The Free (P.S.) (6 page)

When her shift ended, Pauline drove home. She didn’t open a bottle of wine; she just drank tea and finished the application for the school nursing position. She changed the sheets on her bed and for the first time in a month tried to sleep in her bedroom. But her mind raced and sleep wouldn’t come, so she went back to the living room and the TV.

The next day she dropped off the application at the school’s administrative office, ate at a Mexican restaurant, and forced herself to walk for an hour. As she did, she passed through downtown, and the blocks of struggling and empty stores. She came to a group of high school girls sitting at a picnic table outside a coffee shop and thought of Jo. She had always struggled with bringing her work home with her. There were times, when she had first become a nurse, that her patients would overwhelm her. She would become engulfed by them and intertwined in their lives. It took her years to build a wall around herself, and still at times she struggled. Now she would allow herself only a moment to falter and then she would quickly pull herself together once again. But the girl reminded her too much of herself and the way she’d felt at her age. Alone and voiceless and unwanted and worthless.

Even though she had desperately wanted to, Pauline had never run away from home. Her mother had left them when she was seven, and Pauline was forced to live alone with her father until she was eighteen. He had worked the graveyard shift at a warehouse driving a forklift. He would sleep during the day and he would yell at her if she was too loud or woke him. Even as a child she had to beg him to go to the grocery store and beg him for money for clothes and things she needed at school. There would be days when he would hardly speak to her, and weeks when he wouldn’t shower. No one explained to her that her father was mentally ill. She had to learn it herself; she had to navigate it alone.

She had become friends with a girl across the street, Cheryl Wheeler. From age twelve to eighteen she ate most dinners there, at Cheryl’s house, with her family. When she turned fifteen Cheryl’s father hired her to work at his dental office cleaning on Friday nights and doing secretarial work on Saturdays. She saved what money she could and dreamed of escape.

As the years passed her father’s moods seemed to grow worse. They became poisonous snakes she had to jump over daily. He would pick on her. He would say cruel things to her. He would make fun of her weight or her appearance or her intelligence. One day he would blame her for what he considered “his failure of a life” and then he’d wake her in the middle of the night and tell her how smart she was, how the whole world was meaningless except for her.

He would forget her birthdays, and for Christmas he would buy her a wrong-size Snoopy sweatshirt, or a Frisbee, or a board game: Candy Land, Monopoly, or Risk. He would be excessively miserly and then for no reason or occasion would buy her an expensive gift, once a watch and another time earrings. Both of which she liked. None of it made sense; it just exhausted her.

And then two weeks before she left for college in Spokane, she came home from a shift at Shari’s restaurant to find a used Ford Focus in the driveway. Her father had saved two years for it. A car for her to drive to college. She would have student loans for seventeen years, but she had a car. Her whole life she felt both hatred and empathy for him, and in the end only an inescapable responsibility. A vague duty she couldn’t quite understand.

The day she left in her new car with her all belongings packed inside, he stayed on the cot in front of the TV saying nothing. After that day she would visit him, but never again did she stay more than a night there, and never once did she let him see inside her apartment or anyplace she ever lived.

Pauline parked at the hospital that afternoon and walked up the six flights of stairs to her floor. She put her coat and purse away and clocked in. In report the charge nurse told her two things: the girl, Jo, had snuck out in the middle of the night, and the old man, Mr. Flory, had finally gone home.

10

Pauline entered room 9 to find Leroy’s mother, Darla, sitting in the chair next to his bed, reading a novel to him.

“I’m sorry to interrupt,” Pauline told her.

Darla set the novel on her lap and took off her reading glasses. “You’re not interrupting,” she said tiredly. “I’d about had it anyway.”

“They say the surgery went well.”

Darla shrugged her shoulders. “That’s what they said.”

“What book are you reading him?”

“
The Light Seekers
.” She held up the faded science-fiction paperback .

“What’s it about?” Pauline asked and went to the computer and looked at Leroy’s chart.

“Do you want the short or the long version?”

“The long,” Pauline said and laughed. “I wouldn’t mind being in a sci-fi book for a minute or two.”

“Well, let me see. This one is set on a planet that has seven moons,” Darla said and eased back in her chair. “There’s a group of women, probably around twenty of them, who travel endlessly across the planet. They’re nomads. They hold five golden spears called light wells, and the light wells can find water, which is nearly nonexistent on the planet. When they get close to a pocket of water the golden spears glow. In the water are power crystals. The women eat the power crystals; it’s their only food. The problem is they’re always getting shot at by these creatures called Zybons. They’re aliens with fancy guns, and their only food is the women. Oh, and I forgot, the women are always bathing each other in the water they find. They’ve done it five times in less than three chapters.”

“Bathing women?”

“And all the women are gorgeous and are always kissing each other.”

“I bet was it written by some dumpy, middle-aged man.”

Darla laughed. “It was. I checked. At least it’s funny that way. I don’t even like science fiction, but Leroy loved it so much. This is an old book of his I found in a box of his things. Maybe it makes him happy somehow to hear it.”

“And he has a personal reader.”

“He does,” she said.

