The Fall of Never(14)

What if Nellie Worthridge is dead by the time Kelly comes back? a small voice deep inside his head spoke up. And on the heels of that: What if Kelly never even comes back at all?

Of course she would be back. Why wouldn’t she?

His mind shifted from Nellie to Sampers, He of the Greasy Hair and the Chapped Lips. Sampers had had a first name—was it Kenneth?—and had a father and a stepmother and a little sister and lived in a house and probably had a dog and maybe some old skin magazines hidden under his bed and maybe his old man beat him and maybe his stepmother was a degenerate alcoholic and maybe all those things came together and, in the end, created a monster out of Kenneth Sampers. Or maybe none of that was true and Sampers—the monster Sampers—was just birthed that way by nature. Josh recalled an intensity in Sampers’s eyes in the mere moments before the trigger was pulled, and it was a muddled, alarming intensity, brimming with questions and confusion. As if his brain was flying solo and his actions, no matter what drove his desires, were inevitable. Maybe sometimes, Josh thought, bad things just happen for no reason and without provocation. And what could you do?

Nothing, he knew. We can do nothing.

He comforted Kelly and let her fall asleep on his shoulder until it was time to leave for the airport.



Doctor Carlos Mendes, a fresh smattering of chalky vomit on the front of his white lab coat, washed his face and hands in the men’s room of the Intensive Care Unit at NYU Downtown Hospital. He was thirty-seven, looked fifty, and felt like he was seventy. He hadn’t seen the underside of his eyelids in roughly forty hours, hadn’t curled up behind Marie, a single arm draped over her slumbering form, in what seemed like weeks.

He dried his face and hands with paper towels from the dispenser, then proceeded to rub off as much of the vomit from his lab coat as he could.

There was much traffic in the hallway of the ICU. Three gunshot wounds, eleven auto accident victims, a dozen heart attacks and embolisms, a plethora of near-suicides—pill-poppers, jumpers, inhalers, and a variety of creative self-inflicted gun wounds and knife mutilations. The ICU could beat you to hell and back, if you only let it—Mendes knew this and accepted it the way a fireman tolerates heat, and never allowed it to overwhelm him. A little vomit on a lab coat meant nothing in the whole scheme of things. Sleep, in essence, was the same. Really, what did sleep mean? Shut your eyes for five minutes in the cafeteria then jerk awake again seconds before you planted your cranium in a bowl of rice pudding. It was a perpetual process, a revolving circus carousel.

Mendes checked his watch and saw that it was late enough to have missed dinner but still early enough to make love to his wife. He grabbed a cup of canned fruit and a plastic fork from the nurse’s station, popped the top and forked some chilled pear cubes into his mouth. Deborah tossed a few clipboards on the desk and smiled wearily at him.

“You about closing shop?” she asked him.

“Got about ten more minutes,” he said, flipping through the clipboard charts. “I’ll make rounds, grab a burger from the cafeteria, then head straight home. I feel like I could sleep for a month.”

“You and me both,” Deborah said, disappearing behind a wall of thick files wedged into flimsy manila folders.

A clipboard under his arm and the can of diced fruit up to his face, he moved down the corridor, absently avoiding traffic. He stopped outside Room 218 and peered down at the chart—Nellie Worthridge. Cerebral thrombosis. Still unconscious.

He pushed open the door and stepped inside, the hiss-and-pull of the old woman’s respirator the only sound filling the room. Her stunted form beneath the bed sheets reminded him of her handicap, and he thought, Yes, that’s right, you’re the poor old thing with no legs. It was clinical, yes, but it was too impossible to remember everyone by name. Particularly the unconscious ones.

Setting his fruit up on the table beside the bed, he checked the old woman’s blood pressure and examined her papillary response while thinking about the smooth brown slope of Marie’s back as she lay in bed, and the perfumed scent of her thick, black hair. How long had it been since he’d crept up behind her and nestled his face in that hair?

Tonight, he promised himself, checking off Room 218 on the clipboard chart.

The old woman’s eyes flipped open. The blood pressure monitor above the bed began whirring. The woman’s mouth began working silently while her spotted and bony hands clutched blindly at the bed sheets. Startled, Mendes backed up a step and stared down at the woman who had been completely unconscious two seconds before.

Like a mechanical puppet, Nellie Worthridge snapped upright in bed, her eyes suddenly very wide and glassy, the sclera of each eye tinged egg-yolk yellow. The machines above her head continued to whir while the respirator sped up to double-time. Before Mendes could react, the old woman shot her right hand out (Mendes had time to catch a glimpse of the loose flap of dangling skin swing out from her upper arm) and blindly grasped the fruit cup from the table beside her bed. Syrupy juice spilled across the table as she shook the contents out and yanked the plastic fork from the cup. With a speed uncommon to someone of her age (not to mention a recent stroke victim), she brought the fork up in front of her and, without looking at it, proceeded to break the plastic tines off the fork with her other hand.

Carlos Mendes snapped back into reality, dropped the clipboard, and rushed to her bedside. He rested a hand on both her shoulders and gently began easing her back down onto the bed while yelling for a nurse. With all the commotion in the hallway someone had to hear him.