The Open Curtain (16 page)

“Is that safe?” asked Lyndi, then held him steady as the nurse undid the sheets on the free side of the bed, pushed them over to bunch under Rudd’s back. They rolled him back to the other side of the bed, over the hill of crumpled sheets, repeated the process to get the new sheets on.

“He’s your boyfriend?” the nurse asked.

“No,” she said. “Not exactly.”

“A friend, then,” the nurse said.

“No,” Lyndi said. “Not quite that either, to be honest.”

The nurse, smoothing the sheets, nodded slightly. “If you don’t mind my asking,” she said, “what exactly is he?”

What indeed?
Lyndi wondered. She hardly knew him, knew only what she had read about him in the papers, most of which was contradictory. What was he to her? He had survived, he had distinguished himself in that way, and for that reason would have to stand in for her family. But in the light of the nurse’s interest such reasoning seemed suspect. He had no obligation to her, didn’t even know her, had never seen her. Her interest, she tried to tell herself, was only a function of finding who her family’s killer was, of avenging them. He was useful to her. He could give her
closure.

But she wanted more than that, she knew, realized that even though she did not know Rudd at all she felt closer to him than anyone else alive or dead.
The next time a nurse asks if he’s my boyfriend,
she promised herself,
I’ll say yes.

She came one day, after algebra, and found the policeman gone. The door was open, the curtain drawn back. Rudd, hands still restrained, was lying as he always had.

She closed the curtain, pulled shut the door, went to the nurse’s station.

“The guard’s gone,” she said to a ponderous pale man with frizzy blond hair, obviously dyed.

“Excuse me?”

“The guard,” she said. “The policeman.”

The nurse pursed his lips. “What room, please.”

She gave him the room number, watched him scan down a chart in a crinkled plastic sleeve.

“Theurer?” he asked. He pronounced it with a soft “th” and an “ew.”
Thewer.

“Yes,” said Lyndi.

“No guard listed today,” he said.

“A policeman’s been there every day,” said Lyndi.

“No guard listed today,” the nurse said again, and turned the chart facedown.

Lyndi hurried back to the room. She sat on the edge of the chair, regarding Rudd. She took from her wallet the card the detective had given her, picked up the telephone beside the bed. She tried dialing the number, but the line clicked after the first four digits, suddenly dialed.

“Podiatry,” a voice said.

She hung up the phone quickly, stood looking at it. She went back to the nurse’s station.

“Is there a phone I can use?” she asked.

The nurse reluctantly uncradled a receiver, handed it across the desk. He punched in a nine. “What number?” he asked.

Lyndi gave him the number. She held the receiver to her ear, staring down the hall where Rudd’s door was, just out of vision.

“Lyndi,” the detective said when he realized who it was. “I’m sorry. Still no leads.”

“No,” she said. “It’s not about that. It’s about Rudd.”

“Rudd? What about him?”

“Where’s the guard?”

“Lyndi, you have to understand there’s only so much we can do. He may never wake up.”

“But the killer,” she said. “He’s still loose.”

“I’m sorry,” he said.

“But there was always a guard here before,” she said. “Just a few more days.”

“Lyndi,” he said. “I sympathize. I really do. But I answer to the taxpayers.”

She took the brakes off the wheels of the bed’s casters. With a case shucked off a pillow, she tied the I.V. stand to the bed rail. Pushing the bed close to the door, she left it there while she went out and scanned the hall.

Nothing there, no one coming. Dragging the bed down the hall, she wheeled it toward the elevator. She pushed the button and the elevator opened immediately and she wheeled the bed in.

An old woman was inside, in the corner, wearing a checkered bathrobe. Around her neck was a chain with glasses on them, no lenses in the frames.

“Johnny?” the woman said.

“What?” said Lyndi. “No, not Johnny. This is Rudd.”

“Johnny?” the woman asked again.

“What floor do you want?” asked Lyndi. “This floor? Were you looking for this floor?”

The woman said nothing, stayed in her corner. Lyndi reached out to press a button, felt the elevator lurch upward before she could do so. The wound on Rudd’s throat was wet with blood, weeping slightly. The doors opened, and she saw before her two white-suited interns.

“Johnny?” the woman asked.

“There you are Mrs. Baetz,” one of them said. “We’ve been looking for you.

“Excuse me,” said Lyndi. The interns moved aside without even looking at her, one of them holding the elevator door back with his hand as Lyndi pushed the bed out.

“Come on out, Mrs. Baetz,” one of the interns said.

“Johnny?” she said.

“No, Mrs. Baetz, I’m not Johnny,” Lyndi heard him say and then she was down the hall, around a corner.
Outpatient,
a sign read. She heard shouting behind her, a high pitched voice. She moved toward a set of double doors that swung open on their own accord. She passed a deserted nurse’s station, kept on down the hall, looking into each room until she found an empty one. Wheeling the bed in, she shut the door.

She turned the light off. A streetlight outside gave a pale and brittle quality to what she could see of the room. She undid the I.V. stand, checked the tube for kinks. Putting down the rail and sitting on the edge of the bed, she undid the restraints on Rudd’s hands as well. She folded his hands on his chest, the I.V. tube drawing tight, its terminating needle bulging slightly beneath his skin. She kept her hands on his hands.

She stroked his cheek. He was not unattractive, she told herself, though emaciated now. She was used to his face, at least. Her hand slid down his jaw and onto his throat, felt the smooth, dribbled scar, the dampness of the weeped blood. She could feel the slow pulse in his neck.

She got out of the bed and went to the other side, took down the rail. Slowly and carefully, she tugged him over, the bed sliding on its casters. She set the brakes, pulled him over until his shoulder hung off the edge.

