A Trick of the Light

There’s a hole in the wall that no one else can see.

It’s five or so feet off the ground, right in the middle of one of the wreaths of faded pink roses on the hallway wallpaper, and small enough that you could fit your finger in it. If you were foolish, that is, which Lou isn’t. She hasn’t lived this many years to go poking into a hole when she doesn’t know what’s on the other side. There could be rats, or razor blades, or something even worse.

What might be worse? That’s for other people to find out. Certainly not her.

She’s tried to tell the staff about the hole, so it can be repaired, but they just brush it off and tell her to take her pills, eat her soup, lie down and have a rest. She doesn’t like those pills, thinks they make her thoughts all slow and muffled like her brain is swaddled in gauze.

Half of what’s wrong with the people in this place is all the pills that are stuffed down their throats, in her opinion. Vivian Mackie next door used to be a friend, but ever since they upped her medication, Lou hasn't been able to get a word of sense out of her. It's a shame.

---

For a few days when the hole first appeared, Lou sneaked her pills into her bra instead of taking them and flushed them down the toilet when she was alone, just in case they were making her see things. Eventually one of the staff caught her at it–Molly, the one who pinches people when they’re too slow or won’t do what they’re told.

Molly scolded her and started making her open her mouth at medication time to show she’d swallowed, but it didn’t matter, because she’d already seen that not taking the pills had no effect on the hole. It was there one way or the other, morning, noon and night, like a dead black eye spying on everyone walking past.

She wonders if it sees some of the things Molly does when no one else is looking.

Lou was taught as a child not to use bad language, but that doesn’t stop her from thinking that Molly is a bitch, a nasty bitch. She thinks it every time Molly blames some poor old man or woman’s ugly bruise on their thin delicate skin instead of her own pinching fingers. Maybe Molly ought to stick one of those fingers in the hole in the wall and find out what happens.

Serve her right if it is rats in there, Lou thinks, and laughs to herself. Pinch you back, Molly, see how you like that.

“What’s funny?” Molly has a puckered sour-lemon scowl as she stuffs Lou's arms into the long grey cardigan with the pockets.

“Nothing,” Lou says. Molly is really a very pretty girl, she thinks, with her wavy auburn hair pinned back in sparkly clips at the sides. Her hands are smooth and unblemished against Lou's wrinkled ones. It’s a shame she is the way she is.

“Did I tell you about the hole in the wall?”

Molly rolls her eyes. “You told everyone about it, Louise. There’s nothing there. Do you want the TV on before I go?”

“All right,” Lou says. “But no game shows.”

When Molly leaves, she changes the channel to her favorite soap opera, then watches part of a show about people who think they’ve seen aliens (Lou's never seen an alien herself, but she can hardly reject the possibility, not now), and then a little of an antique episode of The Mod Squad. She remembers her son Curtis loving this one when he was a boy of ten or twelve. All a long time ago, now, long enough that even Curtis is getting old–a grandfather, and retired–which never fails to amaze her.

Curtis can’t see the hole either, but he’s nicer about it than Molly and the rest of the staff are, or the other residents for that matter. I don’t see it, Momma, but I believe you do, he’d said when she showed him.

He'd walked her back to her room after that and had a long whispered conversation with Mrs. Hernandez, the facility director, out in the hallway. She doesn’t know what they were talking about, but it didn’t seem good.

---

When the clock says it’s half an hour to lunchtime, it’s safe to leave her room and explore a little. Everyone else will either be in their own rooms or the day room, and the staff will all be down below, laying tables and filling glasses.

Still, she opens the door slowly and checks before making her way to the stairs. There's an elevator at the end of the hall for people who use wheelchairs, but Lou is of the opinion that she should keep taking the stairs for as long as she still can. She leaves her cane behind, so it won’t thump on the hard tile.

This place is dressed up to look like a home, with curtains and wallpaper, but it’s really a hospital in disguise, and the tile floors are one of the tells. The rubber treads on the steps are another. They’re there to help prevent falls, but they also make it easier for her to climb, slowly and carefully, to the floor above.

