Joe (11 page)

Chapter
Nineteen

Merion

The
walk up to the building was not so bad. Spring had taken a good hold in the
past few weeks. Multicolored tulips sprouted up along the sidewalk. The grass
around the flowers was plush and green. Small trees on the grounds were just
beginning to split new buds. Merion always took time to enjoy the pleasures
that nature offered. But here, outside of this particular building, any new
growth, so fresh and full of life, seemed out of place. Or maybe not out of
place so much as deceiving, like the shadowed monster in the room that turns
into a coatrack when you turn on the lights. Only with this place it was the
other way around.

She turned right at the end of the
sidewalk and began making her way toward the electric front doors of the
building. Here too, the land was groomed. She tried not focusing on those
electric doors that slid away so smoothly to allow entrance and then shut so
smoothly—and somehow with more finality—behind you as soon as you made it
inside. Merion would not admit it, but she
hated
coming here.

The doors slid open easily, seeming to
whisper a secret as the metal skated metal. Merion took one last breath of
fresh air before entering. It would be her last for the next hour. She
considered for a moment that maybe this wasn’t the best way to spend her day
off. Well, her
taken
day off.

Sure enough, as she crossed the
threshold, that’s what hit her first: the
smell
of the place. In sharp
contrast to the fresh blooms just on the exterior, the air inside held a
teeth-clenching quality. There was only one word for it.

Old
. Merion bit down on her tongue to keep her face from
scrunching up. There were two doors, one to her left and one to her right.
Directly ahead was a nurse’s station and a small restroom. In the past two
years of coming here Merion had never had the need so urgent as to warrant
using that restroom. She could only imagine the stench that box must be
housing.

She went to the door on the right and pushed
down the metal handle. The door was heavy, and made purposely so. You didn’t
want to go having any of the “guests” escaping. For most of the residents of
Hillbrook Retirement Facility the world behind this door was the last one they
would know on this earth.

That’s what it is. Not just old, but
dying.
It’s the smell of the dying.

Merion couldn’t help but think such
things when she came here. Part of it was because she was pushing sixty-five
herself, and over the past two years she had come to fully believe that she
would prefer dying to coming and spending her last days in an old folks’ home.
The other part was because coming here made her feel guilty. Guilty and
selfish.

She pushed the door open, leaning her
body into it because it was so heavy, and shut it behind her. Ahead of her was
a long, white hallway. Fluorescent lights glared down from the ceiling, bounced
off the stark white walls and rebounded from the off-white linoleum floors.
That
smell
was amplified twelve notches in here.

No wonder they say you see a white light
when you die,
Merion
thought.
They drown you in it here. A lot of folks bite the bullet here.

It wasn’t so much the lighting, or the
cold sterile feel of the place that made Merion so loathe to come to the home.
It wasn’t even that stench of approaching death that unnerved her so. It was
the people here that made it hard. Some of them stayed in their rooms. Others
were spry enough to wheel themselves around in a chair or with a walker. Others
were propped up out in the hallway, sitting in wheelchairs that slanted back
slightly, not moving, not talking, and some hardly even blinking. To Merion
they seemed more like dolls than actual people. Dolls some big child had
carried to the living room and positioned upright in the crook of the couch.
Dolls with snot running freely from their nose and glue-like crust caking their
eyes. She found it all disturbing.

The first to approach her on this Friday
morning was a lady by the name of Joan Crawford. Over the past two years Merion
had taken a liking to the old woman. Joan was one of the ones wheeling herself
around in a chair, using her feet to drag her along rather than turning the
wheels with her hands. But Joan scared her a touch, too.

When Merion saw Joan, she forced a smile
to her lips, her teeth clenching just a little too tight. The old woman spotted
her and smiled widely, pumping her feet in short steps to get her chair going.
For a moment Merion considered just turning her head and walking swiftly by the
old coot, but she could

(end up here in a few years, too)

never find it in her heart to do it.
Merion slowed her pace, waiting for Ms. Crawford.

