The Tides (23 page)

human urine and feces deep in the pores of her skin. She brought her head up and said again, helplessly, 'Please, Papa, I have dreams. But I can't reach them.'

'I give you something,' he said reasonably. 'To make you sleep.'

'She died,' Naomi said. 'I was sitting right beside her and she died and I didn't even know it. No passage. Nothing to mark her passage.' But there had been. A clear passage. An instrument she couldn't deny. She was lying to her father, still, and she couldn't help it.

'You should not be in this place. Your husband should never have allowed it. It is a place of living death.' He lit his pipe again and she watched him, his fingers, his twitching eyebrows, and heard the moaning of the hungry, the weeping and gagging of the sick, the silence of the troughs of the dead. She swallowed hard and waited for her father to say more.

When he did not, she said, 'But you own it. It belongs to you.'

'I came to America after the war. After
—
the war. To New York City I came, and there was a rabbi, a German Jew. And he said to me, "Lipkowitz owns places to keep the old and the sick, he makes a living, you go there." So I came here. Later I think this rabbi said to people, "Goldberg makes a living. You go there." ' He smiled, then was saying before he had stopped smiling, so that the smile took on a ghoulish aspect, 'When we are no longer here to bear witness, our dead can rest in peace. We know who they were.'

Naomi did not understand him. She bowed her head before him, as she always had. Just this morning - she did not know why the image should rise before her now, in her father's presence - the flesh on Myra Larsen's hip had

flaked away like the wood of a rotten stump; it was black, and it stank. They cut off her dead flesh with scissors. Myra screamed, fought with foolish arms and legs. They overpowered her with little effort, did what they had come to do, and left her alone again.

Ira leaned forward out of the overhead light, and for a moment his daughter was afraid of him, too. 'Come work in my office. There I take care of children. Little ones. There we have hope. This other is unclean. You can do nothing here.'

Teeth. Piles of teeth. Sets of grinning teeth on shelves gathering dust. Insects crawling between broken teeth. Flecks of gold in the sunshine. Gaping mouths: pink gums, gray gums, bloody holes and stumps where the teeth should be.

'People suffer here,' she offered.

Bodies everywhere. The stench of bodies. Nakedness shamed. White buttocks spread and closed. Red hands and gray thighs and the yellow soles of feet. Bellies bulging and collapsing. Parts of bodies no longer there: hands and arms and feet and breasts somewhere, rotting, freezing, sliding back into the earth that ought to have been poisoned by all the suffering but was in fact fertilized. Water rising, receding again, depositing some of what had been suspended in it, exposing layers.

Her father scoffed. 'Three meals a day, a warm bed, a roof over their head - this is human suffering? People like you to take care of them?' He relit his pipe; his eyebrows were working dangerously. 'This is not human suffering.'

'You own it,' she said again, knowing that there was something here. 'You make money from it.'

He drew on his pipe. Surely by now, she thought in anguish, his coffee was cold. His eyes glistened with tears.

She was the cause of her father's torment, and for the first time in her life she was able actually to imagine him dirty, starving, cold. Immersed in human filth. Surviving.

'Tell me,' she said, boldly laying her hands on his arm, feeling for his numbers as if they had been Braille, 'Papa, tell me about the camps.' But he could not.

Faye was almost ready, and she had to do
something
to keep from losing her mind, she couldn't abide just hanging around anymore. So she took Marshall for a walk.

He wouldn't have known where to go without her, but she led him, flitting, singing, and (foolishly, he knew; he remembered always telling himself
—
and to no avail then, either
—
that he was being foolish when it came to Faye) he trusted her.

'Trust' was an odd word to use in regard to Faye, but the truth was that Marshall had always trusted her. Not to behave well. Not to be reliable or even predictable. Not because of anything trustworthy she did or anything dishonorable she refrained from doing, but because Faye herself inspired him to trust, drew trust out of him, a leap of faith, an expression of himself in relation to her rather than the other way around.

