The Fall of Never(67)

“What? Damn it, tell me.”

“I think,” Josh began, choked on his words, then started again: “I think she might be dying.”



In the bathroom of the diner, Mendes dialed home on his cell phone.

“Baby.”

“Come home, Carlito.”

“A few more hours.”

“They work you too hard. Tell them I said to send you home.”

He smiled. “Them who?”

“I don’t know. Them who is keeping you from me. I don’t like it. It isn’t fair.”

“I know, my sweet.” He caught his reflection grinning in the bathroom mirror and quickly stopped. He looked like a ghost, like the walking dead. “I won’t be much longer. Are you feeling all right?”

“I’m perfect. And fat.”

“Not fat.”

“Very fat. I feel like a watermelon. Big-big-big.”

“I think you look beautiful, sweet.”

“Well you are a strange man.”

“Isn’t that why you married me?” He couldn’t help but smile again. “How’s Mamma?”

“Asleep. Her leg’s been hurting all day.”

“I’ll bring home some aspirin.”

“There’s enough here. Just come home straight.”

“All right,” he said, “I’ll come home straight. In a little while.”

Josh was waiting for him outside. A fine mist was working its sluggish way along the ground. In the dark, Joshua Cavey somehow appeared older, almost wizened. His skin looked pale and sickly.

“You haven’t been sleeping,” Mendes said as he followed Josh across the street. It was not a question.

“Is that a professional observation?”

“It’s a friendly observation. Or maybe just an observation, period. You’ve been really going crazy with this, too?”

“More than you could know,” Josh said, and stepped up on the opposite curb.

The furnace in Nellie’s building was pumping ferocious heat, and it attacked them as soon as they stepped inside. To Mendes’s surprise, and for whatever reason, Josh opted to take the stairwell to Nellie’s apartment. The stairwell was a narrow, almost perfectly vertical maze of linoleum risers and pitted iron railings. Their feet made hollow thuds on the stairs.

“She’s close?” Mendes asked.

“Seventh floor.”

“Seventh?”

Josh, ahead of him on the stairwell, glanced back over his shoulder. Mendes couldn’t tell if he was grinning or not. “What’s wrong? Too many cigarettes on your lunch break?”

They reached the seventh floor and, upon stepping through the small stairwell passageway that communicated with it, Mendes froze. Josh noticed and looked back at the doctor again.

“What is it?”

“This hallway,” Mendes said. “I’ve been…”

“What?”

“I think I’ve dreamt of this place.”

Josh remained staring at him for a beat longer before turning around and moving further down the hallway. For a brief moment, Mendes could only watch him walk, powerless to lift his own feet, move his own legs. So vividly, he could recall his dream from the night before—the narrow hallway with what appeared to be subway doors opening and closing at one end; the vulgar words spray-painted on the apartment doors; the sounds of small children creeping into the hall behind him, their urgent little hands all of a sudden against his back; and, worst of all, the fleshy umbilical cord that came slithering out from between those subway doors toward him…

You’re here, that same Marie-like voice spoke up in his head, you’re inside your dream now.

And on the heels of that he thought: Just what the hell is going on here?

“Come on,” Josh said and tried the knob of what was apparently Nellie Worthridge’s apartment. Locked, Josh withdrew a ball of keys and unlocked it, opened it.

They stepped inside.

The apartment was dark and stiflingly hot. It smelled of soured fruit, Mendes recognized. Fruit…and sweat, maybe. And there was a sound, too—a crackling, perpetuating sound which suggested a small fire roasting in a distant hearth. The sound was so peculiar, in fact, that he opened his mouth to ask what it was—and then the music hit him and he recognized it immediately: Duke Ellington striking up “Black Beauty.” They’d walked into the apartment between two songs playing low on an old record.

Josh snickered off to his left. “Startled?”

“Caught me off guard.”

“She likes the record player on all the time now. Always Ellington.”

“At least she has good taste.”

They were talking in unconscious whispers. His eyes slowly growing accustomed to the dark, Mendes saw Josh step into the small kitchen nook and switch on a single light over the sink. The bulb illuminated the countless orange curls that littered the countertop: orange peels. Seemingly hundreds of them. That explained the smell.

“What is this?” Mendes whispered.

Josh returned to his side. “I told you she’s sick.”

“You said you think she’s dying.”

“Yes. I mean, I think so. She won’t talk about it. Come on, she’s in the back bedroom.”