Goodnight Beautiful(38)

The Velcro rips apart and then a tube of light, like that of a flashlight, appears in the darkness, shining down on a medical chart in the doctor’s hands. Sam’s eyes adjust enough to make out the details of the room, cast mostly in shadow. He’s in a single bed, under a patchwork quilt. There’s a closet door and a small window, floral curtains drawn in front of it. Wallpaper—chartreuse yellow shapes feeding on themselves, like some sort of Escher-on-acid creation. Sam squeezes his eyes shut, realizing this isn’t a hospital room. It’s what looks to be someone’s bedroom.

“Where am I?” Sam asks.

“I don’t expect you would remember,” the doctor says. “The brain’s reasoning and cognitive processing centers tend to shut down during traumatic events. A way to help us forget the bad things.” The doctor turns to face Sam and Sam sees that what he thought was a flashlight isn’t a flashlight but a headlamp secured to the doctor’s head. “What am I telling you this for though, right, Dr. Statler? You probably understand that better than anyone.”

The doctor is beside him peering down at Sam over a pair of eyeglasses, and Sam can’t pull his eyes away from the face, his brain slow to put the pieces into place.

The short hair, graying at the temples. The bright blue eyeglasses hiding the same pair of eyes Sam felt watching from a window upstairs, in the Lawrence House, every day when he arrived for work.

“Albert Bitterman?” Sam says, sure he’s imagining it. “My landlord?”

Albert leans closer and smiles. “Hey there, heartbreaker.”

“Albert,” Sam says again, confused. “Why am I at your house?”

But Albert just shushes into Sam’s ear and presses two pills into his mouth. “Go to sleep, Dr. Statler,” he says, clicking off the headlamp as Sam floats toward the darkness. “You’ve been through a lot.”





Part III





Chapter 27




“Albert Bitterman?” the UPS man shouts from the open door of his truck the next morning.

“Yes, that’s me!” I call out, pulling on my jacket as I step onto the porch. He disappears to the back of the truck and then reemerges, pushing a hand trolley loaded with boxes. “You made good time,” I say as he approaches. “Saw you on the GPS. A little blue dot leaving the pickup facility just after 8 a.m. Quite a feature on the redesigned website.”

The man bangs the hand trolley backward up the steps. “It’s creepy, if you ask me,” he says and now I wish I’d said it first, because I completely agree. (In fact, if he were to check the recent comments on the UPS Facebook page, he’d see that an anonymous user (me) made the same observation twenty minutes ago: Am I the only one who sees the danger in allowing any schmo with an internet connection to follow a truck carrying thousands of dollars of top-ranked medical equipment?)

Rain drips from the brim of his UPS baseball hat as he draws a small machine from his back pocket, and I take stock of the inventory. One metal rolling cart with a retractable arm. One emergency crash cart with an attached trash can and side hooks for both a broom and a mop—one of the few pieces of equipment I’ve given a five-star rating to as a twenty-five-year employee of Home Health Angels, Inc.

“Looks like it’s all here,” I say.

“Want me to bring it in?”

“Inside the foyer is fine.”

“Suit yourself.” He backs the trolley inside and drops the boxes onto the floor. “Cool place,” he says, looking into the living room. “Nice and bright.”

“Can’t take any credit,” I say, as he hands me the computer to sign. “It was just as the last owner left it, and I haven’t wanted to change a thing.”

“Agatha, right? Nice lady.”

I pause, the plastic pen hovering over the screen. “You knew her?”

“A little bit. Work a route long enough, you meet everyone at least once.” He shoves the computer back into his pocket. “I was sorry to read that she’d died. You know she laid there for five days before she was found by the woman who cleaned her house?”

“It was a man,” I say.

“Sorry?”

“The person who found her. It was a man.”

“Is that right?” He shrugs. “I heard it was the housekeeper, so I assumed it was a woman. Anyway.” He pulls down his hat and tucks into his collar as he steps onto the cold porch. “Have a good one.”

I wait for his taillights to recede over the hill before going into the kitchen for the blue Home Health Angels apron I couldn’t bear to throw away after losing my job. I tie it around my waist and fill the pocket with my supplies—a tube of Neosporin, a fresh bandage, and a pair of latex gloves. I head down the hall, insert the key quietly into the lock, and flick the light switch when I enter. Sam’s stirring in his bed and murmuring his wife’s name. I close the door and go to his side, my back straight, my heart full, feeling more useful than I have in a long time.





Chapter 28




Annie parks between two police cruisers and pulls up her hood, sick to death of the rain. John Gently is behind the desk when she steps into the waiting room.

“Is Chief Sheehy here?”