Mercy House Read online

Sure he was eighty-five, and there were folks in here fifteen years his junior pissing into their Depends, soaked through with their own filth and stinking up the felt on the backgammon boards with their shit-flecked fingers, but that didn’t mean that Arnold Piper was ready to give up the fight yet.

  Arnold was a marine.

  He’d taken the help recently as a kind of crutch while he was building his strength back up, knowing that a day would come when he would be able to work his way over there by himself. Using the handrails, of course, so as not to end up sprawled with his shriveled ass uncovered if he was able to get his pants down in time, trying to arch the stream away from himself so he didn’t have to sit in his own wetness until someone found him and helped him up.

  That, pissing on himself, had happened once before and wouldn’t happen again. So being helped to the can was the lesser of two indignities he would suffer gladly.

  Deterioration: a word that got thrown around in private meetings with doctors and occupational therapists a lot around here but never seemed to get whispered in the rec room. The deterioration would take him, yes, but not yet.

  Oh, he’d occasionally forget what day it was, but he’d never forgotten his children or even their growing brood. He was able to recite the names of his grandchildren whenever their parents deigned to visit him: once a year, and always a week before Thanksgiving. To beat the traffic.

  An octogenarian he was, yes, but that was a new title, ephemeral. It was a namesake he hadn’t held five years prior and one he wouldn’t have once he made it to ninety. But more than that he was also a marine: a title that the years could never strip.

  Because he’d felt the weight of a flamethrower on his back, killed a man using only a bayonet on Hill 66. He had the tattoos and the nightmares to prove it.

  And now…

  Now he was pressing the blue button. The console in his hand looked like a small remote control, one from back in the days before infrared, when the clickers still had cords attaching them to the TV. It had two buttons on it, but Arnold had only ever pressed the baby blue one.

  The blue button would call the nurse, while the red one above it, a hard plastic switch that needed to be pressed for a moment to prove you really meant it, would call a doctor. Supposedly the red button would have them come running from wherever they were in the hospital, but that button was for emergencies, and Arnold considered it a point of pride that he’d never once needed to use it.

  Arnold had made a silent resolution a few years ago that he would never click and hold that red button. If the heart attack seemed strong enough to knock him off the Earth for good, he would just let it happen. But until such a time as that—The End—he would fight. Fight to keep his mind sharp. And fight even harder to keep his knees in good enough shape that he’d never lie in a pool of his own piss again, the linoleum cold against his pecker.

  “Again, Arnie?” Flores said, entering the room. She was smiling, maybe joking with him in the only way her accented English and politeness would let her. Arnold didn’t see what was funny about his situation.

  “I like to stay hydrated, and needing to go is a by-product of that. Too much agua.”

  Flores just nodded, moved over to the side of his bed and let the railing down. He wished she wouldn’t do that, pen him in like that. He didn’t think that he moved that much in his sleep to justify it. Well, when his wife had been around he had tossed in his sleep. That’s why they’d slept in separate beds since the seventies, since the night he’d woken himself up by throwing a punch and thereby dislocating her jaw in the process. So maybe he still did have the capacity to thrash around a bit and they were right to lock him in for his own protection.

  “You smell that, Flores?” he asked as the woman bent close and took his arm. She gave him a look.

  “You being fresh?” she said, the accent gone, either a put-on for the codgers or this expression she’d learned only in English, with a slight Philly lilt.

  “No. Not you, I’m being nice. I smelled it before you came in. Smells like…” he said, drifting off, engaged in his sniffing. Flores gave his arm a slight tug to bring him back to the present.

  “I think they painted downstairs yesterday, honey. They had the windows open to air it out, don’t worry,” she said.

  The nurses were wired to cut off complaints before they could start. Were the workmen in my room? Are the fumes toxic? Does my family know that you’re turning my room into a gas chamber?

  “No, it’s not that. It don’t smell like paint,” Arnie said, allowing Flores to help pull him off his mound of pillows, sitting up and swinging his legs around the side of the bed. “It’s not chemical, it’s natural. Like rotten fruit.”

