Tiny Little Thing (28 page)

Frank speaks up behind her in a reasonable voice, a politician’s voice, smoothing the way for compromise. “Dr. Keene, surely we can allow Tiny’s own mother to see her. The sedatives seem to have taken effect. She just wants to make sure Tiny’s comfortable.”

“A natural urge.” Dr. Keene smiles. “But in these delicate psychiatric cases, we can’t exercise too much caution. The slightest trigger can set off another episode. Mrs. Hardcastle needs the most absolute quiet right now.”

Absolute quiet.
You can hear it behind the door, a sepulchral absence of sound. Mrs. Schuyler thinks of her dream, a few nights ago, and a premonition rises up like bile in the back of her throat. She needs a drink to force it back down. Mrs. Schuyler has never liked silence, anyway; she’s deeply mistrustful of people and places that make no noise at all. Sound is life. Silence is the opposite.

Absolute quiet is the absolute worst of all.

She pitches her chin at the old familiar angle and raises her eyebrow in the old familiar way. The actions help to keep her heart steady, her adrenaline in check. “Surely, Dr. Keene, we can bend the rules a teensy half-inch, don’t you think? I’d be most grateful for even the smallest glimpse of my daughter. I promise I wouldn’t disturb her, not a bit.”

For an instant, the flicker of temptation touches his eyes. Then it’s gone. “I’m sorry, Mrs. Schuyler. Perhaps in a day or two, when she’s had a chance to rest. Not that I can make any sort of guarantee, in so serious a case as this.”

“Listen here,” growls Major Harrison.

Frank cuts him off. “Dr. Keene, as Mrs. Hardcastle’s husband, I have the right to make decisions like this—”

“Actually, Mr. Hardcastle, and with all due respect,” says Dr. Keene, still smiling, “that’s not precisely true.”

“Not true? How can it not be true? I’m a lawyer, Dr. Keene, and I know precisely what—”

“As a lawyer, then, Mr. Hardcastle, perhaps you should have taken a little more time to examine the admittance papers before you signed them.” Dr. Keene releases the doorknob, removes his glasses, and wipes them with a handkerchief from his breast pocket. “Your father, who will be paying for her care here, has the power to make those decisions on her behalf.”

“What?”
says Frank.

“What the
hell
?” says Major Harrison.

“That’s impossible,” says Frank. “I want to see those papers. That’s illegal and unconscionable, and I’ll fight you all the way to court if I have to—”

But Major Harrison is already muscling his way past them all, lifting Dr. Keene away from the door as he might remove a potted plant from his path. He grabs the doorknob. It’s locked. Without hesitation, he steps back, raises one leg, and releases a kick of pistonlike strength.

The wood splinters. The door flies open.

The room is empty.

•   •   •

F
rom the look on Dr. Keene’s face, he’s as surprised as anybody. Mrs. Schuyler takes a grain of comfort in that thought.

Fleeting comfort, because in the next instant, he’s running to a telephone in the hallway and picking up the receiver. She can’t hear the words, though, because Frank is shouting in panic, and Major Harrison has grabbed her hand and tows her down the hall, the opposite direction, toward the back of the building.

Her shoes totter against the slick floor. She gasps out a question—
What on earth?
or
What in the devil?
, she’s not sure—but it’s lost in the scramble. They reach the end of the hallway, a T junction.

“You go that way, I’ll go this,” says the major. “Look for Pepper!”

“Pepper?”

“She’s with Pepper! Trust me.” He takes off down the left-hand hallway, and Mrs. Schuyler, too shocked to do anything but obey that commanding officer’s voice, takes off her shoes and runs down the other. The passage is white and empty, lined with doors. Should she check any of them? What in the hell is she looking for, anyway?

Pepper. Pepper and Tiny.

And what does she do with them if she finds them?

She rounds an antiseptic corner and collides with a man’s broad back.

The two of them tumble to the ground. The man grunts in surprise.

“I’m so terribly sorry,” she begins, sarcasm at the ready, and the man turns his face toward her. His hair is graying, his eyes are blue. “Why, Franklin!”

“Vivian!”

His eyes dart to the nearest door, a few feet away. An image flashes back in Mrs. Schuyler’s brain, the instant before she collided with him. He’s got his hand on that knob, he’s closing that door.

She turns her head. “Major!” she calls out.

“Quiet!” Franklin Hardcastle grabs her wrist.

