The Deep End (6 page)

“Some idiot phoned in the middle of the night and hung up,” Joanne told her. “Eve …”

“You don’t think these pains really could have anything to do with the miscarriage, do you?” Eve interrupted, looking very fragile.

“How do you mean?”

Eve tried to laugh. “Well, you know, maybe they left something in there after they cleaned me out. I did lose a lot of blood.”

“I’m positive they didn’t leave anything inside you,” Joanne assured her, watching a hint of color return slowly to her friend’s cheeks. “You’d be dead by now if they had,” she added, and both women laughed in earnest.

“Thanks,” Eve smiled. “You always did know how to cheer me up.”

Baycrest Nursing Home was located on South Drive, a block and a half from Great Neck Hospital. It was an old brick structure that had survived several renovations without noticeable change to its appearance. Outside, the windows had been replaced by more modern Thermopane glass; inside, though the walls had recently been repainted in shades of trendy peach, the corridors still looked as sad and abandoned as most of the residents who walked them. No amount of bright colors or modern art could disguise the forced joviality of the institutionalized setting. Death row with flowers, Joanne thought as she moved toward her grandfather’s room at the end of the hall.

She could hear the commotion even before the nurse appeared in the doorway. “Honest to God, that man!” the very fat, very black nurse exclaimed, smoothing her uniform as she struggled to calm herself. “Oh, not your granddaddy, honey,” she said to Joanne, recognizing her and smiling. “Your granddaddy is no trouble at all, sleeps like a baby all the time. And he looks so cute in his little hat.”

“Is Mr. Hensley giving you more problems?” Joanne asked. Sam Hensley was notorious among the nurses at the Baycrest Nursing Home. He had been shuffled between the various floors ever since his arrival six months before.

“I went in to ask whether he needed help in relieving himself, and you know what he did? He threw the bedpan at me. Thank God it was empty! Honestly, I don’t know what happens to some people when they get old.” The woman stopped abruptly. “I don’t mean any disrespect, Mrs. Hunter,” she stammered. “Your granddaddy is such a sweet little man. He never gives anybody any trouble.”

“My grandfather doesn’t know where he is most of the time,” Joanne said softly, thinking how strange it sounded to hear the massive man her grandfather had once been described as sweet and little.

He had started shrinking, she recalled, in the year following the death of his wife of almost sixty years. Little by little, his weight fell away; his shoulders sank; his long neck withered. She felt lately that he resembled not so much a man as an ancient snapping turtle.

He had begun spinning his cocoon soon after he checked himself into the Baycrest Nursing Home five years ago, and he had sealed himself inside it forever around the same time that Joanne’s mother had discovered a lump in her left breast. He had never asked why his daughter’s visits became less frequent, and when she had succumbed to the disease three years ago—three years ago already? Joanne marveled as she pushed open the door to her grandfather’s room—Joanne and her brother had decided not to tell him. Instead, she had stepped in to fill the vacant role, visiting the old man every week, less
from a sense of duty, as Eve’s mother had earlier suggested, than because he provided her with her only tangible link to the past.

This was the man who had sat with her on rainy afternoons at the cottage and patiently explained the intricacies of gin rummy, who had boiled her perfect five-minute eggs, covering them with little hand-crocheted hats to keep them warm, watching while she ate them, talking to her animatedly about his week in the city, never condescending or patronizing, always exuberant and bursting with life.

“Linda?” her grandfather asked as Joanne approached his bedside and took his hand in hers, his voice almost a parody of what it had once been.

“Yes, Pa,” Joanne answered, unconsciously assuming her mother’s voice as she pulled up a chair. “I’m here.” When was the last time he had called her by her rightful name? she wondered. It’s Joanne, she wanted to tell him, but he was already snoring, and Joanne was left clutching his hand through the bars at the side of the bed, wondering whether she would ever get used to being called by her mother’s name.

“Amazing how they can just drop off like that,” the voice said from somewhere beside her. Joanne looked over at the other bed, where old Sam Hensley was currently sleeping peacefully. “A minute ago,” the woman standing at the foot of the bed continued, “he was a raving lunatic. You should have seen him. He threw a bedpan at the nurse! I don’t know what I’m going to do. If they kick him off this floor, I don’t know where they’ll put him. This is the third home I’ve had to move him to. I’m going out for a cigarette.” She spun around and for the first time
since Joanne had entered the room, she was aware that the woman’s son was also present, leaning his straight-backed wooden chair against the wall, his head resting against his right shoulder, his eyes closed. “Can you believe this?” the woman demanded. “If either one of these sleeping beauties wakes up, tell them I’ve gone down the hail for a cigarette.”

