The Tides (14 page)

'Jenny,' Alex said.

'Did you tell her you had the power turned off? My four-year-old had a terrible cold, it could have been pneumonia for all he knew, and her daddy turns the heat and the lights off on her for three days and nights in the middle of February. How could you do that, Alex?'

'I had to do something to get things off dead center between us. I do not intend to spend the rest of my life in a nursing home, not when I have a home of my own to go to and I'm paying the bills. Even though they do take better care of me here than you ever did.'

'I need to get you cleaned up' Abby started.

Sobbing, Jenny pushed post Abby and out of the room. Her loose sandals made an awkward sound as she rushed down the hall. Then the door at the end of the hall swung
open and shut, its heavy spring slowing and muting the slam. Abby stood there breathless, clean linen in her arms, tasting the fecal odor now on the roof of her mouth.

Alex sighed. 'You see? You see what I have to put up with?' Abby didn't know what to say. She hated nasty talk and yelling. 'I think she's gone crazy,' Alex said under her hands. 'I think she's actually had a psychotic break.' There was a pause. Abby worked. Alex said in a different tone, 'Maybe I can make use of that.'

Abby was going to be sick. She dropped his cold leg onto the bed and backed out of the room. Behind her the whistling started up again.

Somebody came into the bathroom with her. Abby was too sick to care. She made it to the toilet and threw up, rested her forehead on the edge of the toilet
—
which wasn't very clean
—
and then threw up again.

When her daughters threw up, she held their heads and wiped their lips with a damp washcloth. Somebody was doing that for her now. In between heaves, she tried to see who it was. As far as she could tell, nobody was there. She must really be getting sick. Who would take care of her kids if she got sick? She kept retching even after there wasn't anything left in her stomach, and her throat filled with hot bile. Ordinary throwing up was bad enough, but at least you knew your body was getting rid of something it couldn't use; dry heaves made her imagine parts of her body itself coming up, stomach lining and lungs and other things she didn't know about but that her body needed even if it didn't know it did.

She stayed in the bathroom for a while after she'd stopped throwing up, just to make sure, and because her knees were too shaky to support her, and because she couldn't face cleaning up Alex's mess or listening to him
bad-mouth his wife while he pretended that wasn't what he was doing.

Somebody suggested that she could just sleep in here and nobody would be the wiser, a soothing and alluring voice hinting at a lullaby, and Abby did fall half-asleep on the floor, which wasn't entirely clean and wasn't cool anymore but was smooth. Her head was filled with pink and blue perfumed gauze that floated like a soft scarf in a soft breeze, very pretty, hard to hold onto but worth the try.

She made herself get up. She wasn't being paid to sleep. She wasn't being paid to be sick. Her patients needed her. Alex needed her. She washed her face at the sink and dried it with the last paper towel, telling herself not to forget to tell Dave that the dispenser was empty. Her mouth tasted terrible and, naturally, she didn't have a toothbrush or even a mint. She sucked water from cupped palms and swished it around in her mouth, spat it into the sink and made sure to rinse the sink out. Her head was clear now, and she felt better. Who could that have been, talking to her?

Florence and Shirley were just coming out of Alex's room with giant white plastic bags full of dirty laundry. 'We got it,' Shirley said cheerfully to Abby. 'He wanted you, but we told him he had to put up with us, so he did'.

'Sorry. I didn't mean to leave it for you.'

'He's on my assignment sheet tonight, not yours,' Florence pointed out.

'But I'm the one who found the mess. I should have cleaned it up. I meant to.'

'You okay, hon?' Shirley asked on her way past. 'You look a little peaked.'

'He just really got to me' Abby started to say, but

Shirley and Florence, lugging the bulky bags, hadn't stopped on their way to the laundry chute.

Abby's memory of the incident was unpleasant, but it also didn't seem very real. Clearest was her feeling of having failed, which she felt a lot anyway, and the impression of the pretty colors, pretty fragrance, cool hands, soft voice she'd had to resist of whoever had been in the bathroom with her while she was being sick. She didn't think there really had been anybody. Could a person just imagine something like that?

She became aware that a buzzer somewhere on Wing 2 had been going off for a long time. Where was that guy Larry? Hiding somewhere reading his Bible, probably. She'd been warned about him, but so far he hadn't tried to convert her. From the nurses' station she could see that Paul Brautigan's light was on, and she went to answer it, chased by Alex's whistle whether he was actually still whistling for her or not.

Paul was standing at his open window. Before she'd even taken in the whole scene, Abby was remonstrating, 'Paul, what in the world are you doing? It's four o'clock in the morning! You can't have your window open, you'll catch cold!'

It took Paul a long time and a lot of effort to move, and he didn't even try to turn around by himself. But at the sound of her he started yelling, like a toddler unable to form words but full of emphasis and intent. His arms flailed. His pajamas, mismatched and too big for him, had slid off his hips and shoulders, and his heels were on the bottoms of them so that he'd surely trip and fall any second. Abby rushed toward him, and was horrified to see him lean out the screenless window, bend almost double over the sill. She grabbed his skinny hips and tugged him

backward, but she always forgot how strong he was and he barely budged. His yelling sent vibrations through his body and into hers.

This was stupid. She knew how to handle Paul. She didn't let go of him, but she moved her hands on his back and sides, massaging a little, soothing. She stepped up beside him. 'What's wrong, Paul?' she asked, hoping her voice was more or less calm.

