So Much Pretty (31 page)

“Please,” Gene said to the guard, “my wife and I are doctors, if we could just have a moment to see that she’s all right.”

Alice watched the guard look at them and raise his eyebrows; he released a short dismissive breath. Standing in their shabby
clothes in the middle of the night with their criminal daughter, their faces creased from wrinkled sheets, wearing their mud boots.

“No, you know, I’m serious now,” Gene said. “I am a medical doctor, and I’d like to stay until she’s seen tomorrow.”

“I understand that, sir,” the guard said. “This is not a patient visitation, though, this is still an incarcerated person in custody. There is medical staff here looking after her, and myself or another officer will be stationed outside this door from now until she goes to the behavioral unit or gets released back to County, okay?”

Claire touched the side of Alice’s neck. Alice wondered if her mother could tell how bad she was hurt. She looked at Claire’s face and hoped to God that she and Gene would leave.

“I’m sorry, Mom,” she said, or thought she said, and began coughing again.

“It’s okay, honey,” Claire said, but Alice could see the disappointment in her mother’s eyes. Claire was afraid of her and afraid of what she’d done to herself, what she might do. It was the opposite of what she wanted. “You got some bruise there. You could have broken your neck.”

Then she heard her father say, “I’d just like to talk to the doctor on call tonight.”

“Sir, you’re welcome to do that; however, I can’t have you in here any longer, okay?”

“My daughter is clearly injured and under mental duress. I see no reason why we can’t stay with her tonight.”

Alice watched the guard give Gene a look of such contempt that she felt the air in the room shift. As if hatred could cause the very space they were in to change, the molecules to rearrange. His face was fleshy and pale, his thin lips were raised at the sides. Alice watched. Were people always like this, showing everything that went on inside them? The guard shook his head slowly,
squinting at Gene’s audacity. “I’m not going to argue with you, sir, okay? I am here to protect your daughter as much as to prevent her from going somewhere. That’s my job, okay? You have a minute now to say your goodbyes.” Then he looked away from them and turned on the television, flipping impatiently through the channels while he waited to escort them out.

When Alice turned her gaze from the guard, she realized Gene was standing beside the bed. He leaned down and kissed her on the cheek. His eyes were so blue, and his hair was unkempt—she didn’t remember him ever looking like this. The lines on his forehead were deep; his hair, always the same color as hers, now had white and silver strands sticking up amid the blond. He felt the sides of her neck, kissed her again on the forehead. She saw that he was beginning to cry and reached up to touch his face, and he took her hand and held it.

Her mother and father were beautiful, she thought as they stood beside her. She was sorry for them, loved them so much. And she wanted them to leave soon, before she couldn’t keep her eyes open anymore. She needed to stay awake, but even as she thought it, she felt slow and heavy in the warm bed with the white sheets.

“She’s had an X ray,” she heard Claire say. “We’d know if there was going to be pulmonary edema by now. It doesn’t look bad. And this drip is certainly going to keep her in one place.”

Gene looked at the plastic bag hanging above Alice’s head. Her eyes followed his and she watched him wince, then he reached up quickly, almost involuntarily, and twisted something at the top of the clear tube that ended in her forearm.
He’s turned it off
, she thought. He looked back down at her and held her gaze, nodding as if to confirm that she hadn’t imagined it. She closed her eyes again.

“Listen, baby,” Gene told her, tapping her cheek a couple of times and putting his face close to hers. “Listen, listen. Al? Mom and I will see you tomorrow as soon as we can. If your cough
gets any worse or you feel confused or like you can’t remember things, or if you feel dizzy or jittery, you call the nurse, right?” He nodded at her, squeezed her hand.

“Is there a nurse?”

“Yeah, honey,” Claire said. “There’s a nurse or an aide who will come. You press the button they showed you. But you’re going to be fine, and you need to sleep.”

“Okay.”

The guard shut her parents out and then placed the remote to the television beside her without saying a word. The room was filled with a diffuse blue light. The ceiling looked far away, and she felt like she was looking down at it.

The guard sipped something from a Styrofoam cup, glanced up at the clock. He had not looked at her once, and she felt like she was a package in the room waiting to be claimed.
She
was something inside her body, and her body was being held there, but it was also holding the thing that she was. Whatever that was. She watched the guard as she began to doze. He was the same as her, a thing inside himself.