  Flores let his arm down. She gave him the I’m letting you go gesture without saying anything. Arnold was able to manage balancing himself while she checked around his bed, looking for something that maybe he’d dropped, a fruit cup gone moldy, petri dish Jell-O.

  “I don’t see anything, Arnie.” She put out her hand for his. He didn’t mind Flores calling him Arnie, it was better than Mr. Piper, what the other nurse insisted on calling him.

  He waved her off. “No, let’s see if I can do it. Just be ready to catch me,” he said, not joking.

  Flores smiled at him without really smiling, more like steeling herself for his failure, trying to keep herself from looking depressed.

  Arnie tried this only with her. The other nurse, Sarah, was less inclined to indulge him in attempting to stand by himself. It’s not that Sarah was harsh or mean, there was just a clinical way about her, a reluctance to deviate from procedure. Maybe it was that Flores allowed herself to believe in miracles, indicated by the tiny silver crucifix around her neck where Sarah wore only a single pearl.

  “Take your time, Arnie,” she said, holding the r in his name longer than any native English speaker would, like she was his sainted Latin mother from another reality.

  The worst pain was not the nerves pinching in his spine as he straightened up, stretching his feet to the floor, his biceps flexing to pick up the slack.

  No, the worst pain was yet to come. That pain would come when his feet would be flat on the tile, his thin argyle socks doing little to blunt the cold, when he thought that just maybe this time would be different. When he shifted his weight off the bed, all of it hit his knees at once like two squares of C-4 explosives, ball bearings stacked inward and outward, feeling like they’d obliterated his kneecaps and left him standing on the splintered ends, his femur and tibia rubbing together.

  There was no use prolonging the inevitable, so Arnold Piper unfixed his fists from the sheets and reached his arms toward Flores, an old man transformed into an infant again by age.

  His ass slid off the side of the bed, his core shifting its weight to his waist, then from his waist to his knees, his armpits already sweating in anticipation of the pain.

  But there was none.

  He looked down at his feet, made sure he could wiggle his toes, telling his rational mind that he hadn’t gone paralytic.

  Flores stood with her mouth hanging open and her palms just about to but not touching his outstretched elbows, ready to catch him should he crumple.

  “Nothing,” Arnold said.

  “You’re doing very good, Arnold.”

  Her words were meant to encourage him, but ended up doing the opposite. Arnold began to feel the salt sting of tears and he blinked through them. Is it good? Is it really? Or am I just becoming numb? Dying by inches and then yards?

  He pushed the thoughts away and took a large step, surprising not only himself but Flores as well, and almost knocking her in the crotch of her bright novelty scrubs. Today her pants were puppies and kittens, probably meant for a veterinary tech, but maybe Flores knew that and didn’t care.

  “Aye, Arnie, slow down,” she said. The phrasing and intonation, and the fact that Flores was an attractive woman, in her way, gave Arnold the kind of tingle reserved for those Jazzercise infomercials they stopped
playing two decades ago.

  There was some pain in his knees, but nothing compared to what it had been yesterday and the weeks before that.

  Flores swiveled to the side, getting out of his way while keeping her arms crooked into a protective halo around his torso. At fifty, he’d stood probably half a foot taller than Flores, but now, curved like he was, she had to dip her arms down slightly to enfold him.

  “I don’t need you to come in with me,” he said as he reached the threshold of his small bathroom.

  “Are you sure?”

  He thought about pulling his own pants down, in privacy, and then the tingle in his sweatpants was replaced with the memory of tile against his flesh. Arnold put a hand on the door frame, steadying himself while weighing his options.

  Flores touched his lower back. “You did so much better today, there’s no need to rush it.” He tried to move away from her fingers. Doing so, the kinks in his spine loosened, enabling him to stand just a bit straighter than he thought he could.