Joanne watched the woman leave, trying to connect a name to the curious combination of defeated face and defiant strut. They had been introduced about a month ago when the woman’s father had been transferred to this room. Marg something-or-other, Joanne recalled, feeling her grandfather’s hand stir inside her own. Crosby, she remembered with some satisfaction. Marg Crosby and her son, Alan, a boy of about eighteen. Maybe a bit older. Or younger, It was so hard to tell these days, her grandfather would have said.

“Linda,” her grandfather murmured.

“Yes, Pa,” Joanne answered, almost by rote, “I’m here.”

Again, the old man fell quiet. Where are you? Joanne asked him silently. Where do you go? Her eyes moved slowly across his pale, thin face, his cheeks less than half their former size, rough with the leftover stubble of a poor morning shave, administered daily by one of the orderlies. His once wide mouth now puckered inward, and his expansive forehead was completely hidden by the worn-out Sherlock Holmes cap that someone had perched atop his head, a gift from her on his eighty-fifth birthday ten years ago.

The decade had brought decimation: her grandmother passed away and her grandfather began his retreat; her mother discovered a cancer in her left breast which
spread to every part of her body and ultimately killed her in eighteen months, while her father succumbed to a massive coronary only nine days after they had buried her mother. And now Paul was gone. He had deserted her too.

“Paul’s left me, Grampa,” she whispered, knowing that he didn’t hear her. “He doesn’t want to be married anymore. I don’t know what I’m going to do,” she cried softly as the old man opened his eyes and stared directly into hers, as if he suddenly understood exactly who she was and what she had said. “Grampa?” she asked, seeing a flicker of the man she remembered from her childhood pass across his features.

His face relaxed into a slow smile. “Do you work here, dear?” he asked.

Old Sam Hensley suddenly bolted upright in his bed and burst into song. “It’s a long way to Tipperary,” he bellowed with surprisingly accurate pitch. “It’s a long way to go!”

Beside him, young Alan Crosby almost fell off his chair with the sudden sound. “Granddad,” he whispered hurriedly, jumping to his feet and looking nervously toward the door. “Sh.”

“Ssh yourself if you don’t like it,” the old man shot back loudly, returning to his song.

“It’s his military period.” Alan smiled meekly at Joanne as his mother and the nurse ran back into the room.

“Oh for God’s sake, Dad, shut up,” Marg Crosby barked as the nurse tried to gently push Sam Hensley back against his pillow.

“There, there, Mr. Hensley,” the nurse was saying, “the concert’s been canceled.”

“Get the hell away from me,” Sam Hensley shouted, taking aim at the woman’s vast girth with a box of tissues from the side table.

“Dad, for God’s sake …”

“Why don’t you just let him sing?” Alan Crosby asked, leaning back against the wall, trying to suppress a smile.

“Oh, Alan,” his mother exclaimed impatiently, “don’t you start, too.”

“Linda,” a frightened voice cried, “what’s all the commotion?”

“It’s all right, Pa,” Joanne whispered, patting her grandfather’s shaking hand reassuringly. “I’m here.”

T
he phone woke her up at not quite seven o’clock the next morning. “Hello,” Joanne said groggily, wiping her eyes and straining to make out the time on the bedside clock. “Hello? Who is this?”

There was no reply.

Joanne sat fully up in bed, resting the phone in her lap before reaching over and dropping the receiver back onto its cradle. “Damn kids,” she muttered, looking down at the old cotton nightgown she always wore to bed. “No wonder your husband left you.” She pulled the blankets up around her neck, trying to block out the early morning light coming through the bedroom curtains. But as soon as she buried her nose into the soft down of the king-size pillow, she smelled traces of Paul, his absence filtering up through her nostrils. She felt his arm fall carelessly across the raised curve of her hip, his knees burrow in against the backs of her own, pressing her rear end into the arch of his groin.

