Where All Light Tends to Go (18 page)

A povidone-iodine yellow glow came through closed curtains as I stared from the parking lot at windows lighting checkered patterns along all four stories. The old hospital had been built to last with bricks that still held red even decades after the mortar dried. Lighter sand-colored bricks cut pin stripes on the building where floors divided, and outlined the windows to add a touch of style. But despite the attempt to liven the place up, there was no hiding it. This is where people came to die.

Electric doors slid back and a woof of air from heavy fans overhead blew against my hair when I entered. Doctors and nurses wearing scrubs with silly patterns like wrapping-paper designs walked in and out of hallways carrying notepads and stethoscopes, one younger nurse bearing a drip bag as she hopped onto the elevator and waited for the door to ding. Check-in was to the right at a long countertop where three women all wearing reading glasses and sour faces squinted at computer screens. When someone would approach them at the counter, they’d hand them a notepad and pen or answer a question without ever looking up from the monitors.

A large, brightly lit aquarium with colorful fish and plants that seemed to pulse and breathe separated the room from where doctors hurried and families waited. The left side of the room was lined in chairs, some of them filled with folks holding sleepless, zombie-type expressions with mouths gaped at a television in the corner spreading the drone of nightly news.

Standing there, I caught on very quickly how the place worked. Folks who stood around with confused looks or walked aimlessly rubbernecking around corners and into rooms were asked what they needed, who they were looking for, or how they could be helped. The people who rushed about frantically and never let their eyes fix onto one thing for too long were allowed free range without a question asked. There were black signs with white type over most of the doorways and similar signs with arrows pointing down halls, up staircases, and into elevators. Following those signs, a man could navigate that place pretty easily without having to speak to anyone. I headed past the aquarium and toward the hallway like I owned the place, and out of the corner of my eye, I saw one of the women behind the counter look my way, but my stride never broke and my focus never altered. Intensive Care pointed into the elevator. Intensive Care pointed up the stairs. I took the stairs.

The dimly lit stairwell smelled of chlorine and the concrete floor felt tacky. My boot soles peeled from the stairs like I walked on transparent tape. There was no one else in the stairwell from what I could hear, but outside elevators dinged, phones rang, and fast-paced footsteps drummed through the halls. Up six flights, a sign over the doorway split the fourth floor between the Post-Operative Surgical Unit and Intensive Care. Robbie was in the latter.

I opened the door into an empty hall. The wall in front of me held framed paintings of boldly colored shapes that never seemed to make much of a picture no matter how hard I looked. The narrow hallway opened up at both ends into brighter rooms, well-lit rooms that beamed a sanitized sort of white light. Large black signs hung from the ceiling by chains at the entrance of each: to the left Post-Op, to the right ICU.

Ambling down that empty hall, it was harder to play it off like I was meant to be there, my boots clomping the stillness and silence that seemed to belong in that place. One nurse perched behind a desk where the room opened up. She was a young Cherokee-looking girl with dark skin, black hair pulled into a bun, and plump lips that she pursed and pursed while she read through the latest Hollywood gossip in one of those tabloids found at grocery store checkouts. She marked her spot in the magazine and placed it down on the counter as I walked by.

“Can I help you, sir?”

I turned and met her eyes. Her stare was wide and her eyebrows angled up and that facial expression told me awfully fast that she wasn’t into being cutesy. “Came to see my grandma,” I said.

She squinted a bit like she was trying to see through a lie. “Visiting hours were from three to six.”

“I know, ma’am.” I walked closer to the desk and tried my damnedest to look vulnerable. “Thing is I don’t get off work till five and it’s a haul up the mountain to get here.” I braced my elbows on the top of the counter and looked down at her, tried to get a read on whether or not she was buying. “I just wanted to look in on her for a minute. I won’t be long, I promise.”

“Like I said, visiting hours were from three to six.”

I buried my head in my hands like the disappointment just might kill me. “Please, ma’am. I promise I won’t be long.” When I pulled my head up out of my hands I could see that I had struck something in her. Her eyes had drawn back into some softer place where things like protocol didn’t seem to matter so much.

