The Fall of Never(11)

I can use some lifting today, he thought, walking up the risers to the old woman’s apartment. He had taken the elevator only once—the first time he and Kelly had been to see the old woman—and had decided upon the stairwell for each subsequent visit. Any display of lethargy made him feel somewhat guilty. After all, the old woman went through her life without any legs. Was he really going to bitch over a few flights of stairs?

He knocked several times on Nellie’s door. She rarely ever answered it, so he waited for the mandatory “Come in.” But it never came. He knocked a few more times and waited (this wasn’t unusual; the woman’s hearing was about as flawless as a country road). When she didn’t answer the second time he reached out and jiggled the doorknob. It turned and he cracked the door open and peeked his head inside.

“Nellie?”

The apartment looked empty. If not for Nellie’s old-fashioned phonograph slowly turning through a Duke Ellington album in the corner of the living room, he would have thought the old woman had stepped out.

He stepped inside and placed the plastic bag of fruit on the kitchen counter. There was a pot of boiling water on the stove. Something wasn’t right.

“Nellie? Hello?”

She might be in the bathroom, he rationalized. Even old ladies have to drop the kids off at the pool on occasion. And if she comes out now and sees me standing here in her kitchen, I might cause her to suffer a heart attack, the poor old thing.

But he didn’t convince himself. Something wasn’t right.

“Nellie? Where are you? Are you here?”

He moved across the living room just as Ellington ended one number and struck up another. As he peered down the hallway he expected to see the bathroom door closed, but it wasn’t. It was propped open halfway by Nellie’s overturned wheelchair. On the floor, half in the bathroom and half in the hallway, was the old woman. She lay there unmoving, and the first thought that blasted through Josh’s head was, She’s dead.

He rushed over to her, righting the wheelchair and pushing it out of the way. It clanged against the toilet. Bending down to the old woman’s chest, he could hear her rasping breath pushing in and out of her lungs, could hear her heart—faint, but still on the clock—beating within her chest. Her eyes were closed and her mouth was frozen open, pulled into a grim mockery of a smile. Dried laces of spit ran down the corners of her mouth and into the wrinkled grooves of her cheeks.

“Okay, Nellie,” he breathed, pulling himself to his feet and rushing for the nearest telephone, “you just hold on, all right? You just hold on.” He was whispering these words, but that didn’t matter; he didn’t think Nellie would be able to hear them, anyway. They were more for his comfort than hers.

He reached for the telephone on the kitchen counter, knocking the bag of oranges to the floor. The bag ripped open and the oranges fell out and rolled across the floor in different directions.

“Hang on, Nellie,” he whispered, and called for help.



It was a stroke and no one had any definite answers. Josh stayed with the old woman until she was stabilized, staring in at her through the glass-and-wire doorway of the ICU. She looked like a child in that bed, so small and seemingly at peace. He remembered her complaining about headaches during the shoot yesterday and now he wondered if that had been a signal of things to come. He didn’t know the first thing about strokes nor about what their symptoms included. And the way he’d found her, unconscious in the doorway to her bathroom at the end of the hall, her chair tipped on its side, those dried lines of spit tracing down her cheeks…he couldn’t shake the image.

Is that how we all go in the end? he wondered. Is it just a matter of time before we all get old and alone and die on the floor of our bathrooms, our chairs tipped over, dried spit on our face?

A young nurse with wide hips brushed by him.

“Will she be all right?” he asked her.

“We’ll be keeping a close eye on her,” the nurse said, smiling with a mouthful of teeth as she continued down the corridor.

That’s not what I asked, he thought, and turned away from the ICU. He walked down the hallway, the sodium ceiling lights making his shadow large and almost comical on the tile floor in front of him. There was a pay phone at the end of the corridor. He picked up the receiver, slipped thirty-five cents into the slot, and dialed Kelly’s number. As he stood listening to Kelly’s phone ring on the other end, he questioned whether or not he should say anything to Kelly at all about Nellie. Would this be the final thing to set her over the top? Would she perhaps discontinue with the project altogether? Surely he’d sensed Kelly’s recent lack of enthusiasm. Would she see Nellie’s stroke as an omen, as an excuse to finally put We the People to rest without ever completing it?

It doesn’t matter, he thought, because I won’t let her. This project is too good, too important, to simply cast aside when it becomes too difficult.

The phone continued to ring with no answer. He hung up the receiver before Kelly’s answering machine picked up and leaned back against the wall. His mind returned to Sampers, the Monster of Manhattan, and to the way the kid had looked in that split second when he pulled the trigger and fired the first of two shots at him. There had been an amalgam of conflicting emotions in the kid’s face—fear, anger, sadness, confusion.

You didn’t want to pull that trigger any more than I wanted to get shot, Joshua Cavey thought morosely.