Final Stroke (11 page)

The nurse was facing in his direction, so he leaned back into his room and waited. After a minute he leaned forward again, and, see
ing she had turned the other way, pushed forward, gave the left wheel of his chair a powerful crank to turn himself, and sped down the hall
way toward the elevators. Any moment he expected to hear his name called, or perhaps the nurse would simply raise a .357 Magnum she kept behind the counter and let him have it. But neither happened and soon he was in the elevator alcove.

He stayed back from the elevators for a while watching from a
grouping of visitor chairs near the windows. A late visitor snuck out from another wing and took an elevator down. Two nurses’ aides got off an elevator and went into his wing without seeing him. He noticed a stack of magazines on a table between two chairs. He wheeled over to the table and gave the pile a shove so the titles and dates of the mag azines showed. They were old magazines, but not too old, and he real ized these were magazines Jan had brought in during the past several weeks, magazines they had gone through in detail. Events described in the magazines had been annotated in the ten-year chart he and Jan were constructing in his room. As he touched the slick surfaces of the magazines he had a horrible feeling that he and Jan were inside the magazines, their past stuck between the slick pages like pressed flow ers, their blood staining the paper.

He had to stop thinking like this. Better to keep his part of the bargain. Be cheerful. Tell a joke. Smile. As he stared at the elevators, he wondered if he’d be able to get past the lobby’s main desk without being stopped. He managed it earlier that evening, but this time of night there wouldn’t be people in and out of elevators to give cover. He was on a mission. Not until he got a good look at that hallway down on the first floor one more time would he be able to sleep.

As he tried to recall the detail of the hallway, he remembered the floor plan he had looked at. It had been mounted to the wall near the door that led to the loading dock. And on the way down there ear
lier in the evening, he’d seen another floor plan on the first floor near the elevators. Escape plans. How to get out of the building in case of fire.

He wheeled past the elevators toward another wing and sure enough, on the wall next to the stairwell door was a floor plan for the third floor. After studying the plan a few seconds he found what he needed. He spun his chair around, gave the left wheel a shove while
throwing his body to the left to keep the chair from going in circles, and went to a short hall next to the last elevator. At the end of the short hall was a door that said Staff Only. He turned his chair side ways to get a grip on the door handle, pushed it down and turned again to push through. On the other side of the door was another short hall, and in the middle of this hall were the wide double doors to the service elevator that would let him off on the first floor out of direct line of sight of the lobby’s main desk.

The service elevator was not as fancy as the passenger elevators and the walls were beat up. He went from three to one without stop
ping, and when the doors slid open he faced a blank wall just like he had on the third floor before the doors closed.

After wheeling out of the elevator, he noticed the first floor hall was longer, with an alarmed emergency exit at the far end. At the near end of the hall was a door to one side he knew would lead to the lobby. Above the door a closed-circuit television camera pointed at him.

He wheeled as fast as he could to the door beneath the camera. Here he could see that the camera had a view of the elevator, the long hallway, and the alarmed emergency exit at the far end. He could only hope the guards at the main desk had not been studying the idiot in the wheelchair with disheveled hair and a crazed grin on his face, because if they had, they’d be standing outside the door waiting for him.

Pulling a door open was a lot harder than pushing through one, and this door was not designed for the wheelchair-bound like the doors in the resident wings. Because his right hand was pretty useless, he had to hook the fingers of his left hand onto the door handle and pull the door open by slowly backing the wheelchair using his left foot. It took a while because every time he managed to pull the door open an inch or two, the door would bump his left foot and he’d have to back up another inch or two.

When he finally got the door open enough so he could wedge the corner of the wheelchair into the opening, he shoved the door aside, expecting to see a couple of smiling security guards. But the guards had remained at their desk. When he peeked around the corner, he could see the tops of their heads above the reception counter. And so, for the second time that night, he turned from the lobby and hurried down the long hallway and through the automatic double doors that led to the nursing home wing.

The hallway in the nursing home wing was lit up as brightly as it had been earlier in the evening. He saw no one at the nurses’ station, which was still a good hundred feet down the hall. As he wheeled down the hall he heard snores from doorways. One snore sounded like the distant bark of a dog and this reminded him of Marjorie tell
ing him about dog days and cat days in the wing. One day a week they brought in dogs for residents to fondle, another day they brought in cats. Marjorie had said, “Everybody dogs them, but I don’t know about cats,” and, after a little back and forth between them with Geor
giana egg-nogging them on, he figured out what Marjorie meant. Ev
erybody in the wing liked dogs, but not everybody in the wing liked cats. After Marjorie nodded that this was exactly what she’d meant to say, Georgiana asked Marjorie why some people didn’t care for cats. To this, Marjorie had replied, “Sneaky,” with a smirk on her face. He recalled it vividly. It was the same smirk she got on her face when she spoke of her conspiracy theories regarding staff members, and even once when she mentioned a nephew of hers, a nephew whom she seemed to be contrasting with her son.

Although he’d never been inside Marjorie’s room, she’d pointed it out to him when they were on their way to the activity room for a stroke rehab meeting. Earlier that evening he had not paused at the room, now he did. In rehab, Marjorie once managed to convey that in
the nursing home wing they remove the nameplate as soon as someone dies, but they do it surreptitiously.

Thinking of the word
surreptitious
reminded him of the word
de
tective
and that reminded him of the Chicago Police Department and that reminded him of Tamara who had visited him here and while he was in the hospital.

Crazy bastard. A wife who loves him so much she tells him about an ex-lover, and here he is sneaking around where he obviously can’t do any good. Probably end up telling Jan all about his wanderings and maybe even send Tamara an e-mail about it.

