Journals of Eleanor Druse, The (Digital Picture Book) (2 page)

I saw her once or twice in our forties, I think. I remember us commiserating because we had both had the misfortune of being discarded by husbands who, at midlife, changed us out for newer models and left us to raise fatherless children. The story was an old, boring one, even then. I had only Bobby to look after when my husband, Randall—like me, he was a professor at Faust College—ran off with one of his art history students. Madeline’s boy and her two girls were still in grade school when her husband took off. The gossips on the beauty shop circuit said that Lloyd Kruger fell for a divorced real estate agent with a 38-inch bust, who apparently showed him more than a house one day. That was back in, oh, the early seventies at least, but I also recall coming across Madeline once or twice after her divorce, and it was as if the darkness visible had fallen like a shroud behind her eyes, and all of those educated smarts were going to waste in there with nobody home to turn on the lights.

Later I heard from friends of mutual friends that she had struggled with depression and eating and anxiety disorders; that she’d been on a rotating regimen of antidepressants and electroshock therapies. I always meant to call and see how she was doing. Then they doubled my course load at Faust, and Bobby kept growing up, and pretty soon Madeline and I were separated by decades.

Her melancholy must have fed on the travails of old age until it fattened to suicidal despair. As I made my way over those icy roads, I charged myself with a mission: to be there at Madeline’s bedside and welcome her back to this world after her determined attempt to leave it.

I followed a caravan of trucks and snowplows to Kingdom Hospital and parked in the doctors’ lot, which was almost empty. They had the lots all plowed out, but I noticed that the walkway outside the emergency room was treacherous. I had to hold on to the handrail for dear life and shuffle my way to the door like a penguin on skates.

Bobby is good friends with Otto, the security guard, and I found the two of them drinking coffee in Otto’s cubicle just off the ER entrance. Otto’s eyes are failing behind Coke-bottle glasses, and Bobby sometimes watches the monitors for him; no harm done, and the night shift supervisor thinks of it as reasonable accommodation of Otto’s visual handicap. Otto also has a dog, Blondi, a German shepherd who helps him get around and sleeps under the security console, where I could see him gnawing on a rawhide toy.

Bobby hid his pipe and his tobacco pouch. An odious habit! His teeth and gums were orange from the poison. He was miffed about my driving, but what could he say? There I was: living proof that I could make the drive without incident. Before I could be seen with him, I had to tidy him up. His hair stood out every which way and his shirt was untucked, making him look even heavier. I sent him into the men’s room with a comb and a toothbrush, and wished something could be done about his shoes, the heels of which had broken down from his walking on them.

He came out, one side of his hair soaked and mashed against the side of his head and the other sticking up like stalks of winter wheat. He walked with me to the elevators, groaning while I hacked away at his hair with the comb. He decided to ride with me, because if nobody was in the psych nurses’ station I wouldn’t even be able to get in the place.

I pinned on my hospice worker ID badge so I would look somewhat official, and up we went to the Kingdom Hospital psychiatric ward.

I’d been a patient on the orthopedic ward and the neurology ward before—for arthritis, tinnitus, some gastric reflux—the usual repairs and servicing the human body requires once the seventy-year limited warranty runs out. I’d never been to the psychiatric ward, though I once worked with a lady in hospice, a schizophrenic who’d been transferred to us from psychiatry. She used to whisper in my ear, “Don’t tell nobody else but the doctor says I caught that shishtofraynia bug that’s going around.”

The elevator stopped and we stepped out into a secure waiting area outside of a well-lit nurses’ station, the upper half of which was enclosed on all four sides by steel mullions and chicken-wire safety glass.

A lone nurse was on the telephone, chart open in front of her. She glanced at Bobby and me and smiled, while Bobby opened the door into the station with a key on a chain.

The nurse pointed at a coffeepot, but we shook our heads. Her name tag said
LAUREL WERLING, R.N.

“She had the ipecac only,” said the nurse into the phone. “Dr. Hook didn’t want her to have anything else because he was afraid of interactions with other drugs she may have taken that we don’t know about.”

