Keepers (24 page)

I stored most of the furniture and all of the keepsakes. I hired a cleaning crew to come in and scrub the place from top to bottom. I hosed down the outside until the aluminum siding shone. I had a landscaper come in and fix the lawn, adding flowers and plants out front and a pair of small trees in the back yard. Both Mom and Dad had often remarked how they’d wished we had more shade back there.

I spoke with a real-estate person. I gave her all the necessary information on the house, as well as the bank-account number where the funds were to be deposited, and told her I would call with my new address as soon as I was settled. We made copies of the keys, signed some forms, and shook hands.

I decided to go down to Kansas and visit my grandmother for a while. She was old and not in the best of health and had cried for an hour on the phone when I called to tell her about her daughter’s accidental death. She had neither the strength nor the money to make the trip to Ohio for the service. I wanted to be around her for as long as she might still be alive; I wanted to be around someone who’d known my mother as a child and could tell me things about her that I’d never known. Dad’s mother never entered into the picture; she never liked me and I never liked her, so there would be no love lost between us.

Two nights before I planned to leave, I was sitting in the middle of the emptied living room reading an excellent biography of Roy Buchanan when it suddenly occurred to me that I never knew what Mom’s or Dad’s favorite song was. I have no idea where the thought came from, but once it entered my head it would not leave, and soon—after polishing off half a twelve-pack of Blatz (Dad’s beer of choice)—I started to cry. It seemed to me that someone should have cared enough to ask either of them if they even had a favorite song and, if they did, should have cared enough to remember what it was. So I focused on that until my head felt like it was going to implode.

The ringing of the phone jarred something back into place, and as soon as I answered, the first thing out of my mouth was, “‘Kiss an Angel Good Morning.’ Mom’s favorite song was—”

On the other end, someone burst into sobs.

I shook myself back into the moment at hand and said, “Hello? I’m sorry about—who is this?”

Beth spluttered out my name, then said: “I’m s-s-sorry, I know y-you said not to cal but s-s-something’s happened and I...
ohgod
...please come over. I can’t ask anyone else t-to—”

I was sitting up straight, every nerve in my body twitching. “What’s wrong? What happened?”

“Gotta...gotta do something with the animals now, I d-d-don’t know what I’m supposed to...she said everything was okay, I
asked
her, you know? ‘Everything’s fine now,’ that’s what she said....”

Forget the lies and feelings of betrayal and the anger and rage and pain and jealousy and everything else; when someone you love calls you in the middle of the night in hysterics, you tell your pride to screw itself and go to them without another thought.

I pulled up in front of the house and knew right away something wasn’t right. For one thing, it looked as if every light in the place was on; Beth and especially Mabel were frugal as hell when it came to utilities—neither one of them would have left that many lights burning. For another, the U-Boat was gone and Mabel’s new car (a tan Toyota Tercel, a very smart and sensible car) sat in the driveway; it was well past two a.m. and Mabel should have been at work. The third thing I discovered when I went to knock on the door.

The house was unlocked.

This was not the worst neighborhood in Cedar Hill, but you wouldn’t live here on “Renter’s Row” unless you absolutely
had
to.

I entered and closed the door behind me. I called for Beth and, getting no answer, for Mabel.

Nothing.

I took a deep breath, my heart triphammering, and immediately began to cough and sneeze. It smelled like the place hadn’t been cleaned in days; everything was sopped in the stench of animal shit and old urine mixed with the musty scent of shed fur and...something else. Something meaty and rotten. It was so overpowering I ran into the bathroom and threw up.

Breathing through my mouth, I checked the kitchen and back yard, then Beth’s room.

She was gone, and so were all the Its.

Finally I knocked on Mabel’s bedroom door. When there was no answer I began to open it and saw a piece of paper that had been taped there but had fallen to the floor. I picked up and unfolded the note. It was from Beth:

I couldn’t stay here any longer. I hadn’t been home in

a couple of days. She must have done it while I was

gone. I’m like you now. I’ve lost everyone. I’m so

sorry for everything. There ought to be a place for

people like us. I hope you can forgive me someday.

