The Nix(74)

The nurses in Willow Glen didn’t try to prevent death. But they did try to guide you to die in the right way. Because if you died from something you weren’t supposed to die from, families became suspicious.

The nurses here were kind. They meant well. Or at least they did at first, when they were new. It was the institution that was the problem. All the rules. The nurses were human, but the rules were not.

Those PBS nature documentaries they showed in the common room said all life aimed toward reproduction.

At Willow Glen, all life aimed toward avoiding litigation.

Everything was charted. If a nurse fed him dinner but forgot to write it down, then in court, technically, she did not feed him dinner.

So they came in with these stacks of paper. They spent more time looking at the paper than looking at the people.

One time he hit his head on the bed frame and got a black eye. The nurse came in with her charts and said to Frank, “Which eye is injured?”

All the nurse had to do was take one look at him to answer that question. But her nose was in the charts. She cared more about documenting the injury than the injury itself.

They recorded everything. Physician progress reports. Dietitian records. Weight-loss charts. Monthly nurse summaries. Food-service logs. Tube-feeding sheets. Medication histories.

Photographs.

They made him stand naked and shivering and they took photographs. This happened roughly once a week.

Checking for evidence of falls. Or bedsores. Bruises of any kind. Evidence of abuse, infections, dehydration, malnutrition.

For court cases, if needed later, in their defense.

“Do you want me to ask them to stop taking photographs?” the young man said.

What were they talking about? He’d lost the thread again. He looked around him: He was in the cafeteria. It was empty. The young man smiled his uncomfortable smile. Smiled like those high-school kids who came in here once or twice a year.

There was this one girl, Frank forgot her name. Maybe Taylor? Or Tyler? He asked her, “Why do you high-school kids come in here?” And she said, “Colleges think it looks good if you’ve done some charity work.”

Two or three times they’d come, then disappeared.

He asked this Taylor or Tyler why all the students only showed up twice and then never came back, and she said, “If you do it twice, that’s good enough to put on your college application.”

She said this with no shame. Like she was such a good girl doing the absolute minimum to get what she wanted.

She asked him about his life. He said there’s not much to tell. She said what did you do? He said he worked at the ChemStar factory. She said what did the factory make? He said it made a compound that when jellied and lit on fire would literally melt the skin off of a hundred thousand men, women, and children in Vietnam. And then she realized she’d made a big mistake coming here and asking him that.

“I was wondering about Faye,” the young man said. “Your daughter Faye? You remember her?”

Faye was so much more hardworking than these high-school shits ever were. Faye worked hard because she was driven. There was something inside that pushed her. Something big and deadly and serious.

“Faye never told me she went to Chicago. Why did she go to Chicago?”

And now it’s 1968 and he’s in the kitchen with Faye under a pale light and he’s kicking her out of the house.

He is so angry with her.

He’d tried so hard to live in that town unnoticed. And she made it impossible.

Leave and never come back, is what he’s telling her.

“What did she do?”

She got herself knocked up. In high school. She let that boy Henry get her pregnant. Wasn’t even married yet. And everybody knew about it.

Which was the thing that enraged him most, how everyone knew. All at once. Like she advertised it in the local mailer. He never figured out how that happened. But he was more mad that everyone knew than about her getting knocked up.

That was before he picked up the dementia and stopped caring about things like this.

After that, she had to go to college. She was an outcast. She left for Chicago.

“But she didn’t stay long, right? In Chicago?”

Came back a month later. Something happened to her there she never talked about. Frank didn’t know what. She told people college was too hard. But he knew that was a lie.

Faye came back and married Henry. They moved away. Left town.

She never really liked him, Henry. Poor guy. He never knew what hit him. There was a word for this in Norwegian: gift, which could mean either “marriage” or “poison,” and that probably seemed about right to Henry.

After Faye left, Frank became like Clyde Thompson after his daughter died: kept a straight face in public and nobody asked him about Faye and eventually it was like she’d never even existed.

No reminders at all, except for the boxes in the basement.

Homework assignments. Diaries. Letters. Those reports from the school counselor. About Faye’s issues. Her panic attacks. Nervous fits. Making up stories for attention. It was all documented. It was here, at Willow Glen. In storage. In the basement. Many years’ worth. Frank kept everything.

He hadn’t seen her now in so long. She’d disappeared, which of course Frank deserved.

Pretty soon, he hoped, he wouldn’t remember her at all.

His mind was falling away.