The Hiding Place Page 17

  “WHATCHA LOOKIN’ AT, Uncle Jim?” I asked, standing behind him as he sat looking out through our living room window at the street below.

  I’d been getting a snack from the kitchen refrigerator—standing on my tiptoes to reach the corn bread on the upper shelf—when I’d heard him talking to someone in the other room. His voice had been low and hushed, as if sharing a secret, and I’d closed the refrigerator and left the kitchen to see what was going on.

  But standing in the passage between the two rooms I could see it was only him, leaning forward in my father’s recliner, his face turned toward the window. He was muttering to himself, his head cocked to one side as if listening to the faint call of birds from far away. “No, no, that’s not true,” I thought he said, although the words were muttered, difficult to make out.

  “What is it?” I placed a hand on his shoulder, thinking maybe it was a game he was playing, that it might be something fun. He startled a bit at my touch, his muscles twitching, but when he saw it was me, smiled and nodded to himself, seemed happy I was there.

  “What’s new, Lindsey Lou?” he asked, using one of those made-up names he sometimes called me.

  “What’re you looking at?” I asked, but he didn’t answer—just left the question hanging there between us, and for some reason I was scared to ask him again. I removed my hand from his shoulder, thinking maybe he was sick or something, that I might get it too if I wasn’t careful.

  “What d’ya think of that kid out there, Lindsey Lou?” he asked me.

  I looked out the window to see who he was talking about. “The one on the bike?” I asked, but he shook his head.

  “Nah, the other one.” His head did a little twitch and I thought I heard him whisper, “Leave me alone,” but I couldn’t be sure and, at any rate, it didn’t seem like he was talking to me. “The one sitting on the curb,” he said, pointing to the neighbors’ boy, Ronald McBee, who was three years younger than me but almost as tall. He had a plastic truck in his hand, his blond head tilted down to study it as he spun its wheels.

  “That’s Ronald,” I told my uncle. “He lives next door.”

  “Ronald,” he echoed. “Yeah,” he said, tapping the fingertips of his right hand on the chair’s leather armrest. “Yeah, I can see that now.”

  “Uncle Jim,” I asked, “are you feeling okay?”

  “What d’ya mean?” He didn’t even turn his head to look at me.

  “You’re not …” I started. “You’re not sick or anything, are you?”

  “Sick,” he said, but there was no inflection in his voice and I couldn’t tell whether it was a question or an answer.

  I turned to go, feeling like I shouldn’t be here, like maybe I should go tell my mom that something wasn’t right with him. Would they take him away, I wondered, if he got sick again? But on the cusp of that thought I could hear my mother telling my father, He’s got no place else to go.

  I was heading toward my room, the plastic-wrapped corn bread a forgotten thing in my hand, when I heard him call my name.

  “Lise. Hey, Lise,” he said, his voice just above a whisper.

  I turned around. His eyes moved back and forth before coming to rest on my face.

  “Why does he keep looking over here?” he asked. “The Ronald kid. What d’ya think he wants with me?”

  I went back to the window, looked out at the boy sitting on the curb. His attention was focused on the toy truck, not our house, and although I watched him for a while, that never changed.

  I turned to look at Uncle Jim. “I don’t think he’s—”

  “See? See there?!” he said, and I spun my head back around but nothing was different.

  “He just looked up again,” Uncle Jim told me, his body rigid, his eyes never leaving the window. “Why does he do that?”

  “I don’t kn—”

  “He knows we’re in here. That’s what I think,” he said, nodding to himself.

  “So what if he does?” I responded, but Uncle Jim had gone back to ignoring me.

  I walked away, left him sitting there. I should’ve gone straight to my mother and told her what was going on. Uncle Jim could be weird sometimes in a way that felt more like a game, like the acting I’d done in my school play the year before. This didn’t feel like one of those times—but I wanted it to. I wanted this to be something we would laugh about later.

