'How'd it get there?' she shouted, loud. 'That's me. How did I get there?'
'It's just a movie, Dotty.'
'Who said they could put me on that thing? They got it wrong! Wasn't like that. Only one room we had and couldn't afford no hired hands, I can tell you.'
The woman from the kitchen made clicking sounds of disapproval. Did everything have to be ruined for her little girl?
'It's just a movie, Dotty,' said Bill.
'What is that thing?' She pointed at the television.
'It's a TV. It's like a radio with pictures. You can show old movies on it. That's what that is, an old movie.'
For some reason, that seemed to mollify Dotty. She dropped back down onto her chair, sulking, arms folded. 'I ain't never seen a movie,' she said, as though that might explain how she came to be in one. She sat looking merely disgruntled for a few minutes more.
Then the cyclone came. When the wind began to moan, Old Dotty began to shake her head from side to side, no, no, no. She looked confused; her hair was wild but her eyes looked frightened and lost. When she finally saw it was a cyclone, she shouted, once, very loudly, and covered her mouth. And when Judy Garland stepped out of Kansas into Oz, Old Dotty covered her face and wept. She pulled in breath with great heaving sobs. The little girl began to cry too.
'I want to go home!' said the little girl.
The mother began to gather up her coat in a rage. 'Just for once,' she muttered in bitterness.
'I want to go home,' echoed Dotty, so softly that only Bill could hear.
'Come on, Dotty,' he murmured. Experimentally he wheeled the chair around. Dotty did not fight. She had gone still and staring, her head hanging slightly. Bill wheeled her down the corridor to where the Angels slept.
'Here we are,' said Bill. 'Back home.'
Old Dynamite didn't fight as he helped her up onto the bed and lifted her feet around, pulled up the bars of the cot. She turned her old seeping head with staring, watery eyes onto the pillow as he tucked her under the quilt. She's peaceful now, Bill thought. Getting her to go to the John will only rile her up. I'll clean her in the morning, before anyone sees.
'You just sleep now, Dotty,' he whispered. He patted her arm, helpless to offer anything. He began to walk back quietly toward the lighted window in the door.
'Take me to the ocean,' said Dotty.
Bill stopped and turned. Did she want to say anything else? He waited. There was a silence for a while. He was about to go again when she said, 'I ain't never seen the sea.'
'We're a long way from the sea, Dotty,' he whispered back to her.
'I'd like to see the ocean,' she said. 'And then I'd like to die.'
What could he tell her? That he'd take her there in the morning? That things were going to get better? That anything good was ever likely to happen to her now?
'They show the ocean on TV, sometimes,' he said.
'I ain't no use to anybody. You oughta take me to the sea and drown me.'
'I don't think that would be a very good idea.'
Two beds down, old Gertie began to moan.
'If we keep talking, we'll wake everybody up. I'll come visit tomorrow,' he said.
'It was about me,' she whispered. 'I really am Dorothy. Dorothy Gael, from Kansas.'
The skin at the back of Bill's neck prickled. My, but that's spooky. That's what the character just said in the film.
Better say nothing, he thought. He walked out of the room backward. Better let her sleep.
He shuddered, involuntarily, and tried to calm himself. Whew. Must have been strange for her. Never seen a movie. Been in here since before movies. So she didn't know what they're like. So she sees an old movie that starts in Kansas about a little girl on a farm, must be like her own life coming back. He listened to his own footfalls, soft-shoed, on the corridor.
He went back to the TV, dreading that maybe someone had knocked it over and got hurt. Everything was fine. Bill leaned over to Jackson, the black janitor. He'd been working in the Home for an age.
'Jack,' he said, 'what's Old Dotty's real name?'
'Don't know,' said Jackson. 'Don't know their names, mostly. They got files on them all, though.'
Wouldn't it be strange, though, if the names really were the same?
Bill drove the car home, and it all seemed to get stranger and stranger, the more he thought about it. Say she was about eighty. She could have been sent here when she was thirty and that would be about 1900. She could have been in here all that time. A whole world could have gone by. The Wright brothers, movies. And both world wars. It's like when they had Veterans Day parades, when he was a kid, and some old guys would come tottering along with their decorations, and they'd be decorations from the Spanish-American War. You had to pinch yourself to realize that there were people who could remember the Spanish-American War.
He needed to talk to Carol. He drove to her house, breathing the smell of the car heater. He parked and ran through the cold to the front door. Lights were still on downstairs. He rang the bell and waited, stomping his feet, waving his hands.