High Country- Pigeon 12 (17 page)

Over the entrance was a truncated porch roof with asphalt shingles. Anna stepped onto a mat that read "Welcome!" and knocked. The door had been painted recently. The faint odor of latex enamel still lingered. A bright brass eye, at odds with the age of the house and, despite its new coat, the door, poked out from the center. A peephole had been put in. Hence the paint job.

From within this newly cloistered world, Anna felt or heard the faintest drift of shushing, a living whisper of socks on hardwood, breath on still air. For a moment she could have sworn an eye applied itself to the other side of the peephole, weighed her and found her wanting. She knocked again, but this time even the might-have-beens were gone. She felt only emptiness and imagined the ghost of stocking feet and staring eye hiding behind the divan, waiting for her to leave.

Shades of Boo Radley.

Returning to the rental car, she wondered what had tickled below the threshold of her senses: Nerves strung too tightly? Sixth sense? Human beings thought in words. Pictures were involved but words had taken over much of the brain. There were times Anna believed the senses could divine information too delicate for the essentially crude and limited tool of language to express; information which animal brains had easily made sense of before humans learned to speak and so reduce all life to words. Now, but for a lucky or insane few, that subliminal input served only to raise the hairs on the on the back of the neck, leave hollow pits in stomachs and unnameable dread in minds.

Driving out of the mountains and into California's central valley, known for its agricultural output, not the beauty of its landscapes, was a joy to Anna. Decades had passed since she'd attended college in San Luis Obispo. Entranced with the drama of New York City, the cold magic of Isle Royale and the wild glory of the Four Corners area, she'd forgotten how deeply she loved California's rolling hills. In spring they were a heartbreaking green and looked as soft as velvet. By August they were gold. Winter turned them a faded yellow-gray. Promising hidden meadows, mystical live oaks and other wonders beyond the rounded crest of each and every hill, they rolled away. Lichen-painted rocks scattered over the winter grass-not with the forbidding size and crushing weight of the granite Sierra, but just enough to add interest and subtle color. Oak trees, limbs twisted and complex, dotted the hillsides; trees for climbing or picnicking beneath, kinder cousins of the black-boughed evergreens constantly whispering of the Donner party and other harsh snowbound gossip.

By herself in the car Anna laughed aloud. Till these thoughts assailed her, she'd had no idea how much the close valley limned with the bones of the mountains had oppressed her.

Merced was flat and low. Not a town to inspire poetry or songs but with a good solid middle-class feel that Anna appreciated after the isolated idiosyncratic world of YosemiteNational Park.

The hospital was clean, modern and well-lit. A crisp Hispanic woman wearing the classic nurse's cap perched on hair so sleek it would have made Eva Peron feel frumpy had Anna sign in, then asked for identification which she compared with the signature. "Sorry," she said, flashing a smile barred with braces and tiny rubber bands. "Security's been beefed up since 9/11. Why any self-respecting terrorist would want to blow up a hospital in Merced beats me. There's drugs and disease cultures, I guess. Anyway you're you." She directed Anna to the second floor. Room 209 was a double room but the bed near the door was unoccupied. Lying small and childlike in the glare of a window that took up most of the wall, Cricket sat propped up in the second bed reading Cosmopolitan. Half a dozen other magazines of similar intellectual content splashed colorfully over the baby-blue blanket.

"Hi," Anna said.

Cricket shrieked. The Cosmo flew into the air with a flutter and three magazines were sent slithering to the floor.

"Anna?" she said when she'd recovered.

Anna picked up the magazines and put them on the metal rolling table, then sat in an orange plastic armchair between Cricket and the window. "Sorry to startle you," she apologized. "How are you doing?"

"I'm going home tomorrow morning."

It wasn't much of an answer but Anna could read what she wanted to know in the girl's face. Cricket was pale. Dark smudges showed like bruises beneath her eyes, and she'd lost weight, noticeably so, though she'd been in the hospital only a couple of days. Her fingers fidgeted, folding and unfolding a corner of one of her magazines, and several times she glanced at the door as if expecting an evil headmaster to appear and cane them for talking during quiet hours.

She was scared out of her wits.

It crossed Anna's mind that she might be dying, that her collapse had nothing to do with whatever she and Nicky had been smoking, that she looked to the door, not for an apocryphal headmaster but for the Grim Reaper himself.

"Did the doctors find out why you collapsed?" she asked.

The question, as harmless and mundane as any asked from beside hospital beds over the ages, alarmed Cricket further.

"My medical records are secret! Nobody can look at them. Secret? Is that the right word?" she asked desperately.

"Sealed? Privileged?" Anna cast about for the language to calm her.

"Privileged. That's it. Nobody can look at them but me."

For a few heartbeats, Anna sat, her face composed in a mild and friendly mask, while she wondered at the reaction. Who worried whether their medical records were sealed? Pregnant unmarried girls? Girls who'd made themselves ill doing something illegal?

"Just making conversation," Anna said. "Nicky and I and the folks at the hotel have been worried about you."

Cricket relaxed a little. "I don't want any trouble," she said.

"Are you in trouble?"

An ache came into Cricket's eyes. Anna'd seen it before in people yearning to unburden themselves. For an instant she thought the girl would confide in her, but Cricket glanced gain at the door and the moment passed.

"Have you had lots of visitors?" Anna tried.

"No," she said quickly.

"Must've gotten pretty lonely."

