The Tides Page 3

  Rebecca's parents wouldn't understand, either; she didn't even try to explain her excitement and pleasure to them. 'I don't understand you,' her mother had been saying all Rebecca's life, sometimes in admiration, sometimes pity, sometimes out of some sort of fear. Billie Emig was spending a lot of time at The Tides since Rebecca's father had been admitted, but she made it plain that she loathed the necessity of having her husband there, and defended herself against the joy and tragedy and fun of the place as she'd always defended herself, by feeling both guilty and superior. And Rebecca didn't think her father had ever been much interested in anything, except, at times, her; senility hadn't changed that.

  A lot of people in the business also didn't share her involvement, not to say obsession. They just worked there. Or they were investors, and maybe the rumors of greed and corruption at the ownership level were true. Dan Murphy, her boss, never objected to her plans for getting away from the medical model and creating a community at The Tides; he never acknowledged them, either. 'Census, babe,' was his refrain. 'The name of the game is census. Keep those beds full and everybody's fucking happy. Including me.'

  She knew the assumption inside the company and out was that she and Dan Murphy were sleeping together, or at least that he had lecherous designs, and she still worried that this compromised her position. But, by reputation, he'd slept with nurses' aides as well as Directors of Nursing, with housekeeping new-hires as well as Health Department surveyors who'd been around for decades.

  He seemed to her less a predator or barterer than an opportunist, and she wondered about even that, for he was hardly, in any ordinary sense, an attractive man. Abrasive and impatient, crude, not easy to be around, certainly not easy to work for, he had eyes small enough, in a fleshy face, to be called beady, a reedy voice with almost no affect, clumpy orangish hair, a squat body that surely would make no heads turn.

  What would it be like to have an affair with Dan Murphy? she wondered, but the fantasy wouldn't stick.

  When he walked the halls of The Tides, many people didn't know who he was. But in a few deceptively casual minutes he would have learned which handrails were loose, what was causing the odor at the end of Wing 1, which rooms didn't have clean towels, which residents were ready for discharge, which staff were fucking up on the job and which were going above and beyond. Sometimes he would tell the administrator these things and sometimes he would keep them to himself until they could be used to greatest advantage.

  She wanted to learn how to do that. She wanted to be that sure of something.

  Rebecca didn't mind the business aspects of running a nursing home, and was confident that, once hospital discharge planners and doctors became familiar with the innovative programs she intended to develop at The Tides, she could, in fact, fill the empty beds and keep them full. She'd already started trying out some of her ideas for humanizing the institution, such as the mural on the lounge wall — Lisa had managed to persuade all the painters but the surly Bob Morley to redo their work after Rebecca's father had painted over it, and Bob's sun had been high enough to escape most of the whitewash anyway.

  Walking along Hammond Street toward Elm, Rebecca laughed wryly to herself. But thinking of her father, open-mouthed and utterly baffled as though he didn't know the incriminating brush in his hand was still oozing globs of white paint, while her mother castigated him and Rebecca and the rest of the staff and fate in general for the of his clothes, thinking of her own outrage that her inaugural project had been sabotaged by her father, who hadn't meant to, she felt sorrow and an odd sense of profound vertigo, but it wasn't as hard as it should have been to set them aside, to set her father aside.

  As she turned onto Elm Street and started down the hill, she caught her first glimpse of The Tides, a thin darker line across the faux horizon created by the lower empty field behind it, and a proprietary satisfaction pumped through her like air into an otherwise formless balloon. She found herself thinking that maybe, because of The Tides, she'd have some idea who she was by the time she was thirty.

  The Tides was a long, low, blond brick building with a flat roof - which, because of its lack of a slope, leaked - and a covered concrete porch along the front face that extended almost seamlessly into the parking lot. It sat on the east edge of a vacant bowl-shaped space, huge by the standards of the suburb surrounding it. Here, when the facility was built, had been the lake which had given it its somewhat fanciful name; Rebecca couldn't quite believe that this body of water had ever really had tides.

  She also found it hard to imagine how anyone could have been so foolish as to build a nursing home on the shore of a lake, however shallow, however placid. Indeed, the lake hadn't lasted long. She didn't know whether the Health Department had insisted it be drained and filled in, for obvious health and safety reasons, or whether someone in the complex of ownership and management had made an independent commonsense decision, but Dan Murphy had told her the land behind the facility had been empty since before he'd owned it, which was seventeen years. After snow or rain, there was sometimes standing water, which she didn't much like, but most of the time the weedy bowl just collected trash; she didn't like that, either, but it didn't seem to require the immediate intervention that so many other aspects of The Tides' physical plant did.

  The open space was vast when you considered that it was in the middle of a dense urban area, and it surprised her that Dan or his predecessors hadn't sold it or found some other way to turn it to a profit. Probably close to an acre, it sloped gently from the back of the facility for fifty yards or so, then dipped steeply. The weeds and trash were thick, but there were no trees, nothing to break its sinking profile, and the lights of the surrounding buildings could seem very distant if you stood at the back door of the dining room, say, and looked out across it at night.

