The Illusionist (21 page)

“Yeah. He's sick, honey. Let's whisper. Let Dean sleep.”

Around three in the afternoon, Dean finally got up. He stumbled around the house in a stupor. His cheek was getting blacker, though the swelling around the eye had diminished.

I gave him dinner, and he sat, dazed-looking, at the table, picking at the chicken nuggets.

“Your name's not on the mailbox?” he asked.

“No. Just the box number. Like before.”

“Nobody'll know I'm here,” he said, as if reassuring himself. “They think we broke up.” As if that were a good thing.

I said nothing to this. He had humiliated me. Now my pain was convenient to his excuse.

*  *  *

The next morning, Monday, I rose, prepared for work, leaving him and Bobby both sleeping. On my way into Sparta, I stopped at my dad's, left the car motor running, and ran upstairs to his apartment to tell him I wouldn't be bringing Bobby today because of Dean's return. “Sure, honey,” he said. He didn't question me, ask me about Dean, where he had been. Anything I wanted was okay.

Now as I drove to work, the sun sparkled off the crusty snow and the road ahead of me and behind me was deserted, everyone away between Christmas and New Year.

At 7:50
A.M.
sharp, I arrived at the Home. I was always early. Mr. Ford was there sitting by the front door in his wheelchair, paper bib under his chin, waiting for me. I knew what he wanted. It was always the same.

I pushed through the door. “Hi, Mr. Ford. You have a good Christmas?”

Mr. Ford mumbled something into his chest, his cataracty eyes staring into nothing, his white hair shaved close to his head, his legs hanging atrophied and lifeless over the wheelchair. I gripped the back of the chair and pushed him away from the door. “It's cold here, Mr. Ford. You'll catch the death.” He mumbled again, and I leaned down to hear him. “What's that?”

“My wife,” Mr. Ford said. “I gotta speak to my wife.”

“Mr. Ford, sweetheart, your wife is dead. You know she's gone, sweetheart. I told you that.”

He looked puzzled. “Yeah yeah . . .”

Inside the Home, the sunlight hit the waxy linoleum floor. A salmony pink line was painted all along the cream walls so the people with Alzheimer's could follow it and find their way back to their rooms. There were posters of exotic places, Hawaiian waterfalls, the Eiffel Tower . . . places we would never go.

Chrissie Peck was walking toward me down the hall and I
smiled brightly at her. Chrissie was always slow in the morning, like she was in a daze and wanted you to feel sorry for her or something because she had to get up early to go to work. Sometimes she was late, or didn't even show up, and it annoyed the hell out of me, but Chrissie was one of my few good people otherwise. Had a real feeling for the clients, could listen to their stories over and over again. I didn't have the patience. It was hard to find people with compassion, hard to find people who wanted to work hard. You would have thought they would want to work, would want the money. But you can't get people to work these days.

I thought, don't tell Chrissie Dean is back. Don't say anything.

“Chrissie, can you take Mr. Ford to the day room? Mr. Ford, they're having aerobics this morning. Why don't you let Chrissie take you?” I said.

Mr. Ford's chin jutted forward, it was covered in a white stubble. “Chrissie, better give Mr. Ford a shave.”

“Mrs. Oakley threw her food tray down again,” Chrissie said. “She's mad. She's demanding to be ‘released.' ”

“Maybe we're going to have to put her in restraints,” I said.

I caught sight of B.J. with his mop. “B.J., there's a spill in twelve. Mrs. Oakley got mad and threw her tray down. Can you get that before someone slips on it?”

“No problem,” B.J. said. Someone told me B.J. was in radar in the army. Now this is the only job he could get around here. Sometimes I wondered if B.J. was a user. The way his blue eyes—though he was black—were all rheumy and floaty. One of those users who keeps it to himself, could still function. Well, as long as he does his job, doesn't steal . . .

Mr. Hanley was in his office on the phone. His ugly kids' school pictures lined up on his desk, orangey-color skin, deep shadows on their faces. Mr. Hanley was having a fight with someone. “They didn't deliver Friday,” he was saying into the phone. Linen delivery. The same contractor serviced all the hospitals and nursing homes in the area. “You said it would be Friday. . . .”

