She heard him cry out as she was replacing the receiver. She set the brown envelope back on the table. There were a lot of hundreds inside it, but that wasn’t the point. Some things aren’t about money. It was the letter that mattered, the one he wrote to the gamblers asking for more time to pay in full. That wasn’t anything like the handwriting she’d seen on his other letter, the one she’d received so long ago containing an apology from Devlin Robey. So she really didn’t owe him anything. She owed herself a lot of years. She wondered how much it would cost to go to trade school, and if the bills in the brown envelope would cover it. Maggie wanted to learn to fix things.
TYPEWRITER MAN
BY SHARYN MCCRUMB WITH SPENCER AND LAURA MCCRUMB
WORKING AT NORTHFIELD Nursing Home isn’t nearly as boring as you think, even if it is a building full of old people. It’s not like I’m a volunteer or anything, all right? I mean, they pay me. Less than I’m worth, I admit, but it’s enough to keep me in video games and halfway decent sneakers.
Ever since my dad died of cancer last year, money has been a little tight at home. My mom went back to work full-time. She’s a registered nurse, and now she works as the nursing supervisor at Northfield, and when she told me that the home was short on orderlies, and suggested that they might be able to use a responsible twelve-year-old for a few hours a week, I jumped at the chance. It made me feel good to know that I was helping out with expenses, even if they were mostly my expenses. Now I work part-time, late afternoons and weekends, with time off during soccer season. We almost made it to the playoffs last year.
Working at Northfield isn’t exactly taxing labor. I load the dishwashers, and I go down to the basement laundry and gather up the clean sheets and towels and deliver them to the four residential floors for the housekeeping staff. Everybody told me that there was a ghost in the basement, because the morgue is right next to the laundry, but I always turn all the lights on when I go down there, and I don’t waste any time, so frankly I’ve never seen anything weird down there. But Kenny Jeffreys swears he once saw the top half of a guy in a Confederate uniform. Just the top half. Too strange for me, man. The live ones around here are bizarre enough.
I see them every evening when I push the meal trolley around the halls, delivering dinner. It doesn’t take you long to get the residents scoped out: there’s senile ones, who barely notice you; feeble but chatty ones that treat me like a grandson, which is nice; and then there are a few space cadets scattered about. Mrs. Graham in room 239 always has to have two dinner trays taken to her. One for her and one for her husband Lincoln. That’s her late husband Lincoln, you understand. Mr. Graham left the planet in ’85, but he still gets a dinner tray. And, no, he doesn’t eat it. I go back at seven to pick up the trays, and his is never touched. And Mrs. Whitbread in 202 has an evil twin. Yeah, in the mirror. She’s always scolding the mirror twin, telling her what a hag she is, and how she ought to behave herself. I swear I’m not making this up. You can ask Kenny Jeffreys, the orderly who works the same hours I do. He’s in his second year at the community college, majoring in health care, so he’s working for tuition and car insurance money. Plus, of course, the experience he can get in the health care field, which does not seem to excite him too much most of the time. He talks about changing his career to TV anchorman, but as far as I know he’s still in health care.
Northfield has its share of oddities, from ghosts to dotty old folks, but the patient that really got to me was the white-haired guy in 226. He was weirder than all the others put together. Kenny calls him Typewriter Man. The name on his door is Mr. Pierce, and you never see him out of his room, or wearing anything except a robe and pajamas. Every time I go into his room with the meal tray, Mr. Pierce is sitting in front of his nonelectric typewriter, tapping away like mad. He must be doing fifty words a minute. Never stops. Never looks up when you set his food down. Just keeps typing, like it’s some urgent report he’s got to finish.
Only there’s no paper in the typewriter. Ever.
And he just keeps typing away.
“What do you think Mr. Pierce is writing that’s so important?” I asked Kenny one evening, when I had delivered the supper tray through another burst of paperless typing in 226.
Kenny shrugged. “Beats me,” he said. “Why don’t you ask him?”
“He never looks up. He never stops typing, or even notices that I’m there.”
“Guess you’ll never know then, kid,” said Kenny, wheeling the laundry cart toward the elevator.
But I wasn’t willing to give up. And I had just come up with an idea that might work.
The next afternoon when I showed up for work, I dropped by my mom’s office and took about twenty sheets of typing paper from the bottom drawer of her desk. She wasn’t there at the time, and I knew she’d never miss it. Then I went upstairs to room 226, and tapped on the door before I let myself in. Mr. Pierce was asleep in front of his television, snoring gently, which didn’t surprise me, because not even weird people can type twenty-four hours a day. I tiptoed up to his desk, and stuck a sheet of paper in the empty typewriter.
“Pleasant dreams, Mr. Pierce,” I whispered as I crept away. “I’ll be back to check on you at mealtime.”
Two hours later, I was pushing the dinner trolley from room to room, tingling with excitement. I told the grandmotherly types about my history project, and I asked Mrs. Graham how her invisible husband was doing, but all the time my mind was on Mr. Pierce and his typewriter.
Finally, I reached room 226. I heard the familiar tapping sounds through the door, and I knocked once, and let myself in, calling out, “Suppertime, Mr. Pierce!” just like I always did, despite the fact that Mr. Pierce never, ever answered back.
I set the tray on the empty desk space beside the typewriter, moving as slowly as I could, so that I could see what he was typing. The paper was still in place, and it was covered with words. I didn’t have to take the paper, because I could memorize the whole thing in thirty seconds. It was the same line over and over: Alva, please come back. I’m sorry. Please come back.
I looked over at Mr. Pierce, but he was hunched over his plate, shoveling in food and ignoring me, the way he always did. I wished him a good evening, and went to find Kenny.
“He just keeps typing the same sentence,” I told him. “He’s telling someone named Alva to please come back, and he says he’s sorry.”
“Maybe it’s his wife,” said Kenny. “I wonder if she knows where he is.”
“Somebody had to sign him in here,” I pointed out.
“Maybe it wasn’t her, though. Maybe they got divorced, and his kids put him here. Maybe she misses him now. A list of his relatives would probably be entered on his records folder.” Kenny reads a lot of paperback mysteries while he’s doing the laundry in the basement. He says it keeps his mind off the ghosts. He looked at me slyly. “Of course, I couldn’t look in those folders, but since they’re in your mom’s office…”
“I’ll see what I can do,” I muttered. I felt sorry for Mr. Pierce, typing that same sad sentence day after day with no hope of getting an answer. Maybe there was hope, though.
The next evening I pushed my meal cart up close to Kenny’s trolley full of towels. “So much for your theories, Sherlock,” I told him. “I read Mr. Pierce’s folder while Mom was at the photocopy machine. She almost caught me, too! Anyhow, his wife’s name was Rosalie, and she died the year he was admitted to Northfield. They didn’t have any children, which is probably why he is here. There was no mention of anyone named Alva in his folder.”