Keepers (21 page)

“They’re turning this place into something out of
2001
, I swear. You need card-keys to move between units now, and every hall has its own camera and a microphone so we can hear if anyone calls out for help. You’d think we were guarding the gold at Fort Knox. There’s even three more full-time security guards, one inside and one covering the grounds for each shift. We’re getting to be quite the place, we are.”

“I don’t have to worry about being stopped or something, do I?”

“No,” she said, reaching into her pocket and removing a plastic credit-card-looking thing at the end of a dark ribbon. “Just make sure you wear this where it can be seen.” She draped the visitor’s pass over my neck. “You have to wear one of these at night—even a fixture like you.”

“‘Fixture.’ Oooh. I love it when you talk like an interior decorator. Tell me about
accouterments
next. Whisper about them slowly.”

“You are the most
evil
boy, aren’t you?”

“I get a lot of complaints about that, yes.”

“Who said I was complaining?” And with that Arlene led me to the unit and left me to my own devices. The break room was in the hall opposite the one leading to Whitey’s room, so it didn’t exactly take a lot of sneaking and skulking to get to his room—though I was anxiously aware that I was on-camera now.

I passed the room that had been the former home of the Captain Spaulding Brothers and slowed. The new occupant—who for the moment had the room to herself—was sitting in her wheelchair, asleep in front of a color television displaying a muted re-run of
The Waltons.
There was a vibrantly green potted plant on the windowsill, several books stuffed between a set of hand-carved cherry-wood bookends themselves shaped like books, an antique Tiffany lamp whose stained-glass shade glowed softly from the 40-watt bulb underneath, diffuse sunlight warming church windows. A patchwork quilt lay neatly folded at the foot of her bed, while the head was covered in an assortment of colorful small pillows. There were framed photographs hanging on the wall next to her bed: a black-and-white wedding picture, so faded around the edges it looked like something glimpsed through a fog; several color photographs of the same cat and dog taken years apart, the cat going from a bright-eyed, grey-furred kitten to something that looked like an over-used feather duster with a rheumy gaze, the dog journeying from its days as a square-bodied bundle of muscles and legs to an arthritic lump atop an old throw rug that, like the animal lying on it, had seen better days. I wondered if the animals were still alive and why there were no pictures of children and grandchildren anywhere. Everything about the room and the woman sleeping in the chair whispered of weariness, of too much quiet, not enough voices and visitors. A lamp, a quilt, some books, a television, and frozen moments from memory framed on the walls; this is what her life had come down to. I wondered if one of those books was a poetry collection, if perhaps it contained any Browning, if she had certain well-thumbed pages marked for easy finding or knew them by heart; did she ever fall asleep repeating snippets of sonnets in her mind as she looked at the frozen moments from her life?

My heart is very tired, my strength is low,

My hands are full of blossoms plucked before,

Held dead within them till myself shall die.

I knew Whitey would kick my ass up between my shoulders if he knew I was thinking these things. (“Know what your name would have been if you’d’ve been born an Indian? ‘Dark Cloud.’ Trust me on this. They wouldn’t have had to worry about having their land stolen by the White Man and then being systematically slaughtered, no—you would’ve
depressed
them to death!”)

I smiled at the thought, wished this sleeping woman pleasant dreams and a happy day to come (I also couldn’t help but smile at the bumper sticker someone had pasted to the back of her wheelchair:
I Accelerate for Fuzzy Bunnies
), then headed to Whitey’s room.

His door was closed.

I stared at the thing, my poised fist frozen in mid-knock.

Maybe this was part of the new security measures, keeping the doors closed at night—but then why hadn’t Miss Acceleration’s door been closed, as well? No, this wasn’t what it appeared to be, it couldn’t be, I wouldn’t accept it, wouldn’t allow it. Whitey might not be in the best shape, but it had only been three days since I’d last seen him (he wasn’t very talkative and insisted he wasn’t feeling well, though I suspected he was just depressed and wanted to be left alone) and I refused to believe that anything had happened to him. Mabel would have told me. I knocked and waited for him to shout something insulting.