'Come with me, Marshall,' she'd cajoled in that sweet and awful wordless way of hers, and he went - with many second thoughts, to be sure, but he went with her nonetheless. (I'm sorry, Billie, but I had no choice.) His walker clicked erratically on the tiles and his feet still shuffled, but sure and apace, down the long shimmering white hall, around the corner, past the nurses sitting behind the high desk who didn't look up, and out the door. Just like that. He would never have done it on his own. But Faye was with him.

Faye.

Horror geysered through him, nausea, sexual arousal. He had suffered losing Faye, and yet he was not free of her. He had found Billie, who had saved him half a lifetime ago, a steady and reliable woman if there ever was one, a woman he suspected he loved more than he knew, and here he was, following Faye again, and for years he had believed Faye to be safely and tragically dead. Though, of course, he'd never had any evidence; he'd never seen her body or even her grave.

He couldn't quite locate her now. He looked around. He didn't know where he was. He remembered exactly how she used to look, to sound, to feel; that is, his memory was exact and minutely detailed, though it might not really have represented Faye as she'd ever existed beyond his impressions of her.

In his exquisitely clear memory, she was something of a shape-changer: a sprite, a succubus. Fine blonde hair, almost ashen, then red-gold, then blue-black; singing to him lullabies and love songs, shrieking curses, promising, breaking promises, changing reality. Scarves, ribbons, all manner of fluttering things; scarves, makeup, and masks, all manner of things to disguise.

He felt the caress of her hand on his member, the slap of her hand hard across his face. He smelled and
—
most appalling, most wonderful of all
—
tasted
her: sweet, bitter, foul.

'Faye.'

Marshall walked a few steps, ran a few steps, fell. Onto cold ground and wet grass in a place he didn't know, a curved place. Into Faye's arms.

In the parking lot of The Tides, closer and closer to the busy street, Faye rolled Marshall in her whispery arms and told him in the rustle of cold grass and weeds, the

shush
and screech of traffic on wet pavement, the scrabbling of his hands and knees in the gravel and trash at the curb as he tried to get away from her, tried to follow fast enough where she led, 'You are so handsome, Marshall, my handsome man, my lover, you are my best lover.'

He knew not to believe her. He knew she was just talking. He knew she talked like this, kissed him like this, charmed and hurt him in just this combination, because she wanted something. But he had never found it possible to begrudge Faye anything she wanted. His heart was fluttering with love and horror and fear. 'Billie!' he cried, but Billie didn't come. He was lost. Faye was the only one who knew where he was. He was alone with Faye.

He had long ago lost his walker, and when he tried to pull himself upright by clinging to a bus bench, his hands weren't strong enough to clutch the rough cement and wood, and he fell. A car and then another car went by, very close. He felt snow.

'You know,' Faye breathed in his ear, sending chills along his spine, 'I always loved you best.'

'What do you want, Faye?' he cried out. Although his face was in an icy puddle and he could hardly breathe, he could see her, swirls of pretty colors, graceful motion. 'What do you want from me now?'

'I want my daughter.'

'No. She's not yours.'

'I'm going to take my daughter. I need her. I can't live without her anymore.'

'No!'

She left him. Because he had refused her, Faye had left him, and now he was utterly alone in a place he had never been before. Scraped and muddy, his pants stiff with snow and frozen urine, he'd managed to hoist himself up onto
the bench, where he sat with his hands clasped tightly between his knees and his head down, trying to think. He was on his way to work, he knew, although he didn't understand why he wasn't carrying a lunch box or why he wasn't absolutely sure which bus to take; he'd gone this way to work hundreds of times or more.

He heard a bus coming and was flooded with relief. Looking up, squinting, finally making out its slightly frightening gray hulk with stiletto headlights, he lit upon a strategy whose cleverness and resourcefulness gratified him. If this bus stopped here, for him, he would know that it was the right bus, and he would not have to admit that he'd forgotten where he was going. Forgotten who he was for a while there, if truth be told, but he wouldn't have to tell that, either.

The bus stopped. The door opened with a sound unlike the sound doors commonly made when they opened, causing him to fear for a few moments that he'd made some other sort of mistake here (perhaps this was not even a bus).

Marshall lifted his head to smile at the driver, couldn't locate a driver in the dimness at the top of the steps, would not get on a contraption like this. Someone called, 'This is a No. 15, sir. Is that the bus you want?'