“Just for a minute or two,” she said. “But don’t make me have to run you off. I need this job, okay?”

“I promise.”

The young nurse nodded, and I strolled around the corner to where a long hallway was lined on both sides with doors. There wasn’t a deputy anywhere in sight, but the hall continued around the corner, so I kept walking. Some of the machines in the rooms beeped every second or two, but some let out a raspy-sounding breath when plungers pushed down and gave air. An old man in the room on the left was having a horrible time, and he was groaning as loudly as he could, too weak to yell. A doctor in teal-colored scrubs and one of those paper-type hats they wear jogged from around the corner and disappeared into the room where the man lay. I kept walking till I got to the edge of the wall and peeked around the corner.

A young, strong-looking bull sat on a metal folding chair outside of a room three doors down, the last room on the wall before the hallway turned up the other side. He didn’t see me right then, but I didn’t want him to catch sight of me sneaking around, so I kept ahead and stood at an open doorway that looked in on some old woman. The woman lay there with tubes running every which way. She was pasty-looking and a line of drool ran from the corner of her open mouth. That old woman had her eyes on me, and I would’ve sworn her dead if it wasn’t for the blinks that came every so often. I turned down the hall to where the bull sat, and he was watching me while he moved a plug of tobacco along his gums with his tongue. His arms rested on his knees. I flicked my eyes back to that old woman, but soon as I did I heard that bull’s shoes clapping across the terrazzo floor.

When his footsteps stopped, I could feel him next to me, and I tried to stay calm. That old woman still stared at me with her mouth slouched open, and I smiled at her. “They don’t think she’s got too much longer,” I said.

The bull put his hand on the doorframe and leaned real close to me to peer inside of the room. “That your grandma?” His head right beside my shoulder, he twisted up toward me.

“Yeah. They don’t think it’ll be more than a week or two.” I turned and looked at him, took a deep swallow. “I just wish she could’ve died at home, passed away in her sleep or something, you know?”

“I know what you mean. Lost mine a couple months back. Same type of thing.” The deputy patted me on the shoulder hard and looked at me with dark brown eyes. “It’s tough.”

I stared at the old woman, who still hadn’t took her eyes away from me. I was sure she was somebody’s grandma, and I was sure they wished all of those things I’d just said. She just wasn’t mine.

The deputy patted me on the shoulder again. “Hang in there, man. It’ll be all right.” He smiled with a black wad of tobacco poking from his gums. “I’m going to go see if I can’t talk that nurse up front into letting me take her out sometime.”

I grinned at him and nodded, and that deputy strutted down the hallway, slicking his hair down with his hand. I watched him move up to the counter and rest his elbows across the top. He worked his feet back far behind him so his body slanted at an angle toward the counter, and he rested his head where his forearms crossed, cocked his head to the side to flirt with the Cherokee girl. I had a minute or two to do what needed done, and I didn’t waste a second. I walked fast in long strides and tried to keep my feet from making any noise against the floor. Noise echoed in those halls and I didn’t need that bull coming back.

The last door before the hallway turned up the other side was where Robbie lay. I would have never recognized him if I hadn’t been there to witness what Jeremy Cabe had done. His face was healed past the tissuey white burns I’d seen when the acid splashed and lit him afire, but what healed was a warped smooth skin that bent and curved the way oil does on top of water. Only a portion of his face along his left eye and cheek still looked like him. The rest was darker and looked like a mound of pink clay that children had smudged into a face.

A feeding tube jutted out of his throat. Lines with all different-colored fluids running through them wrapped around his arms and chest and slipped under the sheets to someplace I couldn’t see. He was hooked to one of those raspy breathing machines, the expandable plunger rising and spreading like an accordion before it pressed down and huffed. There wasn’t a lick of movement about him. His chest never rose when the machine filled him with another breath.

“Who are you?” a tired-sounding voice asked from a darkened corner at my side. I hadn’t seen her there until she spoke. “Who are you, boy?” She stood up from a maroon upholstered chair and walked over to me. She couldn’t have been all that much older than Mama, but you’d have never known. The way she wore her hair and the way she dressed made her look a good ten years older than she was. Her dark hair was short and permed into curls that had been mashed flat on one side where she’d pressed her head against something for rest. She dressed like a schoolteacher, with pastel-colored slacks ironed into a crease and a loose-fitting cotton shirt that held like a T-shirt but fancier. “Are you a friend of Robbie’s?”

