering him to Gracie. “Don’t you drop him either,” he said.

Gracie looked down at Louis. He gave her a drooling smile. “Mothers don’t drop their babies,” she said.

“That a fact?” said Atlas. “I guess mothers are about the most perfect thing there is.”

“No. Babies, then mothers.”

“Doesn’t leave much room for fathers.”

Gracie didn’t answer him. She moved closer and leaned against him, felt Atlas against her, and Louis in her arms, immersed herself in the loveliness. “This is it,” she said after a long moment.