More Than Enough (15 page)

I closed that book, realizing that sitting there waiting to be identified was not the best idea. So I moved on, walking through one and then another set of double doors and down a number of windowless hallways and through a few windowless rooms, wondering where everybody was, wondering where the rooms with windows began, where I might find a place to look at the world outside the blankness of Oak Groves. I wanted that place to fulfill at least the smallest part of what its name promised. I wanted there to be oaks at Oak Groves. I wanted it to have rows and rows of those trees—thickly leaved, sleepy giants that turned golden in the fall and exploded in the spring. I wanted there to be miles of green lawn and hedges and flowers where old people could wander and gather in times of good weather. And when the weather was no good—as it was that day—at least they could look out at the gray winter grounds and imagine it in summer. But I couldn't find one window in that place.

I walked down one corridor after another and through one more set of double doors and into an unlit room where I just stood in the dark. Oak Groves was so white, so glaringly white. The walls and floors and ceilings were white. Everything exposed, naked, with no shadows. My eyes felt scorched, burnt out. I was tired of seeing so damn much, and I understood why my mother hated her job. I maybe even began to understand why she would do just about anything to get out of the place. And so I stood there looking into the shapeless dark, adjusting to it as things—tables, counters, a chair, and then another chair—began gently emerging from all that soft, contourless nothing. I thought then that if you ever had to fall into nothing, if you had to die and experience nothing, a nothing of darkness would be much more bearable than a nothing of light. That would be my preference, anyway. I had a moment or two more with that thought before the doors flung open and the world exploded, suddenly bright. I squinted and put a hand above my eyes the way you'd do to keep the sun away, though it had no effect in the whiteness of Oak Groves. In front of me stretched over a table lay old Colonel Warner's body, covered in a green hospital blanket up to his naked shoulders. His forehead was huge and as white as an unused bar of soap, with the same waxy, clean texture. Thick black hair grew from his ears, which were large and wooden-looking with rubbery lobes. I knew it was Colonel Warner because he was dead and because on top of a box of clothes at the end of his table lay a dark blue military jacket, glittering with decorations. He had been a tall man and his feet stuck out of the blanket, one of them bare, bleached like a sun-dried bone, and the other covered in a black sock that stopped just below his white knee. “What are you looking at?” Nurse Brown asked me. Her face expressed disgust. “Did you do that?” she asked. “Did you put that sock there?”

“No,” I said.

She walked over to the colonel, removed the sock from his foot, and put it in the box. She blamed me. I could see that in her face. She thought that I had put that sock on the dead man's foot. How she could have thought that I didn't know, except that her belief in the corruption of children went far deeper than I could ever imagine. God, how I wished she hadn't removed that sock from old Colonel Warner's foot. The socked foot hadn't bothered me so much. But the naked one had, and I'd wanted her to find the other sock and put it on him. Then I wanted her to find his other things in that box—his boxer shorts, his white button-up shirt, his necktie, his dark blue military pants, his shoes, and finally his decorated jacket—and put them on him one by one until Colonel Warner was dressed as if for dinner or formal tea or even war, for anything that a military officer did.

“Stop that staring,” Nurse Brown said.

I couldn't take my eyes off him. I just had to look at him and keep on looking at him until I was sick. My face heated up and sweat beaded my forehead. I felt that deep, painful movement in my gut. It came over me too suddenly, too powerfully to control—a pinprick of heat that blossomed and gushed out. My stomach muscles clenched as hot liquid seeped into my pants. I had shat myself. I looked down, and Nurse Brown, who saw people do that sort of thing daily, knew right away what had happened. “Well,” she said, taking me by the hand and pulling me along, “it looks like you've made a mess.”

“I'm sorry,” I said. I could not believe the sound of my own voice—the smallness of it. Nurse Brown marched on, gripping my hand firmly in hers until she left me at the door of a large closet. “Don't move,” she said. She came out with a folded pair of sky blue Oak Groves pajamas and a roll of white plastic garbage bags. As we walked, I smelled myself—the simple, unmistakable smell of shit—and felt it trail down my legs and touch my socks. “I'm sorry,” I said again, and felt as though I were apologizing for a great deal more than messing myself, though I was not about to admit to terrorizing the old woman or stealing Colonel Warner's urine.