Going to the other side of the bed she tucked herself under the I.V. tube and climbed in with him, stretching her body next to his. She carefully stretched her arm over him, letting her hand rest upon the sharp carriage of his hips. She stayed like that, listening to his shallow breathing, speaking softly to him. Soon she fell asleep.

When she awoke, she was uncertain of where she was. There was someone beside her and a hand on her shoulder. She shrugged and the hand slid off. She lifted her head and saw the face beside her in the dim light. Its eyes were fluttering open and closed.

“Rudd?” she said.

“No,” he said, and closed his eyes.

She said his name again, but he said nothing. She wondered if she had dreamt it. She shook him, nothing happened.

“Rudd?” she said again.

She got up out of the bed, wandered the room. Maybe she should call someone, she thought. But if it were just a dream?

She went to the window, looked out. Below, the hospital parking lot was lit dimly by streetlamps. She found her car, parked near one of the lampposts. Perhaps it was nothing, she thought. Perhaps she had imagined it. She went back to the bed and climbed in. She looked into Rudd’s face, waiting.

When she awoke again it was light, sun streaming into the room through the window, the fluorescent lights on above her as well. There was a doctor just beside her and a nurse too, and Rudd’s mother as well, looking stricken.

“There you are,” said the doctor. “We wondered what you’d done with him.”

“I was saving him,” she said. “The killer.”

“She was kidnapping him. Call the police,” said Rudd’s mother.

“Now, let’s think a minute,” said the doctor, turning toward her. “There’s no harm done, really. No need to bring the police in, is there?”

Lyndi climbed out of the bed. “I was protecting him,” she said. “He woke up.”

Rudd’s mother looked at her. “I want her arrested.”

“Now, now,” said the doctor, smiling. “Let’s have none of that.” He reached out, took the boy’s face in his hands, examining it by holding it still and moving his own face frenetically about. Rudd’s eyelids fluttered.

“He was doing that before,” said Lyndi.

“Was he now?” said the doctor. “Rudd, can you hear me?”

Rudd opened his eyes and looked up, looked at Lyndi. He held her gaze, quiet. His expression was placid, almost not an expression at all. He stayed looking at her, until his mother elbowed Lyndi aside, and, effusive and enveloping, embraced Rudd’s suddenly terrified face.

A
fter a while she was back to her real life—the end of classes, her few school acquaintances leaving for the holidays, scattered phone calls from her aunt, occasional visits from church members and neighbors, late night television until she fell asleep on the same couch she had been sitting on when she first received news of her family’s deaths. She was alone.

Over break, she woke up in the early morning and pulled herself off the couch, turned off the TV, and stumbled upstairs to sleep a few more hours in her own bed. When she awoke, she showered in her parents’ bathroom; afterwards, a towel wrapped around her head and another knotted just above her breasts, she went slowly through her parents’ closet, just looking. She rearranged the drawers of the kitchen, put them back to how they had been before her aunt had arrived, and then spent four or five days opening the wrong drawers until her body was trained again.

A neighbor tried to set her up with her nephew, a pouting fraternity brat who had few interests outside of skiing and bubblegum rap. She started going to church again, made it through the immense pressure of attention on her first day back.

“Where are your parents?” Sister Woolsey, a cantankerous and catheterized widow in a wheelchair bellowed. “Why didn’t you bring them along?”

“They’re dead, Mother,” Lyndi heard Sister Woolsey’s granddaughter whisper.

“Good thing she didn’t bring them, then.”

She was going on, she was getting along. She took a job gift-wrapping for the university bookstore, found herself the only gift-wrapper under fifty.
Come out and visit for Christmas,
her aunt suggested to her answering machine,
if you can afford it.
She didn’t bother to return the call. There was
a singles congregation locally, the bishop let her know—
maybe you’d prefer to attend church there? Perhaps you’ll find this book interesting?,
offering her
The Seven Habits of Highly Successful People.
There was a picture of a bald man on the front. She thanked him, and fled his office as soon as she could.

At first, through the windows, she could see a fine snow, tiny flakes drifting in the air without settling, the air bitter cold. Quarter to five. She tore another piece of tape off the roll, creased the paper, folded it. “Next,” she said.

When she had finished wrapping—board games, scriptures, inspirational tapes, even a book or two, lines from nine in the morning until six when the bookstore closed—she walked out through the Wilkinson Center, past the theater, down the stairs and past the flower shop, under the awning and out into the open air.

She crossed the street to her car, one of the few left in the lot. She got in, turned on the car, then sat there. Snow was coming down quicker now and gathering on the glass. She could not bring herself to drive.
What’s wrong with me?
she wondered. The snow gathered until she could see nothing, the car enclosed and silent, the whole of the world outside blotted out. There was nothing but herself and the interior of the car. She found the thought alarming and flicked the windshield wipers once, the snow scraping back. Yet the glass was so fogged within that it was still difficult to see. She brought her hand to the gear shift, but already the snow had begun to fill in the windshield and, as it did so, she was again unable to bring herself to drive.

Why is it?
she thought. And then,
What is it about parking lots?

And,
What if he comes after me?

Who?

The one who came after my family.

And who was he?

I don’t know.

She had been worried for Rudd because he had seen the killer. Rudd
knew.
Or might know. But what of her? She was the only member of her family left. If the killer had meant to kill her father and mother and sister, if this was not some random crime or accident of fate, then there was every reason to believe he might come after her. Yet the police had immediately assumed the crime was random, had never given her a guard, had done nothing, not a thing, to protect her. Anyone could kill her at any time.

She remembered, in the other parking lot, the odd procession of the dead she had seen—her father, her mother, her sister, and finally Rudd, not
dead, lagging behind, though when she had first seen it she thought it meant that Rudd too had died. Were she to open her door here, in this parking lot, would she see them again?