Nothing.

I grabbed the door handle and began to open it when the rest of it finally registered: his name plate had been removed from its slot in the wall next to the door, the clipboard which held his chart was no longer hanging on its hook underneath his name, and the lights in the room were off. Whitey always kept the bathroom light on at night so he didn’t have to stumble through the dark to take a leak.

If I don’t turn on the light, everything will be fine,
I thought.
Right now it’s dark and you’re not looking at anything that confirms what you’re trying not to think about, so for this moment, in the dark, Whitey’s here and sleeping and everything’s the way it was the last time you were here
.

The smart thing to do was not turn on the light. I’d lost too many people recently. Dad was chewed up and dead and gone, Mom might as well be dead for all the joy she found in her day-to-day existence, and I’d seen so little of Beth for the last six weeks she could have been in Guatemala with the Peace Corps. I would not allow another person to slip away from me. And the best way to ensure that would be to do the smart thing, and the smart thing was not to turn on the light.

I turned on the light.

Two beds, both empty. No television, no video-tape machine, no pictures, no books in precarious stacks; nothing in the closets but hangers, nothing in the restroom except an unused roll of toilet paper, a full soap dispenser, and a tub and sink that were desert-dry.

I stood in the empty room shaking my head while something in the middle of my chest tried to snap through my ribcage. This was not—repeat
not
—happening. Maybe I’d gone into the wrong room, it could happen, so there I was back out in the hall checking the room number and it was the right number but that didn’t mean anything, Whitey was always bitching about how little space he had in there so maybe they’d just moved him to another room, a bigger room, one big enough to hold all of his stuff and leave space for his ego. I went down the left side of the hall first, checking and double checking the names next to the doors and Whitey’s wasn’t among them, so now I went up the right side, double and triple checking the names and it wasn’t there, either. I reached the end of the hall and went left toward the break room because Mabel was there and she’d know, she could tell me what was going on—

—unless she didn’t know, unless something happened earlier today and the detritus had already been cached away and no one had told her—

—the door to the break room stood half-opened. I started to push my way inside when I heard Mabel say, “It’s probably for the best,” but there was something in her voice that told me she was simply parroting a practiced response, that she didn’t really believe what she was saying but wanted whomever she was talking with to think she did, then a male voice replied, “It’s always for the best, it’s important you remember that” and I had the door open and was standing there long enough to see that the man she was speaking to wasn’t dressed in an administrator’s three-piece suit or even a jacket and tie, no; he was dressed in a tan jumpsuit and wore a wool cap pulled down on the sides to cover the top half of his ears, and he was the first to notice me.

“This area is for sanctioned personnel only,” he said. His face and voice were granite.

I reached down and fumbled at the thing hanging around my neck. “I’ve got a visitor’s pass.”

“That doesn’t matter—you shouldn’t be in here. What’s your name?”

Mabel’s face drained of color the second I told him but I figured it was more out of concern that she was about to get into trouble. I decided to play it safe and act as if I didn’t know her, like I was just some schlub off the street who couldn’t find his butt with both hands, a floodlight, and a seven-man search party.

“I’m sorry if I’ve interrupted anything but I was looking for...for my uncle, Marty Weis?” I pointed over my shoulder, looking directly at Mabel. “His room’s empty, ma’am. Has he been moved to another unit?”

Mabel released a breath and said to Jumpsuit, “I’ll take care of this,” walked over, and gestured for me to move toward the nurse’s desk. As we walked down the hall she slapped an iron clamp that looked like her hand on my elbow. “How the
hell
did you get in?”

I looked back to see Jumpsuit standing outside the break room, watching her escort me out. “Arlene let me in, she said—”

“—she shouldn’t have let you in. Unless it’s an emergency, there are now no visitors allowed after eight-thirty.”

“I’m sorry, Ma—uh, ma’am, I didn’t know.” She shot a quick thank-you glance at me when I said “ma’am.” “Where is he?”