This is why I don’t trust happiness. It’s better to leave

and re-make yourself. It’s always been the best thing.

I love you. Always remember that.

I opened the bedroom door and—

(
If I don’t turn on the light, everything will be fine
)

—turned on the light.

The first thing I saw were all the pink- and rust-colored feathers scattered around the room, on the floor, sticking to the walls and curtains and light fixtures, but as I stepped closer to the mess on the bed I realized that the feathers had once been white. The dull buzz of flies sounded in my ears. The carpeting grew more and more damp the nearer I came to the bed. There were probably a thousand other smells and splotches and sights but the closer I moved toward the bed, the more my peripheral vision faded out until I could see only through a small, frozen, iris-out circle.

The upper half of the mattress and headboard were splattered in blood speckled with chunks of bone and mangled tissue. She’d dressed for work before lying down and placing the feather pillows over her face. After that it was a simple matter of pulling the pistol out of the drawer in her night stand, pushing and prodding into the pillows until she could feel the barrel’s position through them, or maybe she’d already had the gun in her hand before she lay down, or maybe—

—one of the stained feathers dislodged from the overhead light and brushed against my shoulder on its way down.

The gun lay on the floor near the bed. I wasn’t about to touch it or anything else in the room. My chest was so tight I thought my lungs were going to collapse. Something was strangling me from within. My vision blurred because of something in my eyes. I reached up to wipe it away but made the mistake of moving at the same time. I stumbled over my own feet and fell onto the bed. I heard the muted splash as I hit the soaked remains of the pillows and the body underneath. I felt heavy tepid liquid slopping between my fingers and soaking into my shirt. It was all over me. I panicked and tried to push away but only managed to slip and fall face-first into the worst of it. I scrabbled around like a crab on a beach, tangling myself in gore-saturated sheets and wet feathers until, at last, I managed to grip the edge of the headboard and pull myself up. I lurched around, trying to wipe the blood from my eyes until I bumped into the dresser. I looked up and saw myself in the mirror and almost lost it. At least I didn’t scream. Not once. As much as I wanted to just throw back my head and let fly with a howl to bring down the house, I didn’t. I backed away from the bloody thing in the reflection, blinked, and saw what was on the floor by the other side of the bed.

Patients’ files.

I’d watched Mabel and the other nurses at the home make notations in enough of these things to recognize one on sight. What the hell had she been doing, bringing these home with her? One was enough to get her fired, but she must have had a couple of dozen piled there. Blood pooled over the top file and ran down the sides of the others like fudge on a sundae. A stapled stack of papers lay to the side of the pile. It too was bloodied, but words could still be seen peeking through the smears here and there. I knelt and leaned close. It looked to be some kind of contract. I saw the word
AGREEMENT
; the rest of the upper line was hidden behind a small slop of blood. I moved closer. I made out Mabel’s name, and the words “in strictest confidence hereby agree” and knew what I was looking at. I scanned the rest of the page, stopped, and came back to some words about a third of the way down the page that I had seen on my first pass but hadn’t let register.

between Keepers and

I heard the echo of her voice from the last time we’d spoken:
And if I don’t screw up
,
if I do what I agreed to and keep this job
,
then I can have all that
.
Is that so bad
?
Does that make me callous
?
Is it such a terrible thing to want an actual home and peace of mind
?

“What the hell did you agree to?” I asked the silence of the dead room.

Am I a bad person
?

A dial clicked numbers in the correct sequence and all the tumblers fell into place, and a door opened and something awful stepped out to make itself partially known.

G
otta do something with the animals now
, Beth had said.

I don’t remember if I closed the door behind me when I ran out of the house, nor do I know if anyone saw me leave, but since the police never showed up on my doorstep after that night I have to assume that I was not seen—or that if I was, no one cared. Around here, you were not your brother’s or sister’s keeper.

