I stood there staring at the thing, my poised fist frozen in mid-knock.
Maybe this was part of the new security measures, keeping the doors closed at night-but then why hadn’t Miss Acceleration’s door been closed, as well? No, this wasn’t what it appeared to be, it couldn’t be, I wouldn’t accept it, wouldn’t allow it. Whitey might not be in the best shape, but it had only been three days since I’d last seen him (he wasn’t very talkative and insisted he wasn’t feeling well, though I suspected he was just depressed and wanted to be left alone) and I refused to believe that anything had happened to him. Mabel would have told me. I knocked, then waited for him to shout something insulting.
Nothing.
I grabbed the door handle and began to open it when the rest of it finally registered: his nameplate had been removed from its slot in the wall next to the door, the clipboard that held his chart was no longer hanging on its hook underneath his name, and the lights in the room were off. Whitey always kept the bathroom light on at night so he didn’t have to stumble through the dark to take a leak.
If I don’t turn on the light, everything will be fine, I thought. Right now it’s dark and you’re not looking at anything that confirms what you’re trying not to think about, so for this moment, in the dark, Whitey’s here and sleeping and everything’s the way it was the last time you were here.
The smart thing to do was not turn on the light. I’d lost too many people recently. Dad was chewed up and dead and gone, Mom might as well be dead for all the joy she found in her day-to-day existence, and I’d seen so little of Beth for the last six weeks she might as well have been in Guatemala with the Peace Corps. I would not allow another person to slip away from me. And the best way to ensure that would be to do the smart thing, and the smart thing was not to turn on the light.
I turned on the light.
Two beds, both empty. No television, no video tape machine, no pictures, no books in precarious stacks; nothing in the closets but hangers, nothing in the restroom except an unused roll of toilet paper, a full soap dispenser, and a tub and sink that were desert-dry.
I stood in the empty room shaking my head while something in the middle of my chest tried to snap through my rib cage. This was not-repeat not -happening. Maybe I’d gone into the wrong room, it could happen. So there I was back out in the hall checking the room number and it was the right number but that didn’t mean anything, Whitey was always bitching about how little space he had in there so maybe they’d just moved him to another room, a bigger room, one big enough to hold all of his stuff and leave space for his ego, left side first, I went down the left side of the hall first, checking and double-checking the names next to the doors and Whitey’s wasn’t among them, so now it up the right side, double- and triple-checking the names and it wasn’t there, either; I reached the end of the hall and went left toward the break room because Mabel was there and she’d know, she could tell me what was going on – unless she didn’t know, unless something happened earlier today and the detritus had already been cached away and no one had told her – the door to the break room stood half-opened. I started to push my way inside when I heard Mabel say, “It’s probably for the best,” but there was something in her voice that told me she was simply parroting a practiced response, that she didn’t really believe what she was saying but wanted whomever she was talking with to think she did. Then a male voice replied, “It’s always for the best, it’s important you remember that.” Then I had the door open and was standing there long enough to see that the man she was speaking to was dressed in an expensive gray suit with white shirt and blue tie and wore a bowler hat on his head that was pulled down to cover the top half of his ears-then he noticed me.
“This area is for sanctioned personnel only,” he said. His face and voice were both granite.
I reached down and fumbled at the thing hanging around my neck. “I’ve got a visitor’s pass.”
“That doesn’t matter-you shouldn’t be in here. What’s your name?”
Mabel’s face drained of color the second I answered his question but I figured it was more out of concern that she was about to get into trouble. I decided to play it safe and act as if I didn’t know her, like I was just some schlub off the street who couldn’t find his butt with both hands, a floodlight, and a seven-man search party.
“I’m sorry if I’ve interrupted anything but I was looking for… for my uncle, Marty Weis?” I pointed over my shoulder, looking directly at Mabel. “His room’s empty, ma’am. Has he been moved to another unit?”
Mabel released a breath and said to Bowler-Hat, “I’ll take care of this,” then walked over and gestured for me to move toward the nurse’s desk. As we walked down the hall she slapped an iron clamp that looked like her hand on my elbow. “How the hell did you get in?”
I looked back to see Bowler-Hat standing outside the break room, watching her escort me out. “Arlene let me in, she said-”
“-she shouldn’t have let you in. Unless it’s an emergency, there are now no visitors allowed after eight- thirty.”
“I’m sorry, Ma-uh, ma’am, I didn’t know.” She shot a quick thank-you glance at me when I said “ma’am.” “Where is he?”
“Mr. Weis is no longer with us,” she said, a little too loudly. She pulled me past the nurse’s desk toward the hallway where I’d entered; her entire body was rigid and we were moving a little too fast.
“Please tell me what happened.”
“Mr. Weis is no longer with us, sir. You can call the Admissions office after nine tomorrow morning.” We turned down the hall and moved toward the door. After a few steps Mabel looked back over her shoulder, then doubled her pace, yanking me along. Her grip on my arm tightened.
“That hurts,” I whispered.
“Jesus, I wish you hadn’t told him your name.”
“So what? Big deal-what’s he going to do, issue an APB?”
Mabel swiped her card-key as she none-too-gently spun me around and began to push the door open with my back. “Listen, you know I love you, right?”
“What the-aren’t you worried about him hearing you?”
“He didn’t follow us and this hall isn’t monitored. You know I love you, right?”
“Yeah…?”
“And you know I don’t say or do anything without a damn good reason, right?”
“Yeah…?”
“Good.” She blinked, then gave a weak, unreadable smile. “You need to leave right now and go home and not come around here or the house for a little while, a couple of weeks, at least, okay?”
“Where’s Marty? He didn’t… didn’t-”
“-Mr. Weis is no longer with us. That’s all I can tell you.” Then she silently mouthed the words He’s fine while slowly shaking her head. “Please do this for me, will you? Go home and stay away for a couple of weeks.”
“But… but what’s… I mean-”
“Do it for me, please?” This wasn’t just out of concern for her job-there was hard, raw, genuine fear in her voice. Before I could say anything else she pushed me outside, closed and locked the door, then spun around and returned to the unit, not giving me so much as a brief backward glance. I was just some schlub off the street.
Back home in the kitchen I put all of Mom’s morning medications in their compartment and then went to bed, where I lay weeping for another hour or so before there was a soft knock on my door and Mom stuck her head inside.
“Is everything all right?”
“Fine,” I said in the same clipped, melodramatic way we’ve all said it when we’re upset and don’t want to say Everything is awful and I just want to die so leave me the hell alone, please.
She held the collar of her tattered blue housecoat closed as she looked out in the hall toward the stairs. “Well, try to keep it down, will you? Your dad will be upset something terrible if he comes home and finds you this way.”
I stared at her; she stood silhouetted in the doorway like some wisp of a dream that lingers in the eyes for a moment upon waking. “I’m sorry.”
“You don’t need to apologize, hon, it’s all right. We just don’t want to upset him. He works so hard.”
“I know.”
She started to close the door, then said: “Is it time for my medicine?”
“Not yet, you take it in the morning.”
“Well, it is the morning. It’s after midnight, isn’t it?”
“Go back to bed, Mom. Take it when you get up again.”
