Woman on the Edge of Time

If she could get through the locked ward door, she was convinced she could escape the hospital. A guard stood on duty in the lobby, but he hardly ever stopped people. Many outpatients came and went, and furloughs for inpatients were common. She knew she could make it, once past that ward door. But because she had run away, they watched her even more closely than the others. Whenever she loitered near the door, the attendants or the nurse would ask what she thought she was doing. She ran out of excuses. Sometimes she would hang around the nursing station making conversation with staff in order to keep an eye on the door, trying to shape a plan for getting through it, but if she looked at the door too much they got suspicious. Then she would try to redeem herself by offering to make coffee for them. The doctors had their own fancy automatic coffee machine in an alcove outside the conference room. Redding drank ten to fourteen cups a day, and the secretary Patty or one of the aides or attendants made it fresh every couple of hours. The lower staff sometimes drank the doctors’ coffee, but mostly used an electric percolator in the little kitchen. Sometimes patients were allowed to used the percolator or to drink an occasional cup of coffee in the afternoon. For Connie that made a big difference, keeping her awake enough to plot and think.

“I’m sorry you didn’t make it out,” she said to Tina as they got ready for bed.

Tina did not answer for a while. Then she said in a soft, remote voice, “My man, the only man I ever loved all the way through and through. Down to the pit of my stomach. They sent him up for thirty years. It might as well be life. Twice a year I get up to see him. Fifteen minutes through a grille. He’s getting old fast there. His hair’s coming out and his teeth … It might as well be for life!”

At bedtime, as Connie was sloshing in the murk of drugged sleep, Skip walked lightly through the rooms of the ward and paused at the foot of her bed. In death his hair had grown out and he had regained his loose‑limbed grace. “Come along,” he called to her over the sleeping Tina. “Aren’t you coming? Shuffle off with me, my dearie‑o! Don’t let them steal the best of you.”

What was it, her Catholic upbringing that kept her from thinking about suicide? Just as contraception had always felt more of a sin than falling into bed. Somehow it was not in her. “I have my own way,” she told Skip, muttering on the drafty back porch of sleep in the wind that blew through the sepia screens from the cold world’s end where they piled the corpses. In the bleak moonlight she whispered to Skip. “I’m fighting too. Even now, when like you I bow, I lick their feet, I crawl and beg, I am biding my time. Wait and see what I do.”

At lunch of macaroni and a little cheese she said to Sybil, “No trust? After all this time you don’t know me?”

“How can I know my friend when I see her kowtowing to the Inquisition?” Sybil sipped her milk as if it were wine, looking down her arched and bony nose.

“We’re at war, Sybil, don’t you see that?”

“Some war! More like a massacre.” Sybil snorted. “Soon to be burned at the stake–the small stake. More cost‑effective, as the grand master says.”

“It’s a war,Sybil … . If I could get out on furlough, I know I could run for it. The city’s so close here. Once off this ward, we’d have it made! People come in and out of this building all day, outpatients, volunteers. If only I could make it to the elevators!”

“There’s a lot more coming and going, yes,” Sybil said thoughtfully, “but also more personnel. I have not yet seen the nursing station empty.”

“You’ve been watching too.”

Sybil smiled. “The volunteers, some are college girls. The hippie one who comes in Thursdays, Mary Ellen? Nurse Roditis told her that, quote, I thinkI’m a witch and go around hexing people, unquote. Mary Ellen came and asked me, quote, if I was into herbs.”

“So what did you say?” She felt close to her friend.

“I said I was into this ward, although unwillingly. But I’m interested in herbs and have done some healing with them.”

“Was she making fun of you?”

Sybil shook her head. “She told me lots of college students are interested in herbs. We discussed valerian, thyme, rosemary, comfrey. Finally she asked if I really was a witch, and when I assured her, she seemed quite pleased. She said several of her friends are ‘into’ witchcraft. She said she’s trying to secure permission for one of her friends to meet me.”

“You don’t think she was … laughing inside the way they do?”

“No, Consuelo. She’d read an herbal and cured a leg infection with lovage compresses. We had the most civilized conversation I’ve had in ages. Except for yourself, of course. I was worried about you when they had that device in your head.”