What You Have Left: The Turner Trilogy (5 page)

“I’ve only got two of the rooms really habitable so far,” Val said as we entered, through the entryway into a small living room that, when the house was built, would have been used only on holidays and formal occasions. Now it sported a narrow bed, a rocking chair, a table doing triple work as desk, eating space and storage area. An antique wardrobe sat in one corner, drawers on the left in use even as the right side went on being stripped of multiple layers of varnish and paint, down to fine wood beneath. Sandpaper, a shallow dish and rags lay atop it.

On the wall by the table hung a gourd banjo. I ran my thumb across the strings, surprised to find they weren’t steel but soft, like a classical guitar’s.

“You really are into this.”

“I guess I am.”

She lifted down the banjo and, sitting, balanced it on her lap. Plucked a string or two, twisted pegs. Then started playing, back of the nail on her second finger striking a melody note then brushing other strings as the thumb popped on and off that short fifth string. “Soldier’s Joy.” Abruptly she stopped, putting the instrument back in place.

“Would you like tea?”

“Love it.”

We went through a double doorway without doors into the kitchen.

“Here’s my real bona fide as a southerner,” she said.

While even the living room had about it an element of improvisation, camping out or making do, the kitchen was fully equipped, pots and provisions set out on shelves, towels on drying racks, dishes stacked in cupboards, knife block on the counter by the stove. We sat at a battered wooden table waiting for water to boil.

“Funny thing is,” Val said, “I
wasn’t
into this, not at all, not for a long time. As a kid I couldn’t wait to get away.”

“You grow up around here?”

“Kentucky. Not a spit’s worth of difference. When I left for college, I swore that was it, I’d never look back. And I’d absolutely never ever
go
back. Took the two JCPenney dresses I’d worked as a waitress to buy, and some books I’d kind of forgotten to return to the library, and settled into a dorm room at Tulane. It was 1975. My Texas roommate’s debut had been attended by hundreds of people. She used most of my closet space in addition to her own—I didn’t need it. And those dresses looked as out of place, as anachronistic, as a gardenia in my hair.”

Val poured water into round teapot.

“I was smart. That was one of two or three ways out of there. Tulane was full of rich East Coast kids who couldn’t get into Ivy League schools and poor southerners on scholarship. I lost the dresses first, the accent not long after. Most any social situation, I discovered, all you had to do was keep quiet and watch those around you. Sugar? Lemon or milk?”

I shook my head.

“By the second year you couldn’t pick me out of the crowd. ‘Wearing camo,’ as a friend of mine put it. I finished near the top of my class, went to Baltimore as a junior partner, very junior, in a group practice.”

She set a mug before me, thoughtfully turned so the chip on its lip faced away.

“I don’t usually prattle on like this.”

“Not a problem.”

“Good.” Settling back at the table, she sipped her tea. “I was up there for four years—dancing with the one who brung me, as my father would say. I liked Baltimore, the firm, liked the work. And I was good at it.”

“What changed?”

“Nothing. Something. Me?” She smiled. “I wanted to, anyway. Do we ever, really?”

“Change?”

Nodding.

“If we don’t—if we can’t—nothing else makes much sense, does it?”

She half-stood to pour us more tea. Close by, just past the window, an owl hooted.

“You’re not a cop, are you?”

“Not for a long time. I was.”

She waited, and after a moment I told her the basics.

“Another Cliff Notes life.”

“What?”

“Those pamphlets on great books that students read instead of the books themselves. A lot of us experience our lives that way. Sum up who we are and what we’re about as a few broad strokes, then do our best to cleave to it. All the good stuff, the small things and distinctions that make the rest worthwhile—Sunday mornings sitting over coffee and the paper, taste of bread fresh from the oven, the feel of wind on your skin, sensing the one you love there beside you—all these get pushed aside. Unnoticed, lost.”

“If we let them.”

“If we let them, right. And as much as anything else, that’s why I’m here.”

Dark had become absolute. Far off, frogs called. Their cries bounced across the pond behind the house, amplified by the water as though it were in fact the metal dish that moonlight made it appear. Moths beat at the window beside us, and at the kitchen’s screen door.

“I drew my weapon three times,” I said. God knows why I told her this. “And each time someone died. The second time, it was raining, I remember. His blood was running down the street. I was in the street too, with his head in my lap. And all the time I kept thinking: My kids are home waiting for me.”

“Kids?”

“A boy and a girl. They grew up without me, have their own lives now. Probably for the best. . . . Thing is, there in the street, in some strange way I was closer to that stranger as he died, this man I’d shot, than I’ve ever been to anyone else my whole life.”

For some time she was silent. We both were.

“I don’t know what to say.”

“You don’t have to say anything.”

“Suddenly everything in my life seems so small.”

“Our lives
are
small.”

She nodded. “They are, aren’t they?”

I followed her outside, onto the porch.

“Don’t suppose you’re hungry?”

“Not really.”

“Seems I always am. Buy popcorn by the case, eat carrot sticks till I start turning orange myself and have to stop, chew celery till my teeth hurt.”

We stood looking up at the sky.

“What about the third time?” she said.

“That I drew my weapon.”

“Yes.”

“That time, it was my own partner.”

“Oh.”

“There’s a lot more to it,” I said.

“There would be.” She looked off into the trees. “Listen.”

I did, and for this one perfect moment silence enveloped us, absolute silence, silence of a kind most of the world and its people have forgotten. Then the frogs started up again and from miles away the hum of cars and trucks on an interstate reached us.

Chapter Eight

A YEAR OR SO
into playing detective, I pulled the chit on a missing-persons case. Rightfully it should have gone to Banks, who was senior and next up. But Banks was actively pursuing leads, the Lieutenant told me, on a series of abductions and rapes at local private schools. Would I mind.

