In Reach (10 page)

“I don’t know what I think. Man like Banjo . . .” Elsie’s voice drifts away.

“Yeah?”

“Sometimes he wakes up in the morning, swings his feet out of bed, and lands on the wrong side of luck.”

“What do you mean?”

Elsie looks at Annie’s puckered face. She’s never going to be pretty, too much forehead, the chin too small. Maybe life will be kind to her, likely it won’t. Elsie manages a crooked smile.

“You want a cookie?”

Annie shakes her head. Elsie helps herself to two more. Once again, she turns toward the window. While she is looking out onto nothing, she hears Annie creep back to the piano bench. She’s ripping through
Lady of Spain
, the notes banging against the cords of Elsie’s tight chest. Elsie wipes her wet face with the back of her hand. To no one but herself, she speaks. “Play it loud, kid. Play it free.”

After Death

Hazel Mueller makes her rounds at the Reach hospital. She pushes a cart with ammonia, disinfectant, paper towels, window cleaner, dust spray, abrasive powder, a broom, feather duster, mop, and bucket. Some of the rooms are carpeted. These she has to come back to with the vacuum cleaner. She lugs the beast down the hall, cursing the stupidity of whoever designed this place. Flat roof that leaks. Carpet that carries infection. The old hospital has been turned into county offices, or she might raise a petition to move back there. It had only ten rooms, and they were small.

Still, it’s not a bad job. Cleaning up the dirt of other people’s lives. Sweeping up behind them. Swabbing their shit out of bathroom stools. Scrubbing vomit off the floor. Smelling the decay of sickness. Tossing out bloody tissues, caked gauze, drooping plants. It’s not so bad, sanitizing a room after death. Wiping the slate clean.

Hazel enters room 5. She’s timed it so the patient is out of the room, down the hall doing physical therapy. Hazel hates talking. She hates small talk and conversation. President Reagan is smiling all over the
TV
tube; she turns him off. She runs her fingers over the window ledge and decides not to bother dusting it. She’s lasted at this job twelve years, first at the old hospital, now this one, because she’s learned how to pace herself.

This is Nellie Watkins’s room. Broke her leg. Fell down on her porch and had to wait for hours until Judy Cochero came to pick her up for pinochle. That can happen to you when you live alone in a small town. Hazel knows this for a fact.

She sits down on the edge of Nellie’s bed. She runs her hands over the pillow cover, smooths it, and picks up the cards propped on Nellie’s bed stand. Any of them that say
God bless you
or
I’ve been praying for you
don’t interest her. She knows better, ever since Ralph left her for that Norcroft woman. There’s one card, though. It’s white with white raised roses on it and
Thinking of you
across the top. The sender has written a special note inside.
I think of you every day, with love.
Hazel runs her fingers over those two words,
with love
. Then, she pockets the card, hitches herself to her feet, and goes about her cleaning.

Later, when she gets home, she stands the card up on her nightstand. She takes down the one from last week, the one with pink roses and
thoughts of you
. The one that Mabel Becker’s husband sent. He wrote, in his own hand,
I don’t think I can live without you
. Mabel went home, but she has cancer and the chemotherapy isn’t working. Still, every night for a week, Hazel read that card before going to sleep.

The next week Mabel Becker is back in the hospital, and something else bad happens. Hazel gets paired up with Iris Cantwell. She’s supposed to show Iris the routine. She’s supposed to take Iris with her room to room and put up with Iris’s constant chatter. Iris knows every patient, too, and takes it on herself to cheer them up. She thinks she’s an expert on coping because her husband died some years back from Huntington’s disease.

“Nellie, how’re you doing today?” That’s Iris. Hazel humps over her mop in the bathroom.

“Not too bad.” Nellie’s voice ripples like water when you throw a stone.

Hazel peeks around the corner of the bathroom and sees Iris fluttering around the room, working while she talks. Iris sprays window cleaner on the windows.

“My goodness.” Iris again. She never shuts up. “These windows are a fright. Doesn’t anybody ever wash them on the outside?”

Later, when they’re sitting in the staff room over a cup of coffee, the nurses sucking on cigarettes, Iris brings up those windows. Hazel never sits at the table. She parks in a chair by the wall reading a book. Iris laughs with Barbara and Lucille.

“Mabel’s back.” Lucille says this. She’s got short brown hair, full lips. She’s been called perky. Hazel hates perky.

“I don’t think she’ll go home this time.” Barbara Harris, red-haired and aging.

