Tales from the Crossroad, Volume 1 Read online

  But on occasion you could take pride in being the stranger who’s willing to cross a line, even if you didn’t see it there or know what it meant to be on the other side.

  It took her fifteen minutes to return with a small box.

  “Mr. Madding?”

  “Madsen.”

  A capped tooth impatient leer, as if he spoke his name only to be difficult. “Oh, I’m terribly sorry. Mr. Madsen then. You say you’re the brother of the deceased?”

  Okay, he was about to be pressed to another wall. That was fine. You almost got used to it. “Yes.”

  “But his name is Harrington. Robert Harrington.”

  “His step-brother.”

  “You said brother.”

  What did these people know about blood, really? “His step-brother. He has no other family.”

  “I was told there was a wife and children.”

  Who the hell was there to tell her that? Mom on her deathbed? “An ex-wife who doesn’t care and two teenage sons who don’t know him.”

  “I’m sorry, but they are the immediate kin and we can’t–“

  ”What’s in the box?”

  She drew her chin back until it almost stuck out the other side of her head. “His ashes, of course.”

  “But–“

  Since when did the hospital cremate bodies, and without so much as a signature from somebody? Madsen’s back teeth ground together as he looked at her again, taking further stock. She enjoyed his puzzlement, comfortable and squarely settled in that knowledge of all matters of mortality. Working in a morgue could make you feel like the queen of the dead.

  “I’m afraid you simply don’t have the authorization needed to–“

  ”Sure.”

  His hands flashed out in a blur of motion and he had the little box. The significance of his brother’s history had been obliterated down to less than three pounds.

  Madsen walked around the desk, past the waxy lady and into the room. He expected to see shining steel drawers packed row upon row with corpses, jars filled with clear liquids and cancerous mutant organs. He thought there would be eyes watching from the tops of shelves, optic nerves still attached.

  Instead, the room was empty except for well-catalogued files and envelopes and trays of bone dust, a scale and a phone on top of the counter. Fluorescent lights hummed above and made the edges of Madsen’s vision burn brighter.

  No windows down here, nothing to do with Bob’s remains unless he turned around and made a break for it. Madsen just wanted to get rid of the ashes and be done. The responsibility wasn’t his and perhaps he shouldn’t have taken it in the first place. Let them dispose of the man however they saw fit, what difference did it make to Bobby?

  But maybe it did. Too late to back off now, Madsen’s course had been set by his frustration. His scalp began to prickle and the heated rush of blood filled his cheeks. Chilly sweat stood out on his upper lip and along with his hairline. He wanted to apologize but the lady wasn’t even in the room with him.

  “Hello?” he called. “Listen, I–“

  That just made it worse, she was probably already calling security. He had to move in some direction, do what needed to be done. He pulled open the lid and poured his brother’s ashes among the contents of all the other trays, a little at a time. Let Bob make some new friends, get taken home by other folks because his own family didn’t want it and never had, alive or dead. It was good enough, and maybe the gesture would mean something later on.

  Madsen spun and saw the woman turning the far corner of the hall beyond the caution tape. What’d she do, hop it? Her footsteps echoed down the corridor with a stern uncompromising cadence. He moved to the elevator and hit the button, wondering if a couple of guards would be ready to take him in the moment the doors opened. It perked him up, thinking of that. The muscles in his arms and back tensed. He wanted someone to test him in some capacity, whatever it might be. A beating would be all right, so long as it took a while.

  When the elevator arrived it was empty. Madsen relaxed and both his shoulders cracked loud as gunshots. He climbed in and hit the button for the lobby. The doors slid shut just as the lady down the corridor called, “Mr. Madding?...did you...?”

  “Thanks!”

  In the lobby, dog fur floated past on the draft as snow piled in through the main entrance, the electric doors held open by thick rubber wedges while the police and families spoke quietly together.