  They come and go—like headaches, he’d told me two weeks before when I’d asked him about the voices in his head, and I clung to that idea, telling myself that tomorrow he would feel better.

  If it gets worse, I’ll tell Mom, I promised myself, and that seemed like a good enough plan.

  Only I never would.

  Chapter 36

  Anyone wanting to get a firsthand look at the vulnerable, unpredictable nature of the human condition need only travel as far as their local hospital emergency room. During medical school, I spent two months working in the ER at Johns Hopkins, where I was afforded a front-row seat to the ebb and flow of the many lives that passed through those daunting translucent sliding glass doors. The waiting room itself is a kind of purgatory, not only for the patients who have come to be treated, but also for their families, who sit among a sea of slack-faced strangers and wrestle with the horror of the unknown outcomes in front of them. A young mother holds her crying four-month-old child in her arms and wonders why the fever will not abate. A middle-aged couple alternate their stares between blank registration forms and the silent automated doors to the resuscitation rooms beyond as their seventeen-year-old daughter is rushed to the operating room to remove a shattered spleen and left kidney resulting from a hit-and-run accident with a drunk driver. An old man looks down at his brown, sensible old man’s shoes and tries to remember what his wife was like before the Alzheimer’s. He agonizes over the guilt of bringing her here, of realizing—finally—that he can no longer take care of her.

  At the registration desk, I gave a fake name and address, advising the clerk that I’d left my ID and credit cards at home in my rush to get to the hospital. She’d been doing her job long enough to know I was lying, but she also understood that I couldn’t be turned away. She dutifully entered my fabricated information into the computer, fastened a patient ID to my left wrist, and added my chart to a rack of fifteen others behind her. “Have a seat, the nurse will call you shortly,” she said in one practiced monotone breath, and her eyes moved to the gentleman waiting behind me.

  I got up and moved to the waiting area. Every chair was occupied, so I stood against a wall and tried to busy myself with other thoughts while I waited for my name to be called. In a seat in front of me, an old lady clutched a blood-soaked towel in her lap, kneading its edges with her fingers. She caught me looking at it, and we locked eyes. “My husband …” she started to explain, and then trailed off, her gaze shifting down and to the right. On the other side of the room, a man erupted in a ratcheting series of coughs. His lungs sounded heavy and wet, as if they’d been left out in the rain overnight. He brought a handkerchief to his mouth, spat in it, then grimaced at what he’d expectorated.

  I stood in that room for an hour and a half before I was called into the treatment area. The nurse led me past a row of three gurneys, all of them occupied by disheveled, malodorous gentlemen who appeared to be recovering from various stages of drunkenness. There was a pungent, eye-watering scent of urine emanating from that section of the hallway, and I wondered if the nurse—for all her years of service in such an environment—even noticed it as we passed. If she did, she didn’t comment, but instead drew back a curtain and tossed a gown onto the bed.

  “Please undress and put on the gown,” she told me, “opening in the back.”

  “It’s just my arm that’s injured.”

  “The doctor can’t properly examine you if you’re not undressed,” she said, and her voice had the same flat intonation as that of the registration clerk, the explanation something she was forced to utter over and over every working day of her life.
I felt sorry for her, so I drew the curtain closed, removed my shirt—gingerly easing the sleeve over my right forearm—and put on the gown. The rest of my clothes stayed on, however. There is just something too unsettling about unnecessarily forsaking one’s pants in public.

  I waited only a short time for the ER physician to appear. He swept aside the curtain and offered me a smile as he stepped up to the bed. “I’m Dr. Mathers. Sorry to keep you waiting.”

  I told him it was okay, that they seemed busy today.

  “We’re busy every day. You should see this place during cold and flu season.”

  “I’d rather not,” I said, and he smiled.

  “Me, either, but they make me come in anyway.” His eyes glanced down at the chart in his hands, then back up at me. “What happened to your arm?”

