Rachel Alexander 04 - Lady Vanishes

Tootsie Roll and the size of a Mr. Frostee truck. I asked where I might find Venus. But she wasn’t answering me. She had something else on her mind. She was scowling, looking down at Dashiell.
    “He can’t be in here,” she said. “How’d you get in here with him anyway?”
    “He’s a—”
    Then I surprised both of us. I began to choke up, tears running down my cheeks, no words coming out, though I know I was trying to tell her that Dashiell was a registered therapy dog.
    “He’s a cool one, isn’t he? He won’t jump on the bed, will he?”
    I shook my head.
    “Therapy dog,” she read off his tag. She frowned at me. “You won’t let him near the IV?”
    “Uh-uh.”
    “Okay. Follow me.” She looked at Dashiell again. “You, too. And mind your manners, you hear?”
    Venus was in one of those curtained cubicles, barely bigger than the bed and full of machines that looked as if they ought to be on a UFO.
    She hasn’t awakened, the nurse told me as she slid the curtain back, they couldn’t be sure she would, and I had fifteen minutes.
    Another New York conversation.
    Who was I going to bother, I thought, sitting there and watching a machine breathing for Venus?
    She must have thought the same thing when she looked at the expression on my face. She flapped her big hand at me. “You can sit awhile,” she said. But she was frowning again. “But pull yourself together,” she said, straightening out the part of the blanket that covered Venus’s feet. “Do you know what she’s picking up? No, you don’t. So wipe your eyes. We don’t need that kind of negative energy in this room.”
    She waited.
    “That’s better. Don’t you be afraid to hold her hand. She won’t break. You can touch her.” She nodded. “Yes, ma’am. Talking’s good, too. Not just any kind, something interesting. You can’t expect a person to want to listen if you’re boring them to death. You need to engage her mind,” she told me, pointing to her own temple. “Let me tell you something, honey, there’s a shitload we don’t know about what’s going on with this girl. You get my point?”
    She wheeled around, her white shoes squeaking on the freshly mopped floor, parting the curtain and disappearing. I told Dashiell to lie down and reached for Venus’s hand.
    “You should have seen Samuel’s class today,” I told her, “you would have loved it. The night I went back late, you know, to snoop, remember, I told you about that? Anyway, when I got to Harbor View, I worked out this game with Dashiell, a sort of ring-around-the-rosy thing. And this afternoon, Sammy and I taught it to the kids.
    “Cora and Dora, instead of falling down, because of course they couldn’t do that, unless they were willing to risk breaking something, they bent their heads into their laps. Cora covered her eyes, too, as if she were playing peekaboo. Of course, Dora gave her hell for that one. Dora was having herself one fine day. She could have passed for a chick in her early eighties, she was so with it today.
    “I got to talk to Cora while I was showing her how to play and tried to get her to tell me what she saw the day Harry was killed. You were right, Venus. She didn’t say anything helpful. All she did was tell me about the naps she had to take with Dora when they were kids, how their mother would fly into a rage if they left their shoes on and dirtied the sheets. She spoke of it as if it were yesterday.
    “But I had to give it a try, just in case. Sometimes the smallest clue, just a hint, can set you in the right direction, set you thinking the way you should be in order to get the answers you need. So you try everything. Just the way you do with the kids.”
    You ring every bell, Marty said once, talking about the cops looking for a witness. If there’s the slimmest chance in the world of getting a piece of the puzzle, you go for it. You have to, he said. That’s the job.
    “The princess kept losing her crown when she leaned forward, then putting it back on by herself. That was a sight to see. Molly finally found her a couple of bobby pins. I haven’t seen those things in years,” I said, remembering that my grandmother Sonya used gray ones, one on each side, and gray hairpins to hold her hair in a bun at the nape of her neck. Grandmothers don’t look like that anymore, bunned old ladies in orthopedic shoes and support hose. Now grandmothers go to the gym and pump iron. “I didn’t know they still made them, bobby