  Madsen left the hospital, crossed the street and hunted around the mammoth parking garage looking for his Mustang. He spent forty minutes roaming around the place and couldn’t spot the car. It happened to him every time he’d come to visit his mother while she was sick–getting lost here for an hour or so before making his way home. But this felt different. He had no memory of where he might’ve parked the 'Stang and finally had to rest against a railing. He crossed his arms tightly against his chest, trying to hold in the confusion. Bobby would’ve been making jokes the whole time, drinking from a flask and eyeing every woman who passed by. The moment lengthened until Madsen wanted to let out a growl. The urge was more powerful than he’d expected and it panicked him some.

  Madsen couldn’t quite decide whether he ought to just leave the Mustang and call a cab or keep looking. In this weather it would take hours to get a taxi, if anybody could get through. He moved to the stairs and kept heading up until he was on the top tier and could look down at the rest of the area. The blizzard had grown much worse even while he was searching for his car. No cabs would be coming out tonight. He could see the cars stacked up along both sides of the highway, some alone and others crushed together in mangled black masses that were already partially covered.

  He wasn’t going home.

  The walk back across the street to the hospital seemed a failure of some sort, as if he couldn’t let go of the place even now that his mother was buried and his brother's ashes had been...liberated. They were both gone so why couldn’t he leave? The question came down to When the fuck am I going to get out of here?

  He stood in the middle of the road, staring at the upper floors of the hospitals as the snowdrift heaped against his knees. If there had ever been a reason for him to keep coming back, maybe he’d find it tonight. Sometimes you only had to think you had a larger fate than going back to the apartment and eating mac-and-cheese in the glow of basic cable and it might come true. If you believed enough, maybe you could force the issue.

  Trouble was he could never believe in anything that much. By the time Madsen started moving again he was nearly buried where he stood. His hair was covered with ice crystals and he finally noticed his nostrils were freezing over.

  Inside again, and the bomb squad had finished clearing the area. The kids were allowed back to the pediatric oncology wing but most of the parents and doctors still didn’t feel safe and just stood around wondering aloud who’d play such a sick joke. The guards and nurses at the administrative desk had switched out and new faces peered at him. Somebody gave Madsen a Styrofoam cup of lukewarm coffee. He drank it without thinking and wandered off again.

  He’d done this a lot while his mother lay dying. Like everyone here, he didn’t exude much of a physical presence and he knew it. You didn’t speak in these halls, didn’t walk as upright as you normally would. The overbearing weight of illness made almost everybody gape at the floor and speak in whispers. You didn’t make much eye contact, and when you did it was fleeting and sort of shameful. You hated the doctors and their shortcomings and mistakes and money, and they hated you for not dying quietly or quickly enough.

  Madsen glanced down to see he was still holding the empty cup. There was no place to throw it away so he crumpled it and stuck it in his pocket. He had no idea where he was and looked at the wall to see a green line running parallel to a red one. What’d that mean? He thought he’d walked up at least one flight of stairs. Christ, had he been this bad before his mother had gotten sick?

  An explosive crush of noise burst from ahead. People walking
quickly away, not running. He waited and saw a couple of the bomb squad dogs tearing down the passage followed by more young cops. He stepped back to the wall and watched them go by. The hell? It was like in high school when you were out on the soccer field and a thunderstorm made everyone rush back into the gym. The teachers wouldn’t know what to do and you’d just hang around the place, hop on the vault, girls dancing in the corner, fights breaking out on the wrestling mats, guys making chicks under the bleachers, finding your friends on one side of the room, eyeing your enemies and waiting.

  So there he was staring after them when he inched around another corner and a squat guy with powerful arms spun toward him, holding a pair of needle-nose pliers and wire cap connectors. A custodian, somebody doing electrical work. Pants riding too high, showing off old brown socks, even though they hung low on his thick hips.

  “Now what’s happened?” Madsen asked.

  “There’s been another bomb scare.”

  “Christ.”

  “This time in ICU. They’re trying to evacuate all the patients but most can’t be moved. Besides, where they gonna go? There’s a blizzard out.”

