“She wants to… send me back to that stinking ol’ place! And if I have to go… you’ll have to go back there too!”
Alison grabs a corner of bedsheet to wipe her streaming eyes. Big Boy sits beside her.
“There’s some snot on your upper lip,” he says.
Alison wipes it away, glaring at him.
“Well… what can you do?”
But Big Boy shakes his head.
“It’s only what you can do that matters, Alison.”
Lorraine gets up slowly from her side of the bed so as not to wake Ed Lewinski, who is sleeping on his stomach. She bends to kiss a naked shoulder, then pulls on a nightshirt from her chest of drawers before walking downstairs to the kitchen of her garden condo to get something to drink. Mouth parched from all the kissing and those other things she did with him, after more years than she cares to remember new meaning to going all the way; around the moon and back with sweet Eddie Lew. Carton of tomato juice on the top shelf in the fridge. She pours a glass, adds a squeeze from the fat plastic lime-juice container, adds Tabasco: Virgin Mary. Leans against the sink smiling to herself as she sips, probably could use a shower but relishes the smell of her lover on her still-tingling body.
The phone. It’s the hospital. Damn.)
By the time Lorraine walks into Alison’s room in the children’s wing Alison has been sedated and is half-asleep.
“Must’ve been a nightmare,” the charge nurse says. “She woke up hysterical, and what a time we had with her. She wet the bed.”
Alison’s head moves on the pillow. Her face is nearly colorless except for the small cherry bow of her mouth.
“Rats and bugs. Fights… all the time. She hurts me.”
Lorraine looks sharply at her. “How are you doing, Sweetie?”
Alison can open her milky eyes only part way. “Headache.”
Lorraine holds her hand. “Can you tell me what you were dreaming about?”
“Nuh.”
“That’s okay. We’ll talk about it later. You rest now.”
Instead of closing her eyes and subsiding into her sedative cocoon, Alison trembles.
“Where’s Dolly?”
“Oh,” Lorraine says, noting that Dolly isn’t in her usual place in the crook of Alison’s arm, “I don’t see her.”
In spite of the dockable sedative more hysteria threatens.
“Dolly!”
Lorraine glances at the charge nurse, who shrugs. Alison begins to wail. Lorraine has a quick look around the spartan room but Dolly isn’t lurking anywhere. Then she remembers: Alison wet the bed, so the sheets could’ve been changed… she questions the nurse, who nods. Possible. Dolly could’ve left the room in a wad of soiled sheets. Lorraine moves swiftly to Alison’s side.
“I think I know where Dolly’s gone. She’s not lost. I’ll bring her to you.” She holds the girl close.
“P-promise?”
“Just give me a few minutes.”
Lorraine takes the elevator to the second-basement level.
Dead quiet down there, no working in the laundry at one-thirty in the morning. The machinery of the elevator seems unnaturally loud to her ears in the quiet of the cavernous basement. Corridors criss-crossing beneath the entire hospital complex. The concrete walls are painted grey and pale green. Yellow ceiling bulbs in wire baskets. Signs point to different areas. Crematory, Electrical, Maintenance, Storage. Laundry.
The metal door, twenty feet from the elevator, is closed. Lorraine pushes it open.
There’s a windowless outer room with a couple of tables, chairs, vending machines for the laundry workers. The room would be full dark except for the illuminated facades of the machines. By their glow she sees, inside the laundry itself, a dumpster-size canvas hamper on wheels that sits beneath the drop chute. And there’s a dim light deep inside the shadowy room. She hears a lone clothes-dryer thumping dully as it makes its rounds.
Lorraine draws a breath that burns her throat, eases around the canteen tables into the laundry. The big room has glass-block windows on one wall, above the pipe complex that grids the ceiling. The one dim bulb is behind pebbled glass in an office door eighty feet away; not enough light to cast her shadow. She tries a wall switch inside the door but nothing much happens to the fluorescent fixtures overhead: a cloudy flickering in two or three of the five-foot tubes.
She draws another breath and begins to search the hamper, pulling out sheets one at a time, shaking them. There are sheets recently peed on, all right, but no Dolly.
“I think I have what you’re looking for,” he says.
Lorraine turns with a jolt that has her skin sparking.
“Who’s there?”
She hears a phlegmy chuckle, then the quavering voice again.
“It’s only me. Did I scare you?”
“Did you-? Hell, yes,” Lorraine says, shaking her head in annoyance. She is unable to tell where his voice is coming from. Next she hears a dry reedy sucking sound, like someone pulling on a straw to get the last drops from a container of soda or fruit juice. That gets on her nerves fast. “Who are you?”
“Oh — I work nights around here. Just washed my old sneakers, now I’m waiting for them to come out of the dryer.”
“What did you mean, you have what I’m looking for? How would you know why-”
She sees him then, shadowy, as he rises from a stool behind a long sorting table; his head, in silhouette against the glass of the office door, looks shaggy. “I believe you come down here for her doll. Throwed out by mistake, was it?”
“Yes. But-”
“Come and get it, then,” he says, chuckling, his amusement causing him to wheeze at the end.
“No. Bring it to me,” Lorraine says. And adds, “Please.”
“All right. All right.” Sounding a little cross. The stool legs scrape on the concrete floor. He comes toward Lorraine, slowly, soundlessly. His sneakers clunking around in the dryer. “How’s little Missy doing? She calm down some from her bad dreams?”
“Were you upstairs earlier? In the children’s wing?”
“That I was. That I was.”
“I see. But how did you know Alison’s doll was missing?”
“Oh, I know things. I know lots of things. Been here almost all my life.”
“Do I know you? What’s your name?”
At the instant she asks, the fluorescent tubes flare overhead with the violence of lightning, the laundry is garishly illuminated, and he is closer than she thought, white-haired, stooped, unkempt head thrust forward of his shoulders as he shuffles toward her. Alison’s Dolly offered in his right hand. Chuckling fit to kill, is Walter Banks. The thumping of old sneakers round and round the dryer tub is like an echo of the accelerated tempo of her heart. She stares in hammering fright at the missing finger on the veiny hand that grips the doll.
“Oh Jesus-!”
The door is only a few feet away, he is old now, and slow and obviously not strong, she can get away easily; Lorraine turns but-There is no room for her to run.
Because Alison is standing in the doorway in her nightie, arms folded, looking up at Lorraine, rigid in her purpose, baleful.