When the door shut behind him, she heard it click, and then there was the sound of something—a chair, maybe—being scraped along the floor outside. Tomorrow was May 1. She tried to read
The Wind in the Willows
in her head, remembering the sentences. Tested to see if her memory was sound.

Sometime after Gene and Claire had gone, she didn’t know how long, minutes or hours, she began to feel incredible pain in her neck and shoulder, the back of her head. A bad muscle pull, a bruise. She felt the injury, but she also felt awake. Whole again, not a thing inside a thing. Her thoughts turned to what to do with herself. She clearly hadn’t needed whatever was in the drip that badly, it had just made it impossible to think or move. Slowly, she tore off the clear tape that held the IV in her arm, then slid the needle out, pulled the hard blue plastic end free from the tubing and jammed it into the mattress.

Minutes, maybe an hour, went by, and she could feel the strain in her neck more intensely. She began to mentally check herself for symptoms, move her hands and feet. She turned her head to the side and felt a sharp pain move somehow from her shoulder to her sinus cavities. Maybe this was what Gene meant by jittery.

It would be very easy for someone in her position to have made a mistake or miscalculation, to have done things irrationally. So she played it back. She did not want to see human beings die. She did not want to leave her home and never come back. She had wanted to do what she was ethically obligated to do under the circumstances. Now she had to complete that obligation. Like she and Lorelei had talked about.

She sat up, swung her feet off the bed. The bathroom was just a few feet away. She walked to it slowly and did not feel dizzy. After peeing, she looked at herself in the mirror to assess the damage. Her neck, chin, and the side of her face were slightly bruised. Not good. Otherwise, she looked fine. She was wearing a blue and white hospital gown and underwear, but there were no shoes in sight, and she had no memory of dressing or undressing. The bathroom offered nothing. Liquid soap, paper towels, a garbage can. There was a drop ceiling and a fluorescent light. She moved slowly back into the dim light of her room, looking at every unhelpful object. The drip hung from a long metal pole with wheels. There was a box of rubber gloves, several locked drawers. Sheets and pillows, window blinds, windows with a small crank in the corner that she supposed could open just a crack. She looked outside and knew which side of the building she was on from all her days working there and following nurses around, thinking about what her parents must have been like when they were practicing, when they were saving lives instead of planting crops. She had wanted to save lives. But it didn’t always happen in a hospital.

Alice knew that she was on the fourth floor. She had not been
taken up to the behavioral unit, and it wasn’t the ICU, by the look of the room, unless it was a room she had never seen—reserved for people who needed supervision outside of the general population—and she thought that was possible. She scanned. A loose floor tile, plastic tubing, the needle that she’d pulled from her arm, accessible lightbulbs, something in the drip bag that killed pain and caused sleep.

She lay back in bed. She knew where the service entrances were, and she mapped them in her head, closed her eyes, and pictured a walk through the hospital from each entrance, then a walk from each floor to every janitorial closet and to the service exit facing the river. She imagined it several times, taking a different elevator and staircase each time, until she had pictured all of them, every closet, every exit, in various combinations.

Who was outside with the guard? If no one, then a pillow and a needle might be all a person needed. A pillow, a needle, a knowledge of anatomy, the powers of invisibility. The same would hold true for calling a nurse. And that would provide her with clothes to wear.

She pictured the drop ceiling in the bathroom: high enough that it could not be reached easily by standing on the toilet. The IV pole could push the tile up and slide it over. Then jump, hang, pull, and a person could be inside the ceiling. A place that was extremely limiting because she would only be able to imagine a map of where things were, not re-create one from memory. But still, a place. Her neck and shoulder hurt, and she focused on the ceiling and breathed slowly. This kind of thinking calmed her like nothing else. Before every meet, before every trapeze trick or project or test or report, for as long as she could remember, she would do this. She would lie in bed and watch several possible futures from beginning to end, before picking one to attempt.

There was always going back. There was no murder weapon.
In a few days she’d be back in court, and things would take time. There were bullets but no weapon. Without a gun or a motive, the case would be difficult to make. There was a canceled check and a missing gun, but those things did not prove anything. She had told Stacy Flynn when she thanked her. But she had done what Lorelei said, gone even further, and could now be considered insane, unreliable. The pain of jail was boredom and confinement and the threat of violence, but that was not real pain, it was something akin to rural life on a different order of magnitude. Something people got through, poor people, real criminals, and political prisoners. Strong and weak, smart and slow, they got through it somehow, but she didn’t think she could.