Still yelling and waving his arms, he let her bring the top half of his body back some, not completely inside the room but a little better balanced. Hanging onto him, she looked out the window, saw nothing out of the ordinary, then lifted her gaze to the expanse of the empty lake behind The Tides, which seemed to go on forever in the night. She could have sworn it had water in it, and that the water was rising, and that sent a buzz of unaccountable fear through her even before she saw the bodies on the bank.

Two of them, she thought at first, but then she saw that it was just one, Larry, sprawled over the rim of the lake-bed with his head at a wrong angle to his body and something dark and glimmering oozing out of a hole in his throat.

Chapter 9

Many of the residents, routinely sedated and in any case acclimated to commotion at all hours and little explanation afterward, slept through the night as well as they ever did. Others, though, were to a greater or lesser extent disturbed by the phones ringing, by the rushing footsteps and echoing voices in the halls, and by the lights and sirens outside, including out where the lake had been in the field behind The Tides.

In her new baby-doll pajamas, Petra was down there with the police, declaring in her furious undertone that it was the Mafia that did it, she had proof. She was so small and her speech so soft that one officer after another bent low to hear her, whereupon she'd grab his front uniform pocket and stand on tiptoe to murmur a proposition: a look at the red ants nesting in her rectum in exchange for three cigarettes. Okay, okay, two.

Gordon Marek hovered around his cache of wine bottles under the scraggly back hedge, some empty and one or two with a little left in them, hoping he wasn't being too obvious. Feeling bad for his Princess that she had to come out in the middle of the night for something bad like this, some guy stabbed in the throat, but wishing she'd get here and take care of things so the fuzz would leave.

The nurse tried to get Paul to go back to bed, but he was too agitated to stay put even after she called the doctor and got orders for an extra shot. He kept talking, his speech even less intelligible than usual. He kept crawling over the bedrails and he was going to fall and hurt himself, so finally they gave up and got him dressed and let him sit in a chair by the nurses' station. Every time a uniformed police officer or ambulance attendant went past, Paul's eyes lit up, his loopy voice rose, and his hands shot out more or less in the direction of the person he wanted to stop.

Rebecca, hurrying with a detective into Paul's room again, was struck in passing by the sound he kept making, a sibilant F followed by a long bray: 'Fff-aaaaaaaay.' More than a few times lately, she'd heard her father make that sound.

But this odd coincidence was obscured almost at once by the questions the detective was asking, most of which she couldn't answer: Had Larry seemed depressed? Had there been anything unusual in his behavior lately? Was there anything in his employment history that would indicate mental instability?

'I don't know,' she kept saying. 'I don't know. I hardly ever saw him. I hardly knew him,' and was vaguely ashamed to admit it, although not knowing a night orderly would not have shamed her if he hadn't killed himself.

Suicide, almost certainly; they'd found a note under Paul's window
—
unsigned, but presumably in Larry's handwriting
—
saying he'd done things he couldn't live with, and the bloody knife had still been in his hand.

It was well after six when Abby finally got to Alex to get him up. He smiled when he saw her and said a pleasant, 'Good morning, Abby,' with a personal, affectionate spin
on it, making it clear he was glad to see her, not just anybody. She couldn't believe he didn't know what had happened. Alex knew everything. But he didn't say anything about it, and so, stubbornly, neither did she.

Alex's morning routine was long and complex, like all his activities of daily living. Abby knew perfectly well what to do, and she should have been in a real rush because they were so far behind, but she found herself perversely waiting for him to tell her each step. She could feel his displeasure in the stiffening of his body, which was making it harder for her to do what she had to do for him. Handling him almost carelessly, she was very aware of his helplessness and of the power she had over him. She'd never thought of that before and didn't like to be thinking it now, but she couldn't seem to help it. She was tired. She was badly shaken by the events of the night. Her thoughts didn't seem to belong to her.

She stripped and bathed him. First the water in the basin was too hot and then it was too cold, though she noted nastily that he did not flinch, because he couldn't. She soaped and rinsed his body, running the washcloth between his fingers and toes and quickly between his thighs. His toenails needed trimming and his penis was soft. Some of them got woodies when you took care of them, which could be enough to scare off a new aide. Abby took a sort of nervous pride in his skin, which was intact without even any reddened areas. Buzzers were going off all up and down the hall and she thought she heard someone calling her name, but she ignored it, taking care of Alex, doing it right.

It wasn't working, though. Concentrating on Alex wasn't making her stop thinking about Larry. She kept seeing his body the way it had looked from Paul's window,
draped over the edge of the lake-bed, throat turned up and cut open as if to let something outs, the way you'd lance a boil. She kept seeing his blood. She'd never seen anybody stabbed before, but on this job she'd seen blood and all kinds of other bodily fluids and she'd never seen anything that looked like that. Gushing out. All different colors, though now she couldn't understand how she could have seen colors when the only illumination had been from the city streetlights around the edge of the field, none of them close, and the security light mounted on the back of The Tides.

And she kept wondering what Paul was trying to say. 'Fff-aaaaay,' he whined and whispered and hollered. 'Fff-aaaaay.' Ever since she'd known him, Paul had said things you couldn't understand; the older aides said they didn't mean anything, they were just noises, but this time especially, Abby wasn't so sure.

'Now the lotion,' Alex prompted as she towelled him dry. 'Don't forget the lotion.'

'When do I ever forget the lotion?'

'You're awfully rough this morning, Abby. Usually you have such gentle hands.'

'Beggars can't be choosers,' she snapped, astonishing herself. She was sure she'd never used that saying before, couldn't think of anybody she'd heard say it, but his offended gasp gave her an ugly little jolt of satisfaction. 'It's been a long night,' she added, through his bedside table in search of the tube of lotion, disturbing his things.