Final Stroke (7 page)

As he sat with his eyes closed recalling the smell of urine from a stairwell climbed long ago, he wondered why, although he had leaned forward in his chair and taken a deep breath, he had not smelled urine here.

Then he heard a sound. Someone else on the stairwell in the proj
ect. But when he opened his eyes, he saw the night LPN who every
one called Betty-who-talks-too-much staring at him. Betty was from his floor. She stood on the far side of the puddle with her arms folded. She was smiling and he wondered how long she’d been there. Actually, he wanted to ask her this but, as usual, the words went upside-down and inside-out and he said nothing. Instead of talking he smiled back at Betty who came around the puddle behind his chair and began her one-sided dialogue.

“The desk said I’d find you here, Steve. I’m surprised you’d come down here. I figured a guy like you wouldn’t waste a trip to the first floor to visit the nursing home. I figured a guy like you’d be out on the grounds doing wheelies. This place is too old for you. How come you’re not glued to your TV watching one of the gumshoe videos your wife brings in?”

When Betty pivoted his wheelchair and began circling the pud dle to take him back to his room, Steve wanted to tell her to wait. He wanted to shout it. He wanted to tell her he needed to do some thing important before he went back to his room. He wanted to tell her there was evidence to be collected before the morning cleaning crew disturbed the crime scene. But, as usual, he was unable to sort the words from the ones spewing from Betty’s mouth. So, before she could wheel him away, he gasped and slumped to one side in his chair,
sticking out his left foot to put on the brakes.

While Betty was busy putting his foot back up on the footrest so she could wheel him back to his room, she kept rattling on about the time of evening and where he should and shouldn’t be.

Damn it, Betty, have a heart! Read my mind, will you?

But of course, Betty could not read his mind. The only person who came close to being able to do that was Jan, and Jan wasn’t here.

But someone else was here. Sergeant Joe Friday was here bolster
ing him for the upcoming fight with Dwayne Matusak. Sergeant Fri
day, who would have to stoop down to look into a boy’s eyes. Sergeant Friday looking knowingly into his eyes. And so, taking a tip from Joe Friday, who often taste-tested questionable substances, he leaned to the side, reached down, and dipped his forefinger into the retreating pud
dle on the floor. And on the way down the hallway, as the breeze of being rapidly wheeled the length of the nursing home wing cooled him and threatened to dry the evidence he had so astutely collected on Mar
jorie’s behalf, he thought,
Oh shit,
to himself, thought about Joe Friday touching his finger to his tongue in that safer black and white world, thought about germs and bacteria and viruses contained in bodily flu
ids, thought about who might have pissed here on this floor, figured an octogenarian’s piss wouldn’t stand up to piss collected from a stairwell corner in the projects, hoped to hell Betty hadn’t seen him dip his fin
ger in the puddle or he might end up in the loony wing, and, finally, put his finger to his mouth and took a taste of what, for some reason, he already knew would not be there. Water. Nothing but water.

After backing him into the elevator, Betty was silent. All he could see before him was the closed elevator door and the controls to one side and the floor indicator lights above the door. Perhaps the silence was deliberate, the ride back to the third floor a time during which the psy
chotic stroke victim was expected to collect his thoughts.

Among the thoughts going up with him in the elevator was a de
ranged theory that we are all born with pure intelligence and the re
mainder of our lives is spent destroying it. But as the second floor light above the door blinked out and the third floor light lit and the door slid open, the theory floated out ahead of him like so much vapor. Now, even though he knew it was only water on the floor, all that re
mained for his effort was self-pity.

Poor Steve Babe, the stroke victim, the fool. Tasting a puddle on the floor to see if it’s piss. It’s come to this. It’s come to this.

CHAPTE
R

FOU
R

To celebrate the opening night of her remodeled res
taurant, Ilonka Szabo invited regular customers for a lavish feast. It was a dream come true, to invite friends in her adopted country to share in her good fortune.

Unfortunately, her most loyal customer would not be coming and this made her sad. His name was Steve Babe, shortened from the Hun
garian
Baberos
at the turn of the century by a great grandfather unaware of jokes the shortened version would generate in the new country. The original name translated as one who is crowned with a laurel wreath as a mark of honor. As Ilonka came from the restaurant kitchen to give a toast she recalled years earlier when Steve told her the details. An immigration official at Ellis Island had confused Baberos with Barab
bas, the thief released from crucifixion instead of Jesus. The official had convinced Steve’s great grandfather that his descendants would not want to be known as heathens and thieves in their new country.