“Mr. Weis is no longer with us,” she said, a little too loudly. She pulled me past the nurse’s desk toward the hallway where I’d entered; her entire body was rigid and we were moving a little too fast.

“Please tell me what happened.”

“Mr. Weis is no longer with us, sir. You can call the Admissions Office after nine tomorrow morning.” We turned down the hall and moved toward the door. After a few steps Mabel looked back over her shoulder, then doubled her pace, yanking me along. Her grip on my arm tightened.

“That
hurts
,” I whispered.

“Jesus, I wish you hadn’t told him your name.”

“So what? Big deal—what’s he going to do, issue an APB?”

Mabel swiped her card-key as she none-too-gently spun me around and began to push the door open with my back. “Listen, you know I love you, right?”

“What the—aren’t you worried about him hearing you?”

“He didn’t follow us and this hall isn’t monitored. You know I love you, right?”

“Yeah...?”

“And you know I don’t say or do anything without a damn good reason, right?”

“Yeah...?”

“Good.” She blinked and gave a weak, unreadable smile. “You need to leave right now and go home and not come around here or the house for a little while, a week or two.”

“Where’s Marty? He didn’t...didn’t—”

“—Mr. Weis is no longer with us. That’s all I can tell you.” Then she silently mouthed the words
He’s fine
while slowly shaking her head. “Please do this for me, will you? Go home and stay away for a couple of weeks.”

“But...but what’s...I mean—”

“Do it for me, please?” This wasn’t just out of concern for her job—there was hard, raw, genuine fear in her voice. Before I could say anything else she pushed me outside, closed and locked the door, spun around, and returned to the unit, not giving me so much as a backward glance. I was just some schlub off the street.

Sitting behind the wheel of my trusty schlubmobile, confused, hurt, and angry, I drove out of the parking lot. I had no idea where I was going until I found myself across the street from the Welsh Hill’s Players Theatre. I sat there thinking about nothing and everything until the doors of the theatre opened and cast members filed out by twos and threes. Beth was not among the first wave, nor the second. I sat in the car another five minutes before she appeared.

She wasn’t alone; the director and another cast member—who from his muscular build and Greek-godlike chiseled features had to be the guy playing Louis—were with her. They stood chatting as the director turned off the lights and locked the doors, then, with a wave and well-practiced smile, Mr.
Ar-Teest
went to his car and drove off.

Beth and Louis stood under the single domed light above the entrance (the building is a small converted church; under the light and spire they looked like figures on a wedding cake) and continued chatting, but the more they talked, the closer they moved to one another until, at last, Louis snaked an arm around her waist. I was starting to open the car door so I could charge over and save her from his lech routine when she slipped
both
her arms around his neck and their bodies moved together for a kiss—and this was no friendly, Good-Rehearsal-See-You-Tomorrow kiss (why does everyone involved in live theatre feel the need to be so kissy-kissy touchy-feely with fellow cast members?)—no, this was a serious, deep, long, wet, passionate kiss, the kind she should have been giving to me but had been too
tired
to offer lately, a kiss like the one she’d given me against which all others would be compared and come up lacking.

I sat with the door half open, one foot on the street and the other by the brake pedal, telling myself that this couldn’t be what it looked like.

Then Louis slid his hand down her back and cupped her ass.

Even from where I was sitting I could hear the deep, sexy laugh she gave—without breaking their lip-lock—and see how she ever-so-gently pressed her groin tight again his.

Once again I was a nine-year-old kid waiting in her car at a gas station while she let some creep feel her up; once again I hated the guy and wanted to kill him; but, unlike
once again
, I was bigger, stronger, angrier: unlike
once again
I could do something about it.

I got out of the car, slammed the door, and started across the street.

They didn’t notice me until I was about five feet away, and even then, though they broke from their kiss, neither one let go of the other. Louis looked at me with the same indifference he probably displayed to waiters and garbage men and all non-theatre people, while Beth looked shocked and terrified—a classic deer-in-the-headlights—but only for a second. Then her face relaxed and she slid her arms down to encircle Louis’s waist.