  “If I don’t try now, I never will again,” he said, leaving out words that he was thinking, knowing that Flores had worked here long enough to fill in the blanks. This was a house of death, a nice one with decent food, but nobody came to Mercy House to get better.

  “Don’t lock the door, then. I’ll be right out here,” she said, taking a step back but looking ready to dive forward, should he topple.

  Arnold stepped into the bathroom and closed the door, keeping one hand on the knob while he pawed for the light switch. Finding it, he almost wished he hadn’t. The fluorescent lights made the white walls, white tile, and white porcelain all look sickly green. If his night vision had been what it was years ago, he would have been able to use the handrail to work his way over to the toilet with no trouble and take his piss in the darkness.

  But if he switched the light off, Flores would see it from under the door and then be asking him if he was all right, so he left it on.

  One hand on the railing, Arnold undid the knot on his sweatpants and let them drop, the fabric got hung up for a moment on his crusty knees, but he gave a light shake and they dropped to the floor, he did the same with the briefs and then prepared himself to sit.

  This was the moment of truth: If his knees gave out, he’d drop forward and not be able to pick himself back up off the floor.

  He sat down. The motion was smooth, his joints feeling well oiled, almost slick.

  It was the first time a toilet seat had truly felt like a throne, becoming a crushed velvet plush cushion congratulating his tired ass on a job well done.

  He listened to the tinkle of water hitting water and Arnold smiled to himself.

  “You okay in there?” Flores asked, her voice bringing him back to Earth, reminding him that whatever this was, it was temporary. Decrepit was now his operative mode. It would be easier if he remembered that.

  “Yeah, I’m fine. I’m going to sit in here a little while though. It’s number two,” he lied. He would have told Sarah he was taking a shit. She was a bit younger, not as nice, she could have taken it. But for Flores, though, for her he was willing to lean into his institutionalized infantilization. Even if it killed him a little to call his shit “number two.”

  “Okay, you’ve got the bell in there. I’ll be back in five minutes to check on you.”

  Arnold didn’t have a good reason for wanting to sit in the bathroom. Maybe he just wanted a moment’s rest.

  He was amazed she was letting him be, then found himself straining to hear footsteps, proof that he was really free, for a few minutes at least.

  Flores’s pink Crocs squeaked when she walked, as she made her way out of his room and into the third-floor hallway of Mercy House.

  Arnold smiled and looked around at his new vacation home, his bathroom. There wasn’t much to see. When he’d first arrived at the rest home, over a decade ago now, he’d kept a stack of old Hustlers wedged under the toilet paper holder, but he’d let the nurses throw them away after a while, when he could no longer pretend that they did anything for him.

  He looked up into the light, wondering if there was anything specific about it that he could ask to have changed. It wasn’t the glass fixture but the bulb itself that seemed to be casting the green hue. He would have to ask Flores if it could be switched. Or next time he’d just leave it off.

  Thinking of his night vision again made him remember Seoul, and thinking of Seoul made him think about calms before storms.

  Maybe that’s what the miraculous healing of his knees and spine were. A calm before the storm.

  The light in the room flickered and came back, but it felt dimmer than before. From tears of joy less than five minutes ago, Arnold Piper was now staring at the fluorescent light of his bathroom, thinking about the dark cloud of his mortality. The cloud was swirling right outside the window to his room; he could feel it lifting the glass, then pressing up against the bathroom door and seeping through the cracks, ready to take him now that he was good and numb, peaceful, pacified.

  It could try, Arnold thought, curling his toes inward and feeling no pain at all as his joints popped and cracked.

  He felt strong.

  Chapter 2

  Nikki Laurel watched Don’s hands clench and loosen on the wheel. She envied her husband. At least driving gave him something to focus on besides the tension that filled the rental car.

  Or the hurtful words that flooded out of his mother’s mouth.

  The radio was on, but not loud enough, and every time Nikki tried to give the dial a half turn, Harriet would complain from the backseat.

  “I can’t hear myself think with all this jungle music,” Harriet said.

