1995
Three sixteen in the morning.
She’d gotten to work, although she couldn’t remember how. It was like the drive hadn’t happened at all, as if the ten minutes had been completely wiped from her memory. It reminded her of the time she’d gotten drunk at a party and had woken up curled up on one of the old lawn chairs on her mother’s front porch—confused and cold and more than a little scared, not at all sure how she’d ended up at home. That’s exactly how she felt. Like she’d just woken up from a nightmare.
She couldn’t stop thinking about Matt coming down the steps out of the house, his hands flailing, and the way his fingers gripped the woman’s butt when he pulled her close. That one image, on constant replay in her head, over and over. Matt coming down the stairs and then his hand on that ass, sinking into the flesh like it was bread dough. Again and again. Hand and ass. Ass and hand.
“You okay?” Jesse asked as he slung his backpack over his shoulder, but she’d waved him away, told him she was fine, he should go home and go to bed. He had lines on the side of his face and she thought he’d probably fallen asleep on a stack of paperwork. He didn’t normally work this late. “You don’t look okay.”
“I’m just tired, that’s all.”
And she was tired, maybe more tired than she’d ever been. Anger has a way of draining a person’s energy, that’s something else her mother always said. Dieting and exercise were a waste of time, she claimed. It was anger that would drop the pounds, pure rage that would keep your thighs lean and your waist trim. And her mother said this from experience—she was thin as a whip and had spent her entire life in either a nonstop state of pissed-off or a drunken stupor. Sometimes both at the same time.
“Has Ms. Ruby called?” she asked, pushing away the textbook she’d brought in. Normally the night shift was a perfect time to study the diagrams and photos, and she had the first quiz of the semester coming up, but there was no way she’d be able to concentrate. Not tonight.
“Yeah, a little bit ago. Asked for you.” Jesse paused. “You sure you’re okay?”
“Yeah, I’m sure.”
Jesse didn’t look convinced, and if he’d been a different sort of man he might’ve stayed and tried to get Janice to talk, to tell him what was wrong. But Jesse never quite seemed to have gotten the hang of talking to women—to anyone, really, even when they worked for him and he was giving out orders—so he just gave her a long look and left.
She sat at the desk after Jesse had left, tracing her finger along the front cover of her biology textbook. There was a sketch of the Vitruvian Man on the front, his arms and legs spread wide. According to Leonardo da Vinci, the ideal man was eight heads tall, but what about the not-so-ideal man? Wasn’t there some other way to sort men without whipping out a measuring tape, a reliable way to recognize a bad guy before you rented out a room at the rec center and promised to be strapped to them for the rest of your life, for-better-or-worse?
The water cooler in the corner burbled, startling her. Normally she liked this time of night, when the lights had been dimmed and the residents were all in bed and the TVs were off and the place smelled clean and the carpets still had vacuum lines in them, but tonight she just felt antsy and full of nerves. Like she was waiting for something to happen, but she didn’t know what.
Matt and that woman are probably done by now, she thought dismally. He’d climbed on top and done his business and now they were in bed together, naked, watching the ceiling fan spin lazily above their heads. There was a photo of Janice on Matt’s nightstand, smiling and looking straight into the camera, and she wondered if he turned it around when he was with this woman. She didn’t think so. Not very many things bothered Matt, and she doubted that her photo would get under his skin. He might even find it funny, that his wife was right there while he slipped it to that girl. She wouldn’t be surprised—Matt’s sense of humor had always been strange, nothing she ever understood. You just don’t get it, he’d always said, but he could never explain exactly what it was.
What are we going to do?
Routine, that’d get her mind off things. She stood up, went to the kitchen. The stainless steel counters were shining; the bulbs mounted on the ceiling threw down cold light. She took a plastic-wrapped loaf of white bread from the walk-in fridge, slipped two soft slices into the toaster although there were eight slots, then considered and put in two more. After two minutes the bread popped up again, toast now, golden brown on each side, and Janice scraped each piece with butter and sprinkled on cinnamon sugar.
Ass and hand, she thought. Couldn’t stop thinking it. It was like a chant in her head, a million voices all coming together to sing. Ass and hand! Hand and ass!
It wasn’t much of a walk to Ms. Ruby’s room with a dinner tray carrying plates of toast and two mugs of milk, to door number 217, up a short flight of stairs and down a hall, and when Janice got there she knocked softly. She had a key, of course, even though most of the residents kept their doors unlocked—she had a master key that would open up every room in the place, just in case there was an emergency, but she still knocked. Just because these people were living in a home was no reason not to be polite.
There was no answer.
“Ms. Ruby?” she called, leaning her forehead into the door and putting her mouth close to the jamb, careful not to let the plates and cups slide off the tray. “Are you awake? I have something for you.”
Nothing.
Janice started back toward the stairs. She was later than normal, Ms. Ruby had probably gone back to sleep, and it’d be best not to wake her this late. Or this early, if you preferred.
But that was unlikely, because Ruby had suffered from insomnia since her husband died ten years before, she’d tell Janice that a dozen times some nights. She always slept during the day, when everyone else was up and about, and she’d spend her nights up. Like a vampire, she’d said once, with some disgust. Of course, if I were a vampire, I’d hopefully be in bed with Tom Cruise right now. Then she’d laughed, hard enough that she’d ended up coughing and gasping for air.
After a moment Janice went back to Ruby’s door and tried the knob. It was unlocked, just as she’d expected. She went inside. This was one of the smaller apartments, just a living room and a separate bedroom, and it was stuffed full of furniture. Big, squashy chairs and doilies—like a hobbit hole, she’d always thought.
“Ruby?” Janice said, nudging the door shut behind her. “I have toast, if you’d like a piece.”
The old woman was in the living room, sitting in one of the armchairs in front of the television like she always did when she was waiting for Janice to show up, watching an infomercial about a folding ladder.
“There you are,” Janice said, setting the tray down on the coffee table and sitting down in the other armchair. The cushion wheezed beneath her. “I thought your heartburn might be acting up again, so I brought…”
She trailed off, at first not sure what was wrong, until she realized Ms. Ruby’s head was canted at a strange angle on her neck, that her eyes were glassy and gazing toward nothing. She’d died sitting in front of the TV, waiting for her toast and conversation.
Janice leaned forward, smoothed down one of Ruby’s white curls that’d become mussed. The old woman was cool to the touch, but her hair felt just as it always had. She’d never considered it, that the hair of the living and the hair of the dead would feel exactly the same.
Death was a natural part of life, that’s what the guy who’d interviewed her for the job had said. Not Jesse but someone else, a man she’d met once and never saw again. She’d heard the same thing in the biology classes she’d taken. If you were alive, you’d die. It was inevitable.
She finished smoothing the stray hair and sat back, taking one of Ruby’s hands into her own. The hand was small and thin, covered in age spots. Her palm and fingers were smooth as silk; the skin felt paper thin. Like the pages of a Bible. If she would’ve come into work on time Ruby wouldn’t have been alone during her final moments. Of course, if she’d come in, she wouldn’t have had the pleasure of watching her husband sink his hands roughly into another woman’s ass, and she wouldn’t now still be thinking of the gun in that drawer.