The Last First Day (20 page)

Mrs. van Dusen slipped Ruth’s shoes off her feet. Then, after a moment of hesitation, she raised Ruth’s legs to the coverlet.

Ruth lay down obediently.

Dr. van Dusen came into the room carrying a glass of water. He pulled up a small chair beside the bed. Mrs. van Dusen retreated to the doorway where she remained, a worried presence.

From his pocket Dr. van Dusen took a brown vial. He shook two small white pills into one hand and then passed Ruth the glass of water. He opened his palm to her.

She sat up and took the pills, swallowing them with the water, and then lay back down.

She did not know what the pills would do to her. Perhaps everyone intended to kill her, the daughter of a murderer.

She looked up at the ceiling, as white and smooth as Mrs. van Dusen’s pale forehead.

How do you feel, Ruth? Dr. van Dusen said.

She did not know how to say: Is my father dead?

Where is my father? she said instead. She had not wanted to ask anyone in the police station that question.

Dr. van Dusen reached over to the bedside table, adjusted the angle of the lampshade to direct the light away from her face.

He was handsome, she thought, watching him. His hair was a thick, golden brown, combed back from a high forehead. The goatee gave him an air of distinction. He was a little different
from other men she had known, she sensed. In a book, she realized, his expression would have been described as intelligent.

Do you want to use the bathroom? he asked. Are you cold?

She shook her head, but then she realized that her teeth were chattering.

Ruth lay rigidly on top of the bedspread; Dr. van Dusen reached down and pulled up a blanket folded at the end of the bed, tucking it in around her. He put a hand on her shoulder. His touch seemed to absorb the shaking and he left his palm there. The weight of it was comforting. She made an effort to quiet her body.

You’ll feel better soon, he said. What you’re feeling now? That’s shock.

He looked at his watch and then at her face again. Your father, he said, has been taken to the hospital.

Mrs. van Dusen came back into the room and quietly pulled the curtains.

Sleep now, Dr. van Dusen said. It’s all right, Ruth. You can close your eyes. It’s safe just to go to sleep.

Ruth could not see them, standing in the hall outside the bedroom door, which had been left ajar, but she could hear their low voices.

She wanted to stay awake, to look again at the room around her. Against one wall was a gleaming dresser of dark wood. She assumed she was in a guest bedroom, but a man’s empty white shirt and doctor’s long white coat hung on a wooden hanger suspended from one brass handle. A dressing
table with an oval mirror stood between the two windows, the rainbow glint of faceted glass jars on its surface. A small stool with a low upholstered back and a tufted red seat was drawn up before the dressing table. Two long fissures of summer-evening light glowed between the long dark curtains. In the corner of the room was a chaise longue covered in a printed fabric, a round table beside it stacked with books. She couldn’t quite make out the design of the fabric. She struggled to prop herself up on one elbow; it felt important to see clearly where she was. There were little boats with black masts scattered across the fabric. Or were they Chinamen with pointed hats?

The room seemed as calm and otherworldly as a distant universe. The weight of her head suddenly felt insupportable, and she allowed herself to fall back to the pillow. She felt tears on her face, but before she could wipe them away, she was asleep.

When she woke later she did not know where she was, nor for one paralyzing moment,
who
she was. The events of the day—something terrible was there, behind her thoughts—swarmed and bulged at the edge of her consciousness, a menace.

Around her, the house—the van Dusens’ house, she remembered now—was completely quiet. Night had fallen.

Then everything came back to her. Where was the hospital where her father had been taken? Should she go find him? But she did not want to find him. It must be true, everything they had said about him.

She sat up quickly and put her feet on the floor. Her head seemed to soar away and bump the ceiling and then return to her shoulders. She waited, her heart racing. When her vision steadied, she stood up and walked across the carpet toward the door. Where were her shoes? Someone had taken away her shoes, but she could not stop to look for them. It was necessary that she leave as quickly as possible.

The room tilted, and she staggered. She put out her hand, bruising her knuckles against the dresser.

The bedroom door was ajar. In the upstairs hall, the shaded lamp on the little table was turned on, casting a soft pool of light on the polished wood. Three other doors leading to the landing were closed. A window in the hall overlooked the street, and she could tell from the light outside that it was near dawn. Somehow she had slept all night.

