Lost (10 page)

When she stopped for breath, Emma butted in: “Yes, but you've gone way overboard with it. Way overboard!”

Holding her arms across her body, Leona hugged herself to break the chill. Talking about Mamie was like a spell; it put her back in that room all those nights. “She wouldn't help herself. Emma, she wouldn't eat, wouldn't talk, or, as far as I know, wouldn't cry either; wouldn't go to the toilet, wet the bed, and day in and day out, hour after hour after hour, she just stared off at—at I don't know what, a place in the air. And you know what they fed her? Pablum, just like a baby.”

Emma slowly shook her head. “I know,” she said. “That's what they say.”

“Okay, so the last time they let me see her, she'd stopped wetting the bed and started going to the bathroom by herself. Most of her bandages had been taken off. But they call me in and say I'm doing more harm than good, I'm not detached enough, but they can't help her because they're
too
detached.”

“But, Leona, you have to admit this is wrong. It's just
crazy
.”

“No,” she said. “I don't. I don't have to admit anything. I've tried to think this through. Her relatives don't have anything; they're barely scraping by. You could see it in their faces. They don't want her; she's just another problem. But they'll take her because, as they put it, ‘We bide by our own,' and for the insurance money. And there's no time left. They're taking her tomorrow.
They're taking her, Emma
. I can't stop it any other way. But what if they don't? She'll be put up for adoption. And I can't do a blessed thing, can't lift a finger to stop it. I can't adopt her, the lawyer told me, because I'm not married. What does that mean? That I'd care for her any less? Anybody else'll want to adopt a perfect baby. Well, she's not a baby, and she's not perfect.”

“That's what worries me most,” Emma said. “That's why I wouldn't want to take her myself. What if she's not quite right?” And she poked at her own head again.

“Will you stop doing that?”

“I have to say what I think.”

Leona shuddered from the cold and tensed her arm muscles tight. Her nose was beginning to run and she had to sniff every few seconds. “Anyway, Emma, what's left? One of those
homes?
There's no bright spot in this. It never gets any better. It's all too iffy and time has run out. Put yourself in my place and tell me what I'm supposed to do. Lay it all aside, the way you said to? I can't, Emma, I just can't. I've got to get her out of this.”

Emma cocked her head to the side and a smile stretched in her wind-chilled face. “Leona, you know what this reminds me of—the way you look right now? It's like it was when we were kids and one of us would have a crush on somebody and we'd have those endless talks about do you think he likes me? Do you think he really likes me? How could I have missed it? My God, Leona, it's all over you. You've fallen in love.”

“Oh, Emma …” She wanted to laugh and tried to, but her teeth chattered too much. “Don't be ridiculous.”

“And you look so good. Nobody'd ever guess there was anything wrong with you.”

“Well, think what you will, Emma. I can't take any more of this, and besides I've got to get in there and pack.” She put her arm around her sister. “Aren't you cold?”

They went toward the house with Emma refusing to be still. “I'm the one people'll talk about. I'm the one who'll have to put up with it. You stayed at my house, so I'm responsible.… And besides, I wanted you to stay with us through Thanksgiving. The boys'll be home then. Bad weather will be here any day, and, Leona, you can't drive worth a hoot.”

“I know you wanted us to spend Thanksgiving together, but you should spend that time with your family without me tagging along.”

“You're part of my family,” Emma said. For a split second, her voice sounded blubbery again.

“Oh, for Christ's sake. I am not. How old are your boys now? Eighteen? Twenty? Out on their own. They're practically strangers to me.”

“That shouldn't be either.”

“No, it probably shouldn't, but it's true. Sad, but true. Emma, why don't you stop this and help me?”

“That's just like you! If you think I'm going to be a party to this, you've got another think coming!”

But as they neared the back door, Emma ducked and pulled out of Leona's arm. “I want to say one thing, though, Leona. These past few months before this trouble came up, that's the way we should've been all these years. And I don't want you to go, because now that I finally feel like we know how to get along.… I feel like I'll never see you again.”