Sure then that it was, Marshall got to his feet by pushing off against the pylon of the bench, and then couldn't figure out how to get from there to the bus steps. Frozen in place by fear and confusion, not to mention arthritis, he couldn't think what to say.

'Faye,' he said, and then, more plausibly, 'Billie?'

'Can I help you, sir?' called the driver.

'No,' Marshall said. 'No, thank you,' in a stronger voice.
'I'm just waiting for my wife.'

The driver hesitated. Then she pulled the doors shut and eased the bus back into traffic. While she was waiting at the next red light, she radioed in about the lost old man. She doubted they'd do anything about it, bu
t at least she'd done her duty.

The sleet grew colder and more dense. There were colors in it, red and green and orange from traffic lights, powder blue and pink and lavender and cold silver gray from Faye. Moonlight, he guessed, from behind thick cloud cover, was low, more cloudlight than moonlight, and amber streetlights were coming apart in fluttering bits. Light of all sorts reflected off the moisture on the pavement, wriggling, oozing. Marshall was lost in all the light. Faye hinted at her presence, teased, but would not reveal herself to him now (he had lost her once before and he would be losing her for the rest of his life), and he couldn't find Billie anywhere. He was lost. Nobody knew where he was. Except Faye.

Chapter 14

Gordon threw a rock at Petra, didn't even come close. She grinned at him, stretching her toothless mouth practically from ear to ear. 'Hey, big boy,' she rasped to him, 'there's red ants nesting in my rectum, did you know that?' and Gordon recognized it as an invitation.

He was tempted, but he was too upset, and she disgusted him. Crazy old whore. Shouldn't let whores like that live here with decent people. Shouldn't let whores like that live, period. Sidearm, he threw a pine branch at her. It hit her in the face, and she giggled, but she did turn back, giving up on him for now. Gordon scowled. Maybe he'd been a fool not to take some pussy when he had a chance. It'd been a long time, man. But she kept telling everybody and his brother that there was a nest of red ants down there. How did he know there wasn't?

Anyhow, nooky was the last thing he wanted now. He wanted his puppy. They took his dog. That nurse bitch took his pup away from him. The boss-lady wasn't around. He needed her. He needed to get his dog back.

That was not going to happen. He didn't even know what they'd done with his dog, pink tongue, fat little belly, white ring like a doughnut on top of his head. Gordon had been just about ready to settle on a name. He'd been just
about ready to name his puppy Doughnut. Now he couldn't. Once you lost something in this life you couldn't very well name it and you never got it back.

He lumbered down the sidewalk to the street and stopped, turned around to look at the building. Goddamn nursing home. Goddamn prison. He could set it on fire. That'd show 'em. He could punch somebody out. He could kill somebody.

Gordon ground at the tears in his eyes with the dirty knuckles of both big fists and lurched out into the middle of Elm Street, muttering, stumbling and weaving. Anybody watching him would have thought he was drunk, but it was the nineteenth of the month and his check hadn't come yet and Gordon was flat-out sober.

He was filled, though, with something wilder than booze, crazier, a lot more powerful. Rage, for one thing. They took his dog. Raging loneliness. And Faye.

Petra yelled after him, 'Pussy!' Hugging herself with bare arms and the empty sleeves of her filthy pink lace-trimmed cardigan worn over her shoulders and buttoned crooked at the neck, she spun to go back into the building and collided with Beatrice Quinn coming out.

'Oh, my dear,' Beatrice said pleasantly, distractedly. 'I hope I didn't hurt you.'

Petra spat, 'Cunt!'

Beatrice had not heard that word before, but it was clear from the woman's inflection that it was not nice. She smiled firmly and used the bulging paper sacks in her arms to wedge herself past Petra without actually coming into contact with her. 'Excuse me,' she said, minding her manners, but it was not a request.

It was much colder outside than Beatrice had anticipated, but she certainly couldn't go back for a
sweater. The porch was unoccupied, thank goodness. Careful not to slip on the damp concrete, she made her way down the ramp, new since this girl had been in charge and Beatrice was grateful, for steps would have been difficult under the present circumstances. There was mist in the air, not quite rain, not quite snow, but her hair and shoulders were getting damp, which wasn't good for her health, and it wouldn't be long before her paper sacks began to weaken. Beatrice was aghast at how many details she had overlooked, never mind how many details she had thought of, repeatedly.

