The Empty Room (21 page)
Jake stayed where he was.
“You think we stole something?” Indignation rose in Colleen. “Are you kidding me?”
“What you got in that bag, you didn’t pay for.” The man came around the counter and Colleen thought he’d take the bag, but he walked past them, stood between them and the door.
The hand that hung by Jake’s side opened, flexed, and then closed into a fist.
“We bought those things at Mr. Żeleński’s. You have no right to accuse us,” she said.
The man and Jake locked eyes. “I don’t accuse you. I accuse him.”
“I did not steal anything from you.” Jake’s voice was dangerously low, dangerously level.
At a party earlier that year Jake’s best friend, Dalek, a Slavic guy who matched him pound for pound, egged him to throw a punch, just so he could see how it felt. Half an hour and a good deal of weed and whisky later, Jake obliged. Dalek’s head snapped back, his eyes rolled and he went down like an axed oak. He called the next day with a swollen jaw and no memory of the incident. The shop owner was at least five inches shorter and seventy-five pounds lighter, but he looked like a fighting rooster.
Colleen knew if she didn’t do something, and quickly, things were going to get ugly. She almost wanted them to. It would serve the racist little shit right to get knocked out, but then Jake would end up in jail … “Oh, for God’s sake. Give me the bag.” She snatched it from Jake. “We’ve got a receipt, you can see for yourself, and then you owe this man an apology.”
Where was the goddamn receipt
? She took everything out of the bag. Rosemary. Beans. Spaghetti. No receipt. “Jake, did you put the receipt in your pocket?”
His eyes flicked to her. He shook his head.
The man’s lip curled. “You see what they are?” he said to the couple who still stood silently near the cash.
“We’ll go and get Mr. Żeleński. He’ll tell you.”
“You go.” The man pointed at Jake. “He stays.”
“Don’t be ridiculous; he’s coming with me.”
“Go get Żeleński,” said Jake.
She didn’t want to leave him there. She would have done anything not to leave him there, but there didn’t seem to be any other way. She touched his arm, his back, his shoulder. “I’ll be back. I’ll be right back. I won’t be a minute.” She glared at the man. “Get out of my way.”
She pushed past him and ran down the block.
“Mr. Żeleński! The other store—the Polish man, he’s got Jake. He says he stole from him.” The words came out in a breathless rush.
“What? What you say?”
She repeated it as he came to her. She realized how wide-eyed and mad she must look. She didn’t care.
He put his hands on her shoulders. “I fix this! The
kafin kup
!”
He didn’t bother to lock the door to his shop or even close it. Colleen would remember this later and love him for it. He marched up the street and into his rival’s store.
“Kurwa ma?!”
he bellowed. “You skinny dog-mothered barbarian! You accuse my friends of theft?”
The other couple had disappeared. Jake had not moved from the spot where Colleen left him. He seemed made of wood. Only his eyes were alive. They glittered, but revealed nothing.
The man said something in Polish and waved his hands in the air. The two shopkeepers faced off and screamed at each other, their spittle meeting in the air between them.
“Odpierdol si
!”
“Kutwa!”
“Palant!”
Mr. Żeleński said, “You think anyone would steal the dreck you carry? Maggots and weevils, that’s all you’re good for.” He took Jake’s arm and pulled him to the door. “You no come in here no more. You come to me only. This is no good place with no good man.”
Colleen followed them, and the other shopkeeper yelled, “You are not welcome here! Any of you. You are not welcome in my store. You come again, I call police!”
All the way down the street Mr. Żeleński cursed his rival and the food he sold. It was old, it was rotten, it was tainted, infested with vermin, like the man’s soul. Jake and Colleen said nothing. They came to Davisville, thanked the little man, who hugged Jake and called him his brother. Jake rolled his lower lip between his teeth and nodded, but said only a quiet thank you.