“That’s pretty lucky.”

“I’m not his first one. His girlfriend, Jeanette, used to read to him. My brother got Leroy into science fiction, and then Leroy got to know her because of it. They met at some science-fiction movie marathon when he was fifteen. He told me that all through high school she’d read novels to him at night, while they were on the phone together.”

“Really?”

“Sounds so boring,” Darla said.

“She must have really loved him,” Pauline said and finished looking through Leroy’s chart.

“They were crazy about each other. She’d come to our house for dinner three or four nights a week, and they’d have the weirdest conversations. All in science fiction; it was like they were from a different planet.”

“That’s funny.”

“To tell you the truth, I loved it. Those dinners were the best part of my day a lot of times. She’d help me cook, she’d cut out recipes and we’d make them together. Jeanette’s a great girl. You know she and I lived in an apartment together when Leroy first got hurt. Imagine having to live with your boyfriend’s mother. Leroy was in a military hospital in San Diego, and we moved down there together.”

“Were you there a long time?” Pauline said and checked his oxygen level and adjusted his tubing. She looked at the chest tubes for air leaks, and measured the fluid level on the canister on the floor beside his bed.

“A couple years,” Darla said. “We rented a one-bedroom apartment next to a freeway. It was an awful place, but the only place we could afford. I should never have brought her into that. Safeway transferred me to a store in Oceanside so at least I had work. She got a job, too. I worked nights and she worked days so someone could always be there with him. The whole time we just passed each other like zombies . . . I can start taking things pretty hard, but she always kept me from being like that. She always kept me from feeling sorry for myself.”

“It’s hard not to feel sorry for yourself when you spend all your time in a hospital worrying,” said Pauline.

“It’s been like one long nightmare really,” Darla said quietly. “From that first phone call saying Leroy was in a coma in a hospital in Germany to when they transferred him to San Diego. It’s all been awful . . . Then the doctors told us they thought Leroy would never make a full recovery. We didn’t believe them at first, but it had been over a year by then and he could barely feed himself. He could hardly walk. He couldn’t talk and could barely use the bathroom by himself . . . In the end I made Jeanette leave. I called her mother and told her to come get her. Was she supposed to spend the rest of her life taking care of a man who really didn’t exist anymore? A mother’s supposed to do that, but not a girlfriend. Her mother and I finally convinced her to leave. I guess maybe we forced her to. I was there another ten months, but nothing changed. I got homesick. It took a while but I was finally able to transfer him to the group home in Washington. And now I’m here.”

“Where’s Jeanette now?” asked Pauline.

“She lives outside of Seattle. She’s not married. She won’t tell me if she’s dating, but I hope she is. I know she has a good job and I’ve seen pictures of her apartment and it’s cute and in a nice neighborhood. She was mad at her mom and me for a while but she got over it. She calls me on Leroy’s birthday. Calls on Christmas and Thanksgiving and Easter. Even on Fourth of July. But we don’t see each other anymore. It’s too hard when we do. But we have the phone.”

“Does she know what’s happened?”

“No,” Darla whispered and looked at the floor. “I know I should call her but every time I try I can’t. Maybe I don’t have it in me to make those kind of calls anymore. Maybe I’m just worn out. She always wants me to call and tell her how Leroy is. Call if anything has changed either good or bad. But I never do. She doesn’t need to be constantly reminded of it. Maybe I’m wrong but I don’t think so. And if I tell her what’s happened now, she’ll just come here and spend all day and night with him and ruin her life again. I wish she’d just get married and have kids. She’d be free from it then. At least mostly. I worry about her like she’s my own daughter. You know we only have one rule when we do talk, and it’s that we can talk about everything except the military.”

“You know, I almost became an army nurse,” Pauline said as she began charting on the computer. “They pay off your student loans, and your starting pay is better than what I make now. But when I got out of school they had an opening here, and here doesn’t seem as bad as seeing all those soldiers get hurt.”

“I don’t even know how you do it here,” Darla said. “I break out into a cold sweat every time I just see this place.”

“Sometimes I do, too,” said Pauline and laughed. “Alright, I guess I better get back to it.”

“I’ll see you later,” Darla said and put on her reading glasses. She picked up the novel again, but was too tired and set it down. She leaned back in the chair, and closed her eyes.

The soldier with the painted face pulled the knife from Leroy’s chest. He wiped the blood from it on Leroy’s shirt and put it back in its sheath. He took a pistol from his holster. He cocked it and pressed it to Leroy’s forehead, but as he did Jeanette grabbed a lamp and swung it at the soldier’s head and hit him with all her strength. The soldier crashed to the ground unconscious. She rushed to Leroy and helped him to his feet as blood poured out of his chest. She led him to the kitchen. With a frying pan she broke out the large window above the sink, and glass spilled out onto the fire escape.

“I can’t make it,” he whispered.

“Of course you can make it.”

He leaned against the kitchen table in such pain he could hardly stand. “Go without me.”

