Lisa Miscione - Twice

“I don’t want to be rude,” said Dax, “but you’re blind. How could you know that?”

“If anything, I’m at an advantage,” she said. “You two stumbled through the tunnels, not used to the dark. I heard you coming ten minutes before you arrived. Darkness is my natural habitat. I’ve only got these lights on for visitors. Besides, I’ve been down here longer than most. People come to me for advice, with gossip. I know everything that goes on.”

Jeff and Dax exchanged a look. Jeff’s disbelief was palpable, but Dax shrugged. Jeff stared at the woman, who he thought looked a little bit like Yoda without the ears. He didn’t question her sanity; he could tell by the way she spoke that she was as sound as either of them, educated, intelligent.

“Well, then… where is he?”

“I’ll have to take you there myself. If you don’t mind following behind an old blind woman,” she said with a raspy noise that was somewhere between a cough and a giggle.

“And what do you want for your help?” asked Dax. In his experience, people like this never did anything for nothing. It was the way of the streets.

She cocked her head a bit. “Young man, I just want him out of the tunnels. People are afraid of him. They call him The Virus because that one’s no good for anyone. No one’s safe with him down here. People start coming after him, and we’re all gonna be in trouble. It starts with you two, next thing you know it will be the police, the FBI. This hole,” she said, waving her cane, “is the only place I have in the world. I lose this and I have nothing.”

Dax nodded. “Well, let’s go, then.”

The three of them exited her nest and continued down the tunnel that had led them to her home. Violet led the way and Dax trailed behind them. The going was slow and the darkness and stench became less and less tolerable the deeper they got. The flashlight Dax carried created a narrow beam of light, but there were so many edges and corners it didn’t illuminate that it didn’t make the blackness any less menacing. After a while, Jeff lost track of the turns and stairways they had taken and said a silent prayer that this woman could be trusted enough to lead them back.

Though she walked with a limp and a cane, Violet didn’t stumble and grope in the darkness as Dax and Jeff did, didn’t seem startled by the sounds of rats or voices in the distance. She was home and they were not; she could see and they were blind.

“How did you wind up down here, Violet?” asked Jeff, after they’d been walking awhile. She’d pushed off the offer of his arm and lumbered up ahead of him. She sighed lightly as if she’d been expecting the question but was reluctant to answer it.

“How did you not wind up down here, Jeffrey?” she asked in return. “There’s no easy answer to that question, is there? How many decisions little and big did you make every day of your life, how many factors known and unknown to you, within and out of your control, led to your life being what it is today?”

“I never thought of it that way,” he answered, chastened.

“Why would you? You don’t seem like the kind of person who has a whole lot of reason to question your decisions… and maybe not a whole lot of time, even if you had reason. Me, I find that I have plenty of both. Reasons and time, that is,” she said without bitterness, her voice little more than a whisper.

“So what did you come up with?” Jeff could sense Dax moving in closer to hear the answer.

“Short version: I was born blind, like I told you, in the late thirties. Part of a large Irish family living in a railroad flat in the East Village. I grew up, got married, was a teacher at the Helen Keller School for the Blind. My husband, Patrick, worked in the Bowery sweatshops making men’s shirts. He handled all our finances and I trusted him to do it, even though he was a drunk and a gambler. I thought that all our lives we were putting money away for our old age. I had a pension, insurance. But when he died about ten years ago, I learned that he had drunk and gambled away every penny, even going so far as to take a loan against my pension. It was only a matter of months after his funeral that I was on the street.”

“No family?” asked Dax.

“None I could turn to,” she said quietly.

“But there have to be programs set up to help “Jeff began.

Violet held up a crooked hand. “I won’t live in a shelter or a hospital where they treat me like an invalid. I need my own space. This is not so bad… for a blind person. At least it’s quiet. I got people who bring me everything I need, a comfortable place to sleep. I’m safer down here than I would be up there.”

“I could help you, Violet,” said Jeff. He thought of his own mother, who’d died five years back from pancreatic cancer surrounded by loved ones. If she had to die, he was happy she’d died like that, knowing that she was loved, that her life had meant something. He would rather have died himself than imagine her like Violet, living in a coffin.

“You’re a nice boy,” she said, not turning around to face him. “But I’m like one of those recidivists. You know, those guys in jail who bitch and moan about how bad they want out of prison. But then they get out and they don’t even know what to do with themselves. They go right back. I don’t think I could live another life.”

“Well, you get in touch with me through Dax and Danielle if you change your mind. You help me get Jed McIntyre and I’ll owe you my life,” he said, putting a hand on her shoulder.

She shrugged him off. “I don’t like to be touched,” she said sternly.

“Sorry,” answered Jeff, turning around to look at Dax, who lifted his hands with a grin. He pointed a finger to his temple and made a circle in the air mouthing, Crazy . Jeff shook his head.

“We’re coming into Rain’s territory now,” she said. “Stay close to me and keep your mouths shut.”

“Who’s Rain?” asked Dax.

“Someone down here that you don’t want to fuck with.”

Dax gave a smug little laugh and Jeff checked the Glock at his waist.

“ What did you say?” asked Lydia as the ground and the room around her seemed to disappear. She looked at the wretched man before her and he looked back with a lascivious leer. She wanted to leap across the room and strangle him, but she kept her place by the guard. The room suddenly felt hot and small and she wanted nothing more than to leave except to know why this little psycho thought she was Jed McIntyre’s girlfriend.

“What are you talking about, Jetty?” asked Ford, the sweet lulling tone he’d been using to coax information out of Jetty gone, cast off like a bad disguise. His voice was a fist poised to take care of Jetty’s few remaining teeth.

Jetty turned to look at him in surprise, the smile he wore flickering into a worried frown. He looked sadly at the bag of candy and cigarettes that Ford still had under his hand.

“J-J-J-Jed,” he stammered, “had pictures of her. He talked about her all the time. Said she was waiting for him to get out.”

“When did you have the opportunity to talk to him?” asked Lydia, who had always imagined Jed like Hannibal Lecter, bound, isolated, with a mask over his face. At least that’s how she liked to think of him.

“During art therapy,” said Jetty quietly. “He only drew pictures of you.”

Lydia had to suppress a laugh, even though there was nothing funny about any of it. The ridiculousness of allowing Jed to have art therapy where he fed his obsession by drawing pictures of her was a testament to the idiocy of the psychiatric profession in general and this hospital in particular. No wonder he’d been allowed to get away. “You bastards,” said Lydia under her breath.