As Colleen and Jake walked along Davisville, Colleen heard herself talking about how unfair it was and what a racist bastard that man was and how they should put in a complaint with someone, or picket his shop or do something. She felt as though the man had dug some chasm between her and Jake and she didn’t know how to cross it. She kept patting his back. If he wasn’t going to talk, then she wanted to sense, through her fingertips, how he was feeling and get some clue how to reach him, to tell him … what? What on earth could she tell him?
She reached to take his hand, but as she did he transferred the bag of groceries to that hand and kept right on walking, his eyes fixed on the sidewalk a few feet in front of him.
C
olleen arrived at the hospital, chewing a handful of mints, and asked the receptionist which room her mother was in. A matronly woman directed her with a minimum of interest. They must see this sort of thing all the time, she thought—distraught relatives, broken hearts, all just part of a day in the cream and brown halls, under the watchful eye of the St. Michael statue, known as the “Urban Angel.” She had not slurred her words at all. She felt adequately muffled, insulated against bruising. She would not think about Jake, not now. She would concentrate on this next thing before her, on the next impossible task this mythologically bad day asked of her.
A silver-bearded man with uneven teeth and a female doctor with glossy black hair and a diamond stud in her nose waited at the elevator bank. Colleen did not make eye contact. She did not want anyone speaking to her, because if someone started talking she knew she would talk back, and she wasn’t quite sure what she might say, or if she’d be able to stop talking once she started.
When the elevator came and they stepped inside, it smelled of disinfectant, and a soiled bandage lay abandoned in the corner, against all health code rules, surely. Both the man and the doctor got out on
the floor below the one Colleen wanted. When the doors opened up they revealed a garishly lit hallway, painted a bluish grey. Colleen walked to the nurses’ station, that bulwark against human contact, and waited until a mousey little nurse wearing pink scrubs looked up from her computer screen.
“Can I help you?”
“I’m looking for room 1462—Deirdre Kerrigan. I’m her daughter.”
The nurse looked puzzled and consulted the screen again. “Deirdre Kerrigan, you said? I don’t see that name here, but I just got on shift. Hang on a minute.”
The nurse stepped away to consult with another nurse. The second nurse, a tall, heron-like, beaky creature, glanced at Colleen and said something, consulting a chart. Colleen’s heart pounded. Her mother was dead. She was too late. Somewhere down the hall a buzzer went off with a bleating complaint and the heron-like nurse sighed and rolled her eyes before sauntering off in the direction of the call. The mousey nurse came back, shaking her head.
“Who told you your mother was here?”
“The nursing home where she lives called me and said she was brought here after a fall and that she was in a coma. They told me downstairs she’s in room 1462. What’s going on? Has she …?”
“Well, she’s not in a coma now and I doubt she ever was, or they’d have kept her here. She’s in the other wing, the North Wing, apparently. Right through those doors, go past the elevators, down the hall, turn left and then another left and through the double doors. I don’t have her file anymore, but they’ll tell you more over
there. She just got moved about an hour ago apparently, before I came on shift, so I don’t have any more information.” The phone rang. “Okay? Excuse me. Through those doors.” The nurse pointed, wiggling her fingers.
Colleen tried to remember the directions, but her mind wasn’t holding onto details. Through the doors, and past the elevator. She got that far and then the words unravelled. Her mother was out of a coma. Had never been in a coma? What did any of that mean? She made a left turn, and then another since there was no other option, and passed through a set of swinging doors. The hallway was full of people all of a sudden. Gurneys and wheelchairs and a woman walking around hooked up to an IV drip, her pasty legs naked, her ankles swollen and sore looking. Orderlies pushed carts of food trays filled with leftover scraps of gelatin, green beans and mashed potatoes. A female janitor wearing a hairnet and blue gloves swabbed the floor. Colleen edged around her cart, which was full of mops and brushes, paper towels and disinfectant spray.
“Excuse me,” Colleen said. “Is this the way to the North Wing nurses’ station?
“You almost there,” said the woman in a thick Eastern-European accent. “You go round by left turn. Not far. You see, you see.”