She’s not even all the way there before she sees something that makes her stop, gripping the handrail tight tight tight for balance.

The hole is still there.

The hole is also bigger.

Lou stands one step below the landing and stares. Yesterday, the hole was fingertip size. Today, it’s as big as a dinner plate, perfectly round, and darker inside than the darkest place she’s ever seen or even imagined. It’s darker than a deep shadow, than a moonless night, than a cave at the bottom of the ocean where only blind fish can live.

She would think it was painted on if not for the fact that she can see its edges, neat and precise in the flowered paper and the drywall underneath. Behind those edges is a whole lot of nothing, as her Grammy would have said. All that deep darkness scares her, but it also pulls at her in a way she can’t explain and doesn’t want to.

Something in her wants to walk over to it and put not a finger inside, but her entire arm (or my head, she thinks, sick with horrified fascination) just to see what will happen.

Another forbidden swear word, one that she once smacked a teenage Curtis for using, floats through her mind: Holy shit.

---

After the reception she’s received the other times she’s talked about the hole, she’s not eager to do it again. However, it occurs to her that now the hole is bigger, perhaps it’s also more visible. You could, maybe, overlook a little marble-size hole, if you were busy or or not paying attention or just not inclined to listen to an old lady.

But could anyone ignore a big hole, a really gigantic hole just slapped there across the wall that way, looking like something that never had existed and never should have?

Could anyone in their right mind ignore that?

Lou doesn't think so.

---

When Curtis comes to visit her the next morning, as he does regularly–three times during the week, and then again to take her to church on Sunday–she tries talking to him again. Curtis is a good son, and she knows he meant it when he said he believed her, but when she coaxes him to accompany her up to the third floor, it doesn’t go well.

“Sorry, Momma, I still don’t–oh no, what is it? Momma? Mom! Hey, we need some help here!”

Curtis grabs Lou's elbow, gets his arm around her waist and holds her up because she’s sinking, her vision fading out to avoid the reality of what she's seeing. Running footsteps in sneakers pound up the stairs, and then someone else seizes her other arm. She feels the too-tight grip and knows it’s Molly.

“What happened?”

“I don’t know!” Curtis sounds panicked. “She wanted me to come and take another look at that hole she thinks is in the wall, and then she just started going down. Momma, can you hear me? You okay?”

“Let’s get her back to her room and we’ll see,” Molly says.

Together, they half-carry Lou down the stairs–whatever else you can say about Molly, she’s strong–and sit her in her chair in front of the TV. Curtis fetches a glass of water from the sink in her bathroom, and then Molly is pushing pills into her mouth that she tries to spit out.

“Get away! I don’t want those.”

“You need them, Louise.” Molly lifts up Lou's chin, holding her mouth closed until the tablets start to dissolve into a bitter sludge, and she swallows and accepts a drink of water just to get rid of the taste. “There. And I’m going to talk to Mrs. Hernandez about increasing your dosage. We’ve got to keep you calm, you can’t go around behaving this way. You don’t want to scare your son, do you?”

Lou glares at her over the rim of the water glass. “Course I don’t want to scare him, but the hole–”

“There's no hole, Mom.” Curtis touches her shoulder. “I swear I’d tell you if there was, but there’s just not. I don't know what you're seeing–maybe a trick of the light–but it's not what you think.”

“I want to talk to you alone, Curtis Michael,” Lou says. She sets the glass down on the table next to her chair, careful to put it on the coaster she always keeps there. “Alone, you hear me?”

“Sorry,” Curtis says to Molly. “If you don’t mind? Just for a minute?”

“No problem,” Molly says. She smiles at Curtis like butter wouldn’t melt (bitch, Lou thinks) and exits the room, leaving the two of them on their own.

Curtis kneels next to her chair and takes her hands in his big, broad ones. From this angle, she can see not only the white in his hair, but the bald spot he’s got at the top, and part of her weeps for the little boy and young man he used to be. She’s not sure anyone should live long enough to see their children get old; it’s not natural.

“What do you want to tell me?”