The old lady came to a stop in front of
her, smiling up at Merion as if she knew exactly who she was, as if she had
been waiting for her to come. Perhaps she had. Merion had never seen any other
visitors for the old woman.

“Do you know who I am?” Ms. Crawford
asked, reaching out and clasping Merion’s hand between her bony, age-spotted
fingers. Her grip was cold and sickly smooth, but Merion didn’t jerk away. Her
own hands had begun to wrinkle as well. As tired as she was of the monotonous
world she lived in, she didn’t have a cruel heart.

“Why, yes,” she said, bending a little
at the waist and giving the old woman a real smile. “You’re Miss Joan Crawford.
Everyone knows who you are.”

Merion knew that the old lady was not
the
Joan Crawford, the once-adored actress, but “Joan” liked to tell people
that she was. Or at least she liked to tell Merion that she was, and Merion had
no intention of challenging an old woman. Especially not an old woman whose
only thing to look forward to was the random visitor who walked through the
white-light hall, visitors who were always here to visit someone else.

Rather die. I’d rather die than live like
this.

But that thought was no good. Because
that thought made her feel guilty. Again.

The old woman’s face lit up with
approval. She winked, her grin spreading back to her earlobes, revealing
multiple missing teeth and seeming to multiply the deep wrinkles that resided
on her face. “That’s right, deary,” she said. She clasped her hands together.
“Oh, wait here. I got something I want to show ya.”

Merion stifled a sigh and nodded at the
old woman, who turned in her wheelchair and set off in the direction of her
room. She knew the old lady was once again going to retrieve an old
black-and-white photograph of herself in her younger years. Preserved behind a
thick, golden-colored frame, it was probably the only one she had.

She waved and smiled at a few of the
other patients who seemed lucid enough to register it. Two returned her smile,
and the other waved back. A minute later Joan came roll-walking out of her
room, with the golden-framed black-and-white photograph laid across her lap.
She lifted it slowly, holding it out in an unsteady hand to Merion, who took
it.

Merion stared down at the lady in the
picture. It was a headshot of Joan while she had been twenty-something. Her
hair was curled under in a perfect bob, the make-up on her eyes heavy but
tasteful. This was one of the parts Merion hated the most about coming here. It
was hard for her to look at the photograph of the young Joan Crawford and
equate her with the woman who walked around in her wheelchair, babbling to
strangers. It was hard to see the once-smooth cheeks and white smile that time
had stolen so completely. It was hard because

(she was getting old, too)

she bet that it had all gone by so fast.
She bet that Ms. Crawford, who waited for strangers to come by so that she
could show them her photograph, thought it all had gone by so fast.

And it is, ain’t it?
Merion thought.
It sure as shit is.

“Well,” Merion said, “weren’t you just
lovely? Absolutely beautiful.”

Ms. Crawford waved a bony hand in
dismissal, her chin pulling down a little as her shriveled cheeks grew a bit
pink.

“And I’ll tell you what, Ms. Crawford,
you haven’t aged a day.”

The old woman released Merion’s hand
only to grip her by the wrist. Her hold was weak with age, but somehow
persistent and demanding. Merion swallowed once. Ms. Crawford’s eyes swept
across the nursing home’s white hall, and she leaned close and spoke in a
hushed tone.

“What do ya say me an’ you bust outta
here?” she asked, her voice raspy with age but as serious as a sergeant’s. Her eyes
continued to dart from side to side. “Gotta get outta this place.” The old
woman’s gaze rested on Merion, who had to resist the urge to take a step back.

Merion tried to give a smile, but found
it simply would not come. It was always the same with Ms. Crawford. She was a
crazy old bat, and as much as she wanted to be kind, Merion was creeped out by
her. A fresh batch of guilt washed over her now as she realized that her
kindness for the old woman was mostly out of sympathy. “I have to go now,”
Merion said, pulling her arm back a little.