  I shook my head. “I’m embarrassed to tell you, but I managed to do this gardening. I’d just come back from the nursery with a bunch of potted plants that I’d lined up along the edge of the yard. I got distracted and forgot they were there for a second, took a step backward and tripped over them—managed to get my arm out enough to break the fall, but … well … this was the result.”

  It amazed me how easily the lie slid out, how I didn’t stammer or blush or avoid eye contact when I said it. It was like I’d practiced delivering the story in front of a mirror several times until I’d gotten it just right. I was so impressed with myself that when he asked what I’d been planting, I didn’t stop to consider my answer before responding. “Tulips,” I replied, and then winced, realizing that was the wrong answer for this time of year.

  “Does that hurt?” he asked, his fingers paused on my upper arm.

  “I was just anticipating how it’s going to feel when you get to my forearm.”

  “I’ll be gentle,” he promised as he began to examine the lower part of my arm, probing delicately over the deformity and feeling for my pulse. He asked me to move my fingers, and I did, although the action caused the pain to intensify. His right thumb pressed against the nail of my index finger, blanching it, and he watched as the pink returned to the nail bed.

  “Okay. We’ll get some X-rays of your arm and go from there.”

  “Thank you.”

  He nodded and started to leave, then paused with one hand on the curtain. “I don’t know if you usually garden in your work clothes, but I think you’ll have better luck planting tulips in the fall. And they usually start out as bulbs, not potted plants.” We were both quiet for the next few seconds. I could hear a baby crying in a room somewhere off to the right.

  “I’ll have the nurse bring you that pain medication,” he said, and was gone as quickly as he’d appeared.

  Chapter 37

  The X-ray technician couldn’t have been more than twenty-two, but he’d been careful with my arm. He chattered on about the Orioles’ chances of making the playoffs this season, about Manny Machado’s incredible play at third base the night before. None of this exuberant monologue required much comment from me, and I leaned back on the stretcher and let the words wash over me, the pain in my forearm ebbing to a vague presence as the Vicodin started to take effect.

  “Well, it’s as I suspected,” Dr. Mathers said as he entered the room. “The radius and ulna are broken and angulated enough that we should straighten them out before putting you in a splint. I can reduce the fracture here, but you’re going to need some sedation. When’s the last time you ate?”

  “Breakfast,” I replied, thinking back to earlier that morning. The time since then seemed like weeks instead of hours. “It was no more than a few sips of coffee.”

  He nodded, had me sign a consent for the procedure, and a few minutes later a nurse came in and started an IV.

  I was worried the visit was taking too long, that the longer I stayed, the greater my chance of getting caught. It was important to keep moving.

  “You ready?” Dr. Mathers asked, returning to the room.

  “Ready as I’ll ever be.”

  They redosed my pain medication, then I watched as Dr. Mathers drew something white and milky into a large syringe. He screwed the tip of it into one of my IV ports and slowly depressed the plunger. “Here goes,” he said as the milky fluid snaked its way through the plastic channel and into the vein in my left hand. I could feel it sliding its way up my arm toward my heart, where it would be pumped to the rest of my body. It tingled a bit, not quite burning but—

  “You tell me when you start to feel sleepy,” Mathers said, but his voice sounded far away and I was already drifting.

  I could feel myself being reclined in the bed. Cool oxygen flowed into my nostrils, reminding me of how the first few breaths of night air felt after emerging from the stale confines of my childhood house on Cedar Street.

  “DON’T STAY OUT too long,” my mother called, the screen door clapping shut behind me. I walked down the three steps to the front yard, ignoring my brother as he shot past me down the driveway on his Big Wheel, the hard plastic tires rumbling on the asphalt. I could hear the pulsing drone of insects, could see the sporadic glow of fireflies against the dim backdrop of dusk. The oak tree in our front yard held its limbs out to either side just as it had always done. It looks tired, I thought, weary of the day. To punctuate this point, it let go of a few leaves, allowing them to flutter to the grass, a hint that summer was almost over and the season of surrendering would soon be upon us.

