The Fall of Never(15)
Pupils dilated and staring straight through Mendes and at the ceiling, the old woman’s hand shot out again and sent the plastic fork sailing across the room. It clattered against the door just as it was swung open, two young nurses rushing in.
“Let’s get her down,” he called to them, the old woman already becoming docile beneath his grip. Her eyes eased closed again. “Her blood pressure just shot through the roof.”
One of the nurses plunged a syringe into the old woman’s arm but by that time, Nellie Worthridge was already out, her respiration slowly returning to normal.
“The hell happened?” one of the young nurses asked.
Mendes didn’t answer her. Massaging his forehead with one hand, he bent and picked up the dropped clipboard, then slowly moved across the floor toward the door. Looking down, he saw the broken fork by his shoe. Three of the four prongs had been busted off, and he had time to think, How incredibly bizarre is that? I swear, with everything I’ve ever seen in all my working years, that was one of the most bizarre things I’ve ever witnessed.
He stared down at the fork for longer than he should have, perplexed by it on a level that he shouldn’t have been. It made no sense.
How strange.
Yet by the time he got home and made love to his wife, he had forgotten all about it.
Chapter Five
It had started to rain when Josh put her into a cab to send her off to the airport. Before closing the door on her, he said, “Will you make me a promise?”
“What?” she said.
“Will you give me a call at some point while you’re away? Just, you know, so I know you’re doing all right.”
She smiled wearily. “I’ll find a phone if I have to.”
Josh shut the door.
The cab ride to JFK felt too long. She watched the cool evening rain splash against the windows of the cab while the cabdriver listened to a news radio show, the volume turned low. To keep her mind off her sister (and off the unexplainable tumult in her gut) she flipped through one of the art books she’d taken off her bookshelf and brought with her. But the distraction didn’t last long, and soon she found herself trying to summon the image of her childhood home in her head, to picture it as it had been before she went away.
And why did I go away, anyhow? She couldn’t remember. It was something, and something big, but I can’t remember anything about it for the life of me.
Becky had been only five years old when Kelly finally left the house to stay at the hospital. Her stay was only supposed to be temporary, until she was able to regain her composure, but she had wound up staying for three years. In fact, thinking back, she found it easier to recall her stay at the hospital than her childhood at the house.
Oh, what a bunch of garbage. Let’s just call a spade a spade. The “hospital” was an institution. Just like the “compound” is really just a house.
Alabaster mortar and puke-green cinderblock walls. Fluorescent tube lighting and gray linoleum hallways. Wire-mesh windows and uniform bedclothes, where every bedroom looked like a carbon copy of each other. Three years. She was eighteen when she finally left, legal adult age to sign herself out. And after that, she didn’t go back to the house, to her parents’ compound. No—after that, she went out on her own, fell into a hasty marriage that ended in divorce, and spent the last few years of her life in Manhattan with very little memory of her childhood and the events that led her down such a path. And that was fine, because until a month ago she had no desire to recall her childhood, her parents or even Becky. She’d even kept Collin’s last name.
Kelly Rich is better than Kelly Kellow any day, she rationalized. I don’t sound like some ridiculous fairytale character anymore.
She’d met Collin in New Hampshire, where she moved after leaving the institution. Even back then it had been her intention to eventually take a shot at New York City, but she decided to take a job as a receptionist at an independent publishing house in Concord which she had been told about by a warm-hearted young nurse at the institution. It wasn’t anything spectacular, but it was a responsibility she’d never had and attacked the opportunity with gusto. There she met Collin Rich. He was twenty-five then and an in-house editor for the company. Handsome, intelligent, funny, Kelly quickly fell in love with him. In hindsight, Kelly supposed her initial attraction to him (and their subsequent engagement) was something she needed rather than something she wanted. But at the time, it seemed the best way to overcome the embarrassment and solitude of the years spent at the institution.
I don’t want to think about Collin, either. In her head, everything just seemed connected to the same invisible hub, the same unremembered yet uncomfortable childhood. And that video, that pale face reflected in the glass of Nellie’s oven? Was I just seeing things, was I just imagining it or was that reflected face really there?
For the briefest of moments she feared she was cracking up again.
This is what it’s like living on the edge.
The cab pulled into the buzzing hub that was JFK International Airport and, after some driving confusion, the driver let her out. Armed with a single duffel bag, she hurried through the terminal, again feeling the sudden need to urinate. She reached the reception desk and gave her name to the attendant behind the counter.
After a few moments of silence from the perky blond attendant, she turned to Kelly and said that she was not registered for any flight leaving this evening.