The Tides (3 page)

But this person somehow reminded him of Faye, and he did not dare be reminded of Faye. He closed his eyes and put his hands over his ears. But without clear external visual or auditory stimuli, his own thoughts grew alarmingly louder, brighter, and more tangled, so he took his hands away and opened his eyes wide.

'It's okay, Dad,' Rebecca said, meaning to reassure. 'Abby, I really don't think Myra can'

'She has a right to express herself, too,' said the young lank-haired aide pushing Myra's wheelchair. Myra's eyes were opening in slits and her voice was lowering as she
saw the bold colors on the wall in front of her.

Bob stretched as high as he could and daubed an approximate circle at the juncture of wall and ceiling. It splattered upward, leaving a trail of tiny orange flecks. Rebecca grimaced. The woman with the Southern accent chuckled softly. 'Hadn't planned on repainting the ceiling, huh, boss?'

'There,' Bob shouted. 'There's your fucking stupid sun son-of-a-bitch,' and threw down the brush and stomped out of the building.

'Myra,' said Abby, taking pains to enunciate. 'Here's a brush and some red paint and a big white space in front of you. Paint something. Show us what you're feeling.'

'I am Cleopatra, Queen of Egypt,' Myra said conversationally.

'Well, here, Cleo.' Abby put the dripping brush into Myra's hand and closed her own fingers around it. 'I'll help.'

Myra looked at her with clear, wide blue eyes. 'You just take your hand away from me, girlie. You just stand there and listen and maybe you'll learn something.' Abby hesitated, then obediently backed away, grinning. Myra leaned so far forward that her long body was bent almost double like a closed safety pin over the restraint, and made a vertical red slash on the wall. Then, her tongue protruding a little and her other hand raised in a loose fist, she made another slash horizontally across the first, forming a rough and dramatic red cross.

She sat back, dropped the brush full of paint into her lap, and sank into her chair as if she had abruptly fallen asleep. 'My God,' breathed the woman with the Sout
hern accent. 'Here comes Paul.'

Two aides propelled a spastic young man toward the
group in the lounge. His chuffing noises might have signified excitement and might have signified distress and might have signified nothing in particular. Bulging eyes fixed on the mural, he grinned and drooled.

Rebecca stooped to ready the largest brush with yellow paint. Paul by now could hardly contain himself. He was whooping and twisting in the grasp of the aides, and one of them barely stopped him from shoving the laden brush into his mouth.

With one loud purposeful grunt he raised his brush back and fell with it against the wall. As he sank to the floor, his arm traced a jagged arc and a yellow streak like a bolt of lightning appeared across the mural. Abby and another aide caught him on the way down and eased him to a sitting position on the paint cloth; he was laughing in his odd breathless way, obviously not hurt and holding the brush aloft.

Many in the group applauded. To be polite, to avoid drawing attention to himself, Marshall clapped, too, although he saw nothing worth such praise. Rebecca hugged the young man. 'Perfect, Paul! That's perfect!'

Paul might have said, 'Yeah!'

Faye whispered to Marshall, 'We can do better than that, you and me,' and very softly blew into his ear.

Mortified to discover himself hardening for her, and to feel the extent of his terror, he cried out (he did not mean to say her name again, but nothing else would show his desire and his fear; maybe he didn't say her name). His daughter reached to hug him, and he held on. 'It is fun, isn't it, Dad? I'm glad you're here!'

Sometime later (or earlier, or in a different time sequence, or outside time altogether, or in memory, or in a kind of foretelling), Marshall found himself poised in front of a
mostly white wall. A wide paintbrush was in his hand, dripping white paint onto the thigh of his charcoal trousers.

Faye encircled his hand in both her small, soft, longnailed ones and laughed, in that delighted and malicious way that had always made him want to run from her at the same time that he would have done almost anything to cause her to laugh like that again, to smile at him like that, to show him he could still please her. 'Aren't we a team, Marshall, honey? Aren't we something?'

Faye raised his arm high above his head, higher than he could reach without standing precariously on tiptoe and bracing the heel of his other hand against the wall, which was sticky. A jagged yellow streak descended into - or, depending on your perspective, rose out of - the thick waves of white paint like the branch or the root of a tree, maybe dead, being covered or marooned by the rising or falling tide. He shouldn't be doing this.

Faye squealed, 'Ooo, this is
fun
!'
—
and shoved his arm up.

He tried to stop, but she was quicker and much more wi
l
lful than he was, and the yellow zigzag disappeared under thick, rivuleted white.

'Marshall, what in the world are you doing?' It was Billie. He knew right away that it was his wife Billie, and he was very glad she had come, but he also felt guilty, although he had forgotten what it was he had done wrong. 'Oh, for heaven's sake, look at your clothes!'

He looked, saw his good charcoal trousers, a burgundy shirt he thought must be new, and respectable black shoes, but no socks. Why was he not wearing socks? Marshall felt himself flush with shame. No wonder Billie was embarrassed. He suspected he embarrassed her a good deal these days, but he never seemed to be aware of it until it was too late. 'I'm sorry,' he said.

'Becky, for heaven's sake, just look at your father!'

'Is he okay?'

'Look at his trousers. Look at his brand-new shirt. A brand-new shirt, first time he's worn it.'

'How did he get into the paint? I thought Lisa put it all away in the cabinets in the activity room.'

'Why wasn't anybody watching him? That's why I had to put him here, because I couldn't watch him twenty-four hours a day, but I could watch him better than this.'

'Dad! You painted over the mural!'

Uncomprehending, Marshall stared. Then, to get away from all of them, Billie and Rebecca and Faye, he retreated a step. The back of his shirt and the seat of his trousers clung to the wet paint on the wall.