  Uncle Jim sat on the far side of the oak with his back against the coarse skin of its trunk. I couldn’t see his face or upper body from where I stood—just the partially bent stretch of one blue-jean-clad leg in the grass. His left hand rested on his knee. The other, I knew, would be holding a cigarette because this was where he came to smoke. My mother had put her foot down about him not smoking in the house.

  I kicked off my flip-flops and walked across the yard in my bare feet, the soft, cool tickle of grass on my skin. I moved slow and quiet, thinking that maybe I’d sneak up on him, would yell “Boo!” when I got to the tree. When I got there, though, he looked so lost in thought that it didn’t feel right to break the silence. I sat down next to him, folded my legs Indian style, and picked at the grass in front of me.

  He didn’t say anything for a long time, just sat there smoking, looking out across the street. I didn’t mind the silence. We had a connection, Uncle Jim and I. We could spend an hour working on a jigsaw puzzle in my parents’ garage, the whole time neither of us saying anything, just concentrating on connecting the pieces. It was different from my mother’s silence because I knew that Uncle Jim was right there with me, not lost in a world that I couldn’t reach. Over the past few weeks we’d started to lose some of that. I could feel him withdrawing a bit—not from me, but from the world in general. He was getting sick again. I didn’t blame him—didn’t hold it against him. During those times I just … missed him. But then his eyes would clear and he’d look over, see me and give me a smile, and I’d grin right back because the warmth of that smile felt good, the minutes or hours that he’d been gone just washing away like dirt in the rain.

  He held the cigarette out, offering me a drag. The first time he’d offered, I brought it to my lips and sucked in the smoke, gagged, coughed, and almost threw up. But I held on to it with my fingers because it had come from Uncle Jim, and the second time I brought it to my mouth I only coughed a little bit. Two drags was about all I could take. He’d nodded and smoked the rest of it down to a stub, his arm wrapped loosely around my shoulders. Now it was something else we shared, something we did together as we sat beneath the tree in the evenings and watched the world go by. And neither my mother nor father ever seemed to notice. Because, like I said, they were distractible people who looked past the family in front of them. As if anything else in the world could be more important.

  “There,” he said, making me jump. I’d started to reach out for the cigarette, but his hand had moved, and now he was pointing with the two fingers that held it. “You see that, Lise?” he asked, his voice low
but clear in the stillness of the yard.

  I looked across the street to where he was pointing, in the direction of our neighbors’ house, but there was no one on their lawn or standing in the driveway. The garage door was closed. The only interior light I could see was coming from a lamp in their living room, the flicker of their television.

  “What?” I asked, but he dropped his hand to the grass, stubbed out the cigarette, and was quiet for a long time.

  I sat there studying the house as the last of the daylight ebbed from the sky. I could hear the sound of my brother’s Big Wheel up the street, the sound of running water through the screen door behind me as my mother washed dishes in the kitchen. But I wasn’t concentrating on that. My focus was on the house across the street. My eyes moved over the modest patch of shrubs, the brown rectangle of the front door with its single glass pane at the top, the slope of the roof tilting toward us, the darkened square of the side window that I could just make out in the shadows because the house wasn’t facing us directly.

  “You see it now?” he asked. I shook my head no. “At the window,” he said. “The one on the side of the house. You see him looking out at us?”

  “Who?” I asked, straining to see what he was talking about, but suddenly I knew the answer to my own question. “Is it Ronald?”

  He smiled. I didn’t look at him—kept my eyes focused on the house—but I could hear him smile in the darkness. The slide of dry lips pulling back against his face. I could picture it in my mind: the humorless, doomed smile of a man who suddenly realizes he is cornered and has no choice but to fight his way out. I could sense the fear settling on him, moving across his skin like a reptile.

  “He sneaks over to our house at night,” he told me. “I can hear him running around on the lawn just outside my window. Sometimes he scratches to come in.”