I Wish You Happy: A Novel Read online

  Silence grows between us. Before it can flourish into a jungle of doubt, I ask, “Do you remember what happened?”

  “I remember you. In the car. Glaring at me through the window like I was a mosquito you’d like to squash. And then I remember waking up in the street with your face looking down at me. I thought . . .”

  Her head moves restlessly on the pillow. “The crisis guy—he says I turned right in front of your car. That there was nothing you could have done. Other people said the same.”

  We sit with this, neither one of us able to supply a memory blazoned with the label What Really Happened. We’re stuck with accepting other people’s versions of an event so earth-shattering neither one of us will ever be the same.

  “They found a note,” I blurt out. “To your husband.”

  Kat’s forehead creases. “I don’t understand.”

  “With your belongings. At the bike hostel. They found a suicide note . . .”

  “I never wrote such a thing. How could they say . . .” She pulls on the bed rail with her free hand, tries to sit up, and falls back with a groan. Sweat beads her forehead. Her face has lost all color.

  “But there was a note,” I insist. “To Tom. From you.”

  She focuses on breathing, her hand pressing against her ribs, and I think she’s not going to answer. Finally, she says, “Not a suicide note. Just . . . I meant to leave that for him when I left. So he wouldn’t worry. I didn’t, I guess.”

  Relief floods through me. I review the note in my mind. There’s no mention of suicide, or death. It could easily be a good-bye note. Cole, Mason, they’re both jumping to conclusions.

  “It was an accident,” I tell her, finally. “That’s all.”

  “It’s a nightmare,” she whispers. “I want . . .” Her voice fades, and I think she’s drifted off again.

  “I know.” I wish I had magic hands, that I could trace my fingers over the damage to her face, her body, and undo what has been done.

  “Don’t let them,” she says, and now her hand fumbles for mine and grips it. “Don’t let them lock me up.”

  I swallow something in my throat. My pulse sounds like dark wings beating at my temples.

  “Please.”

  “All right. I won’t let them.” The words have a leaden finality to them, as if I’ve signed and sealed some sort of deal.

  “What did you do?” a voice demands from the doorway. It’s not a soft, sick-room voice at all, and it belongs to a woman in uniform. She’s as large as her voice, tall and broad beamed, solid rather than fat. With her there is no hesitation. She comes to the bedside and gestures for me to release Kat’s hand.

  “You should go,” the sitter says. “Let me fix this.”

  I wait for Kat to say something, but she just lies there, eyes closed. She releases my hand. A tear glimmers on her lashes, then glides down her temple and into her ear. I want to wipe it away, but I’ve been dismissed. When I get up, the sitter drops into the chair with a little grunt, immediately redoing the restraint.

  Out in the hallway, I blink in the fluorescent lights, dazzled and confused. The nurse is back at the desk, typing something into the computer. Her eyes drift up when I stand there, waiting. “Yes? Oh, it’s you. Rae, right?”

  “Are the restraints really necessary?”

  “We’ll reevaluate.”

  “Surely, with the sitter there . . .”

  “Last night we weren’t able to restrain her. Patients can be crazy strong when they get agitated. Was there anything else I can do for you?”

  Another dismissal.

  Not wanting to wait for the elevator, I make my escape down the stairs. In the lobby I run into Mason. I’d forgotten about him, that he might be waiting for an opportunity to speak in a low voice about how horrible it is, that a woman would want to take her own life. So young. So beautiful. So sad.

  Only now I can tell him that he was wrong. The note is wrong. Only, if this is true, why does the darkness continue to weigh me down?

  “I thought you’d be long gone” is what I say. I don’t want to stand around and be polite, and there’s nothing I want to hear from him. I head across the lobby, toward the door.

  Mason follows. “Business.”

  “Wasn’t your interview yesterday?”

  “I’m waiting to hear. They said I was overqualified.”

  “For what, exactly?” I immediately wish I’d bitten my curious tongue, but I can’t imagine what he’s planning to do in Colville with his Chicago impatience and his fancy suit and expensive shoes.

  “Selling real estate.”

