The Story Until Now: A Great Big Book of Stories (60 page)

Something is shimmering out there.
I am coming for you.

“Who killed Vic?”

Jane murmurs, “I wish he’d stop.”

Rosie’s theme music makes a cheerful sound in the room. The ambiance is cheerful, and so is Gram. Although massed shadows roll down the halls like thunderclouds before a terrible storm, the room is bright. There are stuffed animals the great-grandchildren gave, marine blue curtains to match the nice comforter and ruffled bolster that Mom bought when they moved Gram out of the house she couldn’t keep. Her hospital bed has a dust ruffle just like a little girl’s. Books she can’t read any more line the little bookshelf like the ghosts of old friends. Family photos stand on the top in Plexiglas frames. Gram with Mom and Jane and the others in Gram’s better days. She looks so pretty! Like somebody else. You wouldn’t know her if it wasn’t for the smile that travels from one snapshot into the next into the studio portrait made on her 80th birthday, into this room and onto the face of the wraith in the recliner chair. There isn’t much left but the smile.

It’s enough, or it would be except for the scary business in the halls. What is it, exactly, that makes Jane anxious today, and fearful for Gram?

It could be nothing, she thinks, as across the hall the old man accuses the world at large: “You know who killed Vic. Who was it? Was it you?”

“Who’s Vic?” she says to Gram.

The old lady turns sweet, empty eyes on her. “Who?”

“The old man across the hall says somebody got murdered.” She shouldn’t be talking about this but it’s better than what she really wants to say:
Don’t you ever want to get out of here, Grammy? Are you happy or sometimes do you think you want to die?
Disturbed, she finishes, “This guy Vic.”

“Oh,” Gram says, blinking the way she does when she doesn’t have the foggiest, which is all the time now. “Vic,” she says with that midrange pleasant smile that means nothing. It is nothing like the welcoming blaze when Jane enters the room but it’s the best she can do. Lips like a shriveled rosebud, with that genteel, vacant tone. “Of course,” Gram says without knowing what she’s saying. “Vic.”

“Who was he, Gram? Was Vic his son and did you meet him, do you know?”
What did the nurses say?
He has a family. They used to come. Now nobody comes and the checks come straight from the bank.

“Who?”

“Vic!” She doesn’t want to scare her grandmother but she does want an answer.

Bemused, the old lady murmurs because it’s expected, “Poor Vic. Oh look, Janie, look what Rosie’s doing now.”

It’s useless to ask her but Gram’s the only person she can ask. “What happened to him, Gram?”

What happened to me? Wife I had before I went away, two boys I had, Timmy and little, did we name one of them Vic My friend Angus had little girls, he was the first over the top and I promised to follow but his belly blew up in a fountain of fire and blood
Pull me back
he was begging would he not have died? I couldn’t, not with that hole in the belly, guts blooming, twitching wet parts of him slithering into my arms it’s not my fault he went first dead like my point man and when I try to sleep they blossom all over again they found his penis in the dirt next to my face keep your head down men …

In the building now, and coming down the hall.
It’s nothing you did in the war.

“Somebody killed Vic and you know it …”

“Oh God.” Jane groans. “What if this is the wrong place?”

“It’s so sweet,” Gram says, “Rosie bringing up her own baby all by herself.”

“You have to move out of this place,” Jane says wildly. Is she trying to get the old lady out of this room for the afternoon or for good? She doesn’t know. The old soldier’s voice rises and she shouts to cover the sound, “It’s not out of the question.”

“Rosie’s just a wonderful mother, just like Oprah and those wonderful people in
The Partridge Family
… “

She grabs Gram’s shoulders. “What if something happened to you?”

“And that nice girl who took care of the Trapp children, they are an inspiration for us all.” This is a lot for Gram to say at one time but she is all worked up now. Her lips are trembling and her eyes glisten with approval. “It’s fine mothers like them and that lovely Ma Walton who make America great.”

Jane tries, she tries! “I don’t think Oprah has any children, Gram.”

