Cat Sitter On A Hot Tin Roof

16

When I got home, an orange sun was hanging above the edge of the glittering sea, its heart visibly beating as it gathered courage to drop into that vast unknown. Michael and Paco were standing on their deck raptly watching, and when I joined them they barely acknowledged my presence. We all stood in fixed fascination as the giant orb suddenly let go and slid into those waiting watery arms, turning the sea bronze and sending up piercing golden rays that gilded the wings of celebratory gulls.

Michael put out a hand and squeezed the back of my neck. “Supper’s almost ready.”

I was so near starving that I felt like my navel had sucked in and stuck to my backbone.

I said, “I’m past ready,” and thundered up the stairs to shower and pull on baggy pants and a loose T.

Barefoot, I hustled down the stairs and into the kitchen, where the big butcher-block island was set for three. Michael was at the stove. Paco was beside the island tossing a green salad. Ella Fitzgerald was on her bar stool. They all looked up when I came in and waved something—spatula, salad spoon, tail.

I was sure Michael had told Paco about Laura’s murder, but by unspoken agreement nobody mentioned it. While Michael dished up whatever we were eating and Paco put salad into three salad bowls, I poured three glasses of Shiraz from the open bottle sitting on the butcher block. The fact that three wineglasses were out instead of two meant Paco wasn’t on duty that night. I didn’t comment, I just noted it and felt a bit more relaxed. Those of us who love people whose jobs put them in mortal danger live in a constant state of red alert, even when we aren’t aware of it. Having already lost a firefighter father and a deputy husband, I take danger seriously. It isn’t just an idea, it’s a lurking shadow always ready to destroy your happiness.

Michael set down three plates of yummy-smelling something, opened the oven and mitted a hot loaf of bread onto a dish towel, flopped the sides of the towel over it, and tossed it on the table. We all took seats. Ella Fitzgerald’s whiskers twitched, but otherwise she made a good show of not being interested.

I looked at my plate. “Oooh.”

Lightly sautéed sea scallops lay over a heap of white beans. The white beans were atop a mound of steamed fresh spinach leaves. The whole thing was topped with a scattering of chopped red tomatoes. It was a red, white, and green dish, sort of an Italian flag of food.

Michael nodded modestly. “New idea. Try it.”

I already knew before I took a bite that I’d love it. Anything Michael makes is delicious, and this was downright soul-stirring. The white beans were flavored with garlic and something else that raised them above ordinary white beans, the scallops were delicately sweet and tender, and the spinach and tomatoes made everything else sit up and take notice. I tried not to make a pig of myself, but I had two helpings, plus two hunks of hot bread with butter.

My idea of heaven is a place where people who love one another gather for good food and good conversation, so I was in heaven. It’s good to be able to recognize those heavenly moments, good to be inwardly grateful to be so lucky.

We didn’t speak about Laura. Instead, we talked about how much better traffic was now that most of the snowbirds had gone home. Paco told us about a procession of bikini-clad young women on spring break following a line of slow-crossing Mottled Ducks that had stopped traffic on Ocean Avenue that morning, and how nobody in the line of cars had objected to the wait—some because they liked the bikinis and some because they liked the ducks. I said lots of bright cheery things too, the way women do to avoid topics they don’t want to talk about. And Michael and Paco nodded and smiled, the way men do when they really aren’t listening to a word you say, but they love you and don’t want you to guess they’re thinking about carburetors or football scores or whatever it is that men think about.

After Todd and Christy died, especially in that terrible first year, the only person I told my feelings to was a shrink I went to for a while. I never told Michael and Paco that I wanted to die as well. I never let them hear me rail about the half-blind old man who had run into my husband and child in the parking lot. I never told them how I despised the state for allowing people to renew their driver’s license without a visual exam, how furious I was at God for allowing my husband and baby to be taken from me. Michael and Paco had been almost as devastated as I was. Dumping all my emotions on them would have made them feel even worse.

The problem with only telling the good happy stuff is that all the bad, scary, sad stuff that doesn’t get told ferments and grows like underground mold, and you never know when it may reach its nasty fingers up and grab you by the throat.

After dinner I helped them clean the kitchen and then told them good night. No matter how shocked I was over Laura’s murder, I still had to post my pet visits for the day. I finished entering all the information a little before nine o’clock and was halfway through undressing for bed when the phone rang. I let the machine answer.

A crisp woman’s voice said, “Ms. Hemingway, this is Ruth Avery at the Bayfront Village Nursing Unit. Cora Mathers asked me to call and let you know she’s a patient here.”

I did a one-legged hop for the phone, but she had hung up. In a breathless rush, I pulled on jeans and a less saggy T-shirt and charged downstairs.

Cora Mathers is the grandmother of a former client who got herself murdered while I was taking care of her cat, and she’s become very dear to me. She lives in a posh apartment her granddaughter bought her at Bayfront Village, one of Sarasota’s best retirement communities. The thought that she was in Bayfront’s nursing unit pushed my heart into my throat.

