The rest of the day passed more or less without incident. Eve stayed in the nurse's office for the rest of first period, and then went to her second class. She hoped Rocky would be there, but no such luck. Ali was there, but she wasn't much of a force without Martina and, more important, Lilly around to give her support and direction. Still, the blonde girl did manage to trip Eve on the way out of the class, and Eve didn't feel like bracing the three of them together later in the day so she ditched the rest of her school classes. It was theoretically difficult to do that since the school was designed to be fairly impregnable, but Eve also knew that several of the emergency exit alarms no longer worked. So leaving was just a matter of walking out the right door.
She spent most of the day at a record store about a mile from the school. The proprietor, a huge Samoan dude whose real name no one seemed to know but who went by the moniker Griffin, was a cool guy who let her work for him sometimes, slipping her a few bucks under the table when she needed it to buy some clothes or re-up the minutes on her phone.
He also understood that sometimes a girl just needed to hide out. He was low-key about making people buy stuff, too. That probably meant he would go out of business soon, but in the meantime she could spend a few hours browsing cool old vinyls of Sex Pistols and Velvet Underground and even a few faded Bowies that she didn't know existed.
Eventually, though, the day started to wane and Eve knew she had to get going.
She traded insults with Griffin for a few minutes, but even he seemed to recognize that she was only doing it as a way of avoiding something else. "You got somewhere you gotta be, little lady?" he finally asked.
"Who's a lady?" she spat.
He laughed, a belly laughed that made the tattoos on the sides of his neck wiggle. "Got me, little lady," he said.
Eve left. She walked a few blocks. Not far enough for her liking. The place she had to go was too close to the bad part of town. Too close to where Eve and her mother lived.
She stood outside the place for a while, staring at it. It was basically a huge featureless block, squat and gray and ugly on the corner of a busy street. There were too few windows, and too many graffiti tags. The whole place reeked of hopelessness, the kind of structure that hadn't fallen into disrepair and disrepute but rather had been built with them in mind.
Finally, she squared her shoulders and walked in through the double glass doors at the front. They weren't locked, though they should have been. The building lobby smelled antiseptic at least, but the ammoniac atmosphere was marred by dim and flickering fluorescent lights that bounced strange shadows off tile that Eve figured probably hadn't seen a good day since the sixties. The space screamed "full-time care for low, low rates" in a way that had an almost physical weight; Eve could feel her shoulders slumping as she walked in.
The lobby had a reception area with a male nurse and a log book that Eve knew visitors were supposed to sign. The nurse barely looked up from reading his Michael Crichton novel, and Eve could see that the last person to sign the log book had done so the year before.
She walked past the reception desk and around a corner to a pair of scuffed steel doors. Eve hit a button beside them and a moment later a grinding sound announced the elevator's arrival. A bell dinged and the doors slid open – the right door opened noticeably slower than the left, as though the elevator had itself suffered a stroke – and she got in.
The elevator was large enough to fit a hospital gurney and a few doctors, but it always made Eve feel vaguely claustrophobic. She didn't know if that was because of where she was going, or because of the décor. Like the rest of the building, the elevator looked like a refugee from a Brady Bunch episode, all barfy orange and lime green. Still, Eve thought it was likely that the color scheme was less offensive than the fact that this puke-painted coffin of an elevator brought her ever closer to something that she preferred not to think about.
Her preferences didn't seem to be a concern for the elevator, though: all too quickly another bell dinged and the doors slid open again (this time the left one being the one that lagged). She hesitated before stepping out of the elevator, and thought seriously about just riding it back down and going home again. But she knew that her mother would ask about this, and didn't feel like having another fight. Sylvia didn't always hit her, but often enough. One knock in the forehead with a beer bottle more than sufficed.
So Eve stepped off the elevator only a moment before the doors began to close. She turned left and moved down the empty hall. No one was ever in this part of the building; in all the times she had come here she had never seen any visitors or even any other medical personnel. Occasionally she saw a patient, but in this part of the facility the patients hardly counted as people themselves.
Fifty feet or so down the hall was the room she had come to visit. She knew that choice of words was wrong; that she should be visiting a person, not a room, but somehow it never seemed like that. Somehow it always seemed like the four walls she sat within had more texture and reality than the people she saw there.
The door to the room was open. This was usual.
She went in.
