Gone for Good (9 page)

On my way out, I stopped at the nurses' station. Janie was gone, so I talked to someone else. She looked to be my age or even younger, and she was tapping away at a computer when I walked up. She stopped what she was doing and smiled up at me.

‘I had to sign in when I came in,' I said. ‘Does everybody have to do that?'

‘Yes,' she said. ‘It used to be only after nine, but we have staffing shortages because of state budget cuts, so now all day.'

I scanned the names above mine on the sign-in sheet. I didn't recognize any.

‘My brother is Ronnie Hampton. Did you see the woman who visited him earlier?'

‘I'm sorry. I just started at five.'

She eyed the keyboard like it was a juicy steak. I knew I was keeping her from her work.

‘I spoke to another nurse – Janie Rader – who said they had to put my brother on something to calm him down. He got a little emotional earlier apparently.'

‘Okay,' she said.

‘Is it possible for something like that to cause hallucinations? Or make someone so out of it they might see things that aren't there?'

Her
eyebrows went up. ‘If your brother is seeing things or hallucinating –'

‘No, no,' I said. ‘I'm not saying anything is wrong. Not really.'

‘Then what is it?' she asked, her impatience starting to show. I wanted to get mad at her but couldn't. I would have acted the same way if someone had shown up and interrupted my work with questions. I felt the same way about my students all the time.

‘Our mother just died, and Ronnie said he saw her. And this woman came to visit him apparently …'

‘He probably had a dream about your mother,' the nurse said. ‘And the drug may have made it more difficult to tell the dream from reality.'

‘Yeah, that's probably it.'

‘I talk in my sleep all the time,' she said, dropping the businesslike air for just a moment. ‘My boyfriend thinks I'm crazy.'

‘You're probably right.'

She turned to the keyboard and started popping the return key as if it had done something wrong and deserved to be punished. Then she started typing.

‘I'll note it in your brother's chart,' she said. ‘It can't hurt to have the doctors check it out. Maybe they can give him something else.'

I didn't leave. I took a pen from the top of the nurses' station and found a scrap of paper. I scribbled my e-mail address and cell phone number. ‘Can you give that to Janie when she comes back? She wanted it.'

‘Of course,' she said. ‘She'll be back later.'

‘Thanks.'

Walking away, I felt even crappier. Had I just made Ronnie's life worse, consigned him to an even deeper drug-induced oblivion?

Paul called me as I was getting into my car. Visions of my tiny apartment danced in my head. The fluffy couch. The criminally small TV. I had work to do, lots of it. But when I left the hospital, all I could think about was being flat on my back, my brain shifted to neutral. But Paul knew which button to push to change my mind.

‘Are you hungry?' he asked. ‘I know it was your first day back.'

‘You had me at “Are you hungry?” ' I said.

Besides, there were things I needed to ask him about.

We met at the Downtown Diner, a local institution that had been unapologetically raising the cholesterol and blood-sugar levels of Dover residents for nearly fifty years. When I arrived at seven thirty, Paul waved to me from a booth. The dinner crowd had thinned out, and except for the sounds of cleanup – clanking dishes, rattling silverware – the place was pretty calm. It smelled good, though. Very good. Grease hung in the air as thick as humidity, reminding me I hadn't eaten much all day. Not for the past few days in fact. I needed to eat, and Paul knew that too.

He looked better than the last time I had seen him in the hospital parking lot. He looked a little more rested, a little less old and tired. He smiled when I sat down, and only mild strain showed in his eyes.

‘I'm
surprised you wanted to come here,' I said. ‘You know …' I pointed to his chest.

Paul had suffered a mild heart attack a few years earlier, one that required an angioplasty to reopen a clogged artery. In the wake of the procedure, he'd adopted a healthier diet and started walking or riding a bike a few miles every day.

‘Oh, that,' he said. He made a dismissive wave of his hand. ‘I cheat sometimes.'

The waitress arrived, notepad in hand, and we both ordered cheeseburgers, fries and Cokes. Paul even asked for a side of mayonnaise for his burger. ‘You know,' he said when she'd walked away, ‘you'd think having my sister die would make me take more caution with my health, but instead …' He let the thought trail off, but I got the point.

‘You want to live it up while you can,' I said.