“I’ve got to go and see her,” Iris chimes in. “Mabel was one of my hostesses years ago. She used to have two or three parties every year. We had so much fun. Once we walked down to the North Platte River and went fishing. We didn’t catch anything, but when we got back, Barney had a fish fry going for all of us. Catfish he’d caught the day before.” Iris’s hands fly while she tells this story about her life as a Tupperware dealer. Barbara and Lucille eat it up. Iris must be past sixty. She dyes her hair, anyone can see that.

That afternoon, Hazel putters around the operating room while Iris fills buckets of sudsy water and carries them outside. Using a long-handled mop, she scrubs the windows. Then, Iris climbs on a stepladder and rubs each pane dry with a cloth. She goes around the entire hospital while Hazel vacuums the carpeted visitors’ lounge and the five carpeted rooms.

When Iris is outside Mabel Becker’s room, Hazel can see her from the lounge. Iris paints a smiley face on the glass with her mop and suds, then knocks on the window and waves at Mabel. Mabel raises herself up on a thin arm. She makes a shooing motion at Iris and laughs.

Hazel moves slowly behind the heavy vacuum cleaner. She sweeps it back and forth, monotonous motion, the roar wrapped around her like a cocoon.

Iris is a regular Mrs. Clean. She insists on corners and cobwebs that Hazel has ignored for years. She drags her cheerfulness around the hospital like a pet on a leash. Lucille and Barbara and Jerry, the hospital administrator, act like she’s God’s gift. Hazel has been doing the dirty work for twelve years without so much as a thank-you, and now they fall over each other dumping praise on Iris. Barbara brings oatmeal cookies with raisins for the coffee room. Nellie Watkins goes home earlier than expected, and Iris gets credit for it. Hazel finds it harder and harder to get out of bed in the morning.

Mabel Becker’s condition grows worse. She’s entering that phase when cancer patients turn on those they love. They shut the door on them. Hazel remembers how her mother did that. Couldn’t stand the sight of her. Mabel’s husband still sits with her every day, but even he can’t take too much of it. Iris chats him up, too. She explains how Mabel isn’t turning her back on
him
, it’s the cancer.

Later, Reverend Fowler stops Iris in the hall. Hazel flips a feather duster over the framed posters hanging in the hallway, insipid pictures of children and angels and kittens. She’s at least two rooms away from the pastor and Iris, but she hears everything. They take no notice of her. She might as well be a potted plant.

“Some of us are coming to lay hands on Mabel, Iris. We hope you’ll join us.” Reverend Fowler, a weasel-faced man, speaks in a grating nasal voice. He’s decent, everybody says, but no one can stand to listen to him preach for long. He knows it, though, and keeps his morning messages mercifully short.

Iris leans on the handle of her dust mop. Her head wags up and down, a signal that she’s giving the pastor’s request serious thought. “Reverend Fowler, do you mean to pray for a cure?”

“Of course. God can heal anything, if we only ask.”

“Mabel’s dying, Pastor. She’s dying of cancer.”

Hazel moves toward Iris and the pastor. She’s already dusted the frames going that direction, but no one knows that.

“Nothing is too big for God, Iris.”

Iris chews on her lip for a moment. She lifts her chin. “No, Pastor. I can’t do that. I can’t go and lay hands on Mabel and ask God to make her well. But I will go and see her on my own. I will do that.”

Hazel sees that the pastor is none too pleased. A smirk grows at the corners of her mouth. So, finally, someone else has run headlong into Iris’s stubbornness. Iris of the last word. Iris who knows the right thing to do. Iris, the caller of shots. Iris, Iris, Iris. It’s enough to make Hazel puke.

Hazel moves through the rest of the day thinking about Iris. Hazel never would have figured her for the cynical type. She could see Iris leading the march on poor Mabel Becker. Cheer up, Mabel, make us all feel better. Thank the Lord, Mabel. God, heal Mabel, amen, amen. Hazel hears the echo of dirt falling on her mother’s coffin. After her mother’s death, she smelled guilt seeping from her armpits, her groin, the bottoms of her feet. She prayed and prayed, thinking her lack of faith had killed her mother, until that Norcroft woman. After that, she gave up on God and learned how to take care of herself.

Later, in the afternoon, Mabel Becker’s husband rushes into the coffee room. He bursts through the door where patients aren’t supposed to be, his face red and scared.

“Somebody help me. I don’t know what to do with Mabel. She’s all upset and crying.”

Lucille and Barbara stub out their cigarettes, reach for stethoscopes, and smooth their white shifts over their hips.

“It’s the preacher. He says he’s going to lay hands on Mabel, and she’s fit to be tied over it.”

Lucille and Barbara stop, frozen like comic book characters. Hazel watches all of this from her perch in the corner.

“Iris, maybe that’s your department,” Lucille suggests with a raise of her eyebrows.

“He’s your pastor, isn’t he?” Barbara says. She’s practically panting, she wants out of this so bad.