The staircase was ahead, a gleaming banister descending precipitously into the darkness.

Down she went, but her head felt disconnected from her feet. The sensation was like walking down a waterfall.

She paused at the foot of the staircase in the front hall. The front door was ahead, two long panels of glass etched with garlands on either side. When she passed before the long mirror her reflection startled her, and she nearly cried out.

Where would she go? Where in the world could she go now? But she must, she must.

She opened the front door.

A boy—the boy from the day before—was sitting on the lowest step of the porch. Bundled stacks of flat newspapers lay
on the pavement in front of him, a pile of rolled papers on the steps beside him.

She could not believe it was the same boy.

A bicycle lay across the front walkway, one wheel canted skyward. The boy’s hair, mussed from sleep, stood up in a cowlick in the back. When she’d seen him on the street on his bicycle, she’d thought his hair was the color of haystacks. Now, under the porch light, she thought of gold.

He turned around, startled, at the sound of the door opening. She looked at him sitting on the porch steps, and then she looked past him to the dark street, a streetlight burning in what seemed to be the center of every tree’s leafy crown. She had to leave, she thought. There was no choice.

She saw the boy stand up as she took a step onto the porch.

The next instant, it was as if she had dropped into deep black water. She felt herself pitching forward into nothingness.

Every time she awoke over the next hours or days, the light in the bedroom was different. She lost track of time. Whatever was in the pills Dr. van Dusen gave her made her able to do nothing but sleep. She woke only to creep to the adjoining bathroom and then back to bed. Sometimes when she woke, Dr. van Dusen was sitting on a chair beside the bed, glasses on his nose, reading a book held on his lap.

Once when she woke—she could tell by the light outside the window that it must be early evening—Dr. van Dusen was seated beside the bed, and Mrs. van Dusen was entering the room carrying a tray.

He smiled up at her as she handed him the tray.

I thought she might like chicken, Mrs. van Dusen said quietly, and then left the room.

Ruth struggled to sit up. Dr. van Dusen stood and set the tray on her knees.

On a plate was a scalloped dish of creamed chicken in a pie crust, a spoonful of bright green peas.

Head lolling—it was a struggle to keep her eyes open—she took one bite, and then another. She put down her fork. The food had no taste or smell at all.

Dr. van Dusen glanced up from whatever he was reading.

It’s the medicine, he said. Sometimes that happens. The taste of things will come back. It will do you good to eat, if you can.

Ruth ate obediently—fork to mouth, fork to mouth. Flares of panic kept igniting in her belly, and she was afraid she might vomit, but she got to the end of it.

He lifted away the tray when she set down her fork.

A moment later she slipped back again into the flat and dreamless and colorless sleep that felt as if a blindfold had been wrapped over her eyes.

She had fainted on the porch of the van Dusens’ house on the morning she had found the boy there, sitting on the steps rolling the newspapers. When she woke in the days ahead, she remembered that, remembered the sensation of her head separating from her body, her body tumbling forward.

Someone—it must have been the boy—had caught her, carried her back upstairs to the bed, but she had no memory of that. She could not make her mind reconcile the fact that the
events surrounding what had happened to her father had culminated in this way, with Ruth deposited into the home of the boy on the bicycle. She could not bear to think about her father, but she could not stop thinking about him, either.

She did not know what would happen to her.

She slept. Waking, she would turn her face into the pillow and struggle to fall back down into the blackness. Once, after using the toilet, she dared glance at herself in the mirror. A stranger looked back at her, lips and cheeks drained of color, her hair wild.

One morning—was it the second day? The
third
? How long had she been sleeping?—Ruth woke to the sight of Mrs. van Dusen lowering a tray to the table beside her bed and the unmistakable smell of scrambled eggs and tea. Morning light poured into the room.

She struggled to sit up.

Mrs. van Dusen spooned sugar into a teacup, poured tea from a china pot decorated with pink flowers. She waited while Ruth pulled herself up against the pillows and then handed her the cup. Ruth noticed that her hand trembled slightly, and that there were dark circles below Mrs. van Dusen’s eyes, as if the fragile skin above her cheekbones had been bruised.