If she'd been able to talk to Dexter about it, he'd have helped her remember things. Even if he hadn't approved of what she was doing, he'd have helped her. But Dexter was gone. They'd taken him away, and it was partly her fault because she'd tattled on him about his hoard of candy, or maybe she ought to have told earlier and then he wouldn't have made himself sick. They wouldn't say so, but she knew she would never see him again.

She stepped along the sidewalk as carefully as she could considering that she didn't have a hand free to grasp the rail. She kept a lookout for cars. Excitement threatened to make her giddy; she calmed herself. Beatrice Quinn was going home, and this time she was taking no chances.

Marshall Emig was going home, too. He didn't know where home was, or even what it was, but he slogged along through cold drizzle that stopped and started and stopped again, between cars that didn't stop, around corners and around corners again. He was driven by a strong if vaguely organized conviction that he would recognize home when he came upon it or it would recognize him. Sometimes he was terrified. Right now, a
moment with nothing behind or ahead of it, he was terrified.

A name came to him, and he called it aloud, cupping unsteady hands around unsteady mouth. 'Billie!'

He didn't really expect an answer, but one came. 'No, honey. It's Faye.'

Marshall stopped in his tracks. 'I don't want anything to do with you, Faye,' he announced, not for the first time, to the shimmer of rainwater and memory that presented itself to him. 'You've been out of my life for a long time. That's the way I like it. I thought you were dead. Go away.'

Dancing with Faye. He remembered dancing with Faye. He was dancing with Faye, her long lithe arms lightly around his neck, her hands cupping the back of his head, now and then bringing his head down to kiss him. He was standing alone then
—
on the dancefloor, on the beach, in their bedroom with the bedclothes still scattered on the floor, on a dark street in dark sleet
—
and he was watching Faye dance. Faye dancing was beauty and sadness, beauty and truth.

Faye took more and more shape: her ash-blonde hair, her rose perfume, the skin in the hollows of her neck and even on her hands and her heels so soft he was afraid to touch it for fear his touch would roughen it and yet couldn't touch it enough. She danced around him, teasing, pulling her scarves across his face and across his groin, inviting him to dance with her but never showing him how. She'd danced like that in their tiny brown kitchenette, sending off rainbows, irradiating the place, and then she'd left.

As if to the rhythm of music, although he knew perfectly well there was no music, Marshall couldn't help but move his feet. There was impatient noise from somewhere
behind him, a car horn, somebody shouting, and he moved too quickly to the inside edge of the sidewalk to get out of the way. He fell. Faye, of course, didn't help him up. She didn't even stay. She flitted over him, more substantial than the mist, kissed the top of his head, and was gone. He'd told her to leave. He wanted nothing more than for her to be gone. He missed her terribly. Missed whom? Was aware only of missing somebody, missing everybody, of being lost, nobody in the world knowing where he was. He curled up on the pavement, which was warm.

Rebecca and her mother were not far away, but neither they nor Marshall knew that. Rebecca said, 'Was he wearing his I.D. bracelet?'

'I don't know.'

Rebecca didn't say anything. But, peering through the mist on the window, which refracted multicolored globules and streaks of lighttraffic lights, headlights and taillights, signs, maybe flashlights, maybe searchlights, blue running lights from a cop car she considered hailing to help them look for her fathershe allowed herself to roll her eyes in exasperation.

'I should have checked,' her mother snapped. 'It's my fault.'

'It's not your fault,' Rebecca said, not entirely meaning it. 'Hopefully the staff will have checked. Hopefully if somebody finds him they'll think to look at the bracelet.'

Billie leaned forward and pointed and said, 'There!' then, 'Oh. No.' And sat back. Rebecca looked where she had pointed and saw the man she'd mistaken for Marshall, an old man, to be sure, but much taller and sturdier, striding along confidently, probably enjoying his walk, probably knowing exactly where he was going. She couldn't believe her mother had thought that was her
father, even for a second, even with the mounting pressure of needing to find him. Trick of the light, trick of the desperate imagination, but that was no excuse: As if they could pull any old man out of the twilight, rescue any old man whether he needed rescuing or not, and he would be her father, they would have done their duty by her father. How could you be married to a man for all these years and ever mistake somebody else for him? You'd think that marriage, of all things, would make you sure who somebody was.