He looked up. “Terry.”

“Hi, Mr. Hanley.” He was only a couple of years older than me, yet he was my boss and he called me by my first name, while I called him by instinct Mr. Hanley.

“Terry, can you work Saturday night—four to twelve overtime? Time and a half. I was counting on Chrissie, but now she says she can't.”

“I gotta check it out with my dad and Bobby.” I wanted to be with Dean.

“I have to know by tomorrow. My wife's on me. She's planned this party.”

“I'll ask my dad. What happened with the linen?”

“They say the driver didn't come in Friday. Now they're trying to get someone to bring it over today.”

I wanted to be with
him
New Year's, alone with him.

*  *  *

All day long, working in the community of the Nightingale Home, not telling anyone. Without this job, I'd die. Why is it that for some people, things can only be right in one area of their lives, either in work or in love? But never both. God doesn't let you have both.
My
area was work; things were right for me in work, but not love.

Right from the start I had done well at the Home. I just worked harder than anyone else. Maybe I just knew somewhere that one day I'd have to take care of Bobby on my own. After only a few months our supervisor left and Mr. Hanley asked me if I could do the job, which would mean $3.40 an hour extra. “You're as well equipped as anyone,” he said. “You know the place.” And so I got the job, and over other people who'd been there longer.

All day long, my mind back there in the house, on Dean. One thing I can trust is Dean with Bobby. He loves Bobby like his own. Bobby would be in heaven today with Dean back. Bobby brings out the kid in Dean, lets Dean be the little boy he always wanted to be, gives Dean permission. For Bobby's Christmas present, I'd
found some beginners' Legos at the Salvation Army. No diagrams or instructions, but the kind with the big holes to make it easier for younger children. They would spend the day building something with it.

Now, at the Home, checking my charts. Mrs. Alderfer on sulfa for her bladder infection, three times a day at meals. . . . Mrs. Cross, probable eczema recurrence in her ear. Picking at it, bleeding. Need doctor's app't. . . . Mrs. O'Connor wandering again. Speak to Dr. Vakil. . . .

Four P.M. on the dot I leave. Outside I hurry across the parking lot to my car. The sky is already darkening. On the other side of the river, to the west, the sun is like a burning coin, and it hurts the eyes to look at it, leaves an afterimage. And the rumble of the cement plant fills the valley like familiar music.

I stop at Food Mart. No one here I know, only that woman from behind the counter at CVS pushing her cart. No one knows my secret. I glide up and down the brightly lit aisles, filling my cart. It's so cold in here I have to keep my gloves on. In my head, I organize the week's needs. Frozen pizza one night, hamburger the next, fish sticks, tartar sauce, cans of pork and beans for Dean and Bobby. I buy candles—pink and silvery aqua—for the evening, after Bobby has gone to bed, when we are going to make love. New dish towels. Nesting. Is it possible we've got something in our hormones that makes us, when we are in love, want to nest, to rearrange twigs and bits of things like a female bird does? Once the father of the baby bird is in place, once the family is complete, you are forever arranging twigs with your beak. . . . You want to bring in supplies, make everything warm and soft.

Now in the supermarket, there's a chill on my skin . . . cans of Mountain Dew, Skittles, all the things he likes . . .

At the checkout counter, while I wait for the clerk to punch in the prices, I pull the
Ledger-Republican
out of the rack. When I get to the police blotter, I see the story. “Police Question Two Sparta Men, Then Release Them in Connection With Rape of
West Taponac Woman.” “Name of victim not released. . . . Police say rape occurred in the parking lot of the Wooden Nickel at around midnight Christmas Eve. . . . Victim has a criminal record, check cashing, fraud, criminal impersonation. . . . Two Sparta men, James Vladeck and Brian Perez, have been questioned and released. . . . Investigation continuing.”

So, they're out. Free. Roaming around. Now they know that Dean went to the cops.

I glance around the huge room, people bent over the bins of produce, poking at the fruits and vegetables, squeezing them, turning cans of food around and around to inspect them. No one here I recognize—except that woman from CVS. I write out the check, push the shopping cart filled with my brown paper bags out through the automatic doors into the parking lot.