“Why, Emma May Mattingly, I do believe you're jealous. Shame on you.
Shame on you
. Bite your tongue.”

Still it was another half hour, quarter past eight and pitch dark outside, before the upstairs bedroom she had used for almost five months was put back in order, the last suitcase stowed with the other six in the trunk of the blue Buick, and she was ready to go. Grumbling and complaining, Emma had been up and down the stairs more times than Leona cared to count, bringing a box Leona didn't need, asking questions, and all the time arguing with herself: “I could stop this, you know. I could call the hospital and warn them what you're going to do. But then I suppose they'd suspect I was in on it.”

“You could always be anonymous,” Leona told her, and grinned.

“Well, it wouldn't take a mental giant to figure out who it was, now, would it? But don't you tempt me.”

Leona went up to the bedroom one last time. “For a final check,” she said. “I always feel as if I'm forgetting something.”

Actually, what she went back for was the black lizardskin briefcase she had left under the far side of the bed. It had come to her as part of the Merchassen estate. To Leona, it somehow represented all the years she had been with the Merchassens, first as housekeeper, then as secretary (and nurse in a crisis), and finally as companion to Helen Merchassen until she had died at the age of eighty-two the summer before last.

The black briefcase was what the doctor had affectionately called “a smuggler's wonder,” and he had bought it simply because it was clever. It opened in half and she laid it flat on the bed. On one side there was a series of pockets and dividers with zippers that seemed to fill the space quite well. But underneath was another compartment at least two inches deep; here is where Leona kept the small vials of medicine wrapped in cotton batting and the compounds and few instruments she had taken from the office before the auction. The doctor had been a fastidious man, so there weren't many other things she thought she should take, except for the personal documents he and his wife had left behind—drivers' licenses, birth certificates, appointment books, a diary. She decided it would be disrespectful to allow these small personal items to be passed on to strangers, and the relatives had no use for them. So she kept them—and she kept them in the pockets and dividers that held the medicines it was probably illegal for her to have.

The other side had an actual false bottom. She cleared this half of everything she had originally put in it. There was a slot in the spine of the briefcase, and by fiddling with the small blade of a penknife, she triggered the release of a panel in the bottom, revealing an inch-deep space the full length and width of the briefcase. And that was where she had placed the larger denominations of bills when she closed her account and withdrew her money at the bank in Scranton. She pulled three thousand-dollar bills from the top of one of the bundles and closed the fake floor of the case.

She and Dr. Merchassen had decided that the illusion of false depth was created by the complex, paisley-patterned lining of the case. On top of the secret compartment she refilled the space with the folder of newspaper clippings she had been able to find about the fire and Mamie Abbott's progress. Then, the beginnings of a runner she had been crocheting on the sly for Emma, and the crochet hook. And finally Doc's Browning automatic, given to him by a distant cousin who had survived the Normandy invasion.

The barrel of the handgun carried the inscription
FABRIQUE NATIONALE D
'
ARMES DE GUERRE HERSTAL BELGIQUE
, but she didn't know what that meant. Doc Merchassen had a name for the gun she couldn't remember—maybe it was service issue, or officer's issue. No, that wasn't right. She did remember Doc telling her how to cock it by pulling the top sleeve back, and that it held thirteen shots, which seemed appropriate. To the best of her knowledge, the gun had never been fired and it frightened her. Leona imagined it packed with dirt inside, blowing up in her hand when she squeezed the trigger. And yet she kept it because it had been one of his most treasured things.

She put it in with the crochet work and shut the briefcase. She wrapped the three big bills inside a five-dollar bill to keep in her hand, took the briefcase, and turned off the light.

Her perspective slowly changed as she went down the curved staircase. Everything seemed to float away from her—the oblong of the downstairs door, the writing table with its vase of silk chrysanthemums, Emma wearing a fresh orange-colored apron. Feeling light-headed, Leona descended the stairs carefully, holding the bannister by the hand with the money and carrying the briefcase in the other.

