CV

24

There it came, down the long corridor, crickety, crickety, crickety. Emily stopped, turned her head to listen.

“What’s the matter now?” said Jim.

“Don’t you hear it?"

“Hear what?”

“The grocery cart.” It was coming nearer, crickety, crickety.

Jim took her arm. “What are you talking about, for God’s sake?”

“It’s his grocery cart.” A tall, sour-smelling man was coming toward them down the corridor; the sound trailed behind him, ghostly, echoing. The man turned and went down a side corridor, and the sound went with him. Emily started to follow, but Jim was holding her arm.

“Whose grocery cart?”

“Danny’s. He’s here, he wants to tell us something.”

“Oh, Christ,” said Jim. He looked as if he were about to cry.

McNulty walked into the room where his patient was waiting, introduced himself, shook hands and sat down with his elbows on the desk. “You say it’s about your wife, Mr. Woodruff?”

Woodruff was in his mid-sixties, red-faced and white-haired; he looked like a man who had been prosperous most of his life, but there was something wrong with the look in his eyes. McNulty had seen that look before, in the eyes of people who had gone through some shattering loss; it was a wounded look, hard to describe—the scleras a little darkened, maybe, a pinched expression in the eyelids.

“She’s hearing things,” Woodruff said. He was holding onto one hand with the other, hard enough to make the fingers turn red and yellow.

“What kind of things does she hear?”

Woodruff swallowed. “A grocery cart. She hears a grocery cart coming down the hall behind some guy, and then she wants to follow him.”

“How many times has this happened?”

“Twice. The first time was yesterday. Then she heard it again this morning when we were on our way to breakfast, and she followed this same guy into the restaurant. Then we ordered, and halfway through breakfast, this guy fell over out of his chair.”

McNulty perked up. “Where was this?”

“In the Madison Restaurant, where we always eat.”

“About nine-thirty, was it?”

“Yeah, about that.”

McNulty doodled a big check mark on his pad. “That’s interesting. Then what?”

“Then she heard the noise again when somebody else got up from another table. A woman. And she got up too and followed her out. I had to talk her out of getting in the elevator. I took her back to the room and made her take a pill.”

“What kind of medication is she on?”

“Valium, and some other stuff for sleeping pills, I forget what it is.”

McNulty made another doodle, a spiral this time. “Has she ever had any mental disturbance before?”

“Yeah,” said Woodruff, and looked down at his hands. “She had a nervous breakdown after our boy died in seventy-three. She was in the hospital for five months.”

“What kind of treatment did she get there, do you know?”

“Insulin.”

“Insulin shock?”

“Yes.”

“Surprised to hear that,” McNulty said, and looked at his doodles. “What about afterwards—did she ever hear things until now?”

“No. She’s always been nervous. She’s a nervous woman.”

“Now,” McNulty said, “what about the grocery cart? That seems like a funny thing to hear. Does it mean anything to you?”

Woodruff did not answer for a moment. When McNulty looked at him, tears were spilling over his eyelids. “Yeah,” he said hoarsely. “Yeah. It was Danny.”

Danny was their youngest, born when Emily was thirty-five. When the boy was about two years old, Jim found an abandoned grocery cart in a weedy lot down the street. There was nothing on it to show where it belonged, so he brought it home just to keep it from being an eyesore. He thought he might give it to the handyman, or something, but when Danny saw it, he claimed it for his own. It was his favorite toy. There was something wrong with the wheels; they made a cricking sound when he pushed it, around and around through the house. “At least you always know where he is,” Jim had said.

That summer of 1973 Jim had bought a big new motor home, and it was all packed for their vacation. A neighbor, Walt Singleton, was standing at the end of the driveway to help Jim when he backed the motor home out of the garage. Emily had gone into the house to get some last-minute thing, and he had tired of waiting for her. He remembered the new-leather smell of the upholstery, the brightness of the sunlight through the blue-tinted windshield. He remembered starting the engine and listening to its confident purr.. Watching Walt in the rearview mirror, he put the gearshift into reverse and drifted slowly backward. Then he felt a bump, and heard Walt scream.

“Doc, that was twenty-five years ago,” he said. “What the hell, can’t we ever—” His voice broke.