While we waited, I looked around the nurses’ station, which was like none other I’d seen in the Kingdom. Each wall of the quadrangle had a thick dead-bolted wooden door with a little hinged windowpane of chicken-wire glass set into it at eye level. Three of the bolted doors gave out into separate dark hallways, lit at this hour only by exit signs glowing fire-engine red at the far ends. The fourth door opened into the waiting area we’d entered from, and Bobby had bolted it after us.

I looked through the darkened glass and out onto the ward, where an emaciated elderly man in a frayed and dirty hospital gown appeared out of the darkness in the hallway opposite like an apparition taking shape in a graveyard, gradually becoming visible as he drifted toward the fluorescent lights of the nurses’ station. He stopped in front of the bolted wooden door, his head framed by the inset pane of wired glass, his skull plainly visible under papery hairless, age-spotted flesh. He had a livid ropy scar on the left side of his head that zigzagged like a lightning bolt from his temple all the way behind his ear. I kept feeling I was on the verge of recognizing him, as if I’d known him as a much younger man or seen a photo of him somewhere: William Burroughs from the
Naked Lunch
jacket? The mortician who’d buried my mother and father at the Oak Lawn Funeral Home?

Behind him on the wall was a fire alarm.

In case of fire, break glass,
I thought. It didn’t say that anywhere on or near the alarm, and it wasn’t that kind of fire alarm, because you can’t have glass anywhere out on the psychiatric ward itself. I don’t know why I thought it. I just did.

He raised his bony hand and rapped on the door of the nurses’ station with his knuckles.

The nurse kept talking into the phone while she opened the hatch in the door and handed out a small paper cup of pills and another with a swallow’s worth of water in it.

Glaring at me, the old man took the pills and the water and said, “You wanna know what love is?”

I don’t know why, but his question raised gooseflesh all over my body. I shuddered in the grip of a violent chill.

The nurse made a face and turned sharply away from the old guy, as if she’d had enough of him weeks ago. She stuck a finger in her open ear and pressed the handset against her other one. “I’m sorry,” she said into the phone, “say again?”

“I said, Do you wanna know what love is?” the old man in the gown repeated loudly.

I gasped and stared at him. I
knew
him. The priest from St. Dymphna’s they’d arrested for child abuse? No, but…

The nurse waved him off and continued her phone conversation.

The old guy tossed the pills into the back of his mouth, followed with the water, and gulped. He crumpled the paper cups and balled them up, one in each fist.

“It’s pigs in a litter lying close together to keep warm.”

He glowered at me as if he was waiting for me to argue with him.

“I’ll say a prayer for you,” I offered. “God bless you.”

“Blessed are the young,” he said, “for they shall inherit the national debt. Did you know that God is really three persons—Father, Son, and Holy Spirit—who are united in one substance or being, kind of like a litle beer that tastes great but is also less filling, and makes the whores of Babylon mudwrestle in the streets.”

He barked a mirthless laugh, turned, and trudged back down the hallway, his gown open in the back, the sallow cheeks of his skinny buttocks drooping and puckering as he walked away into the darkness.

In case of fire, break glass.

“Still no luck reaching any family,” the nurse said into the phone. Then she glanced at me, smiled, and said, “But Mrs. Druse is here. She maybe able to tell us something.”

Bobby’s beeper sounded, just about the time Nurse Werling got off the phone. He looked down at it and grumbled about having to transport someone from the emergency room.

“Mum, you come down to Otto’s cubicle when you’re finished, you hear? I don’t want you driving home in this, you understand?”

“I love you, Bobby,” I said.

“Love you, too, Mum,” he mumbled.

Laurel Werling was a pleasant woman, but she acted even younger than she looked and seemed a trifle inexperienced, as if she was used to being second in command to someone who had the night off. She made several more phone calls to make sure she was handling Madeline Kruger’s attempted suicide according to protocols. I learned that the police had found Madeline in her kitchen, where she had extinguished the pilot light on her stove, turned on the gas, put a pillow in the oven, and laid her head on it. They’d also found an empty bottle of pain medication on the counter.