“Take your
hand
off me!” she snaps, but for once in her life, a man doesn’t obey her. Instead, he tightens his grip, he squeezes her slender wrist, and such is her fury at this ungentlemanly conduct, she jerks her hand away. She jerks with heroic force—she, Mrs. Vivian Schuyler of Fifth Avenue, who lunches at the Colony Club and shops at Bergdorf’s—because her
daughters
are behind that door, she knows it in her blood, her
daughters
, and by God there is no cad on earth who can stop her from reaching them.

Hardcastle falls to the floor and lunges for her ankle. She raises her other hand, the one that still holds her shoe with the tall heel, and she bangs him on the head with it, as she might rap an impertinent dog with a newspaper.

In her maternal rage, she must have got him good, maybe found his eye with a righteous stiletto. He falls backward, and she reaches for the door and flings it open.

A small room appears before her, an office of some kind, and in the chair slumps a delicate-boned woman in a white nurse’s uniform. Her head rests on the desk, cradled by her arms.

“Tiny!” Mrs. Schuyler darts forward, and something heavy crashes into her side. She sprawls to the floor.

“Mums?”

Mrs. Schuyler grabs her upper arm and looks up indignantly. “Pepper?”

“What are you
doing
here?” Her middle daughter, dressed improbably in a white nurse’s uniform, drops a metal chair on the floor.

“Help me up, for God’s sake! Is she all right?”

Pepper’s hand closes around Mrs. Schuyler’s upper arm, which is white with pain, and hauls her upward. “She’s fine! She’s just high. I don’t know what the hell they gave her, but it doped her into seventh heaven. I found a couple of nurses’ uniforms in the staff closet and managed to sneak into her room when they left with the drugs, the grand escape plan, but not soon enough. I had to drag her down the hallway, and fucking Hardcastle found us. Hit me, the bastard.” She rubs her cheek.

Mrs. Schuyler rounds the corner of the desk and touches her daughter’s white back. Behind them, the August light strikes hard against the Venetian blinds. The room smells stuffily of old wood. “Tiny? Oh, darling. My God, that bastard—”

A thump interrupts her. Tiny lifts her head. “Mums?”

In the doorway, Hardcastle is struggling with someone, a broad-shouldered someone, for whom he’s no match at all. An instant later, he drops back to the floor. Major Harrison muscles past him and staggers around the desk to kneel in front of the floppy Tiny and take her hands. “Jesus. Is she all right? Tiny, talk to me.”

“Caspian. Darling.” She smiles. “Why are you so pink?”

He turns his head to Hardcastle, who has grasped the doorframe and is launching himself to his feet. “I’m going to fucking kill you,” he says.

“Are you threatening me?” Hardcastle says.

“Right after I get her out of here, I will physically rip you apart—”

“And what are you going to do with her, hmm? You
can’t
get her out of here. There are reporters everywhere. A guard in the lobby. She can’t leave here without my signature.”

Tiny turns her sleepy head to her father-in-law. “You, sir, are a jackass,” she says, “and I want a—a what-do-you-call-it—”

“Divorce?” says Pepper.

Tiny smiles like an angel. “Yes! Divorce. And then I will kill you and feed you to Percy.”

Mr. Hardcastle throws up his hands. “You see? She’s gone straight out of her mind. She’s staying right here.”

Mrs. Schuyler straightens, pulls off her gloves, and fixes her eyes on the trickle of blood smearing the orbital bone of Hardcastle’s left eye. “She hasn’t gone out of her mind. She’s fighting you back, you old bastard, and I’m proud of her.”

“She’s nuts, and she’s staying right here.”

“I’m her mother. I’ll walk right out of here and explain to those reporters what you’re doing, and, by God, your precious son will never be elected to so much as the sanitation board.”

“No, you won’t,” he says. “Because if you
try
to take her, if you think for one instant you can remove my daughter-in-law from this clinic, you should know I’ve acquired a set of photographs from a certain young lady in the campaign office—”

“Dad?”

Hardcastle turns.

Frank stands in the hallway, just outside the door. His blue eyes are wide and white rimmed; his hand presses against the edge of the doorframe, as if it’s the only thing holding him up.

“Frank—” Hardcastle begins.

“Dad, what’s going on?” Frank’s voice is calm, if a little higher-pitched than usual. A little uncertain, for once in his life, of the ground beneath him. “What do you mean, photographs? From
Josephine
?”