  Rebecca was thinking, again, that there was potential in that space, if she could just come up with the right thing to do with it. A garden, maybe; she'd like to have fresh produce for the kitchen, and surely there were residents who'd have both the physical energy and the knowledge to grow vegetables. Or maybe they could raise animals of some kind, like chickensnot that she knew anything about chickens. Or goats. Could you have goats in the city? Something glinted wet in the middle distance of the vacant space as she came closer to it; something streaked and shimmered, the suggestion of blue and violet and silvery gray. She cursed. There'd been no significant precipitation for weeks; why should there be water?

  As she crossed Ahern Street and came up on the west edge of The Tides property, it looked as if the bottom foot or so of the wide depression was under water. The closer she got, the more water there seemed to be; at one point, the back wall of the building rippled, vaguely distorted as though the lake that had not been there for decades were rising up it now.

  It was her facility, and her responsibility to investigate. What could be risky, anyway, about trying to find out where this seepage was coming from? But she was afraid.

  She moved her right foot off the sidewalk and onto rough ground, which slanted downward away from her. Swiveling to the right, she brought her left foot around, and nearly lost her balance as the ground seemed to shift and the angle of it to steepen. Gravity and momentum, or some other force, drew her rapidly downhill, though for some reason she did her best to resist, and in scant seconds she was at the bottom of the bowl, where she'd never been before, out of breath and tingling as if she'd fallen, grasping in vain for something tall and sturdy enough to break her descent.

  Her tactile sense told her that it was perfectly dry down here; there was no hint of moisture against exposed flesh or trickling through shoes or fabric. But things looked wet. The outlines of grasses and low thorny bushes were smeared. Crumpled newspapers and plastic grocery bags looked to have been melted, dissolved at the edges, in some cases even run together to form some strange amalgam. A brown beer bottle here and there, a green plastic two-liter soda bottle, a fat clear bottle with a smudged red label that had once held wine a
ll glistened, sparkled, rendered pretty by the wavery refractions of what looked like but was not water.

  Disoriented, chilled, and frightened, Rebecca thought to clamber out of the depression, which was deeper and wider, steeper-sided, than she'd have imagined, and hurry into her facility by one of the back doors; she hoped she had her key and that it would work in the new lock. Instead, she slid farther down, so that the line of The Tides was barely visible above the lake-bed rim.

  Her feet seemed wider, rounder under her, her shoes soft-sided and unable to hold their shape. She couldn't quite make out separate fingers on the hand she held up before her face, and the veins and dancing tendons in the back of her hand colored haloes across the skin. The sounds in her head were gauzy. There was the smell of roses, unlikely on a September evening, but inescapable, and when she pivoted to look for the source of the fragrance, which it seemed imperative to locate, she slipped and fell into her own shadow, which shouldn't have been there at all in the half-light but which accepted and then absorbed her impression.

  Sitting up, struggling to her knees and then to her feet, not wet but feeling smudged and hazy, Rebecca suddenly had a flash of a memory she'd never had before. A rainbow drawn across her cheek. A rainbow ribbon slid across her cheek and then tied into her hair. The smell of roses, which only now, with a shock, did she recognize as roses. The elongated, smeary shock of somebody important leaving and never coming back. Water closing over her face, rainbow water, and then sliding away.

  Somebody called her without quite using her name.

  Chapter 3

  'Faye!'

  Rebecca jumped and looked up from the staffing report. A cloud must have passed rapidly over the sun, for the square of indirect light from the window beside her father's bed was almost lavender for a moment, and the even less direct light inside the room, under the glare of the fluorescents, took on a decidedly purple cast before it returned to normal. Usually, outside light, temperature, weather were of so little relevance inside the facility that Rebecca could go for hours without noticing, and it would be a bit of a shock to emerge after work and find snow in the air, or a sunset.

  The long, perforated sheets of the staffing report tumbled over the edge of her father's bedside table, which she should have known wouldn't be a big enough work surface. Heavy and slick, they threatened to slide off onto the floor. If she lost her place it would take forever to find it again among all the rows of numbers, columns of names, charts of symbols. This was the dozenth weekly staffing report she'd done, and it still took her most of a day, partly because of the complexity and tedium of the task itself, partly because she resented having to do it at all, and largely because it was so hard to keep her mind on it among all the interruptions, most of them welcome.

  Even when she came in in the middle of the night to do it, there were myriad things more interesting than staffing reports to claim her attention. Of primary concern to her at the moment was the persistent problem of staff sleeping on the job. She seemed to be the only one who objected to this; more than a few people had informed her, defensively or indignantly or indulgently or with a shrug, that the night shift at every facility napped. But it infuriated her, and she derived a certain short-lived perverse pleasure at three o'clock in the morning from sneaking into the staff lounge, where on some nights there'd be aides and even the nurse dozing in practically every chair, and shouting, 'Staff meeting!'