The first bed held a gray-haired old man, perhaps sixty or sixty-five. He stared blankly at the ceiling. Eve watched him for a few seconds, wondering if he would blink. He didn't, though after a moment a thick gobbet of spittle welled up and ran out of his open mouth, down his cheek, and splashed against the light blue pillow behind his head. The pillow was darker blue where the spit fell, a testament to the fact that this wasn't the first time this event had occurred. Eve wondered what the old coot's problem was. Dementia? Stroke victim? Just good ol' fashioned cuckoo?
Didn't matter. He wasn't going to tell her, that was for sure. And Eve wasn't here to play Dr. House for this guy. She swung slowly to face the other patient in the room.
The woman in the second bed had once been a beauty. High cheekbones still showed the shadows of what once had been, as did the eyes that sparkled even in the lusterless light of the room. Her skin was white, almost translucent, with blue web-veins that spread from under her silver hair and throbbed ever so slightly. Still, what beauty she had once possessed had mostly been stolen by the Alzheimer's that had chipped away at the old woman's mind and left her a shell of her former self.
Eve stepped the rest of the way into the room, and as she did so the old woman's head swiveled until she was looking at Eve. Though it was hard to say if she was actually looking at Eve... or at something else that happened to occupy the same space Eve currently did.
"Hi, Gramma," said Eve.
Gramma's face crumpled in on itself as though she was going to cry, then it relaxed a bit. "Do I know you?" she asked.
Eve shook her head, not to indicate a negative answer, but rather as a subconscious expression of disappointment. Her gramma had been like this for as long as Eve could remember, but for some reason she still expected the old woman to know her. For some reason she still hoped that Gramma would recognize her, would escape from whatever cage her mind had been trapped within and rejoin the land of the living and the free.
"It's me," said Eve. "It's your granddaughter."
"I dreamt they died," said Gramma. "I dreamt Slightly and Nibs died."
Eve twitched. For a moment she almost remembered something, almost remembered something in her dream of the night before –
(almost remembered the feel of the hunt, the call of the night as he ran, the feel of the blade as it cut through his heart)
– and then it was gone again as Gramma said, "Did you bring treats?" The old lady's eyes were bright and glittering like a child's, innocent and full of hope.
"No," said Eve. "No treats." She felt bad saying it, as though she should have brought something, as though she should have known that the old woman would ask for such a thing.
"He always brought me treats," said Gramma.
"Who did?" asked Eve. "Grampa?" For some reason she felt her heart beat a bit faster as hope – unasked for and unwelcome – spread its wings within her. She didn't know anything about anyone in her family, not really. Her mother alternated between soused and closed-mouthed, and her grandmother had always been like this. The smallest hint of a life before the one she knew held a strange power over Eve.
"No," said Gramma. She smiled broadly, the innocent grin of a girl coming down the stairs to a Christmas tree laden with lights and presents beneath. "The boy at the window."
Eve looked over reflexively, glancing at the window that allowed a view only marginally better than the one possible from her own room. Nothing there. Just the setting sun over a nasty part of the city – if there was any other kind of part.
She turned her face back to her grandmother in time to see the old lady relax into the bed, her body melting backward and her face growing slack. The years melted away from her, the wrinkles seeming to disappear as she said, "Read me a story?"
Eve's shoulders slumped. "Which one?" she asked. She knew the answer, of course, but like her hope that she might one day find out something of her family, she also hoped someday to be surprised in this as well.
No such luck this time. Gramma pointed to the beige table beside her bed. The table was chipped and scarred, a formica-coated monstrosity clearly scrounged from a Salvation Army thrift store, but it sufficed to hold its one occupant: an equally scuffed and beaten book.
Eve took the book between thumb and forefinger, holding it as she might a soiled diaper. There was a red plastic chair on the other side of Gramma's bed, and she circled around to it without looking at what she held. She pulled the chair up closer to the bed. It scraped against the cheap linoleum flooring, a dry, rasping sound that never failed to make Eve's teeth feel like jumping out of her jaw.
She sat back in the chair. Looked at Gramma. She was staring back at Eve, her eyes wide with excitement and anticipation. "You sure?" she said to the old woman.
"Read, read!" Gramma practically shouted.
Eve sighed. She considered not reading. The thought only lasted a moment. Last time she refused Gramma her preferred story, the old bat had freaked out so completely that the hospital had to sedate her. They'd called Eve's mother, and to say there'd been hell to pay would've been a severe understatement.
Eve looked at the book in her hands. Peter and Wendy by J.M. Barrie. Better known by the countless Disney freaks the world over as the Peter Pan story. She sighed again and opened to a random part. At least she was spared the need to read contiguously. Gramma didn't care what part she read, only that she read from this book.