Hardcastle inhales long and loud: a parent about to explain things to an exceptionally young child. He speaks soothingly. “Your wife is sick, Frank. She’s had a breakdown. She—”

“Is that true?” Frank shifts his gaze to Mrs. Schuyler, to Tiny, and to Major Harrison, who has risen to his feet and placed a protective hand on Tiny’s shoulder. “Cap? Why are you here? Dad?” He turns back to his father. “Why
can’t
we just take Tiny home now? Why do we need to lock her up here?”

“Son—”

“Tell me, Dad. Tell me what’s going on here.”

Pepper interrupts in a fury. “Oh, I’ll tell you what’s going on here, Frank Hardcastle,” she says. Valiant Pepper. She’s holding her cheek with one hand, her fierce heart in the other. The nurse’s cap lies upside down on the floor, by her feet.

That cheek will need ice,
Mrs. Schuyler thinks. Where are they going to find ice? She curls her arm around Tiny’s shoulders, touching Major Harrison’s hand on the other side. Her scarlet manicure against his neat soldierly fingernails. The premonition is rising again, but this time it doesn’t taste like bile. It has a saltier taste, the taste of pity.

Pepper raises her other hand and stabs her finger in Frank’s direction. “I’ll tell you what’s going on. Tiny told me herself, before they pinned her down and stuck that last syringe in her. You see, my big sister caught you doing it with your little boyfriend the other day—”

“What?”

“And I’ll bet Daddy found out. I’ll bet Daddy’s having you followed. Aren’t you, Daddy? I’ll bet this Josephine reports to you, doesn’t she?”

Nobody stirs. The sound of shock bounces from the walls and echoes about the furniture. Hardcastle’s mouth is slack, grasping for a denial he can’t quite seem to locate. The room has turned suffocating. In the heat, Mrs. Schuyler’s silk stockings itch against her legs, not that you’d ever reveal a detail like that, at a time like this, and when your legs are perhaps your most alluring feature. Her hand moves to cover that of Major Harrison, coiled like a spring atop her daughter’s tiny white shoulder. To keep him steady. Not to strike.

“Christ,” whispers Frank. “Dad?”

“Son—”

“It’s true, isn’t it?”

“No, I—”

“Dad. Dad.” Frank shakes his head. He looks at Tiny; he lifts his hands and stares at his palms like he doesn’t recognize them. Across his face, the Venetian blinds form a horizontal pattern of sunshine and shadow. “My God,” he says. “What have I done?”

The poor man, thinks Mrs. Schuyler. He can’t even comprehend it. He’s doesn’t even know what this is, what it means, when the bill comes due.

Hardcastle’s jaw moves. “Son, it’s for your own good. Someone had to—”

Frank’s right hand closes into a fist, which he swings with almighty force into his father’s stomach.

“Go to hell,” he whispers.

Hardcastle drops to his knees. Major Harrison starts forward, an officer’s instinct, either to save him or to finish him off.

But Frank doesn’t even glance at his father. He strides around the corner of the desk, where Tiny sits, straight-backed, her hands braced on the sides of the chair. The round nurse’s cap tilts drunkenly onto her temple. Frank kneels before her and straightens it.

“Frank,” she says. “Franklin. You hit him.”

“I’m sorry,” he says. “I’m so sorry.”

“You’re always sorry. But you don’t mean it.” She closes her eyes, as if the lids are too heavy. “You can all go to hell.”

“I will,” he says. “You can stick me there yourself. Just let me get you out of here first.”

Mrs. Schuyler glances at Major Harrison, who’s hauling up Hardcastle’s defeated body by the collar. “I’m all right,” the older man gasps. A sliver of gray hair falls onto his cheekbone. He scrabbles for the hand holding his collar, but Major Harrison isn’t letting go.

Mrs. Schuyler’s fingers fall away from Tiny’s shoulder. She takes a single step back, relinquishing command, and the sunshine on her dress feels delicious. Frank slides his arms tenderly around his wife’s body and lifts her from the chair.

“What are you doing?” cries Hardcastle. He lunges toward them, hand outstretched, but Major Harrison jerks him back like a puppet.

“I’m taking her home.” Frank doesn’t look at his father. He doesn’t look at anyone: not Mrs. Schuyler, not Pepper, not the anguished face of Major Harrison. Not even Tiny, nestled in his arms. Her eyes are closed anyway. He stares ahead, glassy and determined, his forehead pale with sweat. “I’m taking my wife home,” he says, and he carries her small, sedated body past them all and through the door to the hallway beyond, and nobody moves to stop him. Nobody makes a sound. His footsteps clack deliberately down the linoleum, softer and softer, until they disappear around a corner.