‘I guess so. Living it up with my cheeseburger.' He forced a smile. ‘The police paid me a visit today,' he said. ‘Those two detectives.'

‘What did they want?'

‘Who knows?' he said. ‘I guess they just wanted to ask me some routine questions. Mostly it was stuff about your mom. You know, did she have any enemies? Did she have any friends? A background examination, I guess you'd call it. They want to know if there was anything in her life that might have driven someone to harm her.'

‘So they're not just focusing on Ronnie?' I asked.

‘They asked about him as well. Just more stuff about violent tendencies or whatever. I didn't have anything else to tell them.'

‘Good,' I said, allowing myself to feel relief.

‘I
have a feeling they'll be coming to you soon,' he said.

‘I can't wait.'

‘You need to be prepared for the kinds of things they're going to ask you,' he said. A firmness had crept into his voice. ‘They're going to – I don't know. They may say things that will upset you.'

‘Like what?'

He seemed about to say something, then thought better of it. ‘I don't know. Just be ready for anything they might throw at you. And remember, they're cops. They may push you a little, rattle your cage. Just keep your cool with them.'

I wanted to say more but didn't. ‘Okay.' I let it go.

I sensed Paul's mood slipping in the wrong direction. The cheer he'd summoned when I came into the restaurant seemed to be draining away, so I tried to steer him towards something else.

‘I made it through my first day back,' I said. ‘No casualties.'

He brightened again. ‘Good.'

‘I wasn't prepared and I'm light-years behind, but I went.'

‘Work can be good for that,' he said. ‘Taking your mind off your troubles. I almost wish I was still working for that reason. Almost.' The waitress brought the Cokes, and Paul peeled a straw from its wrapper and took a long drink. ‘You have that practical aspect to your personality. It comes from our side of the family.'

‘Work through things by just moving on?' I asked.

‘Exactly.' He looked a little distant, a little lost in his own thoughts. ‘I don't have that quite as much as Leslie
did. I get a little hung up on things, and they turn over in my mind. Over and over sometimes.'

I drank my Coke, felt the sugar and caffeine hitting my bloodstream. It was delicious, and I wished they could serve it to me through an IV. ‘It's because you care,' I said.

‘Like Ronnie,' he said. ‘I think of him in there, in that hospital.' He shook his head. ‘I worry about that and all the pressures on him.'

‘I just came from there,' I said. ‘Did you go today?'

‘This morning. I guess I was there until about two.'

‘How did he seem to you?'

Before he answered, our food arrived. The waitress set the thick plates heaped with meat and fries down in front of us, then handed over a sticky bottle of ketchup. I asked for another Coke, and once that was delivered, Paul and I were ready to continue our conversation.

‘He seemed fine,' he said. ‘Quiet still, just like he was at home. But not bad, I guess.' He sighed. ‘I guess I expected the police to show up and bug him, but they didn't. Not while I was there.'

I considered not telling him about Ronnie's outburst during the afternoon. I didn't want to make him feel any worse or more guilty or conflicted over Ronnie's stay at Dover Community. But I needed to know if he had any guesses as to who else could have gone to Ronnie's room that day, so I told him all about it, relating Janie's story as accurately as I could recall it. While I was telling Paul, he stopped eating. He picked at his fries, lifting them up and setting them back down on his plate without taking any more bites. When I was finished telling him, he didn't look up.

I
asked, ‘Do you have any idea who this woman might be? Does she sound like anyone Ronnie or Mom knew?'

Paul lifted his hand to his forehead and rubbed his temple. ‘I don't think so. I don't know everybody they knew.'

‘Could it be someone Ronnie knew?' I asked. ‘Someone from where he went to speech therapy, or someone from work?'

‘Your guess is as good as mine,' he said, his voice weary.

‘The nurse thought it might be a relative.'

‘We're short on those,' he said. ‘And getting shorter every day.'

I decided not to press him too hard. I turned my attention to my food – which I enjoyed a great deal – and tried to think of non-bothersome small talk. But what was there to talk about? What else existed in the world besides the crisis enveloping my family? I gave up trying to talk about anything else and said, ‘Ronnie said something strange when I asked him about it.'

Paul ate a couple of fries. ‘What was that?' he asked.

‘Well, first he said my name. I asked him who came to see him, and he said, “Elizabeth.” '

‘He was doped up by then?' Paul asked.