Outside the nursing unit at Bayfront, I careened into the parking lot and practically jumped out of the Bronco before it came to a stop. A smattering of cars in the parking lot said visiting hours weren’t over yet, but I knew I didn’t have much time. A pleasant-faced woman at the reception desk seemed to brace herself as she watched me barrel into the lobby.

I said, “I’m here to see Cora Mathers. And don’t tell me I can’t see her, because I’ll raise such a stink you can’t believe.”

The woman turned to peck keys on a computer keyboard and peer at a screen.

Mildly, she said, “She’s in Room Two-oh-four.”

I gave her a curt nod, probably the way Genghis Khan acknowledged people who stepped out of his way when he was trampling over the countryside, and took the stairs instead of the elevator. I didn’t have time to wait for an elevator.

I didn’t have to look for Room 204. It was directly across the hall from the stairwell, and the door was open. An old sitcom from the seventies was blaring from a small TV on a movable metal contraption at the foot of the first hospital bed, where a woman with drug-glazed eyes was lying flat on her back looking at the screen.

Hurrying around a curtain separating her bed from the next one, I found Cora sitting in an easy chair. She had one foot propped on a stool and was looking out the window at pale spots of sailboats on the darkened bay. Soaking wet, Cora might weigh eighty pounds, and she’s roughly the height of an average sixth-grade child. Except for an exasperated look on her face, she looked normal—which is to say she looked frail and old, but healthy.

When my grandmother was Cora’s age—closer to ninety than eighty—she went beach walking every day, read everything published, and seriously considered taking up wind surfing. Cora, on the other hand, is the kind of woman who peaks at fifteen, is matronly at forty, and old at sixty. Age doesn’t have anything to do with how many times the earth has revolved around the sun since one’s birth, it’s about health and being protected. If circumstances had been different, Cora might have ended up as robust as my grandmother, but she started out living hand-to-mouth and scared. Now she’s living high on the hog and lonely. In either case, she has faced reality without losing her faith in goodness, which I consider a major life accomplishment.

When she saw me, she threw both arms out wide and grinned. “Well, hallelujah and pass the biscuits! I’ve been waiting for you all this damn day.”

I leaned to hug her slight shoulders. “I didn’t know you were here. What happened?”

“Oh, it’s the silliest thing. I slipped in the bathroom last night and twisted my ankle a little bit, and nothing would do them but I had to come over here and spend the night. Now they won’t let me go home until the swelling goes down. It’s plain stupid, is what it is, so I told them to call you.”

She was trying for anger, but I could see fear in her eyes. When a resident of a retirement community is no longer able to live alone, they are routinely moved to the facility’s nursing wing, and their apartment is sold. Every old person fears they’ll be unfairly railroaded into a nursing unit while they’re still capable of living alone.

I knelt beside the stool to look at her ankle. It was a little puffy but not bruised. I poked it with a tentative finger, and Cora flinched.

I said, “They feed you okay in here?”

She brightened. “I had bacon and eggs for breakfast.”

“No kidding. Real bacon or pulverized turkey skin?”

“Real pork. And real biscuits too. Lunch wasn’t bad either, and for dinner I had chicken and dumplings.”

Personally, I never have understood the appeal of boiled chicken with pieces of dough dropped on it, but I made enthusiastic noises before I bent over her bedside table to make sure her water carafe was filled.

I said, “I guess they can afford to go all out when they know you’ll just be here a day or two.”

She looked thoughtful. “That’s true. I don’t think they feed the really sick people that good.” She pointed toward the curtain and lowered her voice. “She’s sick as a dog, and all she got for breakfast was cream of wheat.”

I said, “As long as they’re feeding you good, it might not be such a bad idea to let them wait on you until your ankle stops hurting. That racket from the TV bother you?”

She rolled her eyes. “Plays that thing all day long. I think she’s a little, you know.” She twirled her forefinger at her temple with gossipy pleasure. “Poor thing, nobody comes to see her.”

More than likely, nobody had come to see Cora either, but she obviously considered herself more popular than her roommate because I was there. When you get down to it, it’s not the fact of things that are important, but how we interpret them. She had more color in her cheeks now that she had perked up, and fear had left her eyes. My own fears were back in the box where they belonged too. Cora was okay, and Bayfront Village had done the right thing to put her in the nursing unit where they could take care of her.

Behind the curtain, the TV noise stopped and an oily male voice said, “And how are we today?”

I stood up straight with my ears tingling. Where had I heard that voice?

A shaky old woman’s voice answered. “I’d of stayed in Mississippi if it hadn’t of been for the hurricane.”

With icy contempt, the man said, “Do you have any idea how weary I am of hearing you say that?”

Cora and I stiffened and gave each other raised eyebrows.

With more force to her voice, the woman said, “I’d of stayed in Mississippi if it hadn’t of been for the hurricane.”