The parking lot is crowded with vehicles. I load up my car, start it up, then I have to wait in a line at the exit. Eventually, the tangle of vehicles breaks and I'm heading out toward West Taponac.

Driving away from Sparta, into the open countryside, my car is the only one on the road.

I approach West Taponac. As I reach Schermerhorn Road, as my car rounds the curve, I glance up at the hill, at my house. Behind it, the ridge of trees, the skeletal shapes of oak and chestnut.

And there is my house, the square shape visible against the lit sky. Don't see Dean's truck. But there's a yellow glow in the windows. He is waiting for me.

*  *  *

Inside, there was a scene of quiet, tense, domestic life. “Hi, guys!”

Dean and Bobby hardly looked up when I entered, they were building a giant Lego assembly, a community with houses and walls, and driving Bobby's trucks along the road. Dean really was a guy, the way he liked Lego and building things. A girl would never do this.

“You parked the truck behind the house?” I said.

“So it couldn't be seen from the road.”

“Your eye's going down,” I told him, though the skin on his cheek was an even more lurid green than before. Maybe it has to get blacker before it heals, I thought.

He stood up from the floor, came toward me, kissed me on the lips for the first time since his return. I remembered again the feeling of those big, soft lips, lips like cushions, the dry, chapped skin. His tongue prodded my lips and I kissed him back, my tongue poking through to find his, all the pores of my skin like flowers opening up to him. Bobby, sitting on the floor with the Lego, gazed up at us. “I got the paper,” I said.

He broke away from the kiss and snatched it from my hand. “They questioned Brian and Jimmy,” I told him.

He raked through the pages till he came to the police blotter, then read avidly. “I knew it!” he cried. “They let 'em go.” He paused, staring across the room at something, thinking. Then he sat down on the couch, the newspaper flat across his lap, still looking out into the room. “Now they know I went to the police. They said they'd kill me if I told anyone.”

“They're full of bullshit,” I said. “They won't do anything. Anyway, they don't know where you are. Nobody knows.”

But he was looking right through me.

“You'll be okay here,” I said. “They don't know where you are. They don't know about me.”

Bobby walked up to him on the couch, tugged at his arm. “Dean. Play with me. Play with me, Dean, play with me.” Little high-pitched voice. But Dean was still staring into space, didn't look at him, as of he was in some kind of trance.

“Honey,” I said to Bobby. “Dean played with you all day. He's talking to Mommy now. Leave Dean be.”

*  *  *

As soon as Bobby is asleep, I go to Dean in my bed. I lie down beside him, and almost immediately, his fresh, wet tongue is inside my mouth. Welcome home! Picking right up where we left off.

Yanking up my sweatshirt, he's at my nipples with his tongue.
Driving me nuts . . . can't take it . . . where to go from here. It is torment, and I think he's going to give me relief, but then he finds someplace new with his tongue. At last, pulling down my sweatpants, finding the place so easily, his lovely wet tongue between my legs, then pushing inside and out, then filling the space. Getting hot . . . hotter. . . . Bedsprings squeaking. I giggle. Can Bobby hear us? No lock on the door and in the middle of it all, I climb out of the bed, brace the back of the chair under the doorknob, and I return. He is healed, all better now.

We all knew what had happened. Even though the paper didn't name the rape victim. Everybody knew Brian was crazy jealous of Dean, and they'd all been seen together that night at the Wooden Nickel. The victim had a record, for criminal impersonation. The paper said Brian and Jimmy had been questioned in the case, and then released and were not suspects at this moment.

We had left him there alone in the parking lot with Brian and Jimmy. I'd wanted to take him home with me, but he wouldn't go. Was afraid of leaving his truck there. His truck was all he had in the world. I wanted to get out of there. The violence of what they were doing to him frightened me, and Melanie's anger. I was afraid she'd attack Brian physically and then get herself killed.

A few days after the item in the paper, Brian and Jimmy appeared again at the Wooden Nickel, Brian edgy and overfriendly suddenly, as if he knew he had almost been caught, eyes darting nervously about the room all the time, as if he was looking for someone, as if he was waiting for Dean to arrive. But he was defiant too, he knew he'd gotten away with it.