‘Yeah.'

‘He didn't know what you were asking him.'

‘Right. But then he said that Mom had been there.'

Paul slumped when I said those words. I could see the energy draining from him.

‘Why are you telling me this?' he asked.

‘I thought –'

‘What does it have to do … with anything? He's high as a kite and he's dreaming,' he said.

‘I
know. I'm sorry.' I looked down at my plate of food. I wanted to stop myself from saying anything more, but I couldn't. ‘I just really want to know who this woman is who went to Ronnie's room and upset him so much. Don't you want to know?'

He sighed. ‘Elizabeth, I'm not sure I want to know anything else about any of this.'

We ate the rest of our meal mostly in silence.

I lived in what might generously be called the graduate student ghetto on the east side of campus. The undergraduates dwelled mostly on the north of campus, where there were larger places to live and share – rental houses and town homes, spaces landlords were more than willing to wedge six or seven students into and charge them an exorbitant monthly rate with the hope that the parents would just go ahead and pay it. Most of them did.

Graduate students tended to live alone or in pairs, and the apartments on the east side of campus were smaller and slightly nicer. And slightly nicer meant the roofs probably weren't falling in, the hot water worked at least half the time, and the chances of the police descending on a residence, lights swirling, to roust a group of underage drinkers were next to none. I lived alone, by choice, in a studio apartment on the top floor of an eighty-year-old building. The railroad tracks ran alongside it, and three times a day or night, freight screamed by. It woke me up the first two nights I lived there. After that, I slept through it without stirring.

I parked in the tiny lot at the back of the building. It was dark by the time I returned home after my dinner with Paul. I was tired. The streetlights were coming on, their yellow glow leaking through the canopy of trees that grew over the back of the apartment building.

I
never felt unsafe in my neighborhood, or anywhere in Dover for that matter. The town had its share of small crimes – cars got broken into; apartments and houses were burgled, usually when people forgot to lock their doors. Around campus, we experienced the typical array of drinking and drug arrests, but there were few assaults and almost never a murder.

But Mom's death had put me on edge. On the drive home, I considered calling Dan or stopping by his place, which would inevitably lead to spending the night with him again – and not spending the night alone in my apartment. But a river of complications flowed from that one simple act, and I needed more than anything else to keep things as simple as possible. And I needed to not be a baby, to not let what happened to Mom filter into my mind so much that I started running scared and jumping at my own shadow.

So when I stepped out of the car into a surreally calm night, I told myself that it was my imagination, my own creeping fears and insecurities preying on me rather than any real disturbance or threat. But the area was dead quiet. Dead. None of the sounds that usually dominated the neighbourhood – music, conversation, cars – were there. And it was too early for things to be so quiet.

Why?

I looked all around me, swivelling my head like a soldier on combat patrol, as I moved to the side of the building where a rickety wooden staircase led to my apartment at the top. I cursed myself for not carrying pepper spray or having taken a self-defence class – all the things I was supposed to do as a young single woman living on her own in
the big world. But my mother had lived the most cautious life imaginable. She locked every door and window and would never open her house to a stranger. Once darkness fell, she did everything in her power to not leave the house. And what had that prudence done for her?

A door slammed somewhere. It sounded as if it had come from behind me, from another building or maybe a car. I turned to look back but saw nothing. I had reached the base of the stairs and started up, hurrying as best I could while carrying my laptop bag and my books – my graduate student tools, the things I carried with me everywhere I went.

The staircase went up three storeys, zigzagging up the side of the building like in an Escher drawing. I reached the first landing and heard someone coming down towards me. Enough space existed for two people to pass without touching each other, but unconsciously I moved to the edge, towards the outer railing, when I heard the steps coming. The person was moving fast, faster than would be normal. I expected it to be one of my neighbours, one of the guys who lived below me who were always hustling off to a basketball game or the library. In the darkness the figure coming towards me looked big – short, yes, but hulking and big, his face obscured and turned away from me in the half light. He brushed past me, his left arm hitting mine and nearly knocking the bag out of my hand. The force of the contact spun me around a quarter turn, giving me a clear view of his departing back.

‘Hey!' I said.

But he didn't stop. He thumped down the stairs, his body just barely maintaining control and remaining upright.
The body didn't look as if it belonged to a student. It looked … older somehow. A professor at our building? Was he slumming?

