The linoleum in room 214 at Rosewood Manor always smelled like pine cleaner that had gone stale by mid-afternoon. I sat there on a Tuesday with my left hip throbbing like a bad tooth, watching the second hand on the wall clock jump four seconds for every real one. Twenty-one days, the discharge planner told my daughter Brenda before she went back to her kitchen in Bakersfield.
Twenty-eight days if the physical therapist decided I could not manage the three steps to my back porch without crying. That was what I kept telling myself to keep from sliding off the edge of my own mind. Do the exercises. Eat the gray meatloaf. Smile at the aides even when they talked over you like you were an old chair they meant to haul out to the curb on trash day.
Beatrice had the bed by the window, the one where the crank was stripped so the glass stayed six inches open to the parking lot regardless of the weather. She was eighty-six years old and her hair had a mind of its own, standing up in a white tuft at the crown no matter how many times the morning aide ran a plastic comb through it. Some days she knew my name was Clara and asked if I wanted a butterscotch from her tin.
Other days she called me Louise and talked about a barn roof that blew off during the winter of forty-seven. She spent hours folding paper napkins into tiny squares and tucking them under her thin hospital pillow until the mattress looked like it had a case of the mumps. People dismissed her with that kind, sickening voice nurses use when they are already thinking about their lunch break. Miss Bea gets mixed up, they would say. Miss Bea tells stories. Miss Bea thinks everybody is stealing her costume jewelry.
The evening aide was Nina Caldwell. She was maybe thirty, with long purple nails that clicked against the medication cart like small billiard balls and perfume sweet and thick enough to taste when she leaned over your mattress. She called everybody baby, but she said it flat, like we were all just duplicate parts on an assembly line she wanted to clear out before her shift ended at eleven.
Every night at eight o’clock, Nina brought the little paper cups of pills. Mine were simple enough. A blood thinner the size of an aspirin, a small white stool softener, and a yellow capsule for the burning in my hip if I asked for it. Beatrice had a whole row of them, little round ones and long oblong ones that looked like tiny torpedoes. Nina always stood right between Beatrice and the cart, her body blocking my view while she handed them over one by one.
I noticed that because there was nothing else to look at in that room except the brown water stain on the ceiling that looked vaguely like Idaho. But noticing is not the same as doing something about it, and I was too tired to start trouble. My hip burned like grease from a hot skillet, and I knew what happened to difficult patients in places like Rosewood.
They sat thirty minutes longer for their call buttons. Their sheets stayed damp an extra hour. So I kept my mouth shut and watched the gray dust motes float through the shaft of light coming off the parking lot halogen lamp.
On Thursday evening, dinner was turkey slices that looked like they had been ironed, mashed potatoes with a skin forming over the top like milk left out on the porch, and a little plastic cup of applesauce. Beatrice stared down at her tray until Nina’s purple nails clicked out into the hallway and the door clicked shut against the latch. Then Beatrice pushed her applesauce cup toward me with one crooked finger. Underneath it was a damp wad of grey hospital tissue.
She peeled it back just enough for me to see. Inside were nine loose pills. Different colors. Different shapes. One bright blue oval, two tiny white rounds, and a half tablet with a jagged edge where someone had broken it with their thumbnail. My mouth went dry instantly, like I had been chewing on dust.
Bea, I said, keeping my voice down so the hallway speaker wouldn’t pick it up. Why do you have these?
She put a finger to her lips, her skin like tissue paper over blue veins, and looked toward the open door. Nina keeps the good ones, she whispered.
I told her we needed to call the nurse right now and give them back before somebody noticed. Beatrice reached out and grabbed my wrist with a grip that surprised me, thin fingers closing around my bone like iron wire. Chart says swallowed, she said. That was the first time I understood she might not be confused at all, or at least not about the things that mattered. She was just playing their game because she knew what happened to people who didn’t.
I tucked the damp tissue down into the top of my hospital gown because my flannel robe didn’t have pockets that zipped. The pills felt hard and cold against my chest through the cotton. I sat there eating four spoonfuls of cold mashed potatoes I didn’t want while out in the hall Nina laughed at somebody’s joke about a broken vending machine. At nine-forty, the night shift changed over, and Mr. Pruitt came on duty. He was older, quiet, with reading glasses on a silver chain around his neck and rubber-soled shoes that squeaked softly down the linoleum. I liked him because he knocked twice on the doorframe even when the door was propped wide open with a rubber doorstop.
I waited until I heard Nina’s heels click toward the loading dock doors where she went to smoke her menthols behind the industrial bins. Then I reached out and pressed my call button once, steady, and waited for the light above the door to blink red.
Mr. Pruitt came in carrying a yellow clipboard and his blood pressure cuff. He stood by the foot of my bed, looking down at his notes with that tired squint people get when they have been on their feet since six in the morning.
