View From a Kite (25 page)

“C'mon Denise,” I mumble, then giggle. I elbow her in the ribs so she'll know I'm faking. “Fair's fair. ‘F you don' wan' him, I do.”

Bing perks up and grins. It's a loathsome sight. Denise is being such a spoilsport, he decides he likes me better. I open the door, fall/stagger to the ground, and lurch to the back of the van.

“C'mon Bingbingbingy,” I warble, pounding on the back. He slams a button on the dash and pops the rear doors open for me. The inside is entirely carpeted in blue shag, visible in the purple of the sex lights he's got duct-taped along one side. Beer can holders are duct-taped to the other side.

“Leave'm alone, Denisiebaby, I saw'm first. I call dibs.”

Bingbingbingy stumbles around the corner of the van, all his fantasies about to come true. He's still got the screwdriver though, and he's thought to take the keys with him in his other hand. I take a deep breath, pray very hard, and move in close to unbuckle his belt and unzip his pants. It's the most disgusting, revolting, filthy thing I've ever done in my life, but I refuse to be raped and murdered and left to die like a dog in a ditch. He's trying to kiss me, but I manage to swerve my mouth out of the way. Fortunately he's not only a mean drunk, he's a really stupid one, and he drops both screwdriver and keys to grab for the parts of my anatomy that interest him the most. I knee the parts of his I'm least interested in and then scoop up the truck keys when he doubles over, screaming. I almost take a header—I'm not completely one hundred per cent sober after all—but I stagger, recover my balance and run like a madwoman for the front of the van. I leap in, throw the keys at Denise, and screech at her to drive, drive, drive! The back doors are still open and Bing has got to his knees and is looking for his screwdriver. He's calling me much worse things than he called Denise and he really means to kill us both and rape us later. Denise throws the van into gear and steps on the gas just as Bing pulls himself and his screwdriver up and grabs for the back doors. The van's a standard with a sloppy clutch and she's hit reverse and she knocks him flat. There's an awful thump of a sound, like a steer dropping on concrete. I'm seeing whole galaxies because I've been thrown onto the front windshield headfirst.

“Shit, shit, shit,” she screams. “I've killed the fucking son of a bitch.” The van lurches forward and stops and we both just sit there, too terrified to look back at his mangled body.

“They'll have to believe it was self-defense,” I whimper, rubbing my aching forehead. “His pants are half down, and he's got a screw…a weapon.”

Denise crawls to the back of the van and, lying on the blue shag, peers out and then under. Bing moans, then starts crawling towards her with the weapon in his hand.

“He's alive,” she screams. “He's got the screwdriver!”

She scrambles back to the driver's seat, kicking me in the head as she goes by, and this time finds the right gear. We peel out onto the highway, back doors swinging and banging, me trying to see out past them, through the second whirligig of stars, to make sure Bing isn't hanging on somewhere. He's crawling around on the verge, looking for his screwdriver, which he has dropped again.

“We're safe,” I yell at her, “just so long as you don't drive us into the river or kick me in the head again. Slow down and quit swerving all over the road, he'll never catch us now. Where'd you learn to drive, at a fucking circus?”

Then we both crack up. We shriek and pound on the dash of the truck, and Denise leans on the horn awhile.

“See,” she yells, “I told you I'd get us a ride home.”

There is the problem of what to do with the van. We don't want to keep it too long in case Bing gets picked up by the police and reports it stolen and they come looking for it—and us. We want to get close to home, but we don't want to leave it anywhere near the Alex in case they put two and two together and Denise and I end up in a lineup at the police station in the morning.

The best thing, we decide, is to leave it downtown with the keys in it. We can walk home from there. It's ten after four in the morning when we park it on a side street beside the Blue Pig Tavern and sneak away. It's a ten-minute hike up the hill to the hospital and there is not a person, not a dog, not an alley cat, not even a mouse stirring in the whole town. We retrieve the bag from behind the dumpster, swap shoes for slippers and put our robes on over our clothes. I boost Denise up the fire escape, then she hauls me up after her. When we reach the ward and peek in the door Morissette is asleep on her chair. She looks happy, she must have won at poker. Denise and I hug hard and then I sneak into my room, strip off my clothes and put on my PJs. Evvie doesn't stir. In the lamplight coming in through the window she looks like a porcelain doll with candy floss hair. It seems impossible she could be anybody's mother. I tuck her blankets around her and crawl into bed. Starting tomorrow I'm going to be really, really good. I've had just about as much fun as I can take.