The man disappeared into the night. I listened for the sound of a car door or engine, but it didn't come.

‘Asshole,' I muttered, then continued my trek to the top. And when I made it there, slightly out of breath, my arms weakened from hauling my gear, I understood why the man had been in such a hurry.

My door sat ajar, the wood around the lock splintered into hundreds of shards and pieces.

I didn't enter my apartment, not alone. I turned and went back down the steps, only to reach the halfway point and realize that the man I'd passed – the one who was very likely responsible for breaking into my apartment – could be lingering at the foot of the stairs. Or somewhere in the darkness of the parking lot. I hadn't heard a car start. Hadn't heard anything to indicate he had left the scene.

I had no way of knowing whether he was the one who'd broken into the apartment. I'd been gone all day, and since my unit sat alone on the top floor, no one would have noticed the shattered door.

I went one floor below, to the two apartments beneath mine. I didn't really know my neighbours. I suspected they were grad students just like me, given their ages and monklike habits. They were quiet as well, never disturbing me with loud music or parties. But I had spoken to a guy in one of the apartments. Once. A pipe beneath my kitchen sink had sprung a leak one night during the previous winter, causing water to run all over my floor and cascade
into his apartment. Fortunately, he was home, and he came up and found the shut-off valve for the water. We didn't say much to each other – what do you say to someone whose apartment you've just flooded? – but he seemed friendly enough. Polite at least. A little nerdy. A little awkward. Some kind of science grad student, I guessed at the time. Maybe engineering.

I knocked on his door, hoping like hell he'd be home. If he was, he was moving slowly, so I knocked again. I was ready to step over to the next apartment, where God knows who lived, when the door opened.

His brow furrowed when he saw me. I didn't think he recognized me, and maybe he wondered what I was carrying in my arms and trying to sell on a fall evening. He looked ready to object, to send me on my way with a polite but stern ‘Thanks but no thanks,' when some flicker of recognition crossed his face.

‘Oh,' he said. ‘Do you live upstairs?'

‘I do,' I said. ‘Can I come in? My place has been broken into.'

I didn't wait for an answer. I went inside and put my things down. I pulled out my phone and dialled 911, reporting the problem to the dispatcher, who asked me three times if I was someplace safe or in any immediate danger. The third time she asked I turned to my neighbour, who was standing in the same spot, his mouth slightly open, and asked, ‘She wants to know if I'm in any immediate danger now. Am I?'

He shook his head.

‘I'm fine,' I said. I told her where I was so the police could find me when they arrived, and we ended our call.
‘They're on their way,' I said to the neighbour, the guy whose name I didn't know.

‘Okay,' he said.

He didn't offer me a seat or a drink. I didn't care. I asked, ‘Did you hear anything unusual upstairs today? My lock is totally shattered.'

He thought about the question for a minute, then said, ‘No, I didn't hear anything. But I was gone most of the day. I had a lab. And tonight I had my headphones on.'

‘Physics?' I asked.

‘Astronomy,' he said. ‘I'm a TA for Professor Landon.'

Astronomy. Made sense.

‘Did you have a friend over here tonight?' I asked. ‘Right before I came home?'

‘A friend?'

‘Yes,' I said. ‘A friend. Or an acquaintance. Did you have someone to your apartment tonight?'

‘Are you suggesting I know the person who broke into your apartment?' he asked, his back stiffening with indignation. Grad students could be touchy.

‘I passed a man on the stairs when I came home,' I said. ‘A stocky little guy. I thought maybe he was here to see you.'

His posture eased. ‘No, he wasn't. I've been alone.'

‘Is anybody home next door?' I asked.

He looked at the wall as though he could see through it and into the next apartment. ‘I don't think so. I don't think he's ever home.'

‘I guess I never see him either.'

‘He might have a girlfriend,' my neighbour said. ‘I talked to him once. He's getting a doctorate in English.'

It was then I realized my hands were shaking. Really
shaking. I didn't know what to do with them. I didn't know what to do about anything.

My neighbour said, ‘So if the guy wasn't here and he wasn't next door, that means you probably passed the guy who broke into your apartment. You must have just missed walking in on him.'

‘That seems to be the case,' I said.

Our conclusion didn't do anything to slow my shaking, so I just waited for the police to arrive.