This hallway was cream-coloured with a wooden handrail. The lighting came not from overhead lights but from boxes of opaque plastic spaced every few feet above closed electrical boards, which housed, Colleen assumed, medical devices of some sort. It would be a cluttered space even without anyone in it. Monitoring equipment
of various kinds, walkers and IVs stood near the doors. Hand sanitizing posts hung at intervals. At the end of the corridor Colleen saw a group standing around what she assumed was the nurses’ station.
As she walked toward it she glanced into the rooms to see if her mother might be there. Old people in every bed, some with their mouths gaping open, others staring at flickering television lights, two with family members huddled round. No sign of Deirdre.
The people at the nurses’ station, a family from the looks of it, asked if they could bring food in for their father.
The nurse, a middle-aged and considerably overweight woman, said, “He’s diabetic, and there are the kidney issues, so we have to be very careful about his diet. No sugar, low protein, low salt and potassium.”
A young man appeared from a room behind the nurses’ station. “Can I help you?”
“I’m looking for my mother. No one seems to know where she is. I don’t understand what’s going on.”
The young man, whose name-badge read M
ATT
D
UDEN
, R.N., smiled in a reassuring sort of way and said, “Well, let’s see if we can’t find her and figure out what’s what, okay? What’s her name?”
“Deirdre Kerrigan.”
He consulted a computer screen and said, “Oh, she’s here. Took a nasty fall from the looks of it. Might have a mild concussion. Some confusion.”
“She’s always confused. Nothing new there.” Colleen laughed. She hadn’t meant to. “So, no coma?” That didn’t come out right.
Nurse Duden looked at Colleen, a little puzzled.
“I mean, they told me she was unconscious, you know, earlier. From the nursing place, the nursing home.”
“Well, there’s no coma. I don’t know why anyone would have said that. We just want to keep her overnight to make sure she’s okay. She was in Emergency and had CAT scans and so forth. But she was up and around this afternoon, even went to a singalong.”
My mother went to a singalong? Colleen thought. It boggled the mind.
“She’s in room 1411. Just down there.” He pointed.
There seemed nothing else to do but see her mother. It was too late to turn around and just head home.
“Listen, before you go, look, uh, why don’t you just step over here.”
Colleen followed him to the end of the nurses’ station. He consulted the chart again and then folded his hands over it.
“I think you should make an appointment with the social worker. They had to move her here from the other ward. There was an incident.”
“What kind of an incident?” Colleen felt woozy. She understood the words the man spoke, or at least she heard them and could have repeated them back if she were asked, but their meaning evaded her. The words floated around her head, but lacked gravitas.
“Well, your mother … we know she has a frontal lobe injury and that does impair impulse control. She tried to escape a couple of times. They found her down in the lobby the second time. But
there was something else.” He looked serious, a little embarrassed. “One of the orderlies apparently found her with her hands around the throat of the woman in the bed next to her.”
Colleen’s hands flew to her own throat. She could see the expression her mother must have worn at that moment quite clearly—the lips curling back, the teeth gnashing, the eyes wide. How often she’d seen that expression in her own childhood.
“Christ,” she said. “Did she hurt her?”
“No, no, she wasn’t hurt. Frightened, I suspect, but not hurt.” Nurse Duden came around the desk and put his hand on her shoulder. “Are you okay?”
“I’m okay.” Colleen tried to smile. “That’s my mum. She has a history of mental illness.”
“Is that so? Well, that’s why she’s on this wing now. Easy to get in, but you need a code to get out through those doors. Maybe the doctor will change her meds. It’s pretty unsettling for them when they come here. Routine is awfully important at this point, you know, when they’ve had the sort of brain injury your mum has. At any rate, we’ve given her something to calm her down and she’s in a room with another woman for now, but we’re keeping an eye out. She ate her dinner. She’s fine.” He smiled. “We were just about to go get her ready for bed. But you can do that now you’re here.”