Ink (16 page)

As he walked down another long hall, identical to the first, he realized he hadn’t passed a soul.

Like I’m the only person here.

He came to another opening, another small sign, and still there was no sign of anyone else. Sweat ran in a cold trail down his spine as he took the hallway to the right.

Like one of those movies where the hero wakes up and finds he’s the last man left alive. And at first, he thinks he’s the lucky one. He thinks something horrible happened to everyone else. Until he realizes that something horrible has happened, but he isn’t lucky at all.

Another sign. Another turn. As he rounded the corner, he almost collided with an orderly in a tan uniform. Jason stepped aside to avoid him, and his left arm hit the wall hard enough to send a flare of pain down to his fingertips.

“Shit, I’m sorry,” Jason said.

The orderly, a tall man with a bald head, dark skin, and deep-set eyes glared at Jason. A tattoo on his arm caught Jason’s eye—a pinup girl in a sexy pink nightgown with something hidden behind her back. She wore a very naughty expression on her face, and not naughty in a nice way.

“You should be careful,” the orderly said in a low, cigarette-rough voice.

“I will.”

The orderly scratched his head, and his scalp rippled with the movement. A stink like an old ashtray filled to overflowing rose up and out as the orderly turned, waving him away with one hand. “Go on now.”

Jason’s mouth went desert dry. He couldn’t move. The orderly laughed, a quick humorless sound, and stared at him with pale green eyes nearly swallowed up by his heavy lids.

“You lost?”

Jason shook his head.

“Better get moving then.”

Jason turned his face away from the strange eyes, but his legs would not cooperate. The orderly’s feet shuffled on the tile, and his uniform made a whispery noise.

He’s coming toward me.

Jason’s slowly turned around, his hands curled into fists. The orderly was gone. The hospital swallowed up the noise of his slow, uneven footsteps. No music played, no voices crept out from behind the closed doors, no equipment beeped. From where he stood, the hallway looked like it went on forever.

Maybe I’m stuck in some horrible place. And no matter how far I walk, no matter how long I walk, there will always be another turn. Another hallway.

His stomach gave a sickening lurch, and he leaned back against the wall, breathing hard. This was stupid. It was a hospital. Not a movie. No zombies, no demented orderlies waited around the corner. He was tired and worried, that was all.

He pushed off the wall. The hallway did have an end, and when he made another right turn he breathed a sigh of relief to find a set of double doors, clearly marked Cardiac Care with an intercom panel set to the right of the doors. He pressed the button and a scratchy, tired voice came out; after he gave his name, the intercom went silent, and the doors opened with a mechanical hiss.

The strange silence followed him in. His shoes made small, slapping noises on the tile floor as he approached the nurses’ station. A short, round woman behind the desk wore scrubs patterned with cartoon characters and spoke to Jason in a voice made only a little less scratchy without the intercom. She sounded like Sailor’s sister. Did everyone in the hospital smoke? That orderly… No, best not to think about him. He was wrong.

Instead of pointing him in the right direction, she grabbed a clipboard and guided him down a quiet hallway with half-open doors on each side. The doors were painted dark blue, the walls a pale shade of grayish-tan. Her shoes made no sound at all as she walked with quick, purposeful steps. Nothing like Sailor’s rolling walk. He didn’t think he’d ever seen
anyone
walk like that.

Something dug into his memory and he shuddered. The CCU was quiet but not silent. Jason heard muted voices from one room, the steady beep of unseen equipment from another, and a quiet sobbing from yet another. Each door had a small brass nameplate in the center, with the patient’s last name handwritten on a white card.

And when they’re done, they slide those little cards out and throw them away. Then they slide in the next patient, the next name.

They passed another nurse in less colorful scrubs, and the two women simply nodded to each other.

The whole wing feels like a tomb. Everyone here is waiting for their ride to come along. Their last ride.

She stopped at the last door on the right, a fully closed door with an empty nameplate. Why wasn’t his father’s name written on a little white card?

