The Tides (29 page)

She didn't see Rebecca. That worried her. Rebecca would be devastated, even if she had gotten herself into this mess. Billie's impulse was to find her, go to her, but she held it sternly in check. What was there to say?

So she went instead to her husband's room and found him on the floor with the chair tied to his back, arms and legs squirming. She said just his name, 'Marshall!' which didn't come close to saying what she meant but she couldn't imagine what would.

She got him free, even though he thought she was Faye and tried to fight her off. When he realized who she was, he called for Faye, tried to chase after Faye, crawling, until the girls came in and they could get him into bed with the siderails up. Shirley kept telling her it was all right but it wasn't all right; Billie couldn't look her in the eye. She was afraid he'd try to crawl out over the rails. Just the thought of it made her sick. But he seemed to have settled down now. He just lay there flat on his back staring at the ceiling. Billie had to stop herself from reaching over and shutting his eyes.

Instead, grunting, she cranked up the head of his bed and tried to feed him his breakfast. He wouldn't eat a bite. He just wouldn't open his mouth. Finally she gave up and put the full tray in the hall for them to collect and went back and hoisted herself up on the bed beside Marshall and they just sat there. She didn't think he knew her anymore. In a sweet, unnerving, surprising way, though, she knew him.

The window of Marshall's room was closed against the cool spring air, curtains drawn against the light although the room was fluorescent bright inside, and so Billie didn't see the pale fog settling over the empty lake-bed and fluttering out of it like layers of gauzy scarves. She didn't
hear Naomi keening softly to herself as she set off into the tidal field: 'I am Faye and they took my child away! I am Faye and they won't give my baby back to me! Ohh! Sit right here beside me, girlie, listen to me and you might learn something. I am Faye! Ohh!'

Chapter 18

Petra knew about the fog. Ants liked fog, she was told, especially red ants, especially fog that had all different colors in it like this. Muttering, hugging herself with the flat arms of her grimy pink sweater, she went out into the many-legged fog.

'She cannot be allowed outside in this weather,' Odette McAleer said sternly to Dan. 'Especially without a coat. Accepted standards of patient care require clothing appropriate to weather conditions if patients are permitted outside the facility.'

'Go get her,' Dan snapped in Maxine's direction.

Maxine restrained herself from coming back with, 'Go get her yourself.' But she did protest, 'She won't come in if she doesn't want to. Or she'll go right back out again.'

'Go get her,' Dan snarled and, dismissing her, pushed his way behind the nurses' station where Diane, Sandy, and Health Department officials were preparing discharge plans for all the patients of The Tides to present to the court this afternoon, although they would likely not be put into effect.

Maxine waited, barely, until Dan's back was turned before mouthing obscenities at him. Then she went out the front door and around the end of the building in

search of Petra. It was chillier out here than she'd expected, and cloudy, clouds scudding across a paler cloud cover, a front or something coming in. She shivered and swore. She didn't know where Petra was and she didn't care. Damned if she was going to freeze her ass off out here. She let herself in the north door without noticing anything unusual outside other than the weather.

Wind was picking up. The fog floated and whipped to meet Rebecca, laying a cushion between her feet and the field she was crossing, then tugging it away so that she stumbled. Swaddling her like a baby's receiving blanket, soft and warm, then swishing like a cold veil across her exposed flesh.

Inside The Tides, the lights flickered more and more harsh and bright as the light outside dimmed, and the ambience of the place took on qualities suggestive of a winter afternoon although it was an early morning in spring. Sandy, pouring coffee for one of the Health Department team, remarked on what peculiar weather they were having today, teased that it must be some sort of sign, but he, irritated at having to be out here monitoring the routine activities of this facility when he had work of his own to do at the office and the damn place wasn't going to be shut down anyway, everybody knew that, didn't respond to any of Sandy's conversational gambits. Sandy thought that was rude, and her feelings were a little hurt.

Billie had dozed off beside her husband in his narrow bed. Shirley found her there and, smiling fondly, sadly, didn't disturb her. No harm in leaving her there for a few minutes; she'd have to face reality soon enough. Shirley turned off the overhead light and shut the door most of the way, rendering Marshall's room dim and nearly hidden from casual view.

Wide awake, Marshall lay still a while longer, listening, getting ready. Sometimes he knew precisely what he was preparing for. Sometimes he knew only the preparation. Finally, he eased himself over the siderails without making much noise or jarring his sleeping wife enough to alert her to his intent.

He knew he wouldn't accomplish his mission on his own two feet. He might very well not anyway, but at the moment he was calm and clear-headed, and he would use any means at his disposal to increase his odds of success.

A wheelchair sat beside the bed. One corner of the privacy curtain draped across the back of it, and Marshall understood how easy it would be not to recognize what this thing was. How easy it would be, too, to be afraid.

But the bewilderment and the possibility of fear faded. Grasping the bedrail with both hands, he shuffled in sideways strides as long and smooth as he could make them, two, three, four, and Billie stirred but didn't wake to stop or confuse him. He leaned on the chair. It rolled, and his choice was either to resist it or to go along. Like bringing a car out of an icy spin, he acted counter-intuitively and went into the dangerous motion instead of against it, wrested his other hand off the relatively stable bedrail and for a few long seconds was moorless in space and time, then got himself turned around and sank into the slung seat.

He needed to pause then, to take some deep breaths and reorient himself as much as possible. But there was no time for that. He was missing some information about his environment, to be sure, but he had enough to go on.

Walking his feet between the front wheels of the chair and pushing at the big back wheels with the heels of his hands, he took himself out of the room into the glare of
the hall. Feeling and smelling fresh air, he maneuvered toward its source. Petra, coming in, held the door open for him. She was talking, but he thought not to him. He had no wish for an actual conversation with her, but he did intend to nod a thank you at her. He might not, however, have done so, since it was necessary for him to focus his entire attention on the task at hand.