Everything aching tonight, Clara? he asked, and his voice sounded like an actual human being instead of an announcement from a machine.
I didn’t answer right away. I reached into the neck of my gown, pulled out the tissue, and dropped the nine loose pills right into his palm. They made a little dry rattle against his skin like gravel in a tin cup. Mr. Pruitt’s face went very still. Professional people do that when they find something they weren’t meant to see. They stop moving altogether so nobody can read their eyes.
Where did you get these, Clara? he asked, and the quiet in the room suddenly felt heavier than the water stain on the ceiling.
Before I could find my tongue to tell him about the applesauce cup, Beatrice lifted her hospital pillow with both hands. She pulled out an old grocery receipt from the local market, the paper yellowed and covered from top to bottom in tiny, sharp pencil marks. Names of aides. Dates in the margins. Little columns of pill colors and counts that looked like tally marks in a logging camp.
Mr. Pruitt leaned under the wall light by my bed, holding the receipt close to his thick lenses, and read the first three lines written in Beatrice’s shaky hand. Then he dropped his clipboard on my tray table, reached up, and grabbed the black wall phone right beside my head.
He didn’t call the front desk downstairs. He dialed four digits direct to the supervisor’s cottage behind the laundry rooms, his thumb tapping a steady rhythm against the plastic casing while he waited for someone to pick up in the dark.
I watched him talk in that low, clipped way men use when they are trying not to swear in front of women old enough to be their mothers. He told them to lock the south wing cart right now. He told them not to let anybody touch the evening logbook in the drawer by the medication room.
While he was talking, Beatrice tucked her grocery receipt back under her pillow, smoothed the corner down with her palm, and lay back down with her eyes fixed on the ceiling. She didn’t look scared and she didn’t look triumphant. She just looked like a woman who had finally finished a chore she’d been dreading since the first snow of the year.
By midnight, the hallway outside room 214 didn’t sound like a nursing home anymore. There were heavy loafers running on the linoleum, the sharp clack of hard-soled shoes belonging to people who didn’t work the floor shifts, and the low, angry murmur of voices coming from the medication station down by the ice machine. Mr. Pruitt never left my room. He stayed sitting in the straight-backed vinyl chair by the door, his hands folded over his clipboard, waiting for the people from the state office to clear the double doors.
When the state inspector finally walked into our room at two in the morning, she wasn’t carrying a clipboard like ours. She had a heavy black binder under her arm and a look on her face like she had smelled something burning for three days and nobody had bothered to check the stove.
She didn’t ask us how we were feeling. She walked straight past my bed to Beatrice’s window-side table, where the empty applesauce cup was still sitting upside down beside a cup of lukewarm water.
Mr. Pruitt stood up from his chair, reached into his breast pocket, and laid the nine loose pills out on a clean paper towel on my tray table, side by side like little colored stones found in a creek bed. Then he reached under Beatrice’s pillow and handed the grocery receipt over without a word.
The inspector didn’t say anything either. She took a small magnifying glass out of her coat pocket, leaned down under the fluorescent glare of the wall lamp, and started matching the pencil tallies on the paper to the shapes of the tablets on the towel.
By three o’clock, they had Nina up from the break room. She wasn’t wearing her pink cardigan anymore, just her uniform top with the sleeves rolled up and her purple nails digging into the skin of her own arms like she was trying to hold herself together against a draft. She didn’t look at either of us. She kept her eyes on the floor between the two beds, watching the spot where my slipper had fallen off hours earlier.
They didn’t arrest her right there in the room, but they didn’t let her touch her purse either. Two men in dark jackets walked her down toward the administrative offices while the supervisor stood in the doorway with her mouth pressed into a thin white line, looking like she wanted the floor to open up right beneath her sensible shoes.
After everybody cleared out and the hallway went back to that hollow, ticking silence, Mr. Pruitt came back into the room with two fresh paper cups of water and a new box of tissues he must have gotten from the nurses’ supply closet.
You girls need anything else before morning? he asked, and he sounded tired down to the marrow of his bones.
Beatrice didn’t open her eyes. She had her hands folded over the top of the blanket, right where the hospital laundry stamp said Rosewood Manor in faded blue ink.
Tell them to bring the white pills next time, she said to the wall. The blue ones taste like chalk.
Mr. Pruitt gave a little dry cough that might have been a laugh if things had been different, then he pulled the privacy curtain halfway across our beds and clicked off the overhead light.
I lay there in the dark with my hip still throbbing, listening to the parking lot heater kick on outside the window with a dull metal thud. The room smelled like stale floor wax and old paper, but for the first time since I came through those double doors twenty-one days ago, the air felt like it belonged to us instead of them. I reached out in the dark and touched the cold metal rail of my bed, waiting for the sun to come up over the gravel lot and show us what was left on the other side of the night.
