Marlow
“Did your brother call?”
Geez, it’s been months since I saw Lennox and Cindy in person. Weekly video chats help. I know my brother doesn’t hate my guts. Cindy actually likes me—somewhat. We both have a raunchy sense of humor and mouths like truckers.
Or Vietnam Vets.
I hold Earl’s hand as he moves around the room, his feet shuffling. He’s lost so much weight. At first, I thought it was healthy—but then it kept dropping.
The grizzled, blind man next to me is too thin, and his middle is swollen. When I help him to his chair, his skin looks tight, red and shiny through the gap between his socks and the worn leather vest that’s draped over his knees, covered in patches, the twin of mine.
“Yeah, he called. Doing good. Loves his job. Loves his wife. They have a nice little place. Still the same good bunch of pals.”
“Good. Good.” Earl’s voice is mumbly. He stares at Jeopardy on the television with unseeing eyes.
Earl hates Jeopardy—and he’s blind. He can’t see anything but shadows, and he’s staring so intently—or his eyes are glazing over. Fixed. He used to be able to see fuzzy outlines and shadows, and I’d catch his eyes moving towards the light, or he’d turn his head towards sounds. Not now.
“Earl, you’re scaring me.”
“Huh?”
I swallow down the panic rising in me. I don’t like feeling like this. Tilly whimpers in the corner and then runs in circles around our feet.
She knows I need to help him.
I don’t know what’s wrong.
The VA moved Earl into Mint Woods Senior Care this year.
Earl and the docs at the VA nursing home agreed Earl didn’t need that level of care.
And hell, they were right. You ever seen a blind man trying to get a bunch of eighty-something veterans in wheelchairs to raid the kitchen to get enough jello cups to make a slip-and-slide ramp? No? Neither had they.
So, Earl was happy to be set free from that place (without getting arrested), even if he was pissed he couldn’t go back to living alone. Mint Woods Senior Care is like an assisted living place, where he gets some looking after, but not enough to make him rebel and lead an octogenarian mutiny.
At first, things were okay. His sugar was under control.
He was eating regularly. They even let me spring him for my brother’s wedding.
Those little “glamour pendants” from the Pine Ridge magic shop really work—although Len reassures me we don’t need ‘em. Humans can’t see the paranormal for shit, not unless it bites ‘em on the ass, or in my brother’s case, crashes down at someone’s feet.
Then about... Oh, six months ago? Things started going downhill at the place, but Earl was still okay.
First, it was the company. They cut staff.
Then they cut the care. As someone independently able to dress, feed, and bathe himself, Earl gets to go to meals in the dining room if he wants—but they won’t make him.
Won’t check on him. He gets his meds dropped off in a big plastic box with days of the week stamped in braille on the lids—but no one checks to see if he takes them.
There’s no medical care other than his annual check with the VA doctor and his endocrinologist.
I think something is really wrong, and even though I’ve now learned that humans can’t necessarily see monsters (and their brains just see us as something else), I’m still helpless. I’m not kin. I’m a visitor—and I’m supposed to leave at six on the dot.
I do—and then I fly back up to his second-floor window in a cubby of an apartment that smells of menthol, talcum, and antiseptic. But those smells have been fading. Other smells, like urine, stale food, and body odor, are taking their place.
“When did you check your sugar, Earl?” I ask, my feathery setae feeling wet on my palms. I’m sweating.
“Huh?”
“Fuck this.” I have seen him do this enough times. If a blind guy can do it, I can do it.
I take Earl’s hand and prick his finger. He doesn’t even react.
“Three hundred.” Holy shit, that’s not good. That can’t be good. “Earl. When did you last eat?”
“Scrambled eggs.”
Breakfast. Did they bring him breakfast? I know Earl doesn’t cook on the little two-burner stove they give him.
I look around and see no evidence of cooking. If his blood sugar is this high without eating...
I grab the white phone attached to the wall. A static-y voice answers me, tinging and pinging.
“I need a nurse to my buddy’s room. Now!”
“Thank you for calling the Mint Woods Group, sir. Which facility are you calling from?”