  Madsen used to think of things like this while he sat with his mother, rubbing her hand. He always figured there’d have to be some kind of precautions set up to deal with troubles like these–power outages, a hurricane. But really, what could anyone do? How could they move people in the last hours of their lives, seven IV drips pumping into their bloated bodies?

  “Is there anything I can do to help?” Madsen asked.

  It caught the custodian wrong and he started to glare, putting heat into his cloudy eyes. They could really turn the poison on when they wanted to. “Who are you?”

  “I’m–“

  ”Why are you here? You’d better go. Go on.”

  There was nothing to argue about so Madsen left, watching more police sprinting past him. None of the cops seemed to even notice him, and it made Madsen want to say something. Hold up a hand, ask if they could even see him.

  His mother had been in ICU at the end, where he held onto her bruised and yellow arm, with the firm and frightening resolve that if he should let go, for a moment, she would leave him. The monitors kept careful scrutiny of her dwindling heart rate while the respirator forced jerking, heaving breaths into her lungs.

  The IV drips–seven of them–filled the room with the sounds of water torture. The anticipation in waiting for each new drop drove Madsen into a silent rage. Every so often someone at the other end of the floor would burst out in a low groaning laughter until Madsen wanted to get up and strangle anybody he could find. You could easily lose your mind on the deathwatch.

  It was almost a blessing–a kindness–that Bob had died first, and quickly. Cirrhosis of the liver and Hepatitis B had taken a strong grinning womanizer with a scotch in his hand and, within a few months, stripped him down to an angry alcoholic bleeding from the ass. Bob wore adult diapers with pants three sized too big, but he never let go of the bottle.

  Madsen hadn’t been around much at the time and had missed most of the transition, but he’d caught the tail end of Bobby’s descent. His stepbrother on the busted couch, sallow and scrawny and scheming against his own children. His ashes, at least, hadn’t smelled of booze and sour milk.

  “Hello?”

  You had to find your solace where you could.

  “Hello?”

  Madsen looked down to see a girl, maybe twelve years old, touching his wrist. Tufts of course gray hair stuck out in odd cusps and notches across her otherwise pink and scabbed head. She still had chubby cheeks though, and her hesitant smile brought out a heaviness of lines from the corners of her face. Bandages swathed her throat and forehead.

  “Yes?” he said.

  “My father–he hasn’t come back.” The dark angles of her ardent face drew together to form an exhausted shadow. She swooned and Madsen had to leap forward to catch her as she collapsed.. He felt all the dense layers of gauze wrapped around her tiny frame beneath the bed shirt. He scanned the corridor for a doctor, hearing the dogs barking somewhere distantly, but saw no one.

  “Hey!” he shouted toward the nurse’s station, except there wasn’t a station there. No one had ever been around for his mother either, except in the middle of the night when they huddled close, trying to explain to him, in mostly indecently placid tones, why she was dying.

  “I’m sorry,” the girl told him. “Sometimes I forget I can’t walk too far anymore.”

  “Let me help you back to your room.”

  She pointed to the doorway and he hefted her into his arms. Maybe seventy pounds. She snuggled there for a second, chin pressed into his chest, while he tried to hold onto the moment knowing it was already gone. He placed her in bed where three sets of heavy sheets were carefully peeled back to reveal her small but deep indentation on the mattress.

  “He left to get our car. From before. When we were supposed to leave, but it was snowing bad, and when they said we could all go back to our room, I did. But he hasn’t come back yet, and he wouldn’t have gone far.”

  “No, of course not,” Madsen said. “He’ll be here soon.”

  “My father–“

  All of us, we’re always searching for a family that’s no longer there. “The blizzard has tied up traffic all over. He probably went out to–“ Come up with a good one. “–get something...for you...to eat. The dining area’s closed and he didn’t know how long you’d be camped out in the lobby. I’m sure he’s trying his best.” Maybe the guy was out there in one of the wrecks, freezing to death on the side of the expressway.

