P. Parrish - An Unquiet Grave

“How long has he been here?”

“Since he was fifteen.”

“What’s going to happen to him?”

Alice stopped her sorting for a second, and when she resumed she didn’t seem to be looking at the files. “I don’t know,” she said. “I’ve been letting him sleep in one of the old beds, but I don’t know what’s going to happen to him when we lock the doors.”

A phone rang somewhere. Alice’s eyes went down the empty hallway. Finally, the phone stopped, the ring echoing in the hallway.

Alice looked back at Louis. “Please don’t tell anyone,” she said.

“Tell anyone what?”

“That I let Charlie stay here.”

When Louis didn’t answer, she bent down and got another empty box. She began stuffing the box with the files she had just sorted. For several minutes, they were both quiet, Louis watching her as she finished filling the second box. Then she picked it up and started toward the stack of boxes at the far wall. Louis picked up the other box and followed her.

She looked up at him in surprise when he deposited it next to the others.

“Phillip Lawrence, the man I’m working for, he’s my foster father,” Louis said. “He was in love with Claudia DeFoe. They were going to elope but Claudia’s mother interfered. Claudia tried to kill herself and her mother sent her here.”

Alice was quiet.

“She was only seventeen,” Louis added.

The phone began to ring again. This time Alice didn’t even look down the hall. She was looking hard at Louis, those keen blue eyes searching for a reason to trust him.

She walked back to the nurse’s station. Reaching behind for a coat, she put it on. “I can’t give you the records,” she said. “But if you want to see E Building, I’ll show it to you.”

Alice walked quickly, head bent against the wind, one hand holding the lapels of her wool coat closed.

“That was originally the tuberculosis sanitarium,” she said, pointing to a building on their left. “After the TB epidemics subsided, it was transformed into a laundry and sewing department.”

Louis glanced at it. Like all the buildings, it looked deserted, front door chained, windows dark.

“The smokestacks are the power plant. Everything was steam heated in the early days, and somewhere around the late twenties, it was reconstructed to provide heat, lights, and hot water to the whole institution.”

Louis paused for a second, turning almost a full circle. “How big is this place?”

“A hundred and eighty acres,” Alice said. “Over there was the bakery and kitchen, and beyond that, the fire-house and police station.”

“A police station?” Louis asked.

“Not like you would imagine,” she said. “More of a security force. They were trained to deal with the patients and, well, to be honest, the hospital didn’t want outsiders coming in unless they had to.”

They passed another brick building, three floors with dark, meshed windows. Alice saw him look up.

“That’s the POG building. It was a dormitory for the homeless men who wandered in every winter. In the old days, Hidden Lake would take in the homeless and let them out every spring. They called them POGs.”

“Pogs?”

“Poor Old Guys.” Alice walked on, her shoes crunching on the frosted grass. Louis followed, his eyes still scanning the grounds as he tried to imagine living inside the iron fence with no contact with the outside world, your mind muddled with drugs or sadness or unseen demons. And he thought about the soothing curl of the waves on the gulf and the endless shimmer of blue that he looked out at every day, and suddenly he could not imagine being without it.

“That’s E Building up ahead,” Alice said.

It was four stories and like the others, red brick with high chimneys, fronted by a plainer version of the administration building portico. All the windows on the second and third floors were barred, but the ground-floor ones were covered with heavy steel gratings. As they got closer, Louis could see that some of the ground-floor window gratings had been pried loose.

“Vandals,” Alice said as they went up the steps. “This building has been closed for over two years.”

She paused at the door and shifted her ring of keys to find the right one. It appeared to Louis that the original door might have been wooden but its replacement was heavy steel, with peeling paint that looked like some of the doors he had seen in prisons.

He glanced back. They were about a quarter mile from the main building and closer now to the heavy trees that abutted the back of the property. On the wind, he caught a hint of water and wondered if the lake was nearby.

“It’s stuck,” Alice said.

Louis used both hands to pull on the door and it opened slowly, the bottom scraping on the concrete. He followed Alice inside. She drew to a stop in the lobby.

“Oh my,” she said softly. “I didn’t know it was this bad.”

The cold air was thick with mildew and dust and something else that smelled medicinal, but aged. The only light came from two front windows, a feeble spray of gray that washed over a small desk. The grimy terrazzo floor was littered with paper. There was a streak of black spray paint on the wall.

Louis’s gaze drifted down the dark hallway. He could make out two elevators and farther down, double steel doors.

Alice turned to a stair well on her left, tilting her head up. “The elevators don’t work,” she said. “We’ll have to walk.”

Again, he followed, listening to the echo of their steps, inhaling that thin scent of medicine in the air. Alice paused at the landing between the first and second floors. She just stood there, a slight frown on her face.

“What’s the matter?” Louis asked.

She walked slowly to an exit door and peered out the small window. “Oh, nothing, really. Just something I remember,” she said.

She was still looking out the window, so Louis came to her side and glanced out the small grated window. It overlooked an exterior staircase and a weed-choked parking lot.

“I was a nurse when I first came here in 1982, and I was assigned to this building for two months,” Alice said. “I was new and this wasn’t the kind of place where you asked a lot of questions. But I remember one day, the head nurse told me to take a patient to this landing and wait with her.”

“What were you supposed to wait for?” Louis asked.

“I didn’t know. But I did as I was told and for ten minutes we just sat here on these steps, not moving or talking.”

“Then what happened?”

“This door opened,” Alice said, pointing. “And a man came through it with two little girls, about four and six. They called the woman Mommy and rushed to hug her. The woman really didn’t respond and barely raised her arms to hug them back, but the little girls didn’t seem to notice.”

Alice’s eyes drifted up the stairs. “You see, children weren’t allowed in here to visit. Their visit lasted fifteen minutes and then they were gone. I took the patient back to her bed and when I started to leave, she looked up at me and she thanked me for the children. I remember being surprised she even knew what had just happened, and I made sure I told the doctor the next day.”

“What happened to her?”

Alice’s eyes dipped to the third step. “The next day, the woman had forgotten all about her children and the family never came back. She died here a year later and was buried in the hospital cemetery.” Alice took a heavy breath. “I often think about those little girls and that moment they had with their mother.”

Alice looked directly at Louis. “But that’s really all any of us have in the end, isn’t it? Moments.”