The Tides (15 page)

'Are you mad at me?'

'Not everything in the world revolves around you, Alex, you know.' Why was she talking to him like this? Worse, why was it fun? She dribbled lotion onto his skin before it

had had time to warm up against her own. He didn't move, and she reminded herself resentfully that he couldn't even feel the cold lotion or her hands in the crevices of his body. She didn't know why she should be mad about that, but she was.

'Abby, Abby, you're in such a hurry. You're not taking time with me.'

'I don't have time, Alex. I have a whole floor of people to take care of, and you're not even in my group.' You're in Larry's group, she thought but did not say. He was, after all, a patient.

'Well, you're not doing anything right.'

Before she had time to realize what she was doing, Abby had slapped him hard across the face. The lotion on her hand left sticky white streaks on his check. He didn't move. He lay naked in front of her, his green eyes narrowed and his tongue protruding slightly between his teeth. She stared at him in horror as his penis hardened and rose.

At the very stroke of eight, a tall balding man in a gray suit and gray tie found Rebecca serving trays in the dining room and introduced himself as Ernest Lindgren, Administrative Specialist, State Department of Health, flashing his state ID. Rebecca finished her last table and led him to her office, trying to decide when and whether to tell him about Larry. Unless that was why he was there
—
but it didn't seem likely that things would have moved that fast.

'We've been expecting you,' she said, because that was what she'd rehearsed to use when the Health Department showed up, wondering too late whether it was a politic thing to say. 'Here's all the documentation about the oven-cleaner incident.' To her own ears, the term 'incident' sounded euphemistic, even cavalier.

Lindgren did not accept the folder, and Rebecca felt something akin to socially awkward as she laid it back down on her desk. He consulted his notes, although she had the impression he would not have needed to. 'I'll get to that. But I am primarily here to investigate a series of other complaints.'

'Complaints?' Rebecca echoed. Her knees weakened and she held onto the edge of the desk as she sank into her chair.

'On September fifteen two residents reportedly had some sort of altercation in the dining room.'

'Oh yes.' Gordon Marek and Cardenio Martinez, but she didn't tell the man from the Health Department their names. Doubtless he already knew. There was an argument over who would sit where. Not an uncommon conflict when people don't have much that belongs to them anymore.

'Later that same month, on the twentieth, a resident allegedly threw a cup of hot coffee at a staff member.'

'That was me.' Rebecca couldn't help chuckling, had to consciously stop the laughter before it veered into nervous giggles. 'We have a lady here who believes she owns the place. That's who she is, The Owner. When I tried to get her into her room for a fire drill, she threw her coffee at me. She missed, by the way.'

'That kind of behavior is unacceptable in a setting like this.'

'What would you recommend?'

'Discharge her.'

'She's been here over ten years. This is her home.'

'Allegedly there have also been several incidents of residents using foul language against staff.'

She blinked. 'Occasionally people become angry, yes.

Even at staff. Maybe it's a way of retaining some sense of self, of resisting the effects of institutionalization.'

'You are taking a risk whenever you encourage the expression of strong emotion.'

'Yes,' said Rebecca, giving up, 'we are taking a risk.'

'The complaint alleges that you have alcoholic patients who actively drink despite doctors' orders to the contrary.'

'None of them has ever been declared legally incompetent, so we have no right to control what they do with their money. To my knowledge they've never been really abusive, except that now and then Gordon Marek likes to play the piano at three in the morning.' She smiled, recognized her need to relocate the little markers of normal life at The Tides.

Florence burst into the office without knocking and stopped short at the sight of the investigator. Breathless, her usually ruddy face florid, the aide announced, 'Sorry, Rebecca, but Mickey just went through the window!'

To her chagrin, Rebecca's first reaction was to glance at Lindgren, who had turned sharply in his chair to look up at the flustered aide. 'A new resident,' Rebecca explained hurriedly to him.

'Schipp,' he said, without consulting his notes. 'Admitted directly from the State Hospital.'

Rebecca ushered Florence out of the office, firmly shutting the door behind her. Unsure whether there could be conversations about nursing-home business kept private from a Health Department official, she half-expected Lindgren to come out and join them, but he didn't. 'What happened?' she asked Florence.

'Nobody knows. He was on his bed asleep last time I checked. Next thing we knew he'd gone out the window.'

'Is he hurt?'

'Not a scratch. We've got him restrained in bed now and he's putting up quite a fuss. Diane's afraid he's fixing to have a seizure. He's seeing things too. Says some woman's trying to get inside him. Says this place is possessed.'

'Ask Diane to request that the doctor review his meds, would you? He's probably been on the same ones for years.' Florence nodded, glanced at the closed office door, and went off down the hall.

Reluctantly, fighting her impulse to rush to the scene of any crisis anywhere in the facility, even though she knew she was often only in the way, Rebecca went back into her office. Lindgren wasn't there. Stretching across the desk as she rounded it to sit down, not needing to look up the number or to see the phone while she punched it in, she dolled the Mental Health Center and was put on hold before she could cut in. A page came for her to take another line. She was afraid to lose her connection to Mental Health; sometimes you could get a busy signal for an hour. But she was still on hold when Sandy repeated the page, so she switched to line 2.

A creditor. Finding the file for his company in the correct spot in her file cabinet, correctly labeled and arranged in approximate chronological order, afforded her considerably greater satisfaction than it warranted, until she saw the light for line I go out.

Meanwhile, Mickey Schipp
bellowed and did his best to fight off the voice, the tongue, the teeth and pointed nails. Tied down, there wasn't much he could do; there really never had been. But the creature that had been trying to choke him this time, in this place, by filling him with itself so there was no room left for him, had eased up, and abruptly Mickey slept.