Bing is chasing me up and down the stairwell. I can't see properly, everything is grey and on the left side at the bottom of my vision is the black hole. Bing has a screwdriver, and sometimes a gun, and no matter how I run I can't lose him. Then he trips and falls except someone has shot him and he isn't Bing anymore, he's Mama and he's lying under the van in the upstairs hall. I have been tiptoeing in the dark, but now I have to flip on the hall light switch to see what I've bumped into and the red dash lights have bled all over the floor and there is a fan of red on the wallpaper behind her and she won't answer me and then I'm running and running for help, down the stairs again and I can't reach the bottom because there's the black hole, lit now with the light from the hall, and then I am pounding on doors, pounding and pounding until both my hands break off.

Evvie is shaking me and shaking me. It's just before dawn, and I've scared her, moaning in my sleep.

“Wake up, Gwennie,” she whispers, “You're havin' a nightmare. Just wake up, please, honey.”

“I'm all right,” I mumble at her. “Go back to bed, Evvie.”

“Are you sure, now?”

“Yes. Go to bed.”

“Okay,” she says and crawls back in and is asleep in seconds.

George and Elizabeth came and got me and took me out of the cop car where I was sitting and took me to wait with them at the hospital. The ambulance had already taken Mama away. George wouldn't let the cops ask me any more questions. When the doctor told us she'd come out of surgery fine and we should go home to rest and the hospital would call us if anything happened, they took me home, to Edith's house. A doctor gave me a shot, and there were pills to take when I woke up. It wasn't until the morning, when I tried to lift a cup of coffee to my mouth and spilled it all over the tablecloth, that we realized something was wrong with my hand. I couldn't feel much through all those pills, but it was swollen and wouldn't grip right. They x-rayed it and put it in a splint, but they couldn't put a cast on it until the swelling went down some. I'd cracked a bone in my wrist pounding on the neighbours' door for help. Sometimes it aches. It aches when I dream stupid dreams with stairwells and black holes and wake up with my hand clenched into a fist and my fingernails cutting half moons into the skin of my palms.

The black hole is the living room where he was sitting on his tan leather lazyboy, the smell of fireworks in the room and the gun fallen at his feet and the mess that had been his head and the back of the lazyboy all over the wall behind. I know what was there because I know I saw it, but I can't remember what it looked like at all. I only remember running and running and running down the stairs.

CHAPTER 53

There's much too much screaming going on in this ward. At the moment it's Belinda, our student-nurse-of-the-month. Normally she's a pretty phlegmatic sort of a girl, but this morning she's hanging on to the end of my bed and screeching bloody blue murder. I try to tell her she's being very unprofessional, but when I open my mouth to speak, the top of my head tries to lift off. The clanging, I discover as Belinda bolts from the room, is the bed pan she's dropped, saucering and spinning around the floor one more time as she kicks it on her way out. It seems to have been empty, which is a small blessing. Evvie's not here, gone to the bathroom maybe, so I can't ask her what's gotten into Belinda. Belinda is wailing down the hall for MacConnell.

The screech of my bedside table drawer separates my brain layers, but I grind my teeth tight and open it enough to pull out my hand mirror. The sight almost makes me faint. There's a huge big lump on my forehead, with a trail of dried blood running down my face, and I have two giant raccoon eyes. Big black circles that used to be mascara. Waterproof mascara. Yeah, like heck.

I can hear MacConnell's merciless stride parting the waves as she bears down the hall towards my room, and the frantic skittering of Belinda in her wake. I grab a tube of hand cream, smear it around my eyes, wipe off the whole thing with my pillow and then flip the pillow over so it's clean side up. I lean back and try to look innocent. Some cream has got into my eyes and they are burning up in my head. The veins are bleeding into my sockets. I can't help but feel I deserve it.