Before Iris can get to her feet, Hazel shoves herself up, grabs a broom, and moves down the hall to the empty room across from Mabel Becker’s. She busies herself in the doorway, jabs at corners with the broom. From here, she can see everything.

“What’s the matter, Mabel?” Iris walks right over to the bed. She takes Mabel’s withered hand in hers and wipes her eyes with a tissue.

“I don’t want them coming here. I don’t want them praying over me.” Mabel gets this out in fits and starts, hiccuping and blowing her nose. She’s got tubes here and there.

Iris glances at Mabel’s husband, the one who said he couldn’t live without her. Now, he shrugs his shoulders and shakes his head like he’s dealing with a two-year-old having a tantrum. He backs away, one step behind the other, until he gets to the doorway, where he bolts. He mutters something about going downtown to Baxter’s for a beer. Hazel watches him lurch down the hall. He stops twice and leans against the hallway, but he keeps on walking out the door.

Mabel has calmed down. “I’m not getting well, Iris.”

“I know,” Iris says matter-of-factly. She could be talking about the weather.

“Nobody will talk to me about it. They all want to pretend it’s not happening.” Mabel’s voice is so weak, Hazel can hardly make out what she’s saying.

“They’re afraid, is all,” Iris says. Hazel almost snorts.

“I suppose they are.” Mabel’s voice has fallen. Hazel moves forward a step or two. “They’re not the ones dying, though.” Mabel
and Iris chuckle a little. Iris pats Mabel’s hand and pulls a chair close to the bed.

“Do you believe in heaven?” Mabel asks.

Iris nods. “I was raised on it,” she says. “Mama died when I was young. Daddy not much later. Now, Pete’s in heaven, too. I wonder sometimes what it will be like.”

“My sister’s gone. I lost a baby once. Died with whooping cough.”

Mabel rests, quiet for a while. Hazel thinks maybe she has fallen asleep when she opens her eyes. “Thank you, Iris.”

Iris starts to stand up. Mabel needs her rest, but she has one more thing on her mind. “Tell the preacher not to come.”

Iris stands by Mabel’s bed. “Mabel, people love you and don’t know how else to show it. Why don’t you let them come? What can it hurt?”

Mabel smiles a little, then nods. As Iris moves away, Mabel shoots out a hand and grabs her arm. “Barney . . . What will become of Barney?”

Iris covers Mabel’s hand with her own. “Barney will manage, Mabel. But he’ll miss you.”

That night, Hazel moves restlessly around the living room of her home. She picks up a magazine and lays it down. Once she trudges to the kitchen, slices a piece of chocolate cake, and pours herself a glass of milk. She turns the
TV
on and off. Finally, she gets herself ready for bed.

In the bathroom she looks at her heavy face in the mirror. Glasses, brown hair. Her eyes dark and saggy underneath. Never was a looker, no sir.

She puts on her striped pajama shirt and drawstring bottoms. Sitting on the edge of the bed, she picks up the card from Mabel’s husband. Her feet flop up and down in her slippers, beat a pattern on the carpeted floor. She flings her glasses onto the bed and
digs at her eyes with her hand. Then, she rubs the back of her neck. She wishes she had soaked her feet, all day on them and her new shoes chafe.

Glasses in place, still restless, she pulls open the top drawer of her nightstand. She takes out a small stack of photographs and clippings. The top photo shows a mom and dad and a boy about twelve. He’s the kid died last year from a rattlesnake bite. Freak accident, out riding by himself, got down to open a fence. The horse returned to the ranch, but by the time they found the kid, he was too far gone. The next is a clipping, obituary for a woman who had a stroke. Another photo, this one of a husband, wife, and a newborn who lived only six days. Hazel works partway through the stack, recalling each room, each diagnosis, until she grows impatient and throws the whole lot on the bed. She reaches again farther back in the drawer and closes her hand around the beads of her mother’s rosary. She lifts it from the drawer and holds it across both palms. She feels no heat, even though she knows her mother fingered the black beads every day. She drapes the rosary over the lampshade, stuffs the clippings and photos back into the drawer, climbs into her bed. As she reaches to turn out the light, she turns the dangling crucifix to the back of the lampshade. The last thing she wants to see is a mangled body on a cross.

The next day, Reverend Fowler shows up with his little band. They stand around Mabel’s bed, lay hands on her, and ask God to heal her. Barney stands by her head, both hands cradling Mabel’s face. Mabel bucks up for their performance, smiles and thanks them.

Three days later, Mabel dies. Iris and Hazel are cleaning out her room, sanitizing it for the next patient.

“Cancer is a hard way to go,” Iris says.

Hazel does not respond.