“The one I’m in! I’m calling from the second floor. I want to talk to the nurse’s desk!”
“I’m sorry, sir, this is the call center. Are you in a Mint Woods Senior Care facility or a Mint Woods Nursing Home?”
“Senior Care! In Two Saddles, West Virginia. And it’s not me, it’s my friend!”
“Let me find that location, sir...” The voice pings and tings some more as Earl’s head droops.
“Fuck. Hurry.”
“All right, now you would like to make an appointment to see the nurse?”
“No, I need a nurse here, to room 217, now!”
“Ah, that is only possible at Mint Woods Nursing Homes, sir. You can schedule a visit for... Thursday at 10:30 with the visiting clinical staff on rotation at your location.”
“There’s no nurse on site?” My voice is warbling and shaking all over the place, red eyes glowing and blinking so fast I must look like a neon disco ball.
“There is, sir, but not after hours. To retain a place in Mint Woods Senior Care home, you cannot need ‘round-the-clock care or skilled nursing.”
“My friend doesn’t need skilled nursing all the time, just right now! He’s sick!”
“If his condition is serious, I would call 911.”
I slam the phone down, convinced that it’s too late for 911. I pick up Earl and Tilly barks once, a sharp, desperate sound.
“Look, girl, I’m taking Earl to the hospital, and then I’m coming back for you.”
And if he makes it... I’m not letting him back in this hellhole ever again...
“I am not going to live in New York. Godless city hellhole.”
“Earl. If you don’t come with me, so help me God, I will dig you up and bury you in Manhattan.”
Earl looks genuinely terrified for a second, and then his scarred features return to their normal “Grumpy Old Cuss” position. “You’re acting like I’m dead.”
“If I let you go back to Mint Woods, you will be.”
“I don’t need nursing care. I don’t crap my pants and forget what month it is or who the president is. Hell, I can name ‘em all. November—and Washington, Adams, Jefferson, Madison, Monroe, Adams Jr., Jackson, Van Buren, Harrison—”
“Save the history lesson! You need to be some place where they can take care of your sugar and your meals, where they actually check on you like... Not like a patient,” I say quickly, because that’ll cause another shouting match, “but like a family member.”
“Places like that don’t exist. The VA out here was good, but they’ll tell me to move on in a couple of weeks. I don’t qualify long-term, not as independent as I am—and I’ll damn well stay that way—if I remember to take my damn pills and I eat regular.”
“Not the boxes of Girl Scout cookies all day long because it’s what you have handy, what you can reach.” I settle Earl’s battered blue hat with sewn-on patches back on his head.
Earl doesn’t answer. I know it hurts his pride to realize that he’d been so out of it, living on boxes of cookies and not checking his sugar regularly once he started needing help. We’re not even going to talk about the lack of clean clothes.
We’re not going to talk about what a shitty friend I’ve been to the only human who has ever befriended me. Sure, Earl doesn’t know what I am, but he doesn’t care, either.
“Stop that groaning. I ain’t dead.”
I stop groaning, but only audibly. Inside, I’m wracked with guilt and worry and fear.
I knew things were bad, but I didn’t realize how bad.
This was the first time I’d gone several nights in a row without checking on him.
I told him I was too busy to stop by—as in too busy using my glamour pendant to see if I could get lucky with the hot new waitress at Jolene’s, the diner out on the highway.
I’m kicking myself because I’m not even “real,” and I don’t have a job, or wife, or kids—what the hell kinda busy was I?
Chasing a big ass and a nice pair of legs because I’ve been restless and needy, and not going to those damn conventions anymore...
And because whenever I get the itch, I hear Cindy’s voice in my head, telling me to try something different, try for something real.
All I know is that a few more days of listening to my hormones instead of my heart might have meant Tilly and me standing beside some coffin while a preacher who don’t know nothing about Earl tries to half-ass his way through a eulogy, and there’s no one to take his folded flag in one of those little glass triangle boxes.
“You need to be where people like me can come and go in safety and not worry about sneaking in and out, and where there’s not just me and Tilly.” Needs a posse of people who have his back, even if they’re not blood kin. Like Lennox has in Pine Ridge.