“We're not a day care center here,” she said, still marching me down the hallway.

“I know,” I said.

She must have heard something in my voice then because she changed her tune. “A mess,” she said, “is just a mess.”

Locked inside a large shower, I undressed and deposited my jeans, underwear, and socks in one of the white garbage bags, then handed the bag off to Nurse Brown, who stood outside the door. On the wall opposite the shower, a full-length mirror reflected me—naked, tall, and skinny with a film of gray liquid running down my legs. I hated my body at the age of fifteen. I hated the new patches of hair, the boniness of it, the awkward dangly limbs. I tried not to look, but I was no more capable of looking away from that strange sight than I had been of looking away from the colonel. As I breathed in the thick odors of shit, I thought of the singing bum and tried to hum, as he had, the melody to “Stormy Weather” but produced only cracked, splintered tones—noise and not music. I gave up on feeling better about anything that had happened that day and went limp beneath the hot drum of water from the showerhead.

When I stepped back into the hallway, I was dressed in the blue pajama bottoms worn by every old man in that place. Luckily, my red winter coat with the vial of Mr. Warner's urine zipped into the pocket and my T-shirt that said
TEAM PLAYER
on it distinguished me from the two old men who were just then dawdling by. “Here,” Nurse Brown said, handing me my dirty clothes, which she had double-bagged in the white garbage liners so that, I guessed, the stink wouldn't get out. Dressed in the uniform of Oak Groves and carrying my shitty clothes in a bag, I followed Nurse Brown.

*   *   *

She took me back into the front room where Jenny sat now looking down at her lap. “I caught your sister playing with Mrs. Smith's hair,” Nurse Brown said. “I'm afraid you two are just going to have to sit here until your mother is done. And I mean sit. I don't want you doing anything else, and I don't want you going anywhere. Understood?”

Jenny lifted her head and nodded at her. “Understood,” my sister said.

I knew that Jenny had not ratted on me, and I was thankful. All the same, I refused to play the part of a five-year-old. “Whatever,” I said, which was a favorite word of mine in those days.

“Sit down,” Nurse Brown commanded, pointing to the seat next to Jenny. I sat down and put the bag with my shitty clothes on the chair next to me. “And don't go anywhere.” As she said those words, I looked right at the part of her mouth with the bloodred mole and watched the mole twitch as her mouth moved. Then her mouth was gone, and once again Jenny and I were alone.

“Thank you for not saying anything,” I said, not looking at Jenny.

“What happened to you? Where are your clothes?”

“Nothing happened to me.”

“Your hair is wet,” she said. “You smell like soap.”

“I just washed my hands.”

Jenny poked at the garbage bag. “Are your clothes in there? Did you get sick or something?”

I moved the bag away from her. “I just washed my stupid hands.”

She was too tired to keep on bugging me about something I wasn't going to tell her. “I would have told,” she said. “I wanted to. But I didn't know how to say it. It was too terrible to say about you.”

“I'm sorry,” I said.

“I don't understand you. I don't understand why you did that to Mrs. Smith.”

“I said I was sorry.”

“You were really trying to hurt her.” I could hear from her voice that Jenny was still shaken. “I didn't know who you were. I didn't recognize you.”

“I wasn't thinking, I guess.” She didn't say anything for a while. “I was still me. I wasn't anybody else or anything.”

“You were such a bully.” That comment bothered me. It made me think of Danny Olsen and what he had done to me and how my sister seemed to think I had done the same to old Mrs. Smith. “You were worse than a bully.”

“I had to do something,” I said. “That was that man's mother.”

“She was an old woman,” Jenny said. She actually stood up and moved a seat away from me.