The windshield wipers spread liquid light across her field of vision, and suddenly she remembered. Lost in the woods behind the house she'd grown up in, mist like this, dripping colors and colorlessness like this, lost, waiting for someone to come for her, waiting for her mother. That part of the memory was distinct: she was waiting for her mother. Only her mother would do.

Taking a corner onto a busy street, fervently hoping he hadn't wandered all the way over here, Rebecca impulsively asked her mother in the dark seat next to her, 'Did I get lost in the woods when I was little? In rain like this? Did you find me?'

Something about the ensuing pause was an alert. 'You used to go down into the woods a lot,' her mother finally answered, and something about the non-responsiveness of the reply made Rebecca press.

'I remember all sorts of pretty colors, like gauze. I remember you finding me.' Being found was a warm memory, and she smiled sideways at her mother, inviting companionship.

'Your father came after you,' her mother said curtly. 'Every time.
Your father always came after you.
You always were your daddy's girl.'

'But I remember waiting for you,' Rebecca persisted, unwilling to give up on the possibility of shared tenderness.

Her mother seemed put out, defensive. 'I don't see how you could remember anything about it at all.
You stopped going down there when you were three years old.'

'I
remember
,' Rebecca insisted, wistful, confused. On the streetcorner diagonally across the intersection was a bent figure, but she knew right away that it was not her father, and her mother didn't even comment.

For some time now, Beatrice Quinn had hardly had a sense of herself except as someone who was going home. She didn't live far from The Tides, and she was quite certain of the route. But she hadn't counted on snow and rain. This was a semi-arid climate, for heaven's sake; it hardly ever rained like this, from low clouds sinking ever lower, a clammy drizzle. All the lights and other landmarks looked different in the rain, and they would confuse her if she didn't keep her wits about her. The rain would slow her down. She crossed Elm Street at the bottom of the hill, having noticed on previous trips that there was no crosswalk for many long blocks. It was all right; there were no cars.

But that man from the nursing home was behind her. There was no reason to think he was following her; she knew he often went out to the liquor storein fact, she'd had him bring her a tiny bottle of brandy once or twice. Beatrice had felt a trifle guilty about that, a tad adventurous, a woman her age sneaking brandy, but she would not think about brandy or about this man or about the rain. She would not think about anything but going home, for that was who she was: a woman, an old woman, on her way home. Satisfaction from that image of herself filled her, warmer than brandy, much steadier.

A woman was with the man. A younger woman, by the looks and sound of her. Beatrice wondered
—
dangerously, for it was such a distraction
—
whether he had a daughter. She'd never thought of him as a family man. The woman had a light step, and Beatrice could bear her laugh. It ought to have been a happy sound, but it made her shiver. She turned off 12th Avenue at Ford Street, and the familiarity of the neighborhood swelled in a way most gratifying. She was definitely on her way home. Behind her, that man and that young woman turned onto Ford Street, too, and they were coming faster, catching up. There was no liquor store down here. The woman's laughter trilled, pretty waves over a deadly undertow. Beatrice kept her mind on what she was about.

'Where do you think he might be trying to go, Mom?'

'Oh heavens, who knows?' Billie gestured in expansive frustration.

'If we could just think the way he might be thinking'

'Becky, be realistic. Your father doesn't think anymore, not the way he used to, not the way you and I think. Not normal thoughts.'

Rebecca's mother had stopped looking out the windows, didn't seem now even to be making an effort to search. Old anger attached itself to this new affront, and Rebecca bit back sharper words than she spoke. 'Maybe it has something to do with this Faye person,' she suggested deliberately. 'Where would he go if he was trying to find Faye?'

Without hesitation her mother said, 'To hell.' It was such an uncharacteristic thing for her to say that Rebecca guffawed. 'Faye's dead,' her mother added flatly.

'Did you know her?'