  “It’s Bruce Springsteen, Ma,” Don replied. “It’s about as white as music can get.”

  Over the last three months Nikki and Harriet’s years-long cold war had gone nuclear.

  Not that it made any of the things she said nicer, but Harriet had an excuse for her behavior. Or at least a card to play, if you wanted to be cynical about it: Harriet Laurel was losing her mind.

  Harriet’s exact flavor of dementia was Pick’s disease.

  Pick’s was like Alzheimer’s, but there were episodes when she’d constantly lick the corners of her mouth, leaving her lips chapped and spotted with sores. It was a terrible fate, a nightmarish reconfiguration of the brain that started with frustration at one’s mounting “senior moments” and quickly moved to an almost merciful catatonia, the body becoming a coffin for the barely active brain.

  Nikki could feel for Harriet there, because she had been through a similar thing—Alzheimer’s—with her father until his death two years ago. But, like getting drunk, there were some things that the disease did not make you do, it just allowed you to.

  Calling your daughter-in-law a “barren coon” was one of those things for which it removed the filter.

  And for Don that was the last straw. It had not been Nikki’s decision to move Harriet to a home, that detail was important and something that the old woman still refused to believe.

  They were in the car now, the first month’s installment already paid, and winding through the Pocono Mountains toward Harriet’s final destination. Nikki felt guilty smiling at the notion that they wouldn’t be making another trip like this again, at least not with Harriet along for the ride.

  “It’s cold,” Harriet said, scratching at the collar of her sweater. She had insisted on dressing up. Harriet wore her nicest sweater, a red and black synthetic, and a pair of black dress slacks with an elastic waist, specially made for seniors. If I’m going to my grave, I’m going to look nice while doing it. “Turn up the heat. You’re not hauling dead meat, yet.”

  “It’s blaring, Mom, and you have your own controls back there. Make it as hot as you want,” Don said, then turned to Nikki. “Can you reach back there and do it for her, hon?”

  Nikki reached her hand over the armrest and touched the knob. She kept her eyes on the road in front of them, trying not to look back at H
arriet, her old hands shaking not from cold but from sadness and fear, her mouth ringed with bloody spots.

  Harriet may not have been a good person, but before her recent changes she had been a good mother at least, and Nikki respected that.

  “Get away, I’ll do it,” Harriet said, smacking the back of Nikki’s fingers, her knuckles colliding with the molded plastic of the car’s climate controls.

  Instead of trying to decipher what Harriet continued to mumble, Nikki looked out her window at the trees, the orange and red leaves at their peak. They hadn’t planned it this way, but they were getting all the beautiful fall foliage that Pennsylvania could offer on this trip, and that was nice, no matter how grim the journey was.

  Don had told Nikki not to come, that she didn’t have to.

  But Google said it was a two-and-a-half-hour drive from South Philly to the front steps of Mercy House, and Nikki wasn’t going to let him take the drive there and back alone. He’d cried in her arms last night and then was sick over it. Don Laurel, a tough guy, even by construction-worker standards, vomiting without having had a drop to drink was a rare and, frankly, frightening occurrence.

  But he’d loved his mother and was sick over not only the thought of losing her but the notion that he was somehow giving up on her. That’s why he’d gotten her the best aid when they were barely able to afford it: twenty-four-hour hospice care, speech therapists on staff for when her throat started to go, and six heated jet baths in the hydrotherapy room, not that Harriet would be taking advantage of most of it, Nikki thought. But the amenities at Mercy House helped gloss over the fact that it was still what every other old folks home was: a place to die, if not quietly then at least out of earshot.

  Nobody in the car knew this better than Harriet, who’d used their last hours together in close quarters as a final opportunity to make her voice heard. It was the longest she’d gone without a nap since she’d moved in with Don and Nikki.

  “Nikki, dear?” Harriet asked a few minutes later. Her voice did not sound shrill or poised to complain, therefore it made Nikki prickle with suspicion.