Free Draw the Dark by Ilsa J. Bick Page B

although it was man-made and about the size of a dinky wading pool—the skilled nursing unit next door was like walking onto a real hospital ward. Nurses in uniforms worked behind a big horseshoe of a desk with computer workstations and monitors and glassed-in cabinets with bottles of medications. Behind the desk, there was also a pretty woman with chestnut hair down to her shoulders and dark almond-shaped eyes, and I thought:
Caravaggio
. She had a handset pressed to one ear and was jotting notes on a pad, but she looked up and smiled as we passed.
    “Who’s that?” I asked Peggy.
    “The doc on call. She switches off with two other docs in town. She usually makes her rounds at the end of the day when she’s done at her office or first thing in the morning. We call her at night if we need to.”
    “Do you need to a lot?”
    “More than we’d like to sometimes. We can run a code and take care of someone in an emergency situation, get them stabilized, but if they get really, really complicated—like they need surgery or something—we transport them to Ashburg Memorial. Sometimes they come back, sometimes they don’t. Most times, they do. We’re set up as a hospice too.”
    “You mean, people die here?”
    The look Peggy threw me practically screamed
DUH
. “Where else? Believe it or not, it’s better to die here than a hospital. When I go, I want to go at home in my own bed. If I can’t do that, then I’d want a place where I can look outside and see water and trees, have my things in my room. There are worse ways to go.”
    The unit was large, arranged in a big square around the nurses’ station, and held about a hundred guests in need of more intensive care, Peggy said. It was also much quieter, a place where you instinctively lowered your voice, though I could hear the occasional beep-beep-beep of machines coming from some of the rooms. A lot of the residents were in hospital gowns and lay in aluminum-railed hospital beds. The smell was really different: the antiseptic odor again, but now I caught the scent of age, the stink of diapers. The people here weren’t necessarily older than the seniors next door, but they really were frailer, all spindly arms with wattles of sagging skin. A lot of the seniors were tied up in their wheelchairs or bedside chairs with a kind of sling Peggy called a posey. A few sat in the common area where a TV chattered to itself in one corner. As we passed through on our way to the kitchen, some of the old people looked over. Their faces were blank and nearly featureless, like when I molded something out of clay that hadn’t worked and so I’d taken a loop tool and skimmed off all the detail in large curls until the clay was smooth again.
    Peggy retrieved a big metal, cafeteria-style gurney loaded with covered trays. “Okay, so here’s the drill. Some people we have to feed. Other folks can feed themselves, but you have to check every couple of minutes or else you’ll be cleaning peas off their laps or the floor. Also, you’ve got to be sure to match the tray with the right person, you got that? Let’s take care of the people who don’t need to be fed first; then I’ll coach you through feeding a few of them. Oh, and be sure to say everyone’s name, and then tell them what’s on the tray to orient them.”
    A half hour went by in a blur of covered trays, napkins tucked under chins, cut-up meat loaf, bowls of quivering Jell-O and mushy peas, and other bowls of colored glop that were probably pureed vegetables and looked like baby food. Still, I was getting into it a little, not so freaked, because the work wasn’t hard. You just had to get over being creeped out, and then it was easy. Well, easier.
    So everything was going okay. Yeah, Mrs. Krauss was a jerk, but Peggy was okay. Lucy had been kind of sweet. I was feeling kind of good, actually—so that alone should’ve tipped me off that things were about to go really, really bad.

    I was on the last set of trays when