The man said, “God, what a waste of time and money! All you decompensating old Binswangers should have been smothered at your first cerebral infarcts.”

The back of my neck prickled, and I spun to glare at the white curtain. I didn’t know what a Binswanger was, but I knew the man had just said something cruel.

A moment of silence followed, and then his oily voice again. “You and the rest of the world will be better off when you’re gone.”

I couldn’t stand it anymore.

I said, “What the hell?” and stepped around the curtain to confront the woman’s nasty visitor. All I saw was a man’s broad back hurrying out the door. The bastard hadn’t even had the grace to say goodbye. I took a moment to make sure the woman was okay, then hurried to the door and looked down the corridor. An elderly man in a wheelchair was pushing himself down the hall, but he didn’t look as if he had enough air in him to speak above a whisper.

A nurse came out of the room next door and saw me scanning the hall. “You need something?”

I said, “A man was just in here. Did you see him?”

“A man?”

“He was talking to Cora Mathers’s roommate. I don’t know her name.”

“Grayberg.” I noticed she didn’t give a first name. Maybe when you stop normally responding to other people, they stop thinking of you as a two-named person.

“He said some cruel things to her.”

The nurse studied me. “Are you related to Cora?”

“He told Mrs. Grayberg she should have been smothered when she had her first stroke.” That wasn’t exactly what he’d said, but it was what he’d meant.

She said, “I didn’t see you get off the elevator. The nurse’s station is right by the elevator, and I didn’t see you get off.”

“I took the stairs. Oh, that’s probably where he went. He went down the stairs.”

“What did he look like?”

“I just heard his voice and saw his back as he left. He was big.”

“Ms. Grayberg watches TV a lot. Maybe it was a man on TV.”

“No, it was a real man.”

She turned away and started down the hall. Over her shoulder, she said, “I’ll watch for strange men.”

I could tell she didn’t believe me. When I thought about it, I didn’t blame her.

I went back to Cora’s room and spoke to Mrs. Grayberg. “Was that your son who was just here?”

Her face twisted in a rictus of despair. “I’d of stayed in Mississippi if it hadn’t of been for the hurricane.”

I couldn’t think of any appropriate answer, so I turned up the sound on her TV and went back to Cora’s side of the curtain.

I whispered, “Was that Mrs. Grayberg’s son?”

“Is that her name? We haven’t actually met, what with her being so loony and all. I wouldn’t worry about her boy. I don’t imagine she even heard him.”

From the despair I’d seen on the woman’s face, I thought she’d heard plenty, but I didn’t say so. It was probably better for Cora to be complacent about him than to be vaguely alarmed like I was.

I promised to come back the next day, kissed the top of Cora’s downy head, and retraced my path past her roommate’s bed. She had stopped crying and gave me a slight smile.

She said, “I’d of stayed in Mississippi if it hadn’t of been for the hurricane.”

From the other side of the curtain, Cora laughed. I gave Ms. Grayberg a friendly wave and hoped nobody told her that Florida got hurricanes too.

As I went down the stairs, I probed all the corners of my mind, trying to remember where I’d heard the man’s smug, pompous voice before. But it was like trying to dislodge a speck of lettuce stuck in your back teeth. Every time I thought I had it, it stayed locked in place.

I made it all the way to the parking lot before I remembered where I’d been when I first heard the man’s voice. It was so unlikely that I sat in the Bronco and argued with myself for a long time before I pulled out my cell phone and called Guidry.

He answered with a curt, “Guidry here.”

I said, “I was just at the Bayfront Village Nursing Unit, and a man came in the room to talk to the woman in the other bed. I know it doesn’t make any sense, but you need to know who he was.”

A beat or two passed, and Guidry said, “Dixie, I’m not even going to try to understand what you just said. Do you have something to tell me?”

I stuck my tongue out at the phone and took a deep breath.

“Cora Mathers is in the nursing unit at Bayfront. She has a roommate named Grayberg. While I was visiting Cora, a man came to visit Mrs. Grayberg. I didn’t see him because a curtain was between us, but I recognized his voice, and I’m positive it was the same man who called Laura Halston while I was at her house. She said she met him at Sarasota Memorial in the emergency room. Maybe he’s a doctor. Or a nurse.”

“You didn’t see him. You didn’t talk to him. But you’re sure it was the same man.”

“I know it sounds crazy, but he has a distinctive voice, and he speaks in a peculiar way. He left before I could get a look at him.”

“Peculiar how? Lisp? Stutter?”

“He talks like a college professor too full of himself. Pedantic. Prissy.”

“So you want me to go to the hospital unit over at Bayfront and ask this Mrs. Grayberg about him?”

“Well ah, Mrs. Grayberg is a little bit senile. She might not be able to give you much information.”

Guidry heaved a deep sigh. “I can’t talk any longer, Dixie. I’ll catch you later.”

He clicked off without saying goodbye, leaving me staring at the phone and wondering what he was avoiding telling me.