“Yeah, I guess you could say that.” I looked at her for a second but turned away fast enough that she couldn’t quite get a good look at me. “I mean, I’ve known him a long time.”

“When he was a little boy, why, he was the wildest thing anyone had ever seen.” She came close and stood by my side, then turned and stared at her son on the gurney. “He was wide open from the moment the doctor laid him in my arms, I tell you. Ain’t ever seen the likes of something so wild.” Robbie’s mother walked over to the bedside and picked up his hand. For a split second I thought of that folded photograph I’d found in his trailer that bookmarked a place in his Bible, a place in his life when his parents stood proudly beside him. His mother did not seem proud anymore, but she would not leave his side. She held his hand gently and stroked back and forth, right beside where an IV line ran into him. She placed his hand back on the white sheets, turned her head and looked at his face. “Now, I knew he was into some trouble. Me and his daddy had known that for a long while, I guess. But this? No, I don’t think either of us could have figured it would come to something like this.”

I watched her as she leaned over him and brushed his hair with her fingers so that it lay in a part across his head. I couldn’t say a word. Seeing her there and knowing what had been done to her son made me feel sick inside. Daddy had thought that type of shit would harden a man, but all it had done to me was poke at all those places where I’d always been soft.

She ran her hand across his face where all of that skin stretched and curled. Then she pulled the sheet up around him and folded it back just a touch like she was tucking in a child. “It’d take an awfully bad man to do this to one of God’s children. An awfully bad man.” She turned back to me and scowled. “I just hope they’re ready for what they’ve got coming. Whether it’s in a courtroom or at the right hand of God, they’ll have to answer for what they’ve done.”

I’d stayed calm the entire time I worked my way through that hospital. I’d played everything perfect to get into that room. But looking at him lying there and listening to her talk about her son, I was absolutely terrified. She didn’t know it, but I was already answering for what I’d done. I was answering every day of my life, every minute I slept. The things I had seen could not be unseen. The things I saw haunted me.

“I know you, boy.” Robbie’s mother walked up and stood directly in front of me. She tilted her head and looked up so as to get the best look her old eyes could piece together.

“No, ma’am. I don’t think we know each other.”

“Yeah.” She drug out that word like the last note of a song. “You’re Charlie McNeely’s boy, ain’t you?”

“No, ma’am.”

“There’s no hiding who you belong to. You’re the spitting image of him.”

I could hear the bull’s footsteps clapping their way back down the hall, and it wouldn’t be long before that line of questioning came from both sides, and I didn’t have an answer for any of it. I backpedaled away from her and through the doorway, out into the hall where all of those white lights shined so bright.

“Where are you going, boy?” Robbie’s mother walked toward the door. “Ain’t you going to at least tell me your name?”

The footsteps were getting close to turning the corner, and Robbie’s mother wasn’t but a step away from coming into the hall. I was tingling all over, and my hands were sweating something horrible. I was feeling like a rabbit again, a rabbit that had done let them get too close and had to run, so I did. “The man who looks back gets caught,” Daddy’d said, so I didn’t look back. I didn’t look back as I tore down that hallway, ran past that counter and that pretty little Cherokee girl, and into that dim hallway where the stairwell came up on the left. I didn’t look back when I jumped those first two flights of steps one right after the other, my knees damn near exploding like Black Cat firecrackers when I smacked down out of the air. I didn’t look back when I made it into that lobby and ran through all of those doctors and nurses in funny-patterned scrubs and past that aquarium with all of those colorful fish and through that heavy fan and those electric sliding glass doors. Even when the truck was running, and I was mashing the gas and reaching for the headlights, I didn’t look back, not for one fucking second. No, I didn’t look back in that rearview until I’d crossed into Jackson County, and even then it was hard, expecting sure as shit those blue lights would flash and there I’d be. But they didn’t come for me that night. I didn’t look back, and I didn’t get caught. Daddy’d been right about that.