“A cherished friend is absent tonight,” said Ilonka, holding up her glass. “Not long ago he suffered a stroke at the young age of fifty
three. He’s at the Saint Mel in the Woods Rehabilitation Facility. He solves mysteries and is quite good at it. Although the stroke oc curred at home, he had been working on a case when it happened. A terrible time for a stroke to creep up like a thief in the night. Pray he solves the most important mystery of his life. Pray he recaptures his past and we’ll soon have him back with us and be able to share a meal with him.”

It was unfair to be here. The warmth, the smells, the voices of din
ers, the smile from Ilonka Szabo, the white tablecloth, the candles, an elegant place setting for two—everything here made it unfair. When the toast was given, Jan saw that Ilonka and several regular patrons glanced toward her table. Jan had the feeling they focused on the seat across from her, the seat where Steve should have been. He would have turned and smiled and said something in Hungarian. She could al
most see him there as he joins in the toast with that crazy smile.

Lydia Jacobson turned from Jan to join the toast, smiled. Because of the subdued lighting, Lydia’s face was shadowed. When Ilonka fin
ished the toast, Lydia offered another toast. “Here’s to Steve.”

As Jan sipped the red Hungarian wine, she wondered if a daily dose of red wine throughout Steve’s lifetime might have made a difference.

“This place is great,” said Lydia.

“It was Steve’s favorite,” said Jan. “Before they remodeled he used to pick up carryout from here. He probably ate Ilonka’s food more often than he should. Americans have the second highest incidence of heart disease and stroke. Can you guess which country is number one?”

“Hungary?” asked Lydia.

“Right,” said Jan. “The home of Steve’s ancestors is one of many
what-ifs. Like, what if he hadn’t eaten so much high cholesterol food? Or, what if he’d exercised regularly? Or, what if we’d made love three times a day for the last ten years? I hope to hell he never has another stroke. When he had a seizure a couple weeks back I thought that was it.”

Lydia reached across the table and touched Jan’s hand. She looked at Jan as if to say, “You can’t blame yourself.”

Jan and Lydia were close enough so sometimes they did not have to speak. Lydia had been with Jan the night of Steve’s stroke. They had been out to dinner, as they were tonight, leaving Steve home doing phone work. Lydia had been with Jan when she found Steve slumped over on the sofa with the phone in his lap. Lydia drove them to the hos
pital. Lydia was the one who’d heard of the clot-dissolving drug which, if given within three hours of an ischemic stroke, was supposed to lessen its effects. The only problem was they did not know exactly when the stroke had occurred. Jan had tried calling some of the phone numbers Steve had written down on a notepad to narrow down the time, but the latest call she could come up with was to a friend from the Chicago PD and that was nearly two hours before she and Lydia found him. Count
ing the time to drive to the hospital in an unseasonable November snow
storm, and the time it took to get a doctor to administer the drug, she could not be sure about the magic three-hour window.

So far, Steve seemed to be doing fairly well recalling the recent past, the past after his stroke. But last week, when his mother and retarded sister visited from Cleveland, it was obvious Steve did not remember them. He put on a good act, though, knowing he should show recognition. Faking it was something a lot of recovering stroke victims did.

Despite not recognizing his mother and sister, there was hope. Recently he’d become obsessed by the recall of a boy from grammar
school. A boy named Dwayne Matusak who apparently threatened Steve during an entire summer. Dwayne Matusak’s name came up more frequently during Jan’s visits, and, according to Steve’s therapists, during his occupational and speech rehab. Although Jan was able to visit Steve every day, his stringent rehab schedule kept her from seeing him as much as she would have liked. He was in an experimental pro gram consisting of eight to fourteen hours per day of therapy. Steve’s doctor said the medication combined with long hours of therapy was Steve’s best shot at recovery. Although this might have been more ex pensive than they could have afforded on their own, the program was experimental and therefore part of the cost was picked up.

Lydia glanced back toward the kitchen door where Ilonka had stood while giving her toast, then turned back to Jan. “I like the name Ilonka.”

“It’s Helen in Hungarian,” said Jan.

“My mom’s name was Helen. She named me Lydia because she saw Groucho Marx sing ‘Lydia the Tattooed Lady’ once.”

As Lydia spoke, she touched the scar on her left cheek with her finger and Jan could see the change that always came over Lydia when she spoke of her past and touched her scar. The scar started at the cor
ner of Lydia’s mouth and went to her eye. Lydia had long black hair, fair complexion, and a thin face. When the scar had been at its worst, it masked Lydia’s beauty and even her personality because, no matter what people said, when they saw a woman with a scar like that, they couldn’t help thinking she must have deserved it.