Dr. van Dusen thought you might feel well enough to eat again, Mrs. van Dusen said.

The eggs smelled wonderful. Ruth ate; the taste of food seemed to have been restored, as well.

When Mrs. van Dusen returned a short time later, she carried a stack of fresh towels.

Maybe you would like to have a bath now, Ruth, she said, though Ruth understood that it wasn’t a question.

Ruth watched from the bed, listening to the sound of the water running. She could see Mrs. van Dusen kneeling by the side of the tub, extending her wrist under the tap to check the temperature of the water. Sunlight from the curtained window fell on her head, her hair the same gold color as the boy’s.

Finally, Mrs. van Dusen got to her feet and came back into the bedroom. She lifted the tray from Ruth’s knees.

Will you be all right? she said. Her eyes sought Ruth’s briefly—Ruth nodded—and then moved away again.

When Mrs. van Dusen withdrew, shutting the door behind her, Ruth made an effort to sit up straighter in bed. Her eyelids still felt so heavy. She walked unsteadily into the bathroom, where she closed the door and shed her wrinkled clothes—clothes that seemed to belong to another lifetime—on the floor.

Once she was lying in the bath, she felt better. The water was warm, and when she allowed herself to sink into it, her ears below the surface, the liquid silence was comforting. The water had been scented with something; there were colored rainbows in it, and it smelled sweetly floral. Or perhaps the smell was just from the room’s astonishing cleanliness, Ruth thought, lying with her face floating just above the water’s surface. Her eyes traveled over the bathroom’s shining faucets, the white tiles of the wall, and the gleaming pink-tiled floor. She’d never been anywhere as clean as the van Dusens’ house, she thought.

She realized she had no clothes other than those she had been wearing … for how many days now?

She had a memory of speaking to Dr. van Dusen at some point, of protesting, of struggling to get out of bed. She had been afraid that he would take her back to the house where she and her father had been living. She did not want ever to see that house again.

What had happened to her father? He must be dead, she thought. Would they tell her?

The memory of him on that day, trying to run, the blood in the air … the thought of the blood filled her with pity. Yet she understood that somehow what had happened was not a complete surprise to her. For her whole life her father had been like a man standing alone at night under a lamppost on a street, waiting, and she did not know for what. She thought that what had been between them might have looked like love—they even might have wanted it to
be
love—but it was as if a river had run between them, separating them.

They had been in some way no relation to each other, his blood his own, nothing to do with her,

She began to cry; she had to sink her head under the water to make herself stop.

Out of the bath, she wrapped herself in one of the big white towels, as soft and clean as everything in the van Dusens’ house.

In the bedroom, she found that the sheets had been changed, the bed made up again with fresh linens, one corner turned down invitingly. On the chair beside the bed were two new blouses, one with narrow pink stripes, the other pale blue, both still pinned to the shirt paper. Beside the shirts were two
skirts, as well as several pairs of cotton underwear and two brassieres, their cups—excruciating, she thought, that someone had noticed the size of her breasts, already big—folded neatly inside one another and slipped discreetly between the blouses. On the bed lay a pale yellow nightgown and a matching robe. Ruth put on the nightgown and climbed back into bed. She sensed that the medicine Dr. van Dusen had been giving her was wearing off—the taste of the eggs had revived her appetite—but all she wanted was to be asleep.

When she woke again later that day, the room was filled with late-afternoon light. She got out of bed and went to use the bathroom, where she saw that her old clothes had been removed. She looked out the bathroom window. Mrs. van Dusen, wearing a wide-brimmed hat, knelt in the garden below among the flowers.

No sound came from anywhere else in the house.

Where was the boy?

Ruth went to the door of the bedroom and looked out onto the landing. From the top of the stairs, she could see down into the front hall. Light came in from the two etched-glass panels beside the front door, and a chandelier distributed colored chinks around the hall, where they moved lazily across the floor and walls. Ruth watched the little squares of light travel silently over the carpet and walls and the slender legs of the hall table. A clock ticked.