“I wish you could at least stay until Frank gets home. I know he'd like to say goodbye.”

Leona could deal with Emma, not her husband; there was no telling what he might do. She'd planned all along to be gone before he came home from his pinochle game. Deep down, she believed he resented her being there. “Emma, if I wait, it'll be too late to get anywhere tonight and I'll never have another chance.” It came out sounding too harsh, too selfish, and she tried to lighten it. “Besides, if I have to sit through watching John Cameron Swayze again, I'll just cringe.”

Emma slowly looked away and went to hold the kitchen door open at the side of the house. When Leona went by, she hugged her with her free arm and kissed her cheek. “Wish me luck, Emma,” she said and slipped the bills, unseen, into Emma's apron pocket.

“Where will you go?”

“Wherever she wants to go.”

It wasn't an answer, but Emma didn't pursue it. “Well, let me know how you are.” Her chin dimpled and creased like a peach pit and she said no more.

Then she was gone, Emma's image losing detail until it was a waving silhouette, framed in the doorway by the yellow light behind.

Slowly she drove down the street, slowly along streets she had taken night after night, streets so embedded in her memory she could walk them blind a year from now. She knew where the sidewalk bucked up from tree roots and where it was sunken, washed over with grass. Past houses that had never been and would never be hers, past families in rooms of light, glimpsed through swagged curtains. How long her heart had ached for such a place—a home and a family all her own.

Anything could go wrong. If Emma let on or started bawling or told Frank and he called the hospital; or if one of the nurses for some unknown reason decided at the wrong moment to go to the laundry room, and in the dark they collided … But Leona couldn't worry about that. For the last few days now, she had mentally rehearsed her going in and coming out. By merely closing her eyes, she could visualize the course she would take, the pale yellow-brown floor and the stark white walls flowing by as she passed from the dusky laundry room through the metal-plated swinging doors, up the six or eight steps of the shadowed vestibule, and to the right into the glare of the corridor where five doors away, five rooms on the left, was Mamie's room.

Now there was nothing to do but wait—wait in her old blue Buick parked in the darkest part of the lot as close to the laundry-room entrance as she could maneuver it without being conspicuously out in the open. She had backed the car up twice now to escape the moonlight, but she had gone as far as she could and the pale glow was catching in a glint on her hood ornament. She stared past it to the window with the speckled light.

Weeks ago, when she bought the blue lampshade with the tiny cutout stars to brighten Mamie's room, it hadn't occurred to her that it would make a light in Mamie's two windows unlike all the others; she'd bought the shade only because she thought the thin cones of light flying from the pinpoint cutouts might arouse a happy response in the child. Now she was waiting, her breath beginning to fog the windshield, for the speckled light to go out. That would be the first domino of the planned sequence.

Long before there was reason to plot anything, she had become familiar with certain of the hospital's night habits, and they would be used tonight as milestones: visiting hours for children ended at eight, adult patients could be visited till nine, then a brief onslaught of nursing activity followed, the taking in of night medications to patients, the plumping of pillows and turning off of lights, the good nights and sweet dreams. This ritual varied only slightly, although some nights it lasted longer than others. Somewhere around quarter to ten, the nurses would drift back to the central nurses' station (where the three long corridors converged) for a last sip of coffee, to freshen their lipstick and comb their hair, to tease each other about the night still ahead, and to pull on sweaters and wraps, anxious to be relieved by the skeleton late-night shift at eleven. Unless one of the patients pushed his buzzer in the night, the corridors would be deserted until six the next morning. That's when they would find Mamie missing.

Although he had always infuriated her with his banging and clanging as he checked and locked and rechecked the exit doors, Leona in her planning had almost overlooked the nightwatchman, who made his rounds shortly after the last shift arrived at ten-thirty. So it was in those minutes of shift change and confusion, but before the rattling passage of the watchman, that she had to make her move.