"I'm okay." Cricket picked up the magazine she'd been mutilating and opened it across her knees. "Before I go home I've got to get my stuff from the dorm. Tomorrow, probably around noon. Will you tell Nicky? See if she can swap shifts or get the day off?"

"Sure," Anna said. "We'll miss you," she added because it was the polite thing to do.

"I'm going home," Cricket insisted as if Anna had threatened to drag her bodily back into the park to her old job.

Incapable of doing or saying anything that wouldn't terrify the girl, Anna just nodded and left.

Hospitals gave her the creeps: the smells, the canned voices over the public address system, the hard light, door after door open on misery after misery flashing past as she walked down the halls. Still, she didn't leave immediately but stopped in a waiting area on the second floor, opposite the elevators. Sitting in a square armchair with the ubiquitous orange upholstery, a shade seen nowhere but in institutions, Anna opened her mind to evils past, present and future to see if she could figure out what had frightened Cricket so badly the only thing she could focus on that didn't bring on an anxiety attack was going home-a place the newly "adult" Cricket Anna had roomed with had referred to with derision on many occasions.

The hospital itself, haunted by unanswered prayers and the clank of bedpans, would frighten anyone, but not to silence. Not a young woman like Cricket. Any normal fear would have her chattering like a magpie.

Cricket's fear was fluid, flowing easily from one horror to the next. Fear Anna would look at her medical records. Why? Anna wasn't family. Morality-based worries-pregnancy, venereal disease or AIDS-Cricket would probably have welcomed a chance to talk about with the cool-grown-up character Anna had created for this job.

The specter of illegality didn't work either. Anna already knew Cricket was using illegal drugs. Cricket knew she knew. No secrets there. Maybe. Or maybe there was something else about her illegal participation that needed to be kept quiet.

Anna shook her head. What was more likely was that whatever stopped Cricket's breath had left a scar on her mind as well. In the strange old days when LSD was heralded as a miracle drug, a drug that allowed one to see God and hadn't the unpleasant side effects of addiction or overdose, Anna had known a number of people who had returned from their trips with demon hitchhikers dwelling in the mind. Seeing God, it seemed, was a good deal more dangerous than the New Testament let on.

A hollow tone sounded. Elevator doors opened. Anna rose and walked into the box. Too long in a hospital was detrimental to one's health. Anna found herself suppressing a need to glance over her shoulder, as Cricket had, to see if she was being stalked.

This mild paranoia struck a chord. As if she were being stalked. One didn't stay vigilant, starting at footsteps and watching doorways, out of fear of secrets being exposed or death by a doctor's decree, but because one was afraid of some corporeal thing: a foot hitting the floor, a three-dimensional body casting a shadow.

In the short time since Cricket had fallen in the Ahwahnee dining room, someone had threatened her with something so dire the once independent and spirited young woman wanted only to run home and hide her head under the covers.

Access to hospital patients was limited. Barring the real possibility that someone had sneaked in up the fire stairs or service entrance, Cricket had either been visited through normal channels or called on the phone. Blessing the security measures she had sniffed at earlier, Anna stopped in Registration. The sleek-headed RN in braces had been replaced by a short, very fat woman in one of the bright-colored outfits styled after surgical scrubs that nurses had adopted when they'd finally won freedom from snug white uniforms and thick white hose. The new keeper of the desk was younger. Her brown hair was wadded up in a clip, ends waving free like a cockatiel's headdress.

Unobtrusively, Anna watched her. The nurse was efficient, quick. She kept an eye on everything. Anna wouldn't get a chance to study the sign-in sheets on the clipboard unnoticed on this woman's watch.

When dealing with bureaucracies, it was Anna's experience that showing interest in information immediately made the guardian of that information decide it was sacred, not to be defiled by unauthorized eyes. Insisting only convinced them one's motives were suspect. Honesty and rationality were not particularly efficacious in bureaucratic settings.

She waited till two others were in line at the desk, then walked up to the chest-high horseshoe of Formica. "Excuse me," she butted into a conversation in progress. "I just have a quick . . ." She elbowed the clipboard with the sign-in sheets onto the floor. Making much scrabble and fuss as she retrieved it, she pinched the clip and allowed the sheets to scatter. With a great show of repentance, she insisted she be allowed to clean up the mess she'd made. Taking her time, she picked up the sheets one by one.

Anna had hoped they'd go back over several days, but she was disappointed. Only today's visitors were included. She scanned the lists anyway. Had she been paying more attention when she'd first arrived, she'd have spared herself this charade. Seven lines above her signature was another slated to visit room 209. The handwriting was abysmal, a scribbled initial, a huge "C" and a trailing "f," the tail of which ran off the page. Scarcely an hour before Anna had arrived, minutes after the commencement of visiting hours, Cauliff had come calling.

Cricket lied when she said she'd had no visitors.

At last, something tangible. Delighted, Anna skipped the elevator, took the stairs two at a time, and returned to 209. Again the shriek but this time Cricket managed to hang on to her magazine. She'd moved on to Mademoiselle.

Once again in the plastic chair, Anna braced her forearms on her knees and looked intently into Cricket's face. This unheralded return had shaken an already crumbling foundation. Anna wouldn't have been surprised if the girl began to shiver from nose to tail like a scared Chihuahua.

"You need to tell me what's going on," Anna said. "You're scared to death; you've quit your job; you're running home. Talk to me."