Maybe keeping quiet about a resident’s death was the right thing to do. Maybe he should go back to his room. According to Marjorie, residents near death were usually transported to the hospital, and the other residents found out the person had died by taking turns hanging around the hallway until someone spied a nurse or aide removing the nameplate. Then they’d pass the word. According to Marjorie, one resident recently died in her sleep. “Him name’s gone and she’s still in there,” Marjorie had said. “Him name’s gone and she’s still in there,” she had repeated, even after Georgiana tried to correct the pronoun.

The word
case
came to mind again, conjuring up something. Not memories, but a feeling, a sense of what has to be done, a sense that things have to be examined, a sense that within him there is a passion to perform this examination. It wasn’t so much in his mind. It was in his soul. Perhaps he was Don Quixote. For some reason this idea of him being a Hispanic idealist intrigued him. Yes, a man destined to right wrongs.

He turned on the light in Marjorie’s room only after closing the door behind him. The bed was made, a pink spread pulled up over the pillow. He began searching the room before he knew what he was looking for. Her wheelchair was there, backed against the window
wall. On the deep windowsill were several framed photographs. The largest photograph was of an older man with a thick nose and bald head. The man wore a dark suit and held an award up before him. “Vietnam Veterans” was printed on the award. The man seemed on the verge of winking and Steve recalled Marjorie mimicking this look when she spoke of her husband Antonio.

Another photograph was of the man—Antonio—and Marjorie together. A studio shot taken decades earlier, Antonio with more hair in this photograph, the faces smooth and flawless as if taken through gauze. Next to this photograph in the foldout frame was another old photo, this one of Marjorie holding a baby while Antonio touches the baby’s forehead with his thick finger. The last set of photographs were of Marjorie’s son. He could tell it was her son because of the chrono
logical collage.

A toddler in shorts who’d gotten more of his looks from his mother than his father. A little boy with a puppy. An adolescent boy playing the piano. A handsome high school boy holding a National Honor Society ribbon. A fine young man in cap and gown. A young man in shirtsleeves stooped on the ground planting a tree. No photos of him playing baseball or football. No photos of him with his father except the one in which his father touches his forehead with a thick finger while … yes, while in the process of either beginning or ending a wink. The father wanting his son to emulate him, but the rest of the photographs implying the son did not do this.

Something Marjorie once said about father and son. Something about the good old days before the son realized who his father was. But also something else, an aside, an indication—”Antonio never able know,”—that at least some good came of her husband’s death, that she was glad her husband had died before finding out something. Something.

In the closet Steve recognized many of the dresses Marjorie had worn to rehab. Whereas most nursing home residents wore sweats, Marjorie insisted on dresses. If she was so formal, what made her go down to the hallway outside the activity room in her nightclothes? Along with the rumor that she’d fallen because of someone’s “acci
dent,” he’d heard she was in nightclothes.

There were several pairs of shoes, but no slippers. He searched the entire closet, inside dresser drawers, and even crawled down from his wheelchair to search beneath the bed, but could find no slippers. They were furry and pink. He’d never seen them but could visualize them because Marjorie had said in rehab that she never wore her furry pink slippers outside her room because they were too informal and too slip
pery to be trusted in a waxed tile hallway once you let go of the hand
rail. “Like crossing ice on butter feet,” she’d said.

A good metaphor, according to Georgiana. Buttered feet on ice. It had been a happy session, all three of them laughing it up that day. And then something turned off Marjorie’s laughter. A word. A single word had turned off Marjorie’s laughter like turning off a faucet.

He looked to the photographs on the windowsill. The son. Some
thing about the son not known by the father. A word that had turned off Marjorie’s laughter. A word Georgiana had used to describe a happy son-of-a-bitch stroke victim.
Gay
.

Back in the hallway. Rolling silently toward the nurses’ station where a nurse faced the other direction staring at a computer screen. Non-glare screen, he hoped. Not like in a movie directed by a fat man who said, “Good evening,” in a deep voice before his television show, a movie in which the hero, trying to sneak along a balcony, is seen by the housekeeper in the reflection on the screen.

A nurses’ aide arrived—subtle difference in uniform color—and both nurse and aide stared at the computer screen. He rolled closer
and lowered his head. The counter at the nurses’ station was about four feet high and he rolled to it sveltely like a clever gunman in an old western hiding behind a convenient boulder. The entrance to the station was on the far side and as long as neither nurse nor aide crossed over to this side he’d be safe. They spoke.

“Bill thinks he’s being overmedicated again.”

“Did you show him the chart?”

“He ignores it. Says the same thing that got Marjorie’ll get him.”

“And what is that?”

“Says she was overmedicated and didn’t know what she was doing. Says she probably slipped in her own pee.”

“I doubt it. Marjorie was too straitlaced. Most likely she was walking in her sleep.”

“What about the puddle?”

“Someone else from earlier, after last activities. Lasix kicked in too far from the john and nobody noticed to clean it up.”

“Beverly’s up late telling her joke to the wall again.”

“Which joke is it tonight? She has several.”

“The one about bananas.”

“Haven’t heard it.”

“She says, ‘I might be old, but physically I’m doing just fine. Of course I don’t keep green bananas on my windowsill anymore.’”

“Oh yeah, I did hear it.”

“You just wanted to hear me repeat it like an idiot.”

“Right.”

He held his left hand over his mouth. The laugh, from deep down inside, threatened to encircle his neck and choke him.
I don’t keep green bananas on my windowsill anymore.
He held his breath, took his hand from his mouth, pushed his chair along the counter. He had to take a chance, get the hell out of there and find a place where he could
laugh, where he could breathe.