“I’m not leaving without you,” Jeanette said and grabbed his arm and helped him onto the counter. She got him out the broken window and onto the fire escape. They climbed down four floors on rusted metal stairs. Leroy could barely walk by the time they got to the street, and blood leaked from his chest and poured out on to the ground. They stumbled toward the city. He leaned on Jeanette and she carried him along and dusk became night. They went until Leroy could no longer walk. Behind an abandoned car they hid and rested. For hours he slept on the dirt and asphalt. When he woke, Jeanette was holding him and running her hands through his hair and he felt no pain.

They began walking again, and he felt almost normal, like nothing was wrong or had ever been wrong. None of it made any sense. They passed a military shipyard where an aircraft carrier and a destroyer were being built. Beyond that was a large construction site where a series of military office buildings were being built. Beyond that was a new ten-story fitness and rehabilitation center. And then came block after block and story after story of new military housing.

They left the city along a two-lane road. Rain began to pour and caravans of military trucks passed them in long lines, their taillights glowing red and disappearing into the night. Leroy held on to Jeanette’s hand and for hours they continued along. They passed dozens of overturned cars on the side of the road and the remains of three derelict houses. They came to the top of a hill and saw, in the distance, a small coastal town.

They took a side road and the pavement turned to gravel and they headed toward the ocean. There were neither lights nor moon, but it was a road Leroy knew. They came to a log house set on the edge of the woods. Leroy unlocked the door and turned on the lights. The walls and floor inside were stained wood, rustic and plain. He lit a fire in the woodstove and went to the fridge and took two Rainier beers from it.

“I’ve always wanted a place like this,” Jeanette said.

“It was my uncle’s place,” said Leroy. “When I was a kid I used to spend weekends here.”

“And you even have beer,” Jeanette said happily as she warmed herself next to the fire.

“My uncle said it was bad luck to leave a fridge with no beer in it. He said it was lonely enough being a fridge, that the least you could do was leave beer so it would have something to look at and admire all day.”

Jeanette laughed and looked around the room. A loft was above them, and a bathroom in the corner. The main room was bare except for a couch, a desk, and an old table. The kitchen was plain and small, with shelves instead of cabinets. There was a sink, a stove, an oven, and a fridge. The walls were bare except for an old water-stained poster near the woodstove.

“Is that Norrin Radd?” she asked.

“You know the Silver Surfer?”

“I love Shalla-Bal.”

“You know Shalla-Bal?!”

“Of course,” she said. “I own the entire Silver Surfer collection.”

“Man oh man,” he said.

“Where did you get the poster?”

“One time my uncle and I drove to a comic-book convention. He had an old Pontiac LeMans and we drove it all the way to Vancouver, British Columbia, where the convention was. We spent three days there. On the last night we walked back from the convention to the motel, but when we got there his car wasn’t parked in the space in front of our room. Turns out somebody had stolen it. It was a car he bought when he got back from Vietnam. He’d had it almost twenty-five years. We called the police and filed a report, and then we went out looking for it ourselves. We spent hours going up and down all the neighborhoods we could walk to. My uncle said he knew we would never find her, but that at least we were suffering for her, at least we were grieving and trying to help her at the same time. My uncle had ideas and theories and superstitions about everything.

“Anyway, by the time we got back to the motel it was dawn and we went to sleep. We were woken hours later by the police telephoning. They hadn’t found the car but they had found a bunch of my uncle’s things. Whoever stole the LeMans threw everything from the car out on some guy’s lawn, and the guy was so mad he called the cops. The funny thing is we’d put all the posters and comic books and souvenirs we bought from the convention in the trunk in case our room got robbed.” Leroy laughed and took a drink off the beer. “But it rained during the night so most everything we’d bought from the convention was ruined. That’s why the poster looks like it does. My uncle had an old suitcase with jumper cables and flares and spare belts in it. The suitcase had his name, phone number, and address on it. That was on the lawn, too, and that’s what led the police to call us.”

“Did they ever find his car?”

“No, we had to take a bus back home. After that he bought a Plymouth Valiant, but the head gasket blew after a couple months. Then he got a white Ford pickup, which I still have. But it’s in storage.”

“In storage because you were going to join?”

“Yeah,” Leroy said.

“But you’re not going to join now?”

“No.”

“Are you sure? They’ll come after you.”

“I’m sure.”

“I’m sorry I got you into this.”

“You didn’t. You were just gonna make me breakfast. Anyway, we can stay here,” Leroy said. “They won’t find this place.”

“I’ve gotten you in serious trouble.”

“It’s alright. But can I ask you a question?”

“Of course.”

“How long have you had it?”

“The mark?”

Leroy nodded.

“A few years. Like I told you, my father made my mother and I go. We had to strip down naked, both my mother and me together, with my father there. My father and I never got along, not even when I was small. It was hard being in a room with him like that. I know it doesn’t sound like a big deal but it was. My mother and I both stood there for a long time and then a nurse and a soldier came in. The nurse gave us each the shot and then she left the room. The soldier stayed. We had to wait an hour and we couldn’t dress and it was cold in the room. When our time was over neither of us showed any signs so they gave us our release papers and our new ID cards that said we were okay. I moved out of the house a year later when I was eighteen and worked as a waitress.