Earl needs more than me.
Damn it, this unselfish love crap bites ass.
“People like you? You... different, son?”
Son. This man loves me better than my own father ever got a chance to.
Maybe it doesn’t bite so much...
“No, I mean... I’m not family. And they get real picky about that, Earl.”
Earl hums, thinking.
I didn’t want to have to do this, but I’m going to do it. The nuclear option. “Earl?”
“What?”
“Mint Woods Nursing Homes don’t allow dogs.
And if you ever have a setback like this again, where you skip a couple meals, let your sugars go crashing and boiling over with no rhyme or reason...
They’ll put you in one. That’s right. VA home is too damn full, and every other place but Mint Woods is too expensive.
You can’t be as ‘independent’ as they want?
They’ll kick you out on your ass before you can say ketoacidosis.
Tilly’ll probably be taken and shipped to some pound before I even hear you’re in the hospital.
I can’t be with you twenty-four-seven. I know you don’t need that!
” I interrupt myself before Earl can, his mouth open in an angry snarl.
“But you need someone to look in on you a couple of times a day. Hell, Earl. I’d do it, but I don’t have a decent place for the three of us, and I don’t have a steady job.
” I swallow grimly. “But I know where I can get one.”
Earl is quiet for a long time. I’m worried he’s slipping away, mentally, or maybe his sugar is bad again, but no. He’s just mulling. “Well. S’pose it won’t matter much. No one visits me but you. I can’t see how ugly the city is, anyway...”
“Not a city. Up in the mountains. My brother’s job runs right along the river, and his buddy is a krak—crack fisherman. Real sharp and knows all the spots. We’ll go fishing, Earl.” My voice is low, urgent, and desperate. Getting him to agree to this is just one part of the plan.
The other two might not be as hard, but they’ll be a close second.
Earl chews invisible tobacco, a habit that he gave up two years ago, but a sure sign that he’s thinking hard. That mind is still sharp as ten tacks and strikes like shrapnel when he’s angry. Hoping he’s not too angry just now...
“Why?”
“Hm?”
“Why are you doin’ all this? My own blood kin don’t fuss.
Haven’t heard from ‘em in years, not a call, not a Christmas card. My buddies at the VFW and American Legion are dropping like flies, put in homes, living with their married daughters, or retired out in Florida—stupid. Hurricanes and humidity that’ll simmer your gizzards.
” Earl fake spits an imaginary wad to show his disdain for the Florida weather.
“New York is cooler. Pretty, too. Lenny invited me up for Thanksgiving.”
“Didn’t invite me, though.”
“He did! And you were there for his wedding, you ass. You’re family.
You want me to spell it out? You are family.
You and Tilly. Lenny and Cindy. You are all I have in the whole fucking world, and if you don’t want to come quietly, then you can come screaming and cussing.
I’m busting you out of Mint Woods when you’re discharged from this place, and we’re starting a new life in Pine Ridge. ”
Silence. Chewing on nothing, or maybe chewing on words.
Then, “The dog comes?”
“Duh.”
“Don’t sass me, you’re not some teenager with a safety pin through his nose.”
“Of course Tilly is coming.”
“And where are we staying?”
“In a nice place.”
“You have no idea, do you?”
“Not yet. But you’re not gonna be released until next week. I have time.”
“You realize my social worker from the VA will have to help you out, or I’m gonna lose my medical coverage and probably my disability checks, right? We joke that the VA loses people in the system all the time, but not when you keep popping into the hospital and costing ‘em money.”
No, I hadn’t thought of that. I just thought of getting him someplace where I could at least try to help him. “Of course, I thought of that. I’m not some brainless piece of bait on a hook. I’m... I’m going to get the people in Pine Ridge to help me find us a place.”
Earl snorts. “The people in Pine Ridge, he says. Like they’re different from people anywhere else. What are they, gods?”
Vampires, krakens, mothmen, Orcs, gargoyles... I smirk, even though he can’t see it. “No, but they’re the next best thing.”