The problem with only telling the good happy stuff is that all the bad, scary, sad stuff that doesn’t get told ferments and grows like underground mold, and you never know when it may reach its nasty fingers up and grab you by the throat.
After dinner I helped them clean the kitchen and then told them good night. No matter how shocked I was over Laura’s murder, I still had to post my pet visits for the day. I finished entering all the information a little before nine o’clock and was halfway through undressing for bed when the phone rang. I let the machine answer.
A crisp woman’s voice said, “Ms. Hemingway, this is Ruth Avery at the Bayfront Village Nursing Unit. Cora Mathers asked me to call and let you know she’s a patient here.”
I did a one-legged hop for the phone, but she had hung up. In a breathless rush, I pulled on jeans and a less saggy T-shirt and charged downstairs.
Cora Mathers is the grandmother of a former client who got herself murdered while I was taking care of her cat, and she’s become very dear to me. She lives in a posh apartment her granddaughter bought her at Bayfront Village, one of Sarasota’s best retirement communities. The thought that she was in Bayfront’s nursing unit pushed my heart into my throat.
Outside the nursing unit at Bayfront, I careened into the parking lot and practically jumped out of the Bronco before it came to a stop. A smattering of cars in the parking lot said visiting hours weren’t over yet, but I knew I didn’t have much time. A pleasant-faced woman at the reception desk seemed to brace herself as she watched me barrel into the lobby.
I said, “I’m here to see Cora Mathers. And don’t tell me I can’t see her, because I’ll raise such a stink you can’t believe.”
The woman turned to peck keys on a computer keyboard and peer at a screen.
Mildly, she said, “She’s in Room Two-oh-four.”
I gave her a curt nod, probably the way Genghis Khan acknowledged people who stepped out of his way when he was trampling over the countryside, and took the stairs instead of the elevator. I didn’t have time to wait for an elevator.
I didn’t have to look for Room 204. It was directly across the hall from the stairwell, and the door was open. An old sitcom from the seventies was blaring from a small TV on a movable metal contraption at the foot of the first hospital bed, where a woman with drug-glazed eyes was lying flat on her back looking at the screen.
Hurrying around a curtain separating her bed from the next one, I found Cora sitting in an easy chair. She had one foot propped on a stool and was looking out the window at pale spots of sailboats on the darkened bay. Soaking wet, Cora might weigh eighty pounds, and she’s roughly the height of an average sixth-grade child. Except for an exasperated look on her face, she looked normal—which is to say she looked frail and old, but healthy.
When my grandmother was Cora’s age—closer to ninety than eighty—she went beach walking every day, read everything published, and seriously considered taking up wind surfing. Cora, on the other hand, is the kind of woman who peaks at fifteen, is matronly at forty, and old at sixty. Age doesn’t have anything to do with how many times the earth has revolved around the sun since one’s birth, it’s about health and being protected. If circumstances had been different, Cora might have ended up as robust as my grandmother, but she started out living hand-to-mouth and scared. Now she’s living high on the hog and lonely. In either case, she has faced reality without losing her faith in goodness, which I consider a major life accomplishment.
When she saw me, she threw both arms out wide and grinned. “Well, hallelujah and pass the biscuits! I’ve been waiting for you all this damn day.”
I leaned to hug her slight shoulders. “I didn’t know you were here. What happened?”
“Oh, it’s the silliest thing. I slipped in the bathroom last night and twisted my ankle a little bit, and nothing would do them but I had to come over here and spend the night. Now they won’t let me go home until the swelling goes down. It’s plain stupid, is what it is, so I told them to call you.”
She was trying for anger, but I could see fear in her eyes. When a resident of a retirement community is no longer able to live alone, they are routinely moved to the facility’s nursing wing, and their apartment is sold. Every old person fears they’ll be unfairly railroaded into a nursing unit while they’re still capable of living alone.
I knelt beside the stool to look at her ankle. It was a little puffy but not bruised. I poked it with a tentative finger, and Cora flinched.
I said, “They feed you okay in here?”
She brightened. “I had bacon and eggs for breakfast.”
“No kidding. Real bacon or pulverized turkey skin?”
“Real pork. And real biscuits too. Lunch wasn’t bad either, and for dinner I had chicken and dumplings.”
Personally, I never have understood the appeal of boiled chicken with pieces of dough dropped on it, but I made enthusiastic noises before I bent over her bedside table to make sure her water carafe was filled.
I said, “I guess they can afford to go all out when they know you’ll just be here a day or two.”
She looked thoughtful. “That’s true. I don’t think they feed the really sick people that good.” She pointed toward the curtain and lowered her voice. “She’s sick as a dog, and all she got for breakfast was cream of wheat.”
I said, “As long as they’re feeding you good, it might not be such a bad idea to let them wait on you until your ankle stops hurting. That racket from the TV bother you?”
She rolled her eyes. “Plays that thing all day long. I think she’s a little, you know.” She twirled her forefinger at her temple with gossipy pleasure. “Poor thing, nobody comes to see her.”
More than likely, nobody had come to see Cora either, but she obviously considered herself more popular than her roommate because I was there. When you get down to it, it’s not the fact of things that are important, but how we interpret them. She had more color in her cheeks now that she had perked up, and fear had left her eyes. My own fears were back in the box where they belonged too. Cora was okay, and Bayfront Village had done the right thing to put her in the nursing unit where they could take care of her.
Behind the curtain, the TV noise stopped and an oily male voice said, “And how are we today?”
I stood up straight with my ears tingling. Where had I heard that voice?
A shaky old woman’s voice answered. “I’d of stayed in Mississippi if it hadn’t of been for the hurricane.”
With icy contempt, the man said, “Do you have any idea how weary I am of hearing you say that?”
Cora and I stiffened and gave each other raised eyebrows.
With more force to her voice, the woman said, “I’d of stayed in Mississippi if it hadn’t of been for the hurricane.”
The man said, “God, what a waste of time and money! All you decompensating old Binswangers should have been smothered at your first cerebral infarcts.”
The back of my neck prickled, and I spun to glare at the white curtain. I didn’t know what a Binswanger was, but I knew the man had just said something cruel.
A moment of silence followed, and then his oily voice again. “You and the rest of the world will be better off when you’re gone.”
I couldn’t stand it anymore.
I said, “What the hell?” and stepped around the curtain to confront the woman’s nasty visitor. All I saw was a man’s broad back hurrying out the door. The bastard hadn’t even had the grace to say goodbye. I took a moment to make sure the woman was okay, then hurried to the door and looked down the corridor. An elderly man in a wheelchair was pushing himself down the hall, but he didn’t look as if he had enough air in him to speak above a whisper.