All for a chance to sweep shit up. He took one more drag, picked a shred of tobacco from his bottom lip, and went inside.
He walked the busy halls looking for the elevator. People hustled in all directions, getting closer to getting things done. He rode up to the fifth floor with a group of silent nurses, wanting another cigarette immediately. He hadn’t been back to the hospital since the last time he’d gone to see Pete in the ICU. Problem was, the whole hospital looked and smelled the same—it had that pale green, clinical smell of fear and business. Whatever else was there, that hospital green was there beneath it, in the sheets on the bed and the tiles on the wall. The pale green of last hope, lukewarm meals in the cafeteria, and visiting hours ending.
He was going to have to knock this the fuck off.
The custodial office had told him where to go. Down the hall, fifth floor, east wing. Ronny knocked on the door while turning the doorknob and stepping into the room. An older man in a lab coat sat with his back to the door, hunched over something, studying something with a magnifying glass.
“I’ll be right with you,” the Doctor muttered in a graveled voice, marking something down, shaking his head about it, and marking again.
“Now—” the Doctor turned to Ronny at the door while shoveling his glasses back on his face, “You’re—Ron, is it?”
He shook Ronny’s hand firmly. No nonsense. The Doctor sized him up, and Ronny wondered what he knew, what preceded him. It couldn’t be good, because Ronny had a reputation. At best, he was considered a loner. Difficult was how they put it, meaning Not terribly ambitious. But he’d found out that what had happened to Pete gave him a free pass. He screwed up, and the neighborhood wives discussed it over coffee in well-appointed parlors, sharing news of his family’s latest grief, and came to the same conclusion: But his brother died, and then his mother left and his father is not quite right and what a terrible shame. They’d always agree, pleased their own sons and daughters were practicing law and lobbying for rain forest protection and joining the Peace Corps in Uganda or Siberia or Kazakhstan, thankful Ronny was not their son.
“They’ve told me you will be, custodially speaking, in charge of my lab. And we need to keep this lab running, tight as a ship,” the Doctor said. He shuffled to the back of the room, waving that Ronny should follow.
“So, Ron, this—” he handed over a key on a metal loop which he pulled from his pocket, and gestured to the shelves of cleaning supplies “—this is the broom closet.”
And that was how Ronny became a janitor. He was issued a navy blue work shirt, a basic limited access entry /exit security badge, and a series of keys to unlock the doors of fifth floor east. Custodianship was pretty close to what he’d expected. He’d banked on the long, scuff-marked halls and the duct-taped mop handle, the routine of back and forth meandering while others rushed past, heads bent, coats flapping their knees. He’d banked on the antiseptic liquid dispensed from an industrial-sized container into an industrial-sized bucket, filled and dumped twice to cover the length of the corridor. He carried a set of master keys hooked to the loop of his work pants. Twenty-seven keys for twenty-seven office /closet /cabinet /washroom doors, plus the door to the south end fire escape. They jangled when he mopped, pushed the broom, sat down, stood up. Every small clanging reminding him of the series of tasks to which he’d committed. He got two smoke breaks and a lunch break, during which he stayed out of the hospital cafeteria and opted instead for the nearby diner where he could eat for two dollars and the ashtrays were shaped, for no particular reason, like flounder.
It was as ordinary a job as Ronny had ever had. He shuffled down the bleak hallway, counting squares of tile, dustpan in tow; shuffled back. It was routine. It was solitary. Not many patients on the floor. Every few days a stretcher would get wheeled through, empty, a nurse headed to the X-ray lab one floor down. A few times a visitor had gotten lost on the way to a patient’s room, and Ronny had to redirect them to the elevators, but there wasn’t much need, otherwise, for anyone to talk to him, or for him to ever speak.
Generic hour after generic hour, he wore the day out in increments of light physical labor, and though it was boring, at least he was moving around and not sitting there staring at blocks of cement anymore. And what more was it meant to be, really, besides what it was: a day job, a way to spend the hours he’d have to get through anyhow. Because if he wasn’t at the hospital he’d have to be somewhere else. No way was he going to stay at home with his dad there, milling around in his old suits, lining up plastic army men on the mantle, shooting finger guns at them from across the room. Forget it. For now he might as well tab the scale and properly dispose of broken iodine vials.
When he went down for his break, he went out the parking deck side and crossed the lot to the benches that bordered a kind of fake, hospital-land park. He smoked and thought about her. The antique situation of her herringbone knee socks, the sweatshirt with the neck cut out that slipped, showing off part of her shoulder when she moved. Not something Ronny would ever notice but everything about Vivian was distinctive in a quiet, offhand way. Probably lots of the time she could be a wallflower, plain as any anonymous person standing shyly in a crowded room, with her monochromatic, slightly ill-fitting clothes; her peach Chapsticked lips. She looked like she lived in a different universe than the girls he knew and had grown used to in all their decorations: decaled palm tree and checkerboard nails and dangling earrings stacked at varying lengths up and down their perfect ears. Definitely sexy, he wouldn’t deny it, but Vivian’s unadorned loveliness was stranger. Out of place. He found himself getting distracted by thoughts of her throughout the day, as he polished the floor, inventoried the Doctor’s scales, and took the stairs two at a time down to the basement. At least it kept him from tallying up all the things he might want to set on fire.
Vivian Merritt Foster drowned in Good Hope Lake. During the heat wave, late afternoon, solo captaining the boat down to the basin where the old prison barracks were, now mostly rotted to shacks. Around here, people joyride boats, leave the cars alone. Mostly ends okay but the storm broke out, no warning, and this boat wasn’t a boat with a proper cabin but a skiff you shove right out of on rough waters, which came, rolling waves that pounded the docks—too far off—and the vessel. The rain pounded the splintering boat and the dreggy lake and went on and on and the lightning diagrammed the smokestacks through the dark, slashed the treetops. Vivian couldn’t swim. She is survived by one known brother, Seth Everett Foster, most recently of California. She appears to have struggled to pen a letter to dry land in her last minutes, though no evidence thereof remains.
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