  Vases of flowers lined the sill, the girl’s drawings taped over her bed. She had a good eye for detail, perspective, light and silhouette, distinctly textured realistic grimaces and smiles and sneers.

  “These are wonderful,” he said, and meant it.

  “I’m okay so long as the pencils are sharp.” Her voice had a pleasant sleepiness to it that made Madsen suddenly feel tired, in a good way. “I can’t use ink or charcoal that well, and it’s hard to keep the pencils pointy enough, even with a sharpener.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Blunt edges turn everything ugly.”

  He let loose with an odd noise, and it took a second to comprehend that the sound was his own laughter. It had been a while since he’d so much as chuckled, and perhaps he’d lost the knack for it. Here she’d said something that had some style–blunt edges turn everything ugly–that rolled off the tongue, and he’d been self-involved enough to apply the words. Madsen shook his head.

  Her small fist snapped out and caught him by the wrist. He sat on the edge of the bed and petted the small knot of colorless hair just over her right ear.

  “You’re cold,” she said.

  “Just my hands.”

  “What’s your name?”

  “I’m Madsen. What’s yours?”

  She ignored the question and kept gazing at him almost longingly, with a mixture of pity and adoration. It was how his mother used to look at him. “Will you stay with me for a while?”

  “Sure.”

  “Just until I fall asleep.”

  “As long as you want.”

  “My father does that most nights, when they let him.”

  She closed her eyes and sighed, and he kept patting her hair with the same intense, obsessive need that had consumed him while he rubbed his mother’s hand at the end. There’s something about this, he thought, that warrants an unholy amount of care and attention. He glanced up at the faces on the wall, searching for her father, but saw only beautiful women and unsightly little boys. He wanted to ask who they were.

  Snow pounded at the window, like the dust–the dust of ancestors–craving notice. Damn, it got you thinking too hard. After more than an hour he got up and left the room. As he stepped into the hall he heard her, shifting in bed and saying softly, “Come back.”

  He wanted to but it was already too late. Madsen knew that now, without fully realizing why, and
yet it didn’t make the walking away any easier. There wasn’t much left to do, but still, something had been left unfinished. He understood that more clearly than anything else that had occurred in the last couple of weeks. He hadn’t accomplished the task at hand, whatever it might be.

  Madsen came across an alcove filled with a few chairs, a new but worn couch, pay phone. At the end they tell you to go call any family members who might want to visit one last time. Like you ring them up while they’re watching one of their yuppie sitcoms, sitting around in sweat pants, one-year-old napping in the bassinet, and they’ll come charging into the night.

  Somebody there now, crimped in the corner.

  He started to walk past.

  Someone on the phone, whispering in a monotone peppered with hideous titters that Madsen had never heard outside of his nightmares. Jesus, it stopped him cold. He swung around and watched the back of the man’s head bobbing toward the mouthpiece, his heavy overcoat covered with ice crystals. The guy trembled there, hands quivering so badly that his knuckles snapped against the metal ledge of the phone and knocked over carefully placed stacks of coins.

  “You–“ Madsen said.

  The guy–Christ no, the kid–wouldn’t turn all the way around, arching his pink, peach-fuzzed chin just enough so he could give Madsen a sidelong glance.

  “You. You’re the one who’s calling in the bomb threats.”

  The teenager coming around a bit more now but still not wanting to look into Madsen’s face. Not a teen really, maybe pushing twenty-one, old enough to have already lost whatever there was to lose. Madsen moved to the other side of the pay phone and saw the kid’s face had been viciously scarred–left eye gone, the socket crushed and matted with dark tissue.

  He thought that might be what it was all about. Kid is in a wreck, holds a grudge against the hospital. Who died with him? A girlfriend? His granny? We all handle our broken hearts so poorly. So he’s calling from inside the hospital and they can’t trace him? The hell’s up with that? Fifty cops and dogs running around the place, and nobody can find him, stop him? Now you’re getting down to the grit, the dirt in the corner, knowing something even worse is going on, and you’ll never know what it really is.