“Go on in,” she said.

Before Jason could move, she walked across the hallway into the opposite room. He stared at the blank nameplate and balled his hands into fists. He didn’t want to go in. A hard but simple truth. If he stood out in the hallway he could pretend everything was fine. No, he couldn’t deny he was in the CCU, but maybe the room belonged to someone else. Not his father. A neighbor maybe or a nameless stranger. Maybe this whole thing was just a mistake. The door held the answer. He simply had to put out his hand and push it open.

But that empty nameplate…

Maybe they forgot to add the little card. People forget things all the time.

Jason took a deep breath and went inside.

7

His father was a still shape beneath the white sheets; Jason paused in the doorway until he saw the rise and fall of his chest. His mother got up, moving slow, and when he hugged her she slumped forward, sighing against his shoulder. She let go first, stepping back to wrap her arms around herself like a butterfly chrysalis, with growing wings made of nightgown and old sweater instead of kaleidoscopic chitin. The shadows beneath her eyes added several unkind years to her face.

“He’s sleeping,” she whispered.

“Is he going to be okay?”

“Yes.”

“Maggie, you don’t have to whisper, I’m awake,” his father said in a thin, papery voice.

But he was alive. That was the most important thing. Jason walked over to the bed and squeezed his hand, ignoring both the cool, clammy skin and the smell of sickness and stale hope radiating from the walls. The steady beep of a heart monitor kept time, punctuated with a drip-drip-drip from an IV bag of clear fluid.

“How are you feeling?”

“Like I just had a heart attack. Next stupid question.” Despite the gruff words, his dad smiled. “Sit down, both of you. You’re making me nervous standing around. I got enough of that from the doctors and nurses.”

“Jack, you’re supposed to be resting,” his mother said, perching on the edge of the chair closest to the bed.

“I’m in a hospital bed, hooked up to who knows what. What else can I do but rest? I can talk and rest at the same time. And why did you wake Jason up? He has to work in the morning.”

Jason hid a smile behind his hand and sat down, the vinyl seat pushing up a puff of cool air around his thighs. “Dad, it’s okay. I’m glad Mom called me, okay?” He turned to his mom. “Are Ryan and Chris coming?”

“I called Ryan, but he didn’t answer. Chris is on his way, and he’s going to keep trying to reach Ryan. Chris said the traffic won’t be so bad this time of night.”

“I don’t know why the damn fool had to move to Virginia in the first place,” his father said. “And Ryan probably turns off his cell phone at night. Jason, you should go home. I’m fine,” he said in that papery, unfine voice. “Don’t give me that look. It wasn’t that bad. They’re going to do a stress test tomorrow and some other things…”

“Jack, please rest.”

Jason’s dad lifted one hand from the bed and dropped it back down. “It is what it is, Maggie,” he said, but closed his eyes, and soon enough, his soft snores drifted up from the bed.

“Mom, what happened?” Jason kept his voice low.

“He didn’t feel well after dinner, so he took a nap and woke up about an hour later with chest pain. He didn’t want me to call 911, of course, but I did anyway because he could hardly breathe from the pain.”

“I wish you would’ve called me earlier.”

She reached over and patted his hand. “I called you as soon as they got him settled in this room. What could you have done? Stand around in the waiting room? Your father didn’t want me to call you at all.”

The door swung open, and the nurse with the less colorful scrubs came in. She checked the monitor and the IV, jotted something down on a clipboard, and nodded at Jason and his mother before she left the room, leaving the door partially open.

“You should just go home,” his mother said. “There’s nothing you can do here. He’s just going to sleep. You can come back in the morning, or you can wait and come over when he gets home. They won’t keep him here for more than a couple of days.”

“I want to stay, okay?”

She nodded in reply, and tears glimmered in her eyes.

“Try not to worry. He’ll be okay, he’s strong. You know that.”

She nodded again.

“Do you need anything? Want me to get you some coffee or something?”