  Maybe he’s kidding. I stop to take a long, hard look. Nope. Dead serious. I try to picture him showing a mobile home plunked down in the middle of forty acres of nothing to a guy in a dusty pickup truck, and fail.

  “It’s, um, sort of a specialized market around here,” I say, cautiously. “Not exactly what you’re used to.”

  “That’s why I’m here. What I want. A slower pace, a different life. Besides, my mother is here.”

  That makes more sense, then. He could be a dutiful son, maybe, although I give him about a week as a real estate agent in this town. We’ve reached the front doors and my freedom.

  “Well, good luck with that. Have a great day!”

  “I gave a statement.” He stands still, holding the door, but his words follow me. “To that guy. Cole. That’s another reason for the sitter.”

  My steps slow, my feet mired in the implications of what he’s saying. I could tell him what she said about the note, but I don’t stop, don’t look back.

  In my car, though, the memories thud against the inside of my skull, laundry spinning in a drier, around and around and around.

  Kat’s eyes burning into me.

  Her fragile-looking hands tied to the bed rails.

  Her words. Don’t let them lock me up.

  Her lips moving silently just before the ambulance showed up. I’ve told myself over and over that I couldn’t hear her. The siren was too loud. I’m not a lip-reader. But I understood her perfectly well. Please. Let me die.

  I lean my forehead against the steering wheel, letting the heat burn into my skin. It was the pain talking, I tell myself. Fear, maybe. People say these things all the time, even when they’re just sick with the flu. The note could easily be just what she said.

  But my promise feels heavy. If she’s lying to me, if I don’t say anything and she manages to kill herself even in ICU, it will be like I’ve killed her twice.

  Tearing a sheet of paper out of the coiled notebook I keep in the car, I write the date at the top, and then To Whom It May Concern. My fingers twitch with the desire to crumple it up, toss it in the backseat, but instead I keep the pen moving, writing out my statement for Cole. I include that Kat on her bike looked angry, not frightened or grief-stricken. I write what she told me about the note just now, and I write what she whispered before the ambulance came. I state my opinion that it’s all kinds of wrong to put her in restraints. I sign my name at the bottom, and after a brief hesitation, I print my full legal name along with the date. Elizabeth Leila Blackwell Chatworth, a.k.a. Rae.

  My plan is to drop it by Cole’s office and leave it with the receptionist. But when I start my car and see the clock I realize that I’m already going to be late for work. Again. No time for detours. I could fax it to his office. I could call and ask him to pick it up.

  After a silent war with my conscience I decide that karma has stepped in and saved me from my complicated loyalties. When I pull into a parking spot at Valley View, I fold the paper in half and stash it in the glove box.

  Chapter Seven

  I’m only five minutes late, but that’s enough to throw off the flow, mine and everybody’s. Corinne, oblivious to my difficulty tracking report, is all over the place, mixing stories about her grandbabies in with the medical condition of the residents and leaving me wondering whether Neil has really been spitting pureed peas across the dining room while Corinne tries to
bandage a blister on the baby’s heel, or whether this happened the other way around.

  As she’s leaving she turns back with a parting shot.

  “Oh, I almost forgot! How could I forget, when it’s so important? The Remember Oscar Event is moving down to the river. We were going to do it at Cole’s place, in his backyard, but I think there might be too many people, and besides, he says the terrain is too rough for Nancy’s wheelchair. It’s supposed to rain this week, so all fingers crossed there won’t be a ban on open fires. I’m making posters. Oh, don’t look like that, honey. The grief will pass. That’s what we’re all here for.” She trots back up the hall, purse swinging, bosom bouncing, and grabs me for a hug.

  For the next couple of hours I don’t have time to think about anything besides work. One of the CNAs calls in sick. All of the residents seem hell-bent on being difficult. At dinner, it turns out that it is Neil who was spitting peas, or, in this case, chocolate pudding. Usually dinner is when I catch up on paperwork and do some charting, but since we’re down a staff member I help out, taking it in turns to feed a couple of the residents who are too far gone with dementia to feed themselves.

