John found Anne after he had his share of sightseeing the berm he had scrambled over back in ‘72, when he was sixteen and obliterated, in the ditch he scaled when he yanked himself out of the rear window of the VW Squareback and waded through the black water to the shore.

Now, glaring in the high sun with his hands in his pockets, he gave himself a satisfied humph and walked the same way he had walked that night, alongside the ditch—shallower than he remembered, dried up too. Sixteen year old him made it all the way home and sloshed through the front door. Mom and Dad just stared as he spoke. Joy riding again. Practicing power sliding with a fifth of Imperial for a passenger. The car was narrow, prone to rolling.

He meandered back toward the edge of the ditch as he strolled, and while imagining the way Mom turned back to her reading unperturbed, he found her. She was dumped in a pile, her sundress, black shorts and pixie brown hair half-muddy and damp from the low humid air. One hand was slung over her side and curled up with rigor, except for her pointer finger, outstretched in timid protest.

Had to put em to use fore i chucked em

For the past few months, though, as the time between bed and her chair and the toilet and meals and the hallway that smelled like shit—all of it smelled like shit—began to run together, she came to expect turning around to see Walter leaning against a doorframe or sitting nonchalantly on her TV with his legs open.

“Walter,” her voice echoed in the toilet bowl. “Leave me alone.”

She had been trying to gather the strength to stand up for something close to a half hour, unwilling to face the pain it would cause in her hips when she did, and Walter had been coaxing her for some time in between. He always came to hurry her along. He coaxed her sweetly, though, mixed with an air of expectation. She remembered the tone from the colder nights they spent in that apartment on the Floridian intracoastal. Light shone through the floorboards at the first blush of morning, and a procession of gulls would thread by over the thin roof, their calls sharp in the prevailing ocean wind, flying from an oystered sandbar over the center of town and the interstate to the landfill on the edge of the wilderness to the west.

There was a banging on the other bathroom door, Dorothy Schoenfeather’s, with whom she shared the facilities. Geraldine felt the vibration and it startled her. She glanced around, slightly frantic, as though for a moment there was something she needed to gather up all at once and steal away with, maybe her bright blue and bundled denim pants, or the sheet of red twist ties peeking out of the magazine rack regurgitating a lump of Readers’ Digests. It occurred suddenly to her that that thing was herself. She growled to Dorothy that the bathroom was, in fact, occupied. Dorothy said no shit it is.

They did not communicate very well, nor much at all, for that matter. The fact that Geraldine was perfectly deaf made it all the more difficult, though even if her hearing was fine it would have helped nothing for cultivating a relationship. 

Dorothy was a very slight woman, 4’10,’’ an inch shorter than Geraldine, despite Geraldine’s terrible posture. She had been in the home for two years longer than her. Her daughter-in-law, Rebecca, was her only visitor. She made it her pastime to invent and relay more and more complex forms of abuse to Rebecca, all carried out by the nurses at the behest of the on-call physician, a hairy and gold chain-laden man in his late 50s, Saul Peters. He seemed to her to be a most surreptitiously vile man, and suffice it to say the fancy got away with her. Most recently, she claimed that they hung her by the heels in her closet door, flagellated her with heavy duty rubber bands on the softest parts of her arms and misted her with white wine vinegar from a spray bottle. Every time she complained, Rebecca would tell her that she’d be sure to speak to someone about it, remind her to follow her medication schedule, kiss her on the forehead and leave in a waft of fruity skin lotion.

A woman with hair like wispy cloudcover and a body like a half-empty bean bag chair sat forward on her elbows in her shared bathroom, arguing in mumbles with her deceased second husband, Walter, who sat with his legs crossed and bare ass dipped in the sink. He watched her knowingly, rolling a Marlboro 100 between his thumb and pointer finger. The smoke curled circuitously around his gaunt frame like a boa constrictor, leading eventually into the whirring exhaust fan over her door. His breath between each drag was labored and deliberate. Had Geraldine looked up at him, she didn’t have to of course, she’d have seen the look on his face: a plaintive impatience, like a parent with errands watching their three year old try to tie their shoes for the fiftieth time.

“Darlin’,” he said with a long wheeze, ceremoniously ashing onto her roommate’s side of the vanity, “I’ve waited long enough.” 

Her response to Walter was bitter and dismissive, and would’ve been imperceptible, had anyone actually been listening.

Walter always appeared to her naked, which on the first few occasions was quite the shock, though it never really wore off. She would nearly roll out of bed in fright, or have to catch herself against a wall, sliding weakly to the floor and calling for a nurse, who would come to find her in tears and stammering about naked men and Walter and the angel she saw over a family friend’s deathbed who looked like Mr. Clean. This would invariably hurt her artificial hips—one broken on Thanksgiving four years ago and the other on the following Christmas—and she would admonish Walter for startling her and causing such pain with pouty, mumbling winces for the rest of the day. The nurses readily ignored her, but this was mostly because whenever she spoke to them it was usually about how wasteful the cleaning ladies were being, taking up a garbage bag with 3 cracker wrappers and a half empty apple sauce in it. It simply made no sense to her.

“Walter,” Her voice echoed in the toilet bowl, “let me alone.” 

He tromped through his apartment door, beginning to feel the heady first signs of the spins.

He went into his room and fell face first into his pillow, but the spins let him tumble end over end like a tomahawk through his pillow and his sheets and his mattress and bed frame and the lower three floors and the bedrooms of strangers and the apartment’s foundation and on into the roiling center of the earth and he slept.

Wendell Berry IV