Chapter 2

As an early autumn sunset stretched and thinned the blue-gray light, Rebecca walked toward The Tides. She'd been at a meeting across town and could well have gone home afterward, but it was too early; there was nothing at home that wouldn't wait, including Kurt, and The Tides compelled her.

She'd parked her car in a lot several blocks over, so she could approach her nursing home on foot, see what it looked like from a distance, experience the feel of it as it gradually came closer, larger, more detailed. Her nursing home. Her facility. Even after three months as administrator of The Tides, she still thrilled to the phrase she finally had a right to use: my place.

People outside the business, to most of whom nursing homes were nothing but warehouses where the elderly and sick with nobody to take care of them went to die, didn't understand that. When she'd met Kurt she'd already been hooked, a geriatric social worker with ideas about revolutionizing the field, and once she'd started studying for her administrator's exam she'd hardly been able or willing to think of anything else. She'd tried to tell him stories about the residents to make him see how fascinating they were, but all he could see were their
illnesses and disabilities and losses, as if there was nothing else to them, and he'd just shudder or laugh and give some variation of the standard response: 'God, those places are
depressing
! And they stink! I don't know how you can stand it.' Kurt worked with children, where he said there was hope.

Rebecca's parents wouldn't understand, either; she didn't even try to explain her excitement and pleasure to them. 'I don't understand you,' her mother had been saying all Rebecca's life, sometimes in admiration, sometimes pity, sometimes out of some sort of fear. Billie Emig was spending a lot of time at The Tides since Rebecca's father had been admitted, but she made it plain that she loathed the necessity of having her husband there, and defended herself against the joy and tragedy and fun of the place as she'd always defended herself, by feeling both guilty and superior. And Rebecca didn't think her father had ever been much interested in anything, except, at times, her; senility hadn't changed that.

A lot of people in the business also didn't share her involvement, not to say obsession. They just worked there. Or they were investors, and maybe the rumors of greed and corruption at the ownership level were true. Dan Murphy, her boss, never objected to her plans for getting away from the medical model and creating a community at The Tides; he never acknowledged them, either. 'Census, babe,' was his refrain. 'The name of the game is census. Keep those beds full and everybody's fucking happy. Including me.'

She knew the assumption inside the company and out was that she and Dan Murphy were sleeping together, or at least that he had lecherous designs, and she still worried that this compromised her position. But, by reputation,
he'd slept with nurses' aides as well as Directors of Nursing, with housekeeping new-hires as well as Health Department surveyors who'd been around for decades.

He seemed to her less a predator or barterer than an opportunist, and she wondered about even that, for he was hardly, in any ordinary sense, an attractive man. Abrasive and impatient, crude, not easy to be around, certainly not easy to work for, he had eyes small enough, in a fleshy face, to be called beady, a reedy voice with almost no affect, clumpy orangish hair, a squat body that surely would make no heads turn.

What would it be like to have an affair with Dan Murphy? she wondered, but the fantasy wouldn't stick.

When he walked the halls of The Tides, many people didn't know who he was. But in a few deceptively casual minutes he would have learned which handrails were loose, what was causing the odor at the end of Wing 1, which rooms didn't have clean towels, which residents were ready for discharge, which staff were fucking up on the job and which were going above and beyond. Sometimes he would tell the administrator these things and sometimes he would keep them to himself until they could be used to greatest advantage.

She wanted to learn how to do that. She wanted to be that sure of something.

Rebecca didn't mind the business aspects of running a nursing home, and was confident that, once hospital discharge planners and doctors became familiar with the innovative programs she intended to develop at The Tides, she could, in fact, fill the empty beds and keep them full. She'd already started trying out some of her ideas for humanizing the institution, such as the mural on the lounge wall
—
Lisa had managed to persuade all the
painters but the surly Bob Morley to redo their work after Rebecca's father had painted over it, and Bob's sun had been high enough to escape most of the whitewash anyway.

Walking along Hammond Street toward Elm, Rebecca laughed wryly to herself. But thinking of her father, open-mouthed and utterly baffled as though he didn't know the incriminating brush in his hand was still oozing globs of white paint, while her mother castigated him and Rebecca and the rest of the staff and fate in general for the of his clothes, thinking of her own outrage that her inaugural project had been sabotaged by her father, who hadn't meant to, she felt sorrow and an odd sense of profound vertigo, but it wasn't as hard as it should have been to set them aside, to set her father aside.

As she turned onto Elm Street and started down the hill, she caught her first glimpse of The Tides, a thin darker line across the
faux
horizon created by the lower empty field behind it, and a proprietary satisfaction pumped through her like air into an otherwise formless balloon. She found herself thinking that maybe, because of The Tides, she'd have some idea who she was by the time she was thirty.

The Tides was a long, low, blond brick building with a flat roof - which, because of its lack of a slope, leaked - and a covered concrete porch along the front face that extended almost seamlessly into the parking lot. It sat on the east edge of a vacant bowl-shaped space, huge by the standards of the suburb surrounding it. Here, when the facility was built, had been the lake which had given it its somewhat fanciful name; Rebecca couldn't quite believe that this body of water had ever really had tides.

She also found it hard to imagine how anyone could have been so foolish as
to build a nursing home on the
shore of a lake, however shallow, however placid. Indeed, the lake hadn't lasted long. She didn't know whether the Health Department had insisted it be drained and filled in, for obvious health and safety reasons, or whether someone in the complex of ownership and management had made an independent commonsense decision, but Dan Murphy had told her the land behind the facility had been empty since before he'd owned it, which was seventeen years. After snow or rain, there was sometimes standing water, which she didn't much like, but most of the time the weedy bowl just collected trash; she didn't like that, either, but it didn't seem to require the immediate intervention that so many other aspects of The Tides' physical plant did.