  Neil behaves himself all through the main course of ground beef and gravy, the mashed potatoes, the soup. We’re late. Meds are due. I still have a couple of foot ulcers to bandage and skin checks to do. I’m careless and in a hurry. There’s a little more than a normal-size spoonful left of chocolate pudding. I pile it on, a heaping, gelatinous mound.

  “Open extra wide,” I tell Neil.

  He complies, his toothless mouth stretching into a wide oval. When I remove the spoon, the pudding leaves a brown smear on his upper lip. He freezes, cheeks bulged, lips pursed. Before I have the sense to duck, he puckers and spits. The whole wet, warm mess hits me full-on across the face. Even with my lips sealed against it, I catch a taste of chocolate.

  Neil bursts out laughing, a toothless cackle that rouses the other resident at the table, who has been nodding off over her plate. She takes one look and joins the laughter. Even Tia, who rushes over with a cloth to wipe my face, is laughing.

  I glare at her.

  She schools her face into a sober mask, but the laughter creeps up despite her best attempts. “Be thankful it’s not what it looks like.” She blots at my scrub top, which has also been liberally spattered. “Much better tasting than the alternative. Smells better, too.”

  Her laughter warms me like sunlight, seeps in through my pores, and teases the dark knot clenched in my belly. My own answering smile eases an ache in my cheekbones I hadn’t known was there. I breathe in a deep, chocolate-pudding-scented breath and relax back into the chair. My body feels loose, disjointed, and all I want to do now is close my eyes and drift on a warm wave of letting go.

  Which, of course, is impossible.

  “Party’s over,” I say, getting to my feet, noticing again how much my body aches. Images of Kat’s battered body swarm, unsummoned, into my brain, chasing away the warm lightness of laughter. “Let’s get the show back on the road.”

  When I pop into Nancy’s room, I hear male laughter before I get into visual range. She’d said something about her son visiting, and I walk into the room, wondering how far the apple falls from the tree. I have him in my head as an actor. Probably gorgeous, gay, and impeccably dressed. But the man sitting in her visitor’s chair is not some stranger. It’s Cole. He’s wearing jeans and a black T-shirt and looks more like he’s visiting a relative than doing an evaluation. His long legs are stretched out, comfortably, and he holds a paper coffee cup in one hand—the good stuff, from the Ritzes kiosk. My body goes into instant craving as the rich smell of it finds its way through my nostrils and all the way into my belly.

  Nancy has been entertaining him. She’s sitting up in her recliner, dressed in a sparkly black tank top with a rope of pearls around her neck. She’s done up to the nines, hair curled, makeup perfectly applied, and looks every inch a star, albeit an aging one.

  Her wicked old eyes narrow as she inspects me head to toe and back again. “What happened to you? Bring somebody Mexican food?” She actually has the nerve to sniff, loudly, like she’s a hunting dog catching the scent. “Doesn’t smell like shit,” she says.

  She, too, has a coffee cup in hand.

  “That better not have sugar in it,” I say, inserting a test strip into the glucose meter.

  “I’m old,” she says. “Better my blood sugar kills me than I kill myself.”

  “You didn’t tell me you were diabetic,” Cole says to her, and then turns to me. “Sorry. I should have asked.”

  “She’s of an age to make her own decisions.”

  When I reach for her hand, she tucks it down along her thigh and gives me a mutinous look. “Let me do it. You’ll hurt me.”

  I roll my eyes, used to her theatrics but self-conscious with Cole watching. Nancy’s more than well aware of my discomfort; I can tell by the way she tilts her head to the side, glancing up at me sideways.

  “Fine. Shoot yourself.”

  “How can you say that to a suicidal woman?”

  Setting her cup on the bedside table, she takes the lancet and deftly pricks her finger, producing a perfect drop of blood.

  “She’s no more suicidal than I am,” I tell Cole, touching the test strip to the blood drop. “She’s just bored. Two-eighty. How much sugar is in that coffee?”

  “Never you mind, dear. That’s my business. That’s what the insulin is for.”

  There’s no point preaching at her. I’ve learned that much.