MacConnell pushes her way past imaginary crowds of riff-raff and begins to examine me. She takes my pulse as if she isn't going to give it back, her icy steel fingers digging deep into my wrist. She blinds me with her flashlight as she makes me look straight ahead while she checks my pupils to make sure they're of equal size and are lined up properly. Then she makes me make them do acrobatic tricks, up, down, left, right, up, down again, to see if they can still perform together as a pair, or if one of them is going to wander off and gaze at the ceiling.

“What happened to you?” she demands.

I don't really have time to come up with a good answer. It hurts so very much to think.

“I don't remember.”

“Did you get up in the night to pee?” she asks, pumping up her blood pressure machine and cutting off the circulation in my right arm.

“Er…yes. I think so.” That doesn't sound like a trick question. I'm allowed to go pee in the middle of the night.

“It's that bathroom door,” she thunders. “I've had it with Maintenance. Belinda, go get an ice pack. Gwen, stay in bed. Don't set foot out of it until I tell you you can. Dr. Grass will have to examine you. Come right back with that ice pack and sit with Gwen until Dr. Grass arrives,” she raises her voice to the departing Belinda.

I have been saved. If only she will lower her voice, take her instruments of torture and go away. She's been fighting with Maintenance over the bathroom doors for weeks. They installed brand new swinging hinges and she swears they're death traps ever since one caught Evvie on the bum and knocked her onto her knees on the hall floor. Maintenance won't remove them because it took them six months to get around to putting them in, and they like them and are proud of their handiwork.

“Can you remember going to the bathroom?” she asks, sternly.

I scrunch up my face and whisper, “Yes, I think so. I went to have a pee.”

“And then?”

I realize, in the nick of time, that I don't want to get Morissette in trouble here. She's far too valuable. We don't want her fired for playing poker or sleeping on the job, we don't want her replaced with some keener who'll spend all night marching up and down the halls, swinging her flashlight about like a Gulag guard.

“It was quiet, except for Mrs. Grant. The light was on in her room and I think the nurses were in with her.”

This is a safe bet. Mrs. Grant has a coughing fit every night and the nurses have to go prop her up and give her ice water and another dose of the yummy red cough medicine.

“Yes, yes,” prompts MacConnell.

“Then I went in the bathroom. That's all. That's all I remember.” My head aches too much to be bothered inventing any more details.

“It's that door,” says MacConnell, as if daring me or anyone else to argue with her. “It swung back and hit you on the head. You don't remember coming back to your room and getting into bed?”

“No,” I whimper. “I have a terrible headache, Mrs. MacConnell. Can I have some aspirin, please?

“No, dear. Not until Dr. Grass says it's all right.”

Belinda is back with the icepack, which she arranges on my head. She sits on a chair at my side and watches me closely. The intensity of her gaze causes painful spasms to wash through my skull so I shut my eyes. MacConnell is rolling up the hall like the Angel of Retribution. I hear her on the phone summoning the head of Maintenance, Archie, into her presence. I have a goose egg on my forehead and a lump on the back of my skull, my eyes are burning coals, my brain is three sizes too big for my head and trying to squeeze out through my ears, and my mouth feels like I've been brushing my teeth with a very old toilet brush—but I feel very sorry for Archie. MacConnell is going to have Maintenance on toast for breakfast this morning. Sorry, Archie. Sorry.

After Grass comes and goes, after the painkillers are approved and start to kick in, things are much better. I get to stay in bed all day and eat from a tray. Sadly, my stomach threatens to turn itself inside out and dangle from my lower lip if I try to put anything in it, so the privilege is pretty much wasted. I doze a lot and I don't dream. When Belinda finally leaves, I whip off the pillowcase and turn it inside out so the black is on the inside. Not too much creamed mascara has smeared off onto the bottom sheet. They bleach the heck out of everything anyway. After lunch, two student nurses come in, park me in a chair, change my bed and remove the bloody, blackened mess. Halfway through the afternoon there is a crash as Maintenance drops the bathroom door, trying to rehang it with the old hinges. Fortunately no one gets hurt. Evvie brings me treats from the dining room, extra Jell-O and extra chocolate pudding. Denise comes by to visit after supper. She's spent most of the day in her room, only leaving to go to the dining room for meals. She's been napping, painting her nails, reflecting—no doubt—on her sins and the great debt she now owes me for saving her from Bingybing.