In the room where Viviana Pierce lay dying, her son and
grandson, keeping vigil, both thought they saw something drift around her. The grandson wondered with a chill whether he was seeing his grandmother's soul leave her body. But the phenomenon was so subtle neither spoke of it to the other.

Viviana stirred, gave a soft moan. Her grandson brought ice chips in a thin cloth to her lips again, all he knew to do; her lips parted. Her son murmured, 'Ma?' His mother didn't answer, nor had he expected her to.

Viviana was aware of certain sensations: cool dampness between her lips, murmuring, the fragrance of roses, sunlight glimmer, music from the bedside radio and noise from the hall, hunger and thirst and loneliness and an utter lack of desire to satisfy any of them, all in the middle distance and receding. More immediately, she was aware of the presence insinuating itself into the spaces that emerged in her as she approached death. It seemed no more strange than dying itself, or than still being alive. It nudged to get in. It made promises and threats.

The longer she'd lived, the surer Viviana had been of who she was. She knew now, too: a woman dying. Almost, she absorbed the thing that was trying to absorb her, almost she took it with her, but it pulled free.

The Administrative Specialist came back into Rebecca's office, red-faced and gesticulating. Still on the phone, Rebecca had just talked at some length about Mickey Schipp to somebody at Mental Health, and she held up a restraining hand in Lindgren's direction as someone else came on the line. He scowled and took his seat again. She hoped she hadn't seemed insolent. More than that, she wished he wouldn't sit there listening. But a harried voice was at last saying, 'Intake,' and she couldn't miss this chance. Rebecca identified herself again
and again outlined the situation. 'I'll need to have that intake worker call you back.'

Rebecca rested her forehead in her hand. 'Aren't you intake?'

'I deal only with the first half of the alphabet.'

'This is an emergency,' Rebecca pointed out helplessly, gave her name and number and hung up.

'It really is not acceptable to have a public restroom in that condition,' Lindgren said to her at once.

Thinking Gordon might have sprayed the wall again or the housekeepers might not have cleaned the toilet well enough, Rebecca felt herself redden. She ha
lf
-rose. 'I'll get somebody on it'

'First I'll need your policies and procedures book, and a place where I can work in some peace and quiet.'

She didn't say how unlikely that was around here. She showed him to-the staff lounge, closed the door behind him, and went in search of a mop and cleaner to clean the worst of the offending restroom herself.

Her dad, weeping, was just then faltering in the front door, his walker like the cage a tomato plant might lean on, but tipped and wobbling. Hands full of cleaning supplies, bucket clumsy over her arm, Rebecca backed out of the utility closet and called to him. 'Dad? What's wrong? How was your trip?'

'I got lost,' he told her plaintively. His voice and body quavered. His spine scarcely supported him. He still didn't know where he was. But now he was with his daughter and to he must be all right (once their being together had signalled that everything was all right for her). He didn't-know who this young woman was, but she was someone familiar, someone important to him, so that was all right (he wanted it to be all right, but he was
co
gnizant of the fact that perceptions could be altered by innumerable internal and external factors and that his might well be being altered at this moment without his knowledge or permission, most likely by Faye). People pushed to get past him. He stood his ground. This girl was a stranger, wanting something from him he didn't dare give, and he recoiled. Rebecca was right beside him, but she was his daughter and he shouldn't be depending on her. Marshall pitied the man who'd been lost and who was still so scared of being lost. 'I didn't know where I was.'

Alarmed, thinking he must have wandered away from the group, Rebecca looked at Colleen, who shook her head. 'He was right with us the whole time,' she said brightly. 'He was just fine.'

'You weren't lost, Dad,' Rebecca assured him. 'We all knew where you were.'

'I'm sorry. I'm sorry, Becky. I got lost.'

'You weren't lost, Dad,' she repeated. Marshall knew full well he deserved the rebuke. 'You were on an outing with other people from this facility, this nursing home, where you live. You went for a bus ride to the mountains. Everybody knew where you were. You weren't lost.'

'I didn't know where I was, young lady. Why wasn't I told?'

Rebecca set the disinfectant and cloths on the nurses'-station counter and reached to button up his shirt, wondering how long it had been open like that, wondering if it ought to matter to her since it obviously didn't matter to him. The fact that he'd always taken pains with his appearance was often given both as rationale for paying attention to it now in his stead and as tragic evidence of how he was no longer himself. But he
was
himself, here

and now: a man who didn't care whether his shirt was buttoned right or not.

He flinched and drew back, then saw what she was doing and allowed it, even smiled. 'Mom's coming for lunch today,' she told him cheerily. 'It's eleven o'clock now, so she'll be here in an hour or so.'

'Who? Mom? My mother?' Eagerly he glanced from one side to the other in an ar
c
constrained as much by limited imagination as by muscle constriction or vertigo.

'My mother. Billie.' It was hard to call her parents by their names. When he still looked blank, she tried, 'Your wife.'

His face stiffened and his knuckles whitened on the bars of the walker. 'Here? Where? My wife, you say? Where is she? What is her business here?'

'She'll be here in about an hour to have lunch with you, Dad.' Rebecca was ashamed of her own impatience, but Sandy had paged her for another call, hopefully Mental Health intake, who wouldn't wait long. 'Go with Colleen down to your room now so Mom will know where to find you.' She patted his arm and turned away, ashamed, then, of the patronizing tone used to mask and make up for the fact that she didn't want to talk to her father anymore.

She went around the counter to pick up the phone and was relieved to hear someone with whom she'd had at least cursory contact before. Rummaging for Mickey's chart - out of place because it had been in such recent and hurried use - she described the situation again, listening to Mickey's renewed shouts now every minute or so. 'I'd like you to look at his meds.'

'I'm sure he's organic. Not amenable to treatment.'