Which was monumental. Whose stakes could not have been higher. The instant he entered the fog, he saw Faye's face in it, eyes shimmering, lips stretched wide in mocking laughter. The instant the door behind him was shut and latched, he no longer lived at The Tides.

Faye could hardly control herself, but she had to, for a little while longer. She couldn't remember the last time she'd been this excited. To think this was happening now, now, when she'd almost come to believe her days of having real fun were gone for good. She should have known better.

Here was her daughter, here was Rebecca, coming of her own free will across the cold weedy expanse toward her. She was virtually a stranger, of course. Faye couldn't tolerate knowing very much about people; the details of other lives were so boring. All she knew about Rebecca, which was more than enough, was what she'd picked up from observation
—
close observation, mind you
—
these last few months, grafted onto bits and pieces of memories from the indignity of the pregnancy culminating in the outrage of the birth and from the first two or three days of her life which was all it had taken for Faye to know beyond a shadow of a doubt that this was not for her.

Rebecca looked a little the worse for wear, Faye thought. Her makeup was a disaster, and that was a terribly unflattering hairdo even when it was combed,
which it wasn't at the moment. Faye could hardly wait to get her hands on that hair. Rebecca's clothes, sort of frumpy in the first place, looked as if she'd slept in them; at the very least, it was the same outfit she'd been wearing yesterday, which was disgusting.

But Rebecca was a pretty girl, her mother's daughter no matter what. This afforded Faye one of those bright, mean little spurts of triumph every bit as satisfying and addictive as a shot of whiskey had ever been. She was petite, which was useful with men. Good features. Not bad posture, and nothing wrong with the way she carried herself that a little motherly instruction couldn't fix.

Faye clasped her hands over her heart, then held out her arms. 'Ah, my darling, they can't keep us apart any longer! The sacred bond between mother and child is simply too strong!' That was lovely.

Many of the weeds in the field were higher than Rebecca's shoulders now, tangling in her hair, brushing her cheeks and under her chin, working themselves inside her clothes, inside her head. It must have been longer than she'd thought since she'd been down here; this must be spring growth. Fog made it hard to think. Fog blurred sky, ground, lake-bed, lake. The lake was full. Overflowing.

Rebecca squinted, stared. The lake was full of a substance with the consistency and rippled sheen of water but streaked with wild color and pulsing with tides of surprising strength and rapidity. There had been rain recently, but hardly this much, and the ground she was crossing to get to the lake wasn't wet; it must be some drainage oddity, or maybe only some trick of the foggy light.

The substance undulated and splashed over the edge of the depression, tongued
at her. In it was a woman in a
flowing gown, lavender and pink, with streaming hair the colors of the fog. Faye. Rebecca took a step backward.
The woman's face was animated, pretty: enormous blue eyes with lashes thickened and curled, artfully heightened color in the cheeks, rosebud lips parted in a dazzling smile. In the silver sky above her was her face again, again and again, and in the tree, just budding like an admirer's bouquet, that was bending and tossing over the lake as if it would break, and in the surface of the lake tilting now so Rebecca could see her own face and the woman's face in it and then dipping flirtatiously away.

Billie woke up. Marshall was gone. Ponderously she struggled off the bed and scrambled for the call button on the cord, then didn't wait for help. As she hurried out into the hall, out into the fog, to catch Marshall herself, the awful suspicion nagged at her that she hadn't really been sleeping hard, that she'd known somewhere in her mind when Marshall went to Faye and she'd been just too tired and too defeated to care.

The field behind the nursing home was ugly as usual, colorless, weedy and bare, littered, generally unkempt. Somebody ought to do something with it. Billie didn't know who, now that Rebecca didn't work here anymore.

But Rebecca was out here. Billie saw her moving toward the hollow in the middle of the field where they said a lake used to be, and wondered what in the world she was doing. At almost the same time she saw Marshall careening after Rebecca in his wheelchair. As far as she could tell through the wisps of fog here and there on the ground like dust mites, the field was practically level, no slope steep enough for him to build up that much momentum, and he certainly didn't have enough strength to be pushing himself that fast. But he was speeding, hell-
bent for leather through the blowing litter and scraggly weeds in pursuit of Rebecca, in pursuit of Faye.

Billie had no hope of catching up to him. Yet she had no choice but to try. She called to him, but of course he paid her no mind. She took a deep breath, stepped off the sidewalk, and started out across the field, already panting. Dust spat into her face, smelling oddly of roses, making her breath hurt in her chest. The sky was gray and lemon-yellow now, mean-looking. In a few places, an individual cloud was outlined in purple like a glimpsed breast.The wind shoved at her. A storm was coming up. Billie could taste the dangerous energy in the air.

Faye twirled. Lavender and pink billowed around Rebecca, and now the wind brought rain - perhaps not rain, for it blew horizontally off the surface of the lake. Faye cried happily, 'I've come back for you! Isn't that wonderful?'

'Who do you think you are?'

Faye let her laughter peal in delight. Her laugh was one of her best natural assets, enhanced by the ways she'd learned to use it in the years since she'd last seen Rebecca. 'Yes, yes, because of you I know who I am at last, and I am in your debt.' She'd said that more than a few times, to quite a range of people, in the distant and recent past, editing it each time until it was perfect. For instance, she used to say, 'And I thank you for that,' but 'in your debt' was more elegant.The declaration was so effective that it had become part of her standard repertoire. This time, though, she could add, 'I'm your mother!'

'I already have a mother.'