  “My son is in town,” she tells Cole. “I’ll bring him to the Event. For the rat. I can come, can’t I, Rae? You got that set up?”

  “Ask Cole. It’s out of my hands.”

  There might be an edge to my voice, because Cole glances up, his eyes asking a question I don’t know how to answer. His intensity makes it difficult to focus, and I check the insulin dosing and what I’ve got in the syringe twice, and then once more for good measure.

  “Told you,” Nancy says. “An Event. Has a life of its own. You’ll have to leave now, my beautiful young man, because she’s going to stick that needle in my belly, and that’s a thing you don’t need to see.”

  “Yes, ma’am.” He unfolds himself from the chair, then totally surprises me by bending down to kiss her cheek. Mental health people of my acquaintance don’t act like that. Maybe a professional pat to the hand, not this gentle, half-mocking affectionate behavior. It sets me off guard, and the smile he turns on me doesn’t help.

  “I need to talk to you,” he says. “Will you have a minute?”

  “Maybe one. We’re having quite a night.”

  “I see that.” His gaze drifts down to my scrub top and back. He’s not checking out my breasts; he’s looking at the chocolate pudding stains.

  My cheeks heat, and I turn my back to open an alcohol swab so he can’t see my face. “Let me get this done, and then I’ll meet you outside. I’m due for a break.”

  This is a stretch of the truth. True, I am due for a break. We’re supposed to get three of them during a shift, in addition to a half hour for lunch. Most nights this is a joke, the truth being that there is always more work than can possibly be done. But I do need to talk to him, I tell myself. For Kat.

  “Don’t blow it,” Nancy says, just before I inject her.

  We both know she’s not talking about the shot, but I ignore her insinuations. “The Event, thanks to you, will be held down by the river. Do I need to arrange transportation?”

  She chuckles. “You mean, do you need to pick me up? So kind of you to offer, dear, but my son will bring me. Hey, I just thought of something. We could call this the Oscar. Right? Maybe I’ll wear a dress.”

  “It will be cold. On the beach. By the river. At night. Wear sweatpants.”

  She gasps in true horror. “Be seen in public in sweats? My darling girl. Where do you get these ideas? Now go, your young man is waiting for you.”

  My young man is indeed w
aiting for me, swatting at a cloud of mosquitoes that has seen dinner and will not be deterred. They’re more interested in him than me, so I don’t offer the reprieve of moving back inside.

  I fetch the statement from my car, first things first, feeling like Judas. I half expect him to hand me thirty pieces of silver in exchange for the folded paper, but he only folds it one more time and tucks it into his back pocket without even taking a look.

  “You can take Nancy off the watch list,” he says, smashing a mosquito on his forearm. It leaves a smear of blood, and he picks it up between thumb and forefinger and wipes it on his jeans.

  “So you are working, then?”

  He flashes me a disarming smile. “Hey, she was much more open to conversation than when I came in last time for a formal evaluation. No way will she be killing herself—at least not until after Saturday night. She will not miss the Oscar Event for love nor money.”

  “Seems a little unfair.”

  “All fair and aboveboard. I read her the riot act last time. She’s a sharp old bird—she understands exactly what I’m doing here, no doubt about that.”

  “You’re not like any counselor I’ve ever met.”

  “Thank you?” He crooks his right eyebrow upward in a question mark.

  I wave my hand in his direction, lacking the words to describe the way he feels human. Immediate. Real. “You’re so comfortable with her. Laid-back. More like you’re a favorite grandson come to visit than a crisis worker here for an evaluation.”

  “I’ve always been a fan of Carl Rogers. I guess it shows.”

  “I thought his name was Fred.”

  His laughter is clean and warm, with no undertone of meanness or ridicule at my mistake. “Not that Mr. Rogers, although they preached pretty much the same doctrine. Carl Rogers the psychologist, the person-centered psychology dude.”

  Will wonders never cease. I consider myself pretty well informed when it comes to counseling. Cognitive behavioral. Mindfulness. EMDR. I know about Freud and Jung and the behaviorists. I don’t know this Carl Rogers guy.