The Silver Ring (3 page)

8

Officer Titus stood on the sidewalk just outside our brownstone.

“Hello there, David,” he said. “How are you?”

I navigated my bike down the steps, my helmet hanging off the handlebars and swinging back and forth. When I reached the bottom I stood there beside my bike, staring at the man who wasn’t wearing his uniform this morning but instead had on jeans and sneakers and a faded tee-shirt.

“What are you doing here?”

“I wanted to apologize for last night.”

“You mean you aren’t always a jerk to seventeen-year-old victims involved in an armed robbery?”

“Technically,” Officer Titus said, “as nothing was stolen, it doesn’t officially count as robbery.”

He smiled, meaning it a joke, but I just stared back at him.

“Anyway, David, I just wanted to say sorry. I’ve been having some personal problems recently and brought it with me on the job, which I know I shouldn’t do, and—”

“If you’re trying to suck up to my dad, you’re talking to the wrong person,” I said, putting on my helmet and snapping the chinstrap together. I realized then I’d left my cell phone inside but didn’t want to risk going back in.

“Are you going for a ride?”

“No, I thought I’d just stand here with my bike and watch traffic go up and down the street.”

He made a face, looked down at his feet, and for the first time I felt sorry for him. I didn’t know why but I was being more of a smartass than usual. Maybe it had to do with his lack of professionalism last night, or maybe I was just cranky because I’d hardly slept.

“Look,” I said, swinging one leg over to straddle the bike, “I appreciate your stopping by like this and apologizing. No hard feelings, okay?”

He looked up, stared back at me, nodded slowly.

“See you around,” I said, because I couldn’t think of anything else to say, and I placed my foot on the pedal and pushed down and moved only an inch before Officer Titus spoke.

“By the way, David, that’s a nice ring you have there.” His voice was suddenly calm, measured, cold. “Where’d you get it?”

9

My grandmother’s nursing home was a large stone building located in the middle of downtown. In a way it was like the heart of the city, a dying heart, an irony that didn’t amuse many of its nearby residents.

I stood across the street next to the pole I’d just chained my bike and helmet to, staring at the glass entrance doors.

Through those doors were countless sick and dying people.

Through those doors were my grandmother and the Alzheimer’s that was slowly killing her.

Last night I’d brought a woman back from the dead.

This morning I’d wanted to heal my mother but couldn’t and now here I was.

Officer Titus’s appearance had thrown me. His apology, and then his innocuous question. It was one thing for my father to notice the ring and ask about it but a completely different thing for a stranger.

Who knows, maybe the ring had been reported stolen and Officer Titus remembered seeing it on my hand last night. Maybe he was a much better cop than I took him for.

After he’d asked his question I’d looked down at the ring as if I didn’t even remember it was there and shrugged and said it had been a present from my girlfriend, a promise ring to stay true to each other until we got married.

Officer Titus didn’t need to know that my girlfriend and I broke up three months ago.

All he needed to know was that it was my ring, mine, and nobody else’s.

I waited for traffic, then started out into the street, the entrance to the realm of the sick and dying growing closer with each step.

10

A sign in the lobby announced the nursing home’s visiting hours:

Monday - Friday 9:00 a.m. to 4:00 p.m.

Saturday - Sunday 11:00 a.m. to 6:00 p.m.

Today was Saturday and it was barely nine o’clock. I knew the nursing home staff was strict regarding its visiting hours. Actually, in the two years my grandmother had been in this place, I had come to believe the staff was strict regarding just about everything.

The worst was a woman with the unfortunate name of Doris Hackman, who made Nurse Ratched look like Florence Nightingale. As luck had it, Nurse Hackman oversaw my grandmother’s floor.

I went straight for the main desk and the man who was sitting behind it, reading this morning’s paper. I was faintly aware of the sudden pinprick on my finger, and then I was standing in front of the desk waiting for the man to glance up and give me a bored look and tell me to come back in two hours.

He quietly turned the page.

I looked around, not sure what to make of this. I considered clearing my throat but instead noticed the bell on the counter and rang that instead.

The man jerked, looked up suddenly, stared at me with wide eyes.

Only, I realized an instant later, he was staring
through
me, because there was something in his eyes, something in the way they were focused that gave away the fact he wasn’t seeing me at all.

I looked around again, and this time noticed the mirror hanging on the wall off to my left.

I could see the counter and the man and the pot of flowers and the events calendar. But that was it.

The man frowned, shook his head, and looked back down at his paper.

I stepped back, glanced down at the silver ring on my finger, the ring that was now glowing its strange glow.

Okay, so not only could I bring a woman back from the dead, but I could turn invisible.

I was fine with that.

Just as long as it worked for what else I needed it to do.

I hurried toward the elevators, pressed the up button, and waited until the doors slid open and Nurse Hackman walked out. She was a large woman, the kind for which they invented the word bulbous, and she had an ugly face, rounded shoulders, frizzy hair.

I didn’t have time to step out of the way and she walked right through me, pausing only momentarily, glancing back with a frown before continuing on her way.