At least Gram has a nice family, unlike that poor bastard across the hall. Who will not stop shouting, “No. He didn’t kill Vic. You know he didn’t and you know who did.”

“Oh, shut up.”

Gram gasps.

“No no, Gram. Not you!”

“And I know it too.” Querulous. “Did you kill Vic?”

“I didn’t kill anybody, Janie, I didn’t.” Gram’s face shrinks like crepe paper; she’s about to cry.

“Shh. Shh, Gram. Don’t worry about him, really.”

“Who?”

“You know. You do! He’s just a crazy old man.”

But Gram’s face is working. She’s caught on an old memory that won’t surface. She can’t tell Jane what it is but Jane can see from her face that it hurts. There is something buried back there unless something is happening to her in the room right now. Whatever it is, it hurts. Gram’s lap robe falls away and she sees her grandmother’s feet are cased in plastic lined with sheepskin. Why?
Oh, Gram.

Meanwhile the old man rails, “Did you kill him?”

If he would only stop
shouting.

“Did you?”

Jane rises to close the door.

“Why, no.” Gram is terribly upset. “Of course not. No.”

But the doors in this place are jiggered so they won’t really close. Regulations, Jane thinks. Health care centers have to come up to code. She soothes her grandmother with bits of blueberry muffin. The old lady chews and chews but when she spreads her mouth in a new smile, the bits of blueberry muffin are still there.

Suddenly the old man’s tone changes. “Why, you didn’t kill Vic, you tried to save him.”

Uneasy, Jane glances at her grandmother, but Gram is fixed on the television now. She smiles on as though she doesn’t hear.

“But he died anyway!”

“Oh, look, Gram.” Jane warbles. Her voice is shaking. It sounds sweet and false. “Look at Rosie.”

“Do you want to know who killed Vic? Do you?”

“Isn’t that a pretty red shirt?”

Anguished, the old man finishes. “I killed Vic.”

“My God.” Jane shoots a look at her grandmother. Did she hear? Is she afraid?

I didn’t kill Angus and I didn’t kill my point man, I got a citation for what I did, the Purple Heart and a Bronze Star but it was shit because I couldn’t get
an erection and I couldn’t get a job. I was shit and my life was shit and I hated them, because before the war ever happened it already was. Alana left me for that Hunky refugee and took the kids but I showed her, I did, I showed them all.

All except me.

“I know who killed Vic,” the old man cries.

“Pretty red shirt. Your mother ought to wear red,” Gram says. “It would take people’s minds off the wrinkles and the fat.”

“Gram!”

Gram goes on in the unruffled tone she uses when Mom cracks during one of these lectures and starts to yell. Just when you love her best she gets a little mean and you remember she always was. “If only she’d get herself up nice, like my girls Rosie and Oprah do.”

From across the hall, the news comes in on a sob. “I killed Vic.”

“They’re just television, Gram.” What if the old man really is a murderer?

“Lose her looks and she’ll lose her handsome man and then what will she do?”

“Mom looks fine.” What if he kills Gram?

“Aaaaaahhh.” His throat opens in grief. “Aaaaaah.”

“Shh,” Jane murmurs, “please don’t.”

And with that brilliant smile that lights up Palmshine, Gram burbles, “Poor Vic.”

“Shh, don’t worry. It’s just crazy talk, Gram.”

Nothing to worry about, Jane tells herself. Veteran, Congressional Medal of Honor or something, all that. Even if he could walk, what would he use? No scissors and no razors allowed here, plastic silverware.

But Jane worries. She’s worried ever since they moved Gram. In a play she knows, street cleaners came for you with rolling garbage cans. You heard the tin whistle just before they took you away. In one story, it’s the Dark Men who come. They live in the mortuary and work by night. When they finish with you, you are another store dummy in the window at Wanamaker’s, and nobody knows. What if evil really is out there, not things you are afraid of, but something real? What if the doctors are ranching organs and selling them by night? What if some Svengali in white tries to bilk Gram out of her money and starts pinching when she says no? Secret beatings and spiteful bruisings go on in places like this, sexual abuse and worse. Anything can happen when you’re old and frail and can’t get out of your chair. Should she stay here and protect Gram? But Jane has a life and a day job. She can’t sleep at the foot of Gram’s
bed every night, even though Gram’s so small now that there’s plenty of room. Besides, Mom researched. Palmshine is run by staunch Methodists with big dependable feet, good, kind Methodist faces, and capable Methodist hands. Palmshine is the best of its kind, Mom researched it. It says so right there in
Consumer Reports.

