Night Shift
Page 33

Tommy shook his head. “They just know Mamie’s getting worse. They’re talking about tying her to the bed.”
Manfred recoiled, imagining ropes or handcuffs.
Tommy noticed. “Naw, you idiot, they use these soft restraints. But we hate to see that happen to Mamie. When she gets back to being okay it’ll embarrass her something awful.”
“So what do you want me to do?” Manfred felt totally at a loss.
“Do some mojo on her. Make her quit thinking about this.”
“I need to send for Fiji. She’s better at that kind of stuff. I’m just a two-bitpsychic.”
“Well, Mr. Two-Bit, you get in there and try.” Tommy got up slowly, stiffly. He and Manfred made their way to the room next door, Mamie and Suzie’s room.
The two women were dressed and sitting in matching armchairs identical to those in Tommy’s room, and the television was turned to a game show. Mamie’s curly white hair was flattened on one side, which would have mortified her if she’d been aware of it. Suzie, whose parents had immigrated to the States from Hong Kong, was carefully combed and made up, as usual. But she looked as exhausted as Tommy.
“I like the hair, Suzie,” Manfred said, when she turned to the door. In the weeks since he’d seen her, Suzie had dyed her steel-gray hair its original black.
“Thank you,” she said. “And how are you and that pretty Estella?”
“Hey, we traded phone numbers,” he said, not at all surprised that Suzie had picked up on his admiration for the nurse’s aide.
“That’s good,” she said. “Now, let’s see if you can help Mamie, here.”
At the sound of her name, Mamie opened her pale blue eyes. She turned slowly and painfully to look at Manfred.
“Hey, honey,” she said, her voice wispy. “I didn’t hear you come in. Hey, Manfred, give me a ride back to Midnight? I need to . . . do something there.” She looked sly.
“No, Mamie,” he said. He sat on the bed closest to her and reached over to hold her thin hand. “I can’t do that. It’s not healthy for you there right now.”
“I don’t have anything to live for,” she said, tears running down the fine pale skin of her cheeks. “I’ll just go there, to the roads, where they cross, and I can put an end to this.”
“Miss Mamie, what would Tommy and Suzie do without you?”
She smiled faintly. “Oh, they’d manage, same as always. Come on, Manfred, put me in that car of yours and let me go home with you.”
He had seldom felt more at a loss.
“I can’t. There’s stuff going on in Midnight that’s bad. We have to clear it up before you come back for a visit.”
Mamie said, “All right.” She’d suddenly lost the thread of the conversation. She glanced over at Tommy. “Tommy? Is it time for lunch yet?”
“Not yet,” he said. “In an hour, honey.” But Mamie had already focused her attention on the television screen, though from her blank expression she wasn’t really engaged with what she was seeing.
Manfred tried again to think of a way he could help his friends. And he came up with nothing.
He said as much to Suzie and Tommy. “All I can do,” he said, “is ask Fiji if she’s got any ideas. And try to solve this problem in Midnight as soon as possible.”
“People just show up and . . . blam!?” Suzie shook her head.
“That’s how it’s happened,” Manfred said. “No motive, no warning.”
“Mamie never was too big on Fiji, but I don’t think she’d care anymore, long as she gets better,” Suzie said wearily.
“All right, buddy-boy,” Tommy said. “You run back to Midnight and you fix things up with Fiji. Mamie shouldn’t be suffering like this.”
Manfred signed out in the lobby, only vaguely conscious of the curious look the volunteer was giving him at his quick departure without his friends, whom he often took on an outing.
Manfred walked slowly to his car. The temperature was only in the low eighties, but he was too preoccupied to enjoy the relief from the summer’s heat. He’d never had such a jarring visit at Safe Harbor. He found himself dismayed and worried to a degree that surprised him. Until this moment, Manfred hadn’t realized how much he’d come to rely on his visits with Tommy, Mamie, and Suzie. He missed his grandmother; their conversation had somehow eased the loss for him, but he hadn’t even understood that. Some psychic I am, he thought.
As he started his car, planning to drive right back to Midnight and talk to Fiji, Manfred found himself—nonetheless!—excited at the prospect of calling Stell. He wondered how long he had to wait until he punched in her number. “I must be really shallow,” he muttered, and he drove back to Midnight thinking of a jumble of things, both happy and sad.
Fiji had customers, so Manfred waited until they’d left before walking over to The Inquiring Mind. He found his friend sitting in one of the wicker armchairs, and she was definitely in a serious mood.
“What?” she said, as he sank into the chair opposite her. She turned her face to his abruptly, as if she’d been interrupted in a conversation with someone else.
“Maybe I should come back tomorrow?”
“No,” she said wearily. “That’s okay. Let me guess. There’s some problem I have to help solve.”
“Ahhhh—yeah.”
“Gee, I’m surprised.”
Manfred had never heard Fiji fall back on sarcasm. “You don’t seem to be in the mood to put yourself out,” he said. “Is there something I can do to help you?”
For a terrible moment, he thought she was going to cry. To his profound relief, the moment passed. Fiji kind of shook herself and then forced a smile onto her face. “So, what is it?” she said.
He explained about Mamie, leaving any mention of Stell out of the story, though he was in the mood to drag her into every conversation.
“So you want me to drive up to Davy and cast some kind of spell on poor old Mamie so she doesn’t want to walk to Midnight to commit suicide,” Fiji said. “And you want me to do this without anyone at the assisted-living place being any the wiser.” She rubbed her face with her hands.
Manfred hadn’t really thought about the difficulty of his request. “Yes,” he said. “That’s about the size of it. I’m sorry, Fiji, I probably wouldn’t even have brought it up if Tommy hadn’t been so positive one of us could do something about it. He thought I could, but I can’t think of any way a psychic could change Mamie’s mind when this awful thing, this impulse, is hijacking her.”