Lineage(90)

Lance quit looking into the rooms and pulled up short behind the wide backside of the nurse, who stood awaiting an elevator at the end of the short T. The doors slid open and they both stepped inside. The nurse hit the backlit number 2 and crossed her hands over her belly as the car hummed around them.

“Just want to warn you, she’s not responsive. I’ve never heard her say a word. I’ve got to stay just outside the door, with it open—facility rules.”

Lance frowned. “Why’s that?” The elevator yawned open to another hallway, this one running straight away from them without obstruction.

The nurse stepped out. “The second floor houses more-aggressive residents.”

Lance peered past the nurse just as a gaunt man shuffled out into the hallway from a room, a uniformed woman following behind him. When Lance looked at them, he didn’t see a caring protector watching over her ward. Instead, he saw the blank expression of someone taking a dog for a walk on the nurse’s face. The man seemed to be running from something only he could see but wasn’t able to make his legs cooperate. His feet slid along the ground, hindering his progress. His vacant eyes bulged as he glanced over his shoulder and a terrified look was etched across his face.

“Mr. Metzger?”

Lance turned and realized that the nurse had continued on while he was transfixed. “Sorry,” he said, catching up with her a few doorways down.

The nurse stood by a thick wooden door with a small rectangular window set in its middle. A tangled mass of keys hung from one pudgy hand.

As he watched her extricate the right key from the group, Lance asked, “What exactly did she do to get locked up here, away from the other residents?”

The nurse grunted. “We had an orderly get bitten once—she doesn’t like men much.”

The door swung inward with a thrust of her hand, and Lance stepped past her and into the room. The living space crowded his senses. The walls were beige, which had most likely been selected to calm the patients, but instead looked lifeless and bland in the wan lighting. A lower-concentrated blend of the smell he had encountered on the floor below hung in the room. A bed, thin and carefully made, stood against one wall. A heavy desk sat below the only window in the room, which shone a dim gray from the clouds outside.

The light filtered onto the humped figure that sat at the desk, its back to the door. Lance studied the woman, her shoulders so rounded by time that they seemed like afterthoughts on her body. Her hair hung at her shoulders, a shade beyond white. The stick-like arms were shrouded in the folds of an overly large sweater that was an ugly color of olive. She made no movement when Lance stepped into the room, his footsteps overly loud in the close quarters.

“I’ll be just outside,” the nurse murmured as she sidestepped out of view.

Lance barely heard her as he approached his grandmother. Her face gradually became visible in the dim light. Her eyes didn’t register him as he neared, but instead they stared out the window—which was much too high to reach even by standing on the desk—at the marbled sky that rolled across its view.

He didn’t know how to begin. Each sentence that came to mind was inane or alien. He stood there, the knowledge that in the chair a few feet away rested his last living relative was not lost on him. The urge to turn and bolt out the door pushed at him, but he forced it away, grabbed a straight-backed chair, and sat.

His first impression of Annette being very old was incorrect. She was ancient. Her eyelids hung loose over sunken eyeballs that were glazed, a fog of years covering them. Her cheeks were lined with the loss of fat that had no doubt filled them full, and resembled two sails hanging limp on a windless day. Her toothless mouth was ajar, but surprisingly, no spittle dripped out of it.

“Hello, my name is Lance,” he began. “I know you don’t know me, but … I’m your grandson.” The words were out of his mouth before he had computed them. The emotion that clung to them stunned him. The longing for a family he had felt while growing up alone came rushing back to him in an instant. The feelings of envy and resentment at seeing other kids with parents and grandparents over the years surfaced from deep within him, and then submerged once again, pushed below by the questions that had drawn him here. “I wanted to ask you about some things. Would you like to talk with me?”

Annette didn’t move. Her eyes remained locked on the window. Lance frowned and leaned closer to the old woman, the smell of aged skin cloying the air around her.

“Annette, do you remember your house? The one at the lake? Do you remember what it looks like?” He thought he saw a movement beneath the sweater, a shiver. “Do you remember where you lived with my father? With your husband?” He stared at the side of her face, examining the lines there. Her jaw shifted, up a fraction of an inch and then back down. Lance blinked. Had she tried to say something?