Brandon punched in the five-digit Nostalgia Neighborhood code and went straight to the caregivers’ room. He stuffed his backpack into one of the small lockers and sat on the couch. His shift didn’t start for another hour. Should he go down to Ms. Hodges’s office, he wondered, and demand to know what was going on? But why bother? She’d tell him lies just like Baiba had.
Maybelle entered the room and frowned. “What you doing here, Brandon?” She peeled out of her black wool coat.
“Baiba was shorthanded,” he lied. “She asked me to come back—just until she finds a replacement.”
“Hmmph. Well, I wouldn’t do it if I was you. Not after Queen Hodges treat you that way yesterday.” Maybelle plopped her substantial weight onto the next cushion. “I s’pose you hear the news?”
“What news?”
“A detective come today and look all around Lucy’s suite. Josie tell me just now. She got it from one of the day girls. Chanelle. You not hear about it?”
Brandon shook his head. “What happened?”
“Nobody know for sure.” Maybelle tugged off the shiny black Steve Madden boots she’d bought back in November. Sixty percent off at Kings Plaza, she had told him proudly the first time she’d worn them to work.
Josie came into the room as Maybelle leaned forward to put the boots into her locker. Josie’s eyes met Brandon’s and she said, “I thought I seen the last of you.”
Brandon felt his hatred for her rise in his throat, but he said nothing.
Maybelle sat up and removed one of her big hoop earrings. “Brandon not hear about the police, Josie. Tell him what you know.”
“I don’t know nothing much.” Josie snarled. “Only that some detective woman come here and look around. Supposedly she and Hodges go looking through the garbage.”
“The garbage?” repeated Maybelle. “Why?”
“Nobody know,” Josie answered.
Brandon watched Maybelle remove her second earring and set the pair at the bottom of her locker. He looked discreetly away as she pulled off her tight sweater and swapped it for a loose-fitting Park Manor polo shirt. Unlike him, Maybelle would never be caught dead wearing her uniform on the street.
Josie continued, “But I do know from Chanelle that the cop go into the dispensary and make Lorena answer all kind of questions.”
“What questions?” asked Brandon.
“She not tell me.” Josie opened a locker. Then she pointed toward the door and said, “Now get out of here. If you’re a man, as you say, then you can’t be watching me dress. Now go on.”
Brandon stepped out of the caregivers’ room. In the parlor, Beauty and the Beast was playing on the large flat-screen television over the fireplace mantle. A puffed-up, hypermasculine Gaston filled the screen. Brandon turned away, walked to the kitchen, and got himself a glass of water. Then he leaned against the long granite counter and thought about Baiba’s words. Tell anybody who asks that you gave Lucy water in that cup. The memory triggered an electrical surge that traveled the length of his spine and made him slam down his glass. “Oh my God.”
He rushed down the hall to Lucy’s suite. He stared at the locked door while he replayed the events of Sunday night. He had followed Cheryl O’Brien into Lucy’s bedroom at ten fifteen. They’d walked to the far side of her bed near the window and then Cheryl had handed him the medicine cup. He had lifted it to eye level—he was absolutely certain of this—and read Lucy’s name on the cup. It was her cup and it held the same yellowish liquid she drank every night.
Lucy had been sitting on the edge of the bed, and he’d turned to her and smiled. “Okay, Lucy,” he remembered saying. “Let’s have a little drink.” Then he pretended to drink from the cup. “Mmmmm. It’s good. Have some, Lucy.”
“Mmmmm.” Lucy echoed him. “Mmmmm.” It was a game they always played. And then, as he raised the cup to her mouth, her lips parted and she sipped agreeably. But after the first sip, she jerked her head back, squeezed her eyelids shut, and pressed her lips together in a sour expression. Then she slapped his hand so forcefully that a little of the diazepam spilled out.
Now Brandon leaned one shoulder against the wall where Lucy’s nameplate had been removed. He punched his fist against the solid plaster and felt the pain throb in his knuckles as a hideous recognition dawned on him. Something bad was in that cup, and Lucy had tried to tell him about it. He had interpreted her nonverbal communication as an inconvenient symptom of her dementia, when in fact it had been the remnants of cognition. He closed his eyes and saw her sour face again. She might be alive right now if he’d paid more attention. He had let her down.
Dr. Evelyn Bruce rounded the corner in her white lab coat and shook her index finger at him. “You’re needed in the ICU right now, Nurse!” Evelyn’s bushy eyebrows made her look wild and severe.
“Yes, Dr. Bruce. I’m going now,” Brandon assured her gently. He wondered if Evelyn had used this same condescending tone with the nurses at Sloan Kettering decades ago when she was a pioneering female surgeon. If he had worked for her then, he might have been offended by her high-handedness, but now he just felt sorry for her. She was stuck in a surreal Grey’s Anatomy version of reality she would never get out of.
He watched her disappear into Arthur Lane’s suite. Seconds later, Melissa Posen, Baiba’s assistant care coordinator, followed her in, and Brandon heard Melissa gently saying, “You’ve already checked this patient’s vitals, Doctor. He needs his rest now.”
Brandon closed his eyes and pressed his fingers into his temples to help him think more clearly. If something other than diazepam was in Lucy’s cup on Sunday night, how had it gotten there? Had Cheryl accidentally filled the cup with someone else’s medicine? Was it conceivable that she had purposefully poured in the wrong medication? When she’d handed him the cup, had she deliberately weaponized him without his knowledge?
He shook his head. No. She wasn’t capable of that. She had no reason to do that. But if she hadn’t done it, who had? And then Brandon’s mind called up an image of Baiba asleep on her pullout bed.
His heart pounded and he felt lightheaded. He returned to the caregivers’ room. Maybelle and Josie were no longer there, thank God, and he grabbed his backpack, punched the combination code to let himself out of Nostalgia, and left Park Manor.
Madison Avenue was crowded with Upper East Siders returning home for the evening. Even after six inches of snow last night, the sidewalks in this zip code were perfectly clear. Brandon turned south. As he approached Seventy-Ninth Street, a woman with a newly groomed standard poodle charged directly at him, and he veered to avoid a collision. He turned to stare at the woman’s back as she continued uptown. In her eyes, he realized, he wasn’t even there.
He stopped in front of the diner Baiba had taken him to last Wednesday. He was, he realized, famished. The two slices of buttered whole wheat toast he’d eaten before his appointment with Judith had hours ago provided all the calories they could. He entered the diner and slid into a booth along the wall. A ponytailed waitress deposited a sweating glass of ice water on his table, held out a menu, and said, “Coffee?”
His head was throbbing and he couldn’t face the menu print. “Coffee, yes, and a bagel with cream cheese.”
When she was gone, he sipped the water and stared across the restaurant at the booth where Baiba had pressed the envelope with three thousand dollars into his hands. Where, he wondered now, had she gotten that money?