“Your mother just won’t admit she takes an afternoon nap. Mrs. Goldblum lives on the other side of the garbage chute. Honest. Besides, good medical jokes are scarce as hen’s teeth. And what else can I tell our daughter the Doctor?”
“I think she’s heard enough jokes for one night,” Flo said. “We have to let the poor girl get some sleep. You do sound tired, dear. We’ll call again on Saturday. Or if you feel like talking, call anytime.”
“Can’t wait to see you, doll,” her father said.
Rebecca lay back in bed, exhausted, but couldn’t sleep. It was comforting to hear their voices. Yet she couldn’t help feeling that everything in her life had turned upside-down again. The sense of vulnerability when David died, the aloneness, stole back into her life like a phantom. She tossed and flailed in her bed. The air in the room was so close she could barely breathe. She was suffocating in her own bed. Then she realized that the door was shut — she never closed her bedroom door, something was lurking behind it, something she almost recognized.
Suddenly someone was pounding her front door with ferocity. They pummelled and banged with unreasonable force until Rebecca checked outside the window, wondering if she could climb down the two floors to the ground. The dark outside was impenetrable. How would she get down? It would be like falling into an abyss. They were yelling something unintelligible downstairs so she opened her bedroom door to hear better. Though she knew the bedroom was upstairs, the front door had somehow moved directly across the hall and now she knew terror because it was brutally clear that she couldn’t escape.
“¡Abra la puerta!” screamed a man’s voice. “¡Abra la puerta!” The pounding continued.
She tried her utmost not to approach the door but something pulled her there, an old curiosity, an ancient fate.
“Who’s there?” she asked, her own voice echoing in the hall.
Hard fists answered her. “¡Abra la puerta!”
“I know what you want and I’m not coming.” Even as the words spilled out, she watched her own hands betray her and open the deadbolt on the door. Her own hands.
Five men with guns fell on her and pinned her arms behind her back. Everything was in shadow. “Okay, bitch, where is she?”
Terrified, she cried, “I don’t know!” But on the couch, barely visible in the dark, lay a woman facing the other way, unknowable.
“Lying bitch!” they said.
Then one man stepped forward, his face still obscured by the shadows. “My colleagues are crude, doctor. They like to hurt people. Why not cooperate, just help us get the old woman the way you helped us get Goldie.”
Rebecca gasped, shrieked toward the shadow-man. “It wasn’t me. I loved her.”
One of them was about to hit her across the face when the phone rang. They all stared at it, until one of the men said not to answer it; another said she must answer it because someone probably knew she was home. A third man picked up the receiver but said nothing. As he moved in the dark room, a slat of light from somewhere found his face. It was Feldberg.
Her eyelids burst open. The back of her neck felt damp and cool from sweat evaporating into the morning. The noise of the phone beside her was relentless.
She picked it up automatically, but she couldn’t quite recall what day it was or why she felt so awful. All she remembered was the dark outline of the woman floating on the couch in her dream.
“Rebecca? Are you all right? Have you seen the paper?”
Rebecca blinked at the clock on the mantle. Seven-thirty. The woman on the couch — Rebecca knew now. It had been Chana.
“Are you awake?” said the voice.
“Oh, Iris, I’m sorry. I should’ve called you ... I didn’t think....”
“What on earth happened?” asked Iris. “It says Mrs. Kochinsky is dead.”
Rebecca knew this stretch of Bathurst Street from her adolescence when she had frequented the Jewish “Y” north of Sheppard Avenue. For several summers she and her friends had spent whole afternoons reclining around the outdoor pool meeting unsuitable boys. Twenty years later, the “Y” was still there. She was glad to be driving against traffic in the morning rush hour as she caught a glimpse of the 1960s white stone building, updated, added on to. It was sprawled on the edge of a ravine that extended from south of Sheppard all the way up past the northern boundaries of the city, a greenbelt along whose bottom groove snaked the Don River. Only a river could stop developers from paving over the grass from end to end. No matter that in some places the riverbed spanned a mere four feet. There was no way of getting around a river, its inevitable pull, like gravity, toward the lake, so one had to accept it gracefully and incorporate it into the plan. The ravine this April was still pallid, the trees bare, but there was an expectancy in the branches, a knowledge of green beneath the dormant grass that Rebecca wished she could be part of.
She had begun to feel a connection before Goldie died. She couldn’t think of her as Mrs. Kochinsky anymore; she had gotten too close for that. Rebecca had been almost optimistic, as far as that went; not very far considering the state of her psyche. But it had all flattened out. No, not flattened. Sunk. Declined. She was going to have to catch herself on the decline, or someone else would. The man who killed Goldie, whoever he was. She had to find out what she could now. She was hoping against hope that Chana could tell her something. Goldie had visited her sister frequently. Maybe she’d said something about the man she thought was going to kill her.
Once past Finch, Rebecca kept her eye out for Sunnydale Terrace, the only other nursing home she knew of on Bathurst besides Baycrest Hospital. Baycrest was the model in Toronto, the queen of geriatric medicine, not a waiting-room for death like those places usually were. She hated Feldberg for his cheapness. Poorer people were in Baycrest.
The sign came into view announcing a two-storey box of a building, probably the same vintage as the “Y,” only not updated. The red brick had lasted the decades well enough, but the place had a desultory look to it, sun-faded curtains stretched crookedly across the upstairs windows.
Rebecca stepped up to the reception desk where a slim dark-haired woman sat in an exaggerated upright position listening on the phone. A plump blonde in a short skirt was passing behind her.
“Excuse me,” Rebecca said.
The blonde looked at her but hardly stopped moving. Rebecca had seen the look before. Professionals in hospitals saved it for people they didn’t need to pay attention to. That meant everyone except doctors. There was another expression altogether they saved for doctors.
“I’m Dr. Temple,” Rebecca said crisply, delighted to see the woman stop in her tracks and rearrange her face. There, that was the expression she wanted. A bit of deference. “I’m looking for Chana Feldberg.”
The blonde smiled a tight polite smile as she came around the desk. “Mrs. Feldberg is up in her room. Is this a professional visit, Doctor, or are you a relative?”
“I was her sister’s physician. Mrs. Kochinsky. Have the police come by to speak to Mrs. Feldberg?”
The blonde put her stubby hands together in front of her. “I was horrified to hear about what happened. It shocked us all here. The police called this morning but I explained Mrs. Feldberg’s condition to them and they left it up to us to deal with it.”
“And what is her condition?” Rebecca asked, getting a bad feeling from the woman’s tone of voice.
“Her behaviour has regressed. We think there’s some dementia involved. Maybe Alzheimer’s. Most of the time she won’t verbalize and when she does, it’s in Yiddish. If we didn’t feed her, she wouldn’t eat. Even then, she’ll only eat in her room, refuses to socialize. It’s difficult for the staff.”
There was