Nurse Werling explained that Madeline was uncooperative and unable or unwilling to provide information the hospital needed to reach her family or next of kin. Madeline seemed disoriented as to time and place, and to have regressed to a childish recalcitrance. The only name that came up reliably in her conversations so far was mine.

I agreed to help any way I could, but I confessed to Ms. Werling that although I had spent many hours sitting with the dying on the sunshine ward, I had no experience dealing with suicidal patients. I knew enough of human nature to suspect that Madeline might not exactly be thrilled to have survived her brush with death. She would wake up knowing that in the end she had failed even at failing, had botched the last thing she had to do right. Otherwise I had no idea what to expect, what to say or do.

Ms. Werling said I should follow Madeline’s lead and let her talk about whatever she wished. She said that attempted suicides often express anger and bitterness against loved ones, which she hoped might give us an opening to obtain contact information for her son and her daughters, or at least determine what cities they were living in.

The nurse led me out into the same hallway where that cranky old rawbones in a gown had appeared. Indeed, I could see him down at the far end of the hallway, backlit by the bluish glow of a
Happy Days
rerun, poking through an ashtray in search of butts, from the looks of it.

Our footsteps echoed on the marble flooring, but the old one never so much as looked our way.

The corridor was lined with more thick wooden doors, some bolted shut, some opening into darkness.

Midway down the hall, an unshaven middle-aged man in an orderly’s uniform very like the one Bobby wears was sitting outside a room in a comfortable recliner, a can of Nozz-A-La cola on the table next to him. He had a book open in his lap and a gooseneck lamp pulled up alongside, but his chin had settled on his chest, and it was obvious he had dozed off.

“That’s Angelo Charron,” said the nurse, raising her voice as we approached, probably because she didn’t want to discipline the orderly for sleeping on the job. “Mrs. Kruger is on suicide precautions, which means someone must keep her in plain view at all times.”

She cleared her throat, and Mr. Charron jerked awake in his chair.

“This is Mrs. Druse,” the nurse said. “Sally Druse. She’s a family friend.”

“Good morning, sir,” I said, and shook his hand.

I caught the fruity scent of alcohol on his breath, despite his attempt to speak out of the far side of his mouth.

“Morning, ma’am,” he said. He did his best to look alert and steered the lamplight away from his red eyes.

I looked into the dark room for some sign of Madeline.

The orderly guided the dim beam of his reading light carefully into the darkness, first finding the foot of the bed and then slowly ascending to reveal the silhouette of the patient’s feet under the bedding. The head of the bed was raised and facing us, but shrouded in darkness.

“She’s been asleep for an hour or so,” he said softly, “but she’s restless. If you stick around she’ll probably wake up and start talking about you and the little girl again.”

“What little girl?” I asked.

He shrugged. “She’s not making much sense. Why don’t you have a listen and see if you can tell what she’s talking about?”

The nurse and I went ahead of the beam and into the room, and just as we did so, Mr. Charron’s shaky hand must have lost its grip on the lamp cover, for the beam of its light fell full onto Mrs. Kruger’s torso and face.

On earth as it is in hell, may I never see such a death’s-head again. Madeline’s face was locked open in a rictus of stark terror, staring straight ahead as if into damnation’s gate. Her gaping mouth and bulging eyes left no doubt about whether it’s possible to literally die of fright. Some ghastly specter like the basilisks of old had killed her with a glance. Her head was thrown back, her palms up, open as if to receive the stigmata, which she had apparently inflicted with an ice pick, still loosely held in one bloody hand.

Nurse Werling and I cried out and came near death ourselves, shaking, unable to breathe. We clutched at each other like scared little girls and held on, afraid one of us might run away and leave the other alone in this chamber with such a frightful corpse.

There was another more terrifying complication.

The wound she’d made in her throat gaped open like a second mouth, and boiling from that ugly gash were seething masses of black ants. Ants had likewise erupted from the gashes in her wrists and had eaten away the edges of her skin, streaming furiously in and out of her suppurating wounds, as if the entirety of her lifeless body had been colonized by vast swarming black armies.

I heard harsh laughter coming in from the hallway.

I knew that voice. It was the old man who’d come for his pills at the nurses’ station.