  Now, righting the stack of slippery papers with her fist, she regarded her father. He was still staring at nothing. Thinking of her experience the other night in the twilit empty lake bed behind the facility, she repeated to herself sternly that it was nothing he was staring at, just as it had been nothing that had so shaken and disoriented her then. The only strong emotion his face registered was curiosity, not fear or rage or anything else explosive that required her intervention, professional or filial.

  Such intense curiosity on her father's face, though, was a curiosity in itself. He'd always taken pains to hold himself aloof. His interest in the world , in her , had always been of a removed, intellectual sort, without much passion.

  Until, Rebecca had lately come to realize, the dementia had started; passion of many sorts , brief unsustained bursts, often free-floating , had in fact been one of the early symptoms, unrecognized at first but cumulative. Shedidn't know what to make of her father's emotional lability. Geriatric theory would have her write it off as symptomatic of chemical and physical alterations in his brain, signifying nothing but the advancing dementia. But, somehow, that explanation didn't seem to her quite sufficient.

  Clearly he wasn't at the moment aware of her. Like finding no reflection in a mirror, this set off an unpleasant shiver, and she had the childish impulse to do something outrageous to claim his attention — jump up and down and make faces; shatter some object or break some rule. Say, 'I love you, Daddy.'

  No matter what she did, his obliviousness to her was likely to be replaced without warning by equally discomfiting scrutiny. This had always been true; she squirmed remembering the sudden searchlight-glare of his attention when she'd been a child and, worse, a teenager — as if, all of a sudden, he hadn't exactly known who she was, or had known too well.

  While he was ignoring her, though, she had the opportunity to observe this man who was her father and was, always had been, such a stranger. There'd been periods in her life when she'd watched and listened to him intently, and periods when she'd gone out of her way to avoid being with him at all and especially alone, for fear of what she might find out and of what she might not. There'd been long stretches — junior year abroad in Spain, grad school on the East Coast — when thoughts of her father and mother had hardly entered her mind at all. Now professional and personal obligation made it virtually impossible to stay away.

  She hadn't thought it was a good idea for him to be placed at the nursing home she administered, but she hadn't been able to articulate why. 'I'm just starting a new jobs,' she'd tried to argue with her mother. 'A whole career. This is my first facility. I've been waiting a long time for this. I don't want to have to think about my father, too.'

  Her mother's face had gone stony. 'I know he's a lot of trouble, but he's your father. And he'll be less of a bother if he's right nearby. If he's in your nursing home, you can make sure they take good care of him.'

  'I'm not sure I know how' Rebecca had started to protest.

  'It's not as if we're moving in with you. You'll still have your personal life.' Unspoken: Such as it is . She'd added slyly, which wasn't like her, 'You and Kurt,' and Rebecca had been surprised that her mother even remembered his name.

  'Mom, this isn't a good idea,' she'd said helplessly, her doomed last shot.

  'All right, Rebecca. All right. I'll find someplace else for him.' Her mother had turned her back, and Rebecca, as always, had panicked and acquiesced.

  Now her father was staring straight at her, the whiskered corners of his mouth twitching in an uncertain smile. Rebecca had the impression that he didn't know exactly who she was, which wouldn't be the first time. Still expecting to be hurt or offended by that, she was surprised to find herself smiling back at him with the same kind of diffuse affection she imagined him to be feeling.

  Both her parents had kept themselves from her. Her mother still did. Rebecca couldn't have said how she knew that; she hadn't in any sense been neglected, and she had no doubt that they loved her. But there'd always been — distance between them and her, the sense of a secret, of something profoundly hidden. Or maybe not; maybe that was nothing but a romantic construct to soften the reality that they just had never been very close.

  Not that she'd always minded. Not that she even entirely minded now. Sometimes, in fact, she'd wished for even greater distance. A certain lightness resulted from being disconnected from one's parents without ever actually having been estranged.

  There was, in fact, a certain gratifying lightness in not being very connected to anybody. She and Kurt had been together for over a year
, and, while she'd have said — did say — they loved, each other, she wouldn't have said they were close. He'd moved in with her because his lease had expired, she owned a house, and it was a convenient and practical arrangement for them both. They divided household chores and expenses. They shared a bed. They decidedly did not share a life.

  Her father roused himself and commanded, 'Get out of here. Leave me alone.' He didn't seem to be talking to her, although he might be. She chose to assume he was not, and to stay.

  He'd been a bulky man, and he still was much taller and larger-framed than she was, as was her mother; Rebecca remembered waiting for her growth spurt, and she'd been well away from home before she'd decided she was always going to be a smaller person than either of her parents. There'd been times when she'd chafed at the physical difference, imbued it with a power differential that made her alternately rebellious and overly eager to please. There'd been times when she'd welcomed it because it set her apart from them, gave physical form to the separateness she already felt. By now, she scarcely thought about it, except as a genetic oddity.