Ms. Crawford released her hold on
Merion’s wrist. Merion offered one more smile and turned on her heels,
continuing at a much swifter pace to her mother’s room. Behind Merion, her
voice seeming to echo down the white hall, Joan Crawford called out, “Got to
get out of
heeeere!
” The old woman’s voice hitched at the end, releasing
a sob that was somehow withered and cobwebbed and sad. So very sad.

Merion was at the end of the hall now.
She had reached room 241, where a small, easily exchangeable, paper label
outside the door currently bore the names ALBERTA ROSBOUGH and RUBY GELLAR.
Merion slipped inside quickly, eager to leave the white-light hallway behind.
She would have to cross back through to exit, but at least she was out for now.

Her mother, Ruby, shared a room with
another tenant, as did most of the “guests” at the retirement facility. Right
now her roommate was Alberta Rosbough. Over the past three years her mother had
probably had about twelve different ones. Merion would just come in, usually on
Saturdays or Sundays because she was often too tired to visit after work, and
find that the name accompanying her mother’s in the label outside of the door
had changed. It was always abrupt and unexpected. One day it would simply read
Sadie Freemont, and the next day, Fran Chesterfield, and she would enter the
room to see a new-old person occupying the half of the room that didn’t belong
to her mother. Merion didn’t have to question what had happened to them.

Bit the bullet.

Her mother would never even acknowledge
the change in roommates to Merion. She acted as though it was an occurrence
that was beyond her notice, and though Merion knew that her mother was mildly
senile, she couldn’t bring herself to believe that Ruby didn’t spare thoughts
for the people dying around her. And, how could she not? Hell, Merion only
visited on weekends, and it was all she thought about while she was here.

But these were ugly thoughts,
guilty
thoughts.
Merion didn’t have the financial resources to keep her mother elsewhere.
Besides, Merion had passed over the hill herself more than a few years ago, and
she didn’t have the physical condition necessary to take care of her mother
herself anymore. Merion’s knee was whacked from an old horse-riding injury. She
wobbled while she walked, in an effort to keep the weight off of it. Arthritis
in her hands was getting worse and worse by the year. Her already-poor eyesight
was growing dimmer. She could still hear as sharply as a wolf. But her clock
was running out too, and okay, yeah, she was selfish. Merion wanted her last
years of life to be hers. She’d raised five kids, living only for them for the
past thirty-some years. She had done her duty, worked hard for her retirement.
She was ready to be free.

And that made her feel the guiltiest of
all.

On this particular Friday morning her
mother was seated in a chair facing the large window that looked out onto the
gardens around the home. Fluffy white pillows were tucked all around her,
between the arms of the chair and her mother’s thin arms, behind her bony back,
on her lap. Ruby Gellar, once a proud and elegant woman, sat in the middle of
all those pillows and stared out at the world. She had lost weight in the past
few months, Merion could see that now. The pillows seemed to swallow her mother
whole, leaving just the blue-grey cloud of her hair at the top them, her
silver-colored eyes floating just below it, the skin of her face pulling ever
downward, as if magnetized by the earth.

To Merion’s right, still in her bed and
assumedly asleep, was Alberta Rosbough. Alberta had only been here for about
three weeks, but Merion never saw her out of her bed. A few times she
considered saying something to the nurses about this, but ultimately knew that
she never would. She knew good and well that some of the staff here were
unsuitable for the job, and it was never a good idea to go pissing them off.
They might take it out on her mother, and she could not afford to move Ruby
anywhere else.

It wasn’t that most of the nurses were
evil, just lazy. But, for people as old as the ones who resided here, that was
a painful and sometimes deadly trait. Merion was rare in the fact that she was
loyal, and the simple fact was that she had to look after her mother first. So,
although she was nearly certain that Alberta was suffering from terrible
bedsores, she didn’t say anything. She supposed she’d seen worse in the past
three years.