Her eyes drifted open; Paul was inside her head now and he would stay there for the rest of the day. No matter what she did or where she went, Paul would be right
beside her. She would take him with her even as she struggled to leave him behind. Her only escape had been a few hours of sleep after she was too exhausted for further recriminations, too worn out for additional regrets. The new day would produce fresh lists of items for which she could berate herself: if only she hadn’t done this; if only she
had
done that. If only Paul would come back, she would be more
this
way, less
that.

She had fallen into bed at one o’clock in the morning, having stayed up to watch a movie she had no desire to see. She was still awake to hear the front door open at just past three, to listen as Robin snuck past her mother’s bedroom, the door to her room closing softly behind her.

It must have been 5 a.m. before Joanne finally succumbed to sleep. Two whole hours, she thought now, trying to will herself several more. It would be hard to look twenty years old on only two hours of sleep a night, and she had concluded just before drifting off to sleep early that morning that her appearance had a great deal to do with Paul’s departure. The woman he married had been twenty-one years old. He hadn’t counted on her getting so noticeably older. Perhaps she should talk to Karen Palmer, ask her who did her eyes …

Joanne was still trying to force herself back to sleep a half hour later when the phone rang again. “Hello?” she whispered, hoping it might be Paul telling her that he couldn’t sleep either, that he wanted to come home. There was no response. “Hello? Hello? Is someone there? Why are you doing this?” she pleaded, about to hang up when she heard something. “Did you say something?” she asked, returning the phone to her ear.

There was a brief pause. Then, “Mrs. Hunter?”

“Yes?” Joanne tried quickly to place the somewhat raspy sound, but while there was a quality to it that was vaguely familiar, she was unable to determine what precisely it was. Certainly no one who knew her well, or he would have addressed her by her first name.

“Mrs. Hunter,” the voice repeated.

“Who is this?” Joanne asked, afraid of the voice though she wasn’t sure why. It defied categorization, she realized, neither young nor old, and curiously sexless.

“Have you read the New York
Times
this morning, Mrs. Hunter?”

“Who is this?”

“Read the morning paper, Mrs. Hunter. There’s something in it that concerns you. Page thirteen of the first section.”

The line went dead in her hands.

“Hello?” Joanne repeated, though the caller had already hung up. She sat motionless in bed for several minutes, listening to her heart thumping, her senses heightened, like an animal when it instinctively feels the presence of danger. Whose voice had she heard and why the intrigue? What could there possibly be on page thirteen of the morning paper that would concern her? Something about Paul? she wondered, getting out of bed.

Pulling her arms through the sleeves of her housecoat, Joanne quietly tiptoed down the stairs to the front door. The girls were still asleep. She wasn’t even sure the
Times
would be there this early.

It was, she found, lifting the heavy Sunday paper and carrying it into the kitchen, dropping it onto the round pinewood table. The weatherman was calling for rain, she read, checking the increasingly cloudy sky through the
sliding glass doors that made up the kitchen’s south wall. She hoped the rain would stop by tomorrow or the men wouldn’t be able to continue work on the pool, and Joanne was eager to have it completed and the strangers who paraded back and forth under her bedroom window out of her life. Especially now that Paul was gone.

She flipped quickly to page thirteen and took a cursory glance down the various columns, seeing nothing that concerned her. Normally she avoided the front pages of the paper, the information therein usually too depressing and no way to start the day. She reasoned that news that was important for her to know would eventually filter down to her, and she had a definite, if not specific, sense of what was going on in the world. Maybe that hadn’t been enough for Paul, she realized now. He was a lawyer, after all, an educated man, and while she herself was university educated, it was true that in recent years she had insulated herself from as much unpleasant news as possible. Since the death of her parents three years ago, Joanne had regularly read only the entertainment and family sections of the newspaper. It made life easier, she rationalized, as slowly, more carefully, her eyes perused the designated page.

There was nothing about Paul or his law firm, nothing about anyone she knew. There were just continuations of articles from other pages, something about a union dispute within the garment industry, a report of a roominghouse fire that left four people dead, and some further details about the woman who had been hacked to pieces in her home in Saddle Rock Estates. Joanne shrugged, closed the paper, then quickly reopened it to check out the page beside it. But there was nothing of note on that
page either. What had the caller wanted her to see? She pushed the first section of the paper away and ferreted out the entertainment section, deciding that maybe she’d take the girls into Manhattan later in the week to see a Broadway play.