Fountain of Death(29)

The thudding was rhythmic and strong, unyielding and brutal.

“I’ve got him locked in the bathroom,” Mrs. O’Reilly was saying. “It was the best I could do. He broke the coffee table.”

The pay phone was just off the foyer, in a little utility hall with a locker room in it and a cloakroom with a revolving coatrack but no attendant. At least, Dessa thought, I’ll be private here. None of the women from her class was anywhere near this hall at all. The foyer was empty, too. If Dessa leaned back a little, she could see the place where the balcony railing had fallen apart. Someone had boarded it up with a piece of plywood.

“He doesn’t sound like he’s calming down,” Dessa said.

“Oh, he’s calming down,” Mrs. O’Reilly told her. “It was a lot worse half an hour ago. I didn’t have him locked up then. And he’s stronger than you think.”

“I know how strong he is.”

“You’re going to have to find a nursing home for him. You can’t keep on with him the way he is. I can’t keep on with him.”

Dessa pressed her forehead against the shiny metal front of the phone. She had never been so hungry in her life. Never. She craved a grocery bag full of Mars bars, sticky sweet, sugar rush. She wanted to go down to Taco Bell and eat three ten-packs of tacos. She wanted to make herself a huge pot of mashed potatoes and smother them in butter. She wanted all the food on earth, right now, this minute, and then she wanted to lie on the floor of her own bedroom and feel the pain in her stomach until it got so bad she passed out.

“You can’t leave now,” she said, in a hoarse voice she barely recognized. “Not today.”

“I’m not going to leave today.”

Dessa relaxed a little. “I can’t find him a nursing home this week,” she said, forcing herself to sound reasonable. “It might take months.”

“You can’t hold onto people when they’ve changed,” Mrs. O’Reilly insisted. “He isn’t the father you knew when you were a girl. He’s an addled old hulk with a disease. He needs twenty-four-hour-a-day nurses. You’re not doing him any good keeping him here.”

“I know.”

“He’s going to hurt somebody someday. Me or you.”

“I know that, too.”

“He’s going to get out of this house when we’ve got our guards down and go wandering around the neighborhood and get murdered for his watch.”

“I wouldn’t mind putting him in a nursing home, Mrs. O’Reilly. It’s not that I don’t like the idea that’s the problem.”

“We all want to be loyal to the parents who brought us up,” Mrs. O’Reilly interrupted. “When they have to go into nursing homes, we think we’re abandoning them. You won’t be abandoning him. He’ll be better off.”

Will he? Dessa asked herself, but she knew the answer to that. He wouldn’t be, because she couldn’t afford to put him any place that would be better off than he was at home. She couldn’t afford to put him any place at all. She wanted to reach through the phone and grab Mrs. O’Reilly by the neck. She wanted to throttle the woman. Of course she had looked into nursing homes. Of course she had. The good private ones were out of the question, but as it turned out, the state facilities were out of the question, too. First, they’d told her, her father would have to “exhaust his assets,” meaning sell the house and anything else he owned and use the money to pay nursing home bills. Then she would have to “sever any proprietary or custodial interest” she had in him, meaning declare him a ward of the state. Then, and only then, would a state facility have him. It would have him for good. She would have no legal standing to complain about his care, if it was bad—and from what Dessa had seen, it was likely to be bad. She would become a nonperson in the life of this man, this man—

“Miss Carter?” Mrs. O’Reilly was saying.

Dessa could see it, thrown up on her memory like a movie on a screen: the backyard in the days when the neighborhood had been a good one, the bright hard sunlight of an early afternoon, the thick greenness of the midsummer heat. Her mother, alive and whole and young, setting plastic knives and forks out on the red-and-white checkered plastic tablecloth spread across the round metal outdoor table. Her father—

But she couldn’t see her father. It had been a long time, Dessa realized, since she had been able to remember her father clearly at all. She could remember things he had done, the wood swing set he had built her, the blue suit he had bought just to wear to her high school graduation, so that he wouldn’t have to appear in work clothes and embarrass her. She couldn’t remember him. Her mother, who had been dead for years, was still fresh in her mind. Dessa sometimes thought she could still smell her mother’s lavender cachet in the big bedroom at home—although that was impossible; the smell of her father’s illness blanketed everything. Her father blanketed everything. Her father, as he was now. What he had become had obliterated everything that he had been.