A patient had disappeared from an extended-care facility. Patricia Pope, nineteen years old. She’d been out with friends celebrating her birthday with slabs of pizza and pitchers of Co’Cola. As they ferried home around eight in the evening, a drunk driver smashed head-on into their car. He’d been drinking since he got off work at five and somehow had entered the new interstate by an exit ramp. The other four in the car were killed. Patricia, riding in the front passenger seat, went through the windshield and onto the hood of the drunk’s F-150. She’d received acute care in Baptist Hospital’s ER, from there had been moved up to neuro ICU for several days where a shunt in her head dripped fluid into a graduated cylinder, then onto a general ward, finally to a separate, step-down facility. She made no acknowledgment when spoken to, reacted but slightly to pain. (In ER they pinched nipples and twisted. Upstairs, kinder and gentler, they poked pins about feet, ankles, forearms, torso.) Her hands had begun curling in upon themselves, first in a series of contractures pitching muscle against bone. Eyes rolled left to right continually. She was incontinent, provided nutrients through a tube that had to be reintroduced with each feeding. Caretakers threaded these tubes down her nose, blew in air through a syringe and listened with a stethoscope to be certain the tube was in her stomach.

The incident occurred on April 3. Patricia had been relocated to the EC facility on April 20. When oncoming nurses went in to check patients early in their shift on the morning of June 17, Patricia was absent from her bed. That was the way the administrator put it when he called. Absent from her bed. Like it was summer camp. The call came in at 7:06. Half an hour later, 7:38 by the brass-and-walnut clock on the wall, I was sitting in the administrator’s office with a cup of venomous coffee in hand watching said administrator, Daniel Covici, MBA, CEO, rub a thumb against the burnished surface of his desk. It was the facility’s desk, of course, but I had no doubt he thought of it as his own.

Most investigations are little more than paint by the numbers. You ask a string of questions in the proper order, when they don’t get answered you ask them again, sooner or later you find your way to the husband or wife, spurned boy-or girlfriend, business partner, parent, younger brother, gardener, eccentric uncle, jealous neighbor. This was no different. Within the hour, down in the Human Resources basement office looking over a list of recent terminations, I came across the name of an orderly who had quit without prior notice at the end of his shift on June 16, saying simply that he was going on to another, better job. He’d been with the hospital sixteen years. Douglas Lynds. Address out by what was at that time Southwestern, a tiny freestanding wooden house.

From the street I caught glimpses of the university’s Gothic spires and buttresses among the trees. The house sat ten or twelve yards back, though the frontage could scarcely be called a yard. Traces of old foundation showed, like teeth rotted to gum level. Probably there had once been a stand of such structures, housing for graduate students maybe, of which only the one remained. It was in immaculate condition, however, freshly painted pristine white, window frames and trim a light, minty green.

Things were a lot looser those days. When I didn’t get a response to my knock, I went around back, knocked again there, then shimmed the kitchen door. If it ever came to it, I’d just say the door was ajar, I heard sounds inside, suspected intruders.

Three rooms. Kitchen with counters and stove immaculate, bath just off it to the right, living room straight ahead, bedroom to the left. That’s where I found her. She was propped up with pillows, dressed in a pale pink nightgown with small blue flowers at neck and hem and larger blue flowers for buttons. Her hair, clean and bright, lay on the pillow, framing a face wherein eyes rolled left, right, left. Mucus ran out of one nostril and snailed towards the slack mouth.

“Please don’t hurt her,” a voice said behind me.

I told him I wouldn’t, told him who I was.

“I’ve been out shopping. I never leave her alone any more than I have to.” He put the bag of groceries on the floor by the door. “She needs changing. All right if I do that?”

Yes.

Going to the bed, he unbuttoned the nightgown and unpinned the towel doing service as diaper. The strong chemical smell of her feces spilled into the room. He took the diaper into the bathroom, to a covered pail there. He ran water till it was warm, and wet a facecloth. Brought it out and, holding her up effortlessly with the flat of one arm, wiped her clean. He took the facecloth back into the bathroom, rinsed and hung it on a rack there, washed his hands. He replaced the diaper, buttoned her gown and smoothed it. Then reached up to snap a fingernail against the IV feed, checking patency, drip rate, level.

“I thought I’d have longer with her. Just the two of us.”

“I’m sorry.”

He hadn’t meant for this to happen, he told me, standing there looking down at her, into her face; hadn’t intended to cause any trouble. He only wanted to take care of her. That’s what he’d been doing at Parkview, for a long time now. Cleaning and bathing her, seeing after her feeds. But there was always too much else to do, too many others needing attention. She deserved better than that.

“What will happen to her now?”

“She’ll go back to the hospital.”

“Parkview, you mean.”

“Right.”

“And I’ll be going to jail.”

“For a while.”

“Any notion how long?”

“Hard to say.” God knows what they’d charge him with. Kidnapping, endangerment? Excessive kindness? “A year, eighteen months, something like that. After that you’d be on probation.”

He nodded.

“Once I’m out, I’ll be able to visit her.”

Chapter Nine

BREAKFAS
T
WAS SRONG
coffee and bagels. There were five kinds of bagels in a paper bag in the freezer (shipped in from Memphis? Little Rock?), butter, homemade fig preserves and cream cheese with chives below. Also a package of lox we both agreed should be put to rest. I washed my face and did what I could by way of brushing teeth while Val assembled it all; then, once we’d eaten, took care of the kitchen while she showered and dressed.

In the yellow Volvo on the way into town I thanked her.