“No, I’m fine. They’ll probably end up kicking you out, you know. It’s past visiting hours.”

“I’ll stay until they do, but I think it’s okay. The nurse would’ve kicked me out before if it wasn’t.”

Leaning back in the chair, she rubbed her eyes. “If you’re going to stay, I think I’ll rest my eyes for a few minutes, but if I fall asleep, make sure you wake me up if the nurse or the doctor comes back in.”

It didn’t take long for her breathing to become slow and even. Jason shifted in the uncomfortable chair, but he didn’t want to leave the room, not with both of them asleep. Even in sleep, his father’s face wore shadows and gray. A bruise bloomed on the back of his hand around the IV needle, and beneath the thin blanket, his legs weren’t limbs, but twigs. Tubes and wires snaked out from underneath the covers like alien appendages.

His mother’s face glowed ghostly pale in the dim lighting, her lips totally devoid of color. Inside the too-big sweater, she appeared shapeless. She twitched in her sleep, and her nightgown’s ruffled hem rose up a few inches, revealing dry, flaky skin crisscrossed with spidery blue veins, sensible shoes with rubberized soles and mismatched white socks. His eyes were drawn back again and again to the blue veins on her legs.

When did they get so old?

A memory, sharp and strong, raced in. A trip to the ocean when Jason was eight, his brothers six and ten. The sun had set over the water, turning everything gold and red. His parents stood up on the beach, holding hands, while the boys ran in and out of the surf, then his dad whispered something in her ear, and her laughter rang out over the water. Bright laughter. Good laughter.

Another nurse poked her head in the door and smiled at Jason, but she didn’t tell him to leave. Instead she pulled the door closed behind her. He rested his head back against the chair and stared up at the tiled ceiling. Underneath the electronic chirp, the heart monitor gave off a steady hum, and he listened to the chirp and the hum and stared at the ceiling and thought about the ocean and the way the waves had swirled icy cold around his ankles as the sun slipped behind the horizon, the shells glistening on the beach, pearly white against the dark sand.

8

Jason dreamed of the white room again. Seashells, not dead animals, covered the floor, and his father stood off to the side in a hospital gown. Heart monitors filled the room, all of them beeping in a chaotic frenzy. Jason knew his father shouldn’t be in the room, but his face wore no fear. His legs were pale below the edge of the blue-and-white-checked gown. As he turned his face toward Jason, he shook his head.

“Son, this isn’t right. Didn’t you read the fine print?”

Jason wanted to tell him he didn’t understand, but a gust of wind blew through the room, hot and fetid, and he choked on his words. The seashells rattled against each other with a thin, bony sound. The wind sucked back out of the room, leaving behind the smell of small dead things with an antiseptic bite. Somewhere, a bird circled overhead, its wings flapping in a deadly arc.

Just a seagull circling over the ocean.

Yes, even the ocean surf was here. He couldn’t see it, but he could hear its steady rush and roar as it gathered up and crashed down.

But it’s only a dream wave. Not real at all. That sunset happened so long ago. The waves came up and washed away our footprints. Washed them all away.

His father shook his head again. “What did you do?”

What did he do? Nothing.

This room wasn’t his making, his design. His father turned around and shuffled away through the seashells, dragging an IV pole behind him, the bag filled with a thick and viscous fluid.
Things
swam in the fluid, white worms chuckling as they took their turn down the spiral of tubing into his father’s arm.

The rush of the ocean wasn’t an ocean anymore, but the steady hum of voices, many voices, all of them whispering, humming. The voices of the mad and depraved.

Jason wanted to yell, to tell his father to stop, but his own voice didn’t work. It wouldn’t. He wasn’t allowed to speak here. He raised his hands, and as his father moved farther away, the heart monitors sped up to a shriek as they joined together, growing louder and louder. Jason’s father walked on with slumped shoulders. The seagull flapped its wings overhead, and the heart monitors screamed…