The scar had been made by a knife wielded by a thug who worked for a downtown pimp disappointed by Lydia’s repeated refusal to join his harem. It was the pimp’s final blow after having gotten her on her
oin. Helping Jan get Lydia into drug rehab and in to see a Michigan Avenue plastic surgeon was Steve’s doing.

Lydia was special. It was largely because of her that Jan had got
ten out of the massage parlor business years earlier. Before the massage parlor business, when they should have been halfway through college, Lydia and Jan were strippers at a club just over the state line in Wis
consin. After the club folded because of all the Chicago and Milwau
kee executives building their weekend “farms” in the area, Lydia and Jan ended up on Chicago’s north side at a massage parlor frequented by some of those same “farmers.”

Later, when the massage parlor business cooled and went under
ground and got dirtier, Lydia told Jan she was getting the hell out and took Jan with her. Jan got a job as a Loop secretary. Lydia was also sup
posed to have taken the high road, and insisted she had, but got sucked back into the underbelly of the city by a bastard who said he loved her, and would love her even more if she did certain things for him.

And so here they were, two hardened ex-strippers and massage parlor girls sitting at a small Hungarian restaurant packed with Hun
garians drinking wine. As Lydia said when they were out last minute Christmas shopping last year before Steve had his stroke, “You figure in a crowd this size, a few have got to be hiding a past they’re not ex
actly proud of. Someone’s got to be ex-hookers and ex-strippers in this crowd of faces, Jan, so it might as well be us.”

Lydia spoke as she worked on her goulash.

“We should have my plastic surgeon attach these dumpling guys directly to our waists instead of eating them.” Lydia chewed for a mo
ment, then said, “Crazy calling these things guys. Maybe we’ve all had strokes to one degree or another. You said Steve used to call a thing
him
, or a male nurse
she
, or even
it
. How’s that any different than call
ing a dumpling a guy?”

“Steve’s better with pronouns now” said Jan. “Slow as hell, but a lot better than he was back in the hospital. When I first got him the
portable computer he was fixated with the idea that the world had changed, not him. Or he’d see news on television about storms and war and earthquakes and look down and shake his head. When he fi nally started typing on the computer, he wrote, ‘It’s official, the world has had a stroke.’ Back then I wasn’t sure if he’d ever talk again.”

When Lydia did not respond, Jan continued. “But he is getting bet
ter. For a while he was fixated on a mystery man from the past, some guy with dark eyes. One of the therapists said since Steve has dark eyes, maybe he was thinking of himself. They run them through the mill at that place. He’s quizzed every day on the names of other patients and people on staff. In one of the hallways on the first floor, they’ve got an employee bulletin board with mug shots and names. And in vocational rehab they’ve got another board without names and they make them put names with the faces.”

Lydia stopped eating and stared at Jan, a familiar sad smile on her face, a smile that had come to mean, “Go ahead, let it out.”

“It’s funny, yet not so funny,” said Jan. “During the last couple years we’d really been watching our diets, trying to avoid things that would gum up Steve’s arteries. We started doing it as soon as we found out his cholesterol was high. I guess we were too late for that one damn clot that went into his speech center and shot the place up.

“But I shouldn’t complain because, despite having to speak slowly to him, he seems to understand most of what I say. He likes to cheer me up when I arrive and usually has a funny story to tell. Did I tell you we made a pact to be cheerful as hell for the rest of our lives? Steve said that since the stroke made him a cheerful son of a bitch, he wants me to be one so he won’t look foolish in public. I suppose saying cheerful things is a lot better than the first few things he got out. A couple days after the stroke, he wrote down that he’d always wanted to die fast, not like this. It was jumbled up, but I managed to decipher it.

“It’s the old emotional roller coaster. When Steve first called Saint Mel’s Hell in the Woods, I assumed he’d coined the phrase and thought it was a breakthrough. But the next day I found out everyone who works there, and most of the residents, call it Hell in the Woods. A woman in the business office told me about it. When Steve was moved from the hospital I thought I’d see more of him. But they keep him busy. ‘Living the rehab,’ they call it. I guess that’s part of the reason they call it Hell in the Woods. I’ve really gotten to know the place, walking the halls when I’m there and can’t see him because he’s in therapy. In the hospital they were more concerned with the physi
cal, like working on using the walker instead of the wheelchair. But here, although they seem reasonably concerned with his physical abili
ties, the main focus is on memory and speech.”