Seeing her move, seeing the empty seat open up between us, I became anxious about all the wrongs I'd committed that day. “Jenny,” I said. “I shouldn't have done it.” She looked away from me then, and someone down the hallway, in a place where we could no longer go now that we had been grounded to the reception area, screamed loudly, almost insanely. God, did I want to leave that place. “I just sort of lost it. I wish I hadn't acted like that. I wish I hadn't scared her. I just wasn't thinking, Jenny.”

Jenny turned a little toward me. “Are you thinking now?” she asked.

“Sure,” I said. “I'm thinking.”

She sat next to me again and put her head on my shoulder. “I'm scared,” she said.

“I know.”

“Is this really happening?”

“No,” I said. “I mean, I'm not going to let it happen. I'm going to do whatever I have to do to keep it from happening.”

“Maybe we shouldn't do anything,” Jenny said. She was tired and yawned and rubbed her nose against my shoulder. “Maybe we should just see what happens.”

Then she lifted her watch and said the time out loud, which she'd gotten in the habit of doing as a way of showing off her new Swatch. “It's half past five already.”

That's when I thought about our father at home. He'd been home all afternoon on what was supposed to be one of his days for studying. He was probably wondering where we were, since Mom usually arrived home by four-thirty. He was probably worried about us. He was probably looking around him at the empty house and starting to feel alone and left out and maybe irritated. “We should call Dad,” I said.

“Nurse Brown said we couldn't leave our seats,” Jenny said. When I got up anyway and walked behind the unmanned reception desk and picked up the telephone, Jenny grabbed on firmly to her chair handles and said, “I'm not getting up. I'm staying right here.”

“Since when have you been so determined to follow the rules?” I asked.

“Things are too crazy.”

The phone rang almost five times before he picked up. “Yep,” he said.

“Yep,” I said back to him, a little annoyed because he was supposed to say “Parker residence” or, at the very least, hello, which even Jenny was capable of doing.

“Yep,” he said.

“Yep,” I said.

“Is this a prank call?” He sounded annoyed.

“Hi, Dad.”

“Oh,” he said, “it's you.”

“I thought I'd call to let you know where we were.”

“Uh-huh.” I could hear the TV in the background, and I could tell that he was more interested in whatever he was watching than in talking to me.

“How are you?”

“I'm dandy,” he said. “I'm watching pregame stuff right now and eating a little popcorn. It's the Jazz versus the Bulls, and things are going to get started in about a half hour. You and me can watch it as soon as you get home.”

“It's
you and I
, Dad,” I said. I couldn't help myself. Sometimes I just wanted my father to speak correctly. Sometimes I just wanted him to be studying on his stupid study days and not to be watching basketball.

“What?”

“You and I can watch it as soon as you get home,”
I said. “That's how you say that. Not
you and me
.”

“You're acting uptight, kiddo,” he said. “I talk the way I talk.” He ate some popcorn. “God, did you know that Malone is shooting nearly seventy percent right now?” I didn't say anything. His carefree tone pissed me off. He'd been sitting on his ass for hours, I knew. “Hello. You there?”

“You flunked,” I said.

“What?”

“Mom showed me your report card. You got one D-minus and two F's.”

“Where the hell's your mother, Steven?” He wasn't chewing on popcorn, and I had the feeling that he wasn't watching TV anymore. He was mad.

“She said it cost us three thousand dollars, Dad. That was our money. It belonged to all of us.”

“Hey,” he said. “You knock that off. You knock it off right now. You put your mother on the line this minute.”

He was a lousy disciplinarian. He'd never been able to wield authority very convincingly. “Mom can't talk right now,” I said.

“What's going on?” he asked. “Why aren't you all home yet?”

I felt my forehead heat up and my face flush. I wasn't sure that I could tell him, even though I knew he needed to hear it. I wasn't sure I could even open my mouth.

“Steven,” he said. “Hello.”

I swallowed. “Somebody died,” I said.

“What?” he said.

“She can't talk to you because somebody—an old man at Oak Groves—died while she was working here today. She's doing something right now that has to do with the dead guy. She's doing paperwork or something. He fell on her and died while she was giving him a bath this morning.”