Even though it was cooler than usual, the humidity was high that night, and every street I drove along was alive with a thin layer of mist that skirled across the beams of my headlights. I was driving through a sea of cotton. A deer darted across the road at one point, followed a few seconds later by two rabbits. Whichever road or street I took, there was some animal in my peripheral vision: a dog, a cat, a raccoon moving through the bushes and shadows on the curb.

The facility was harder to find at night. The road was lit not at all, and the moon was hiding behind thick stationary clouds as if it were afraid or ashamed to allow its light to reveal too much.

I passed the building and had to turn around. I killed my headlights before turning up the asphalt drive, then pulled over into the shadows. I would walk the rest of the way.

I have never in my life been so anxiously aware of the silences in the night or the sound of my own breathing. I crept up the drive like some thief casing a target house and nearly jumped out of my skin when a skunk waddled across the drive on its way from one patch of trees to the other. The area around the building was brightened by a sole sodium-vapor light at the edge of the visitors’ parking lot. I spotted the U-Boat parked at the farthest end. On the other side of the building, Keepers’ vans formed the long, segmented shadow-shape of a giant serpent in slumber.

I started toward the entrance doors when another car turned onto the driveway. I was still covered in Mabel’s blood (oddly enough, cleaning up before leaving the house never entered my mind) and the last thing I needed was to be seen like this. I leapt aside, cowering behind a trash dumpster as the new-looking Mercedes drove up and parked in front of the entrance.

A man and a woman got out and opened the back doors. The man removed and unfolded a wheelchair while his wife helped a much older and frail-looking woman out of the back seat; once she was situated in the chair, the man reached in the car, removed a pet carrier, and the three of them went inside.

As soon as they were through the doors I ran across the lot toward the U-Boat to see if Beth and the Its were still there. Maybe she’d gotten here, parked, then froze as the shock of everything finally hit. I’d find her sitting there, hands gripping the steering wheel so tightly their knuckles would be white.

It was empty.

I took a deep breath and tried unsuccessfully to steady my shaking hands. I thought about the day we’d piled into the car and brought the other Its out here, the way Whitey had gotten so emotional about the leaving women, how Mabel walked through the selection area in a semi-catatonic daze, and the way I’d found Beth coming out of the room behind the large steel door. I suddenly wished that I smoked; a cigarette would help right now, the feel of it between my fingers, the aroma of the tobacco as it was ignited by the flame, the first deep inhalation...oh, yeah. That would have been nice. Mom liked to smoke. Dad preferred a pipe. I missed them terribly. I missed Whitey and Beth and Mabel, missed the world I’d once known and had taken for granted.

I heard car doors slam and slunk over to the front of the building in time to see the Mercedes’ taillights receding; the driver didn’t even signal or slow as the car reached the road, he just tore out of there with a squeal of tires and burst of exhaust and a sudden, violent leftward skid that he quickly corrected before gunning the engine and speeding away.

I wiped blood and perspiration from my face, took another deep breath, and stepped inside.

An old cat sat in one of the top cages; it was the only animal here, and I was the only person. I stared at the cat and it, in turn, showed his interest in me by yawning.

I knew this animal—
recognized
it, anyway—but couldn’t place it. It wasn’t one of the Its but, still...where had I seen this disenchanting arthritic bundle of fur and teeth?

The selection area was dark and closed off by a collapsible barred security door.

That left only the large steel door on the right.

I peered through its window but could see nothing, then realized this was intentional, that you could only see through from the other side. I reached down and grabbed the handle. It never occurred to me that this door might be locked; if that had been the case, I might be a much different and happier man now, but it was unlocked and swung open with only a minimum of effort.

The cold draft from inside seemed less severe than before, but that was probably because the night itself was cooler, so the contrast in temperatures wasn’t as drastic.