The doors started to slide shut and I jumped inside. I pressed the button for the third floor and waited until the doors opened again and I stepped out onto my grandmother’s floor. All the florescent ceiling lights were on—every single one—yet the floor still managed to exude a dreary and desolate feeling.

I walked past a nurse helping an elderly man climb into his wheelchair. It made me think briefly of my mother and how I’d placed my hands on her legs but hadn’t changed a thing.

As I walked I could smell the people around me, could smell the promise of death, and I wanted to stop at every room, touch every sick man and woman, and rid them of their diseases, reverse their biological clocks so they would begin to grow young.

And maybe I would do that, I told myself as I reached my grandmother’s room. Maybe I would.

The silver ring was still glowing, keeping me invisible. I placed my palm on the handle, pushed it down, and slipped inside.

11

The moment my grandmother’s door snapped shut again the ring stopped glowing. I glanced up at the mirror in her bathroom and I could see myself again.

I barely had time to relish the thought and experience of my invisibility before a groan sounded out in the dim room and I looked over at the woman in the bed.

She stirred, her small and frail head moving back and forth on the pillow. From where I stood she looked like a ghost, an emaciated and shriveled corpse.

“Grandma,” I said.

She groaned again, opened her eyes, looked at me.

“John?” she whispered in a long, drawn out voice.

I went to her bed and pulled up a chair next to it and sat down.

“No, Grandma, it’s David. I’m your grandson.”

“John … you look so … different.”

“Grandma,” I said, and something cracked in my voice. It was the same thing that had been with me in the kitchen when I tried to heal my mom, the thing that understood I had failed then and that I would fail now.

“John,” my grandmother said again in that dreamy way of hers, pushing down her bedcovers so she could reach out a hand to me.

I just stared at it—the wrinkled flesh, the brown nails—and I didn’t move. I couldn’t move. All I could do was sit there and smell the malodorous mixture of scents wafting from her dying body.

“John”—still holding her hand out to me—“what have you … been doing lately?”

“I’ve started another affair.”

“Oh,” she said, and lost the strength to keep her hand balanced in the air. “Well, that’s nice.”

I tried remembering a time when she hadn’t been like this. When she had been completely lucid and happy and would take me to the park and bring day-old bread so we could feed the ducks.

“John,” she said again, and that thing inside of me keeping me frozen snapped.

I stood, leaned forward, and placed my hand—the hand with the silver ring—on her forehead.

I closed my eyes, picturing the ring in my mind, willing it to glow.

“John?” she asked now, and I shushed her, told her to be quiet, and with my eyes closed I just stood there with my hand against her forehead, praying that the ring would suck the Alzheimer’s out of her body.

I stood like that for thirty seconds, a minute, five minutes, however long it took before the door opened and an angry voice said, “What in God’s name is going on here?”

12

Doris Hackman stood in the doorway, one hand on the handle, the other quickly reaching out and flicking on the light switch. Our eyes met for just an instant and then she stepped back, shouted, “Celia, call security, now!” and before I knew it she was running at me.

She was much faster than she looked. In the matter of only seconds she had made it across the room, her teeth bared, her hands already reaching for me. It didn’t cross my mind until that instant what it had looked like from her point of view: me standing over my grandmother, my hand on her forehead, but with my back to the doorway, it could easily have appeared as if I was trying to suffocate her.

“No, listen, look,” I said, already stepping back.

Doris grabbed me, pulled me away from the bed, and right then I felt that familiar pinprick and saw everything about this woman’s life, just like I had with Dorothy, and I immediately said, “King’s death wasn’t your fault.”

The woman paused, her hands still squeezing me, her eyes now going wide.

Staring back into her ugly face, I said, “It was your mother who forgot to chain him up that day. Not you.”

Frantic footsteps headed toward us up the corridor.

“That’s how he made it out into the road. That’s how he got hit by that truck. It wasn’t your fault like your mom later told you. It was hers.”

Two orderlies appeared in the doorway at the same moment Doris loosened her grip on my arm. That physical connection was lost but as I stared back into her ugly face, into her eyes, I saw something else that hadn’t happened yet but which she was planning.

“Want us to call the cops?” one of the orderlies asked.

“Don’t you do it,” I said to her. “He may be sick, he may have no family, but you don’t have the right to let him die.”

Her eyes widened again, her normally pale face suffused with blood.

“Nurse Hackman!” the other orderly said. They had both entered the room, were slowly approaching us. “Do you want us to call the police or not?”

She was staring back at me, shaking her head almost imperceptibly, whispering, “How can you … how could you possibly …”

“I know you want to help,” I said. “But it’s wrong, and you know it.”

“John?” My grandmother’s long, drawn out voice caused me to blink, to shake the possible images out of my mind: Doris Hackman standing over a dying man on this floor, feeling pity for him, considering the idea of accelerating his death. “What’s … happening?”

“Nurse Hackman,” the same orderly said, reaching out and touching her arm.

Just like me she blinked, shook her head as if awaking from a dream, and then looked at the two orderlies. “No, don’t bother with the police. Just escort him out of the building and make sure he never comes back.”