"'Captain,' said Smee, 'could we not kidap these boys' mother and make her our mother?' 'It is a princely scheme,' cried Hook, and at once it took practical shape in his great brain," Eve read.
"Ooh," whispered Gramma. "Hook is a smart one."
Eve almost smiled. This whole thing irritated her. Seeing her grandmother descend a bit further into a sinkhole of mindlessness every time, seeing her deteriorate before her eyes... and most of all having to read the same damn story time after time. But at the same time, she couldn't deny that there was something fun about watching the old lady's eyes as she heard the story. Like it wasn't just a storyto her, but some kind of strange family history. A tether to the past, a line to the future. Eve remembered hearing about an old Jimmy Stewart movie that people had watched during the Great Depression. Apparently it had been a movie of such hopefulness and love that for years after the classic actor was approached by people who thanked him and told him that they had decided not to kill themselves after seeing that movie. Sometimes stories mattered more than the truth. Apparently Peter and Wendy was like that for Gramma.
"He is a smart one," Eve agreed. Then, continuing on, "'We will seize the children and carry them to the boat: the boys we will make walk the plank, and Wendy shall be our mother.'" She glanced at Gramma. The bedridden woman's eyes were already closed, but Eve knew that she couldn't stop reading. Not yet. She had a while to go before her grandmother would be ready to let go of the fantasy of Peter Pan and the lost boys, of Hook and the pirates.
Eve read. She hated being here, hated doing this. But she also loved it. For a few hours a few times a week the outside world disappeared. The hospital itself was a total piece of crap, a blight on the face of medical establishments everywhere. But when she was reading she couldn't see the flickering lights, the chipped paint, the scarred flooring and out of date equipment. She just saw the words on the page, just heard her own voice speaking comfort to someone who relied on her to bring her hope, to bring her relief and respite from an otherwise pointless existence.
She read longer than usual that evening. Read of Peter and how he was so beautiful because he had all his first teeth. Read of how Hook carried his gloom within him. Of the songs the children sang on the isle of Neverland, songs which were beautiful but frightening all at once. Of the love that Peter had for Wendy, and the way it changed in the end because Wendy herself changed. And when she read of this she shivered as though a chill had run through her, though the room was warm and sweat beaded her brow.
She looked over at her grandmother. The old lady was asleep, and probably had been for some time. Eve stood, being careful not to let the chair scrape its way across the floor. She walked around Gramma's bed and put Peter and Wendy back on the off-white nightstand.
Eve looked at the book for a while. The book sported a picture of a boy dressed in green and a girl in a light blue nightgown. Eve knew they were supposed to be playing, frolicking across a field or a meadow in Neverland. But in that instant she had the distinct impression that they weren't playing at all; that the girl was running from the boy, and that both of them were deadly serious.
The idea disquieted her. She looked away from the book. Glanced to the side. And almost screamed when she saw her grandmother looking at her. Her eyes were open. Bright and shining and somehow more alert than Eve could remember seeing them.
The two stared at one another for a moment, long enough that Eve wondered if she had fallen asleep in the plastic chair and was in fact dreaming all of this, when Gramma spoke.
"I remember sometimes," she said. "I remember who I am, and who you are." She paused, then added, "I remember it all."
Eve blinked quickly and could tell beyond any doubt that this was no dream. The air was hot and moist on her cheeks, the flickering lights were giving her a headache that was all-too real. The room smelled of antiseptic and beneath it of urine and vomit and feces. Her senses shrieked that this was real.
"Then who am I?" she said. And that hope fluttered again. She didn't know why, but she felt as though this might be the moment that explained... everything. Who she was. Where she came from. What life had in store for her.
Gramma crooked one arthritis-ridden finger, gesturing for Eve to come closer. She did so, leaning in close enough that she could feel her relative's breath on her ear as she whispered, "He'll come for you, you know." Then the white wings of Eve's hope folded in on themselves and blackened and died as her grandmother giggled and said, "Peter Pan. He'll show up at your window like he showed up at mine."
Eve shook her head. She pushed her grandmother softly back into her bed and was surprised how much effort it took not to put a pillow over the crazy old woman's face. She didn't, though. Didn't suffocate her. Didn't kill her. Didn't put her out of her misery, though she thought that might have been the right thing to do. Instead she forced herself to lean down once more and whisper, "I'm sure he will, Gramma. I'm sure he will."