Then why is she so upset?

Mostly, it’s the shouting. “Who killed Vic?”

“Look, Gram,” Jane says, pointing to a branch outside the window. “Look at the pretty bird.”

Gram turns her head obediently. She looks right at it but does not see. “Pretty,” she says with that lovely, undiscriminating smile.

In the next second she’s asleep. It happens. Jane’s used to it. She’s also pledged to stay until six. If she’s not here when Gram wakes up—if she doesn’t stay until the supper tray comes—“Oh look, Gram, it’s lovely Sunday dinner, turkey and apple crisp, again” her grandmother won’t eat. If she doesn’t stay her grandmother will wake up alone in her pretty room on a Sunday night and start to cry.

Nobody can stand living with the dead I know that stink of decay, when they pull back the robe to wash me I see in their faces how it smells, well stick your face in it put your hands into it and inhale, take me the way I am if I can’t stand it how can you so wallow in your own stink and stay the fuck away I don’t want you but I won’t let go until I get my revenge on you God damn you, it’s all your fault unless it was Alana’s, she was gone and the boys were gone when I got back so it’s her fault unless Angus started it, why didn’t you just say no, unless it was the Lieutenant for putting me in charge or those candymouthed shitfaced sons I had with their greedy shiteating smiles you can all just go to hell and stay there and leave me alone and I’ll stay here

Let me in.

As long as Gram keeps smiling, Jane can handle it. She can live with the shadows and the shouting, but Gram isn’t in right now. Jane is alone with it.

“You didn’t kill Vic.”

“Oh, stop it.” She turns up the
TV
.

The puchline rolls in. “I killed Vic,” he cries again. Again.

Trembling, Jane pats the air above Gram, she apologizes to Rosie—are these shows on a loop? Spilling into these cheery rooms even on Sundays when real
TV
is showing something else? “I’ll be right back,” she says, and even though at Gram’s age sleep is tenuous and leaving her is risky, she slips into the hall.

“Do you know who killed Vic?” The old man’s shout meets her at the door. “Do you?”

“Stop it.” She slams into his room. “Just stop it!”

“What?” His head turns at the sound. “What?” he shouts, glaring at nothing. His mouth is a furnace fueled by hatred. “Go away!”

But Jane is angry now. “I’m not going anywhere until you shut up.”

“It’s you.” For a moment his voice softens. “Is it really you?”

“Who do you think I am?”

Something changes. “Thank God you’ve come.”

A part of Jane knows you shouldn’t walk into things you don’t know about, but it’s too late. Besides, the shadows are massing outside the door and if she stands here long enough they will come rolling in. Something is out there waiting, whether for her or for Gram or for this old veteran, she does not know. There is more at issue here than Jane’s sanity or her grandmother’s comfort and safety. The trouble—and this is what strikes her dumb and leaves her cracked open, vulnerable and waiting—is that she can’t say what. Because the old soldier’s tone has changed she says gently, “Just be quiet now,
OK
?”

“And now that I have you here. It’s Anzio, don’t you see?” He clears his throat like a lecturer about to start. “Tobruk.” Big voice for a man in his what, eighties, nineties. The old veteran looks well and handsome, considering—flowing white hair, square jaw, sharp brow, knife-blade nose.

“You’re hurting people out there. That’s all.”

“Don’t you see what I’m talking about?”

“That’s enough!”

“Stand still, Alana. Don’t you dare walk out while I’m talking to you! Bizerte, don’t you get it? Monte Cassino. Normandy. Tobruk.”