Kate Wilhelm - Clear And Convincing Proof

Besides, it would be temporary. As soon as she got a loan, and finished fixing up the house, she would sell it. She didn’t want a house and a job; she wanted some money for the first time in her life. Sell it, take a long vacation, buy a new car…As she scrubbed away grime accumulated over many years, she came to appreciate the fine woodwork, the lovely cabinets, good cedar-lined closets, lead-glass-fronted bookcases in the living room. Two hundred thousand, she told herself. She could endure anything, even teaching fifth grade, for that kind of payback.

More to the point, she would need an income. First she had to spruce herself up, she decided, fingering her hair, lank and mousy brown. She was forty years old and felt fifty, and suspected she looked it. Start with the hair, she told herself; she could not volunteer for anything, much less apply for a teaching position looking like a charwoman.

The next week she put in her application with the school district and then drove to the Kelso-McIvey Rehabilitation Clinic, which turned out to be four blocks from her house. There was a large parking lot in front of the two-story building, a high hedge and a covered walk from a wide drive. A big van under the cover had a mechanism lowering a patient in a wheelchair.

Erica passed it and entered the building, which was not at all institutional. Baskets held potted plants and more plants in ceramic pots were on the reception desk. A teddy bear leaned against a pot with a basket of peppermints nearby. A pretty, blond young woman at the reception desk greeted her and, on hearing her name, said, “Mrs. Boardman will be free in a minute or two. She’s expecting you. You want to sit over there and wait? I’ll tell her you’re here.” She wore a name tag: Annie. She motioned toward a waiting room where a few other people were seated, and then smiled at the patient an attendant was wheeling in.

“Mrs. Daniels! How nice to see you. How’s it going? You look wonderful!”

Erica was not kept waiting long. Annie beckoned her and led the way down a brightly lit corridor, chatting as she walked. “Boy, can they use volunteers here. Half the people you see working are volunteers, in fact.”

“Well, I won’t have a lot of free time,” Erica said.

“Ten minutes makes a difference,” Annie said. “Here we are.”

She tapped on a door, opened it and moved aside for Erica to enter. A tall, lean woman rose from her desk as they entered. She looked to be sixty and was dressed in chinos and a T-shirt. Her hair was gray, straight and very short, almost too severe, but bright blue earrings and a matching necklace softened her appearance, and her smile was warm and friendly as she came around the desk to take Erica’s hand.

“Ms. Castle, how do you do? I’m Naomi Boardman. Thanks, Annie. Will you be around for a bit?”

“Until four-thirty. I’ll be at the front desk until Bernie gets back from the dentist. That should be any minute now.” She smiled at Erica and left.

Then, seated in two visitors’ chairs, Naomi Boardman and Erica talked. It was not a real interview, Erica came to realize very fast. Things had already been decided. Naomi made it clear that they wanted her.

“When I brought it up with Darren—he’s our head physical therapist—we agreed that it’s a marvelous idea, to have someone read to the patients. They work so hard, harder than any of the staff, and they are exhausted by the end of the day. This would be relaxing, and even comforting, we believe.”

The patients varied in age, she said, from young children to octogenarians, suffering the effects of bicycle accidents, strokes, congenital birth defects, fire, brain tumors—all kinds of trauma. Although most of them were outpatients, there was also a fifteen-bed hospital on the upper floor. Sometimes it was filled with a waiting list, other times not. At present, she said, they had eleven patients up there.

Feeling a growing disquietude, Erica asked, “But who would I be reading to? What age group? How many?”

“Well, we won’t know that until you begin. Maybe four, maybe ten. All ages. And anything you would find suitable for your fifth grade classes would work fine.” She smiled at Erica. “You’ll have a lot of latitude. It won’t be so much what you read, you see, as the fact that you will be reading to them. And you have such a nice voice.”

It was arranged. She would begin on Wednesday, starting at five in the evening. Naomi hesitated over the hour. It was best for the patients because some of them were so fretful by then, restless and exhausted, but it might be hard for Erica. Not at all, Erica assured her. Then Naomi called Annie back and asked her to show Erica the facility. “Welcome to the Kelso-McIvey Rehabilitation Center,” Naomi said.

“I’ve never heard anyone call it that,” Annie confided, as she started the tour. “It’s just the rehab clinic. Down that way are the therapy rooms. We won’t go in while they’re being used. This way to the garden. Darren thinks it’s a good idea to get people out in the open as much as possible.”

Erica saw little of the clinic that day, but later she came to appreciate the many ways the curse of institution had been obliterated. One wall held children’s art, colorful, fanciful, honest. Another displayed whimsical figures from Disney or Dr. Suess. Dorothy with her steadfast companions on the yellow brick road. Superheroes. Christopher Robin and Pooh. There was a ceiling-to-floor wall of greeting cards: Valentine’s Day, Christmas cards, birthday cards, thank-you cards. There were plants throughout, in baskets, brass planters, hanging from baskets, on wall brackets. The visitors’ waiting room had a game table, large-screen television, current magazines, a jigsaw puzzle in progress on a table. She laughed later when she followed arrows from the children’s ward to the upper lounge. The arrows began to go this way and that, a drunkard’s walk trail, and then climbed a wall, ending abruptly. A splotch on the floor was the start of the arrows from there, more or less steady to the lounge. She learned that Naomi had been the decorator, and it all worked delightfully.

The offices were like offices everywhere with the usual furnishings, but when she viewed the therapy rooms later, she caught in her breath. Medieval torture chambers, she thought, mortify the flesh and save the soul. But here the plan was to save the body. Tables with straps dangling, holding curiously shaped brackets, cups, straps. A device that appeared to be designed to support body parts—legs, arms, torsos. Several treadmills, walkways with rails, one with a contraption that was like a rescue seat she had seen on television hauling a person from a sinking ship. A small swimming pool in a room so hot and humid it was like a steam bath. A mechanism there apparently could lift a patient and lower him or her into the water, then fish the patient out again.

On that first day, she caught glimpses only as she was escorted to the garden, screened on three sides by shrubbery. It was laid out in such a way, Annie explained, that each section of the path was a particular length, a quarter of a mile, a third of a mile, an eighth. The whole thing, if you covered every path, zigzagging around, would be two miles, with a waterfall at one end and steps going up to it on both sides. There was a koi pond up there, with a couple of benches, a nice place to relax and watch the fish. Apparently it was simply decorative, but that was deceptive, she said; Darren knew that one of the hardest tasks some patients encountered was going up and down steps. Everything had been laid out by Darren, she said, and a landscape company had planted it and maintained it.

“For the most part, you can’t see one path from any other one,” Annie said. “There could be half a dozen patients out here, and they’d be invisible to one another. All Darren’s doing.”