Outside the door, she heard the chair scrape the floor and a low rolling sound.

She heard a woman’s voice, indistinct words, no accent but the flat A’s and lilt of a question being asked.

“No, no, no,” the guard said. “You don’t got to worry about that.”

The woman’s voice again, and she could hear this time that she was whispering, afraid.

“She’s been out cold for the last three hours,” the guard said. “She won’t be up until we want her up. Take your time.”

Alice shut her eyes and breathed easily as the metal handle clicked. She did not hear the door shut. The hollow rolling sound passed her, and she heard the bathroom door swing and hit the rubber stop, which reverberated. She opened her eyes to see a square gray bin on wheels a few meters away. The door to her room hadn’t been shut, and she could see partway into the hall through the opening and also through the narrow crack at the hinges. She saw the guard’s legs and part of his back. Water was running in the bathroom, and she stood quickly and looked into the bin, thrust her hands in and found sheets, flimsy hospital gowns, their ties tangled and wound. It didn’t matter who came out of the bathroom or if the guard turned around, it didn’t matter
anymore if anyone saw her, what could they do to her now?

She saw his legs move. He uncrossed his ankles, drew them in, and stood. It didn’t matter. He could come in and it wouldn’t matter; she did not have time to get back in bed. She had not picked one of her strategies—she had jumped at any little chance, and now she would pay. She stood perfectly still, peering through the crack where the door was hinged to the wall, and saw the guard walk away from his chair, away from her room. Straight into the hall. Her skin broke out in goose bumps, and she could feel the hair standing up on her body.

She dug quickly through the pile of linen and spotted at last a dirty V-neck scrub shirt. She tore off her gown and put it on. And pants—two sizes too big, at least, and covered in something orange, dye or food. Inside the bathroom, the water was still running. She had no idea what the person inside looked like or wore, but that didn’t matter, either. She put the pants on and tied them, rolling the waist over a few times but not enough to expose her bare feet. Then she threw the clothing and sheets back into the bin, pulled a pair of rubber gloves out of the box near the bed, grabbed the pillow and the needle from the mattress, and pushed the bin toward the door. She stuck the needle into the top of the scrub pants. It didn’t matter now. Out the door into the bright empty hall. The nurses at the round station did not look up when she went past. She held the pillow in front of her and to the side to cover her bruised neck and jaw. Pushed the bin away from the bathrooms and vending area, rounded the corner to the elevator that was closest to the emergency stairs, and jabbed the button several times. As it arrived, she heard a woman scream, frantically calling to the nurses, calling for the guard, and she pushed the bin and pillow into the elevator and sprinted to the heavy gray door that opened to the emergency stairs, knowing someone must have heard the door shut and the bell of the elevator and that she had just minutes.

She climbed over the painted metal rail, raised her arms above
her head, and jumped straight down the narrow center of the stairwell. Falling fast, she caught the rail two flights down. She turned herself around so that her feet rested on the rail, then let go again. Falling another flight, catching herself on the opposite rail and then another until she heard a door open above her and voices, and she slipped back through the bars onto the concrete stairs so she would not be seen. Voices echoed above her, and she ran quickly and silently in her bare feet the last short flight that ended in the basement. She opened the door and walked slowly toward the clock-out station to the left of a service exit that led directly outside and was closest to the river. There were orderlies and cleaning staff in the glassed-in break room, and she walked past them because there was no other way, and she tried to look worn out and happy to be going home for the night. She was in physical pain and figured that couldn’t hurt her impersonation of a member of the cleaning staff, and they probably had no idea she was there or who she was, or if they did, it didn’t matter anymore. The risk benefit needed to be reconfigured every foot she got closer to the door. If someone tried to stop her now, she would use the needle to buy time. She didn’t think the hospital would issue a general alarm. It would terrify the patients. So, calmly, naturally, she pulled a random time card from the slot and pushed it beneath the stamp for the sake of appearance, opened the door, and was hit by a wave of cold night air. She shut the heavy metal door behind her and ran across the sidewalk and down the embankment into a ditch and caught her breath. There were no stars. But the sky was paler than she had expected, and she thought it must be close to four in the morning.