“Curtis–baby–” Lou hunts for the right words. “It's grown again. It was this size–” She frees her hands from his and holds up her fingers a little way apart, to show him. “And then it was this size–” This shape takes both her hands to describe. “And now it’s so big you could just about lean into it. How come you can’t see it? Or Molly, or Mrs. Hernandez? How come no one can see it but me?”

“Momma, I think you’re seeing things that aren’t there,” Curtis says, soft and soothing. “They told me this might happen as time passed, I just hoped it wouldn’t happen this soon.” He pats her knee. “You’ve got to take your pills, okay? Listen to Molly. She’s only trying to take care of you.”

“Don’t talk about what you don’t know about,” Lou says sharply. She sees a stricken look cross her son’s face and tries to be gentler. “Sorry, baby. All I mean is, Molly’s not sweet like you think. And I don’t like how those pills make me feel.”

“I know you don’t.” Curtis stands up. “Look, I’ll talk to Molly and to Mrs. Hernandez. We’ll figure out what’s best for you, but until then, please, please take the pills? Just for a day or two. Do it for me. All right?”

“All right.” Lou fumbles for the remote, wanting this conversation to be over. She needs to think.

“You want me to cut on the TV for you?”

“I can do it,” Lou says with dignity.

“Okay. I’ll see you on Sunday?”

“Yeah, baby, I'll see you then.”

Curtis bends down, kisses her on the cheek–his face is scratchy with stubble, as if he hasn’t been looking after himself as well as he should–and leaves her alone with the TV for company.

On today’s installment of the soap opera, the woman who cheated on her husband yesterday is finding out that she’s pregnant by her lover. Knowing how these stories go, it will probably be triplets, Lou thinks, trying to calm her racing heart. At least the pills help a little with that.

What can she do? Just above her head, this thing is expanding by the day, and no one will listen. Could she take a picture? No, she doesn't have a phone with a camera in it like Curtis's. Call the police? They might not see the hole either.

What if it keeps growing until it swallows up the third floor? What if it spreads down here too? What if it engulfs the entire building? The street? The world? What will happen to Curtis, to his daughters, to their children–her great-grandchildren?

To her?

She's sitting there, terrified by the possibilities, when Molly reappears, carrying a plate that holds a plastic-wrapped peanut butter and jelly sandwich on white bread, a pudding cup with a tinfoil lid, and a banana. Shoving aside the water glass and coaster on Lou's side table, she bangs the plate down next to them.

“You’re eating lunch in your room.”

“How come?”

“Because you can’t be trusted to go downstairs,” Molly informs her. “I told Mrs. Hernandez how you freaked out in the hallway. She says you'll stay in here until you start taking your meds without a fight and stop acting crazy.”

She kneels down the same way Curtis did, but the look on her face isn’t like Curtis’s tender, worried one at all; it’s pure spite and venom. Yesterday's sparkly hair clips have been replaced by ones with tiny cloth daisies glued to them. The daisies are so out of whack with Molly's furious expression that Lou feels for a minute as if she really might be going crazy.

“You think you can just do whatever you want, Louise, but you can’t. You’re sick and seeing things and you don’t know what’s good for you anymore. You need to follow directions.”

“I am not sick,” Lou says through gritted teeth. “And I don’t have to do a thing you say, you snotty bitch.”

Molly’s eyes go wide, and then her hand shoots out and grabs Lou's arm, fingers digging in. Lou's never received the full pinching treatment before, and now she can see why some of the other residents have cried when it’s happened to them. It feels as if Molly’s fingers will sink all the way down through her flesh to the bone and leave a mark there.

“You better think twice about how you talk to me, Louise. A lot can happen when your son’s not here. A lot.”

“He’ll see if I’ve got bruises.”

“He also saw you nearly fall down in the hallway earlier.” Molly gives her arm another brutal pinch with a twist at the end. “I’ll tell him you wandered off and fell again. He’ll believe me. He knows you’re losing it.”

“You let me go!”

It comes out as more of a pitiful protest than the fierce shout she meant it to be, but it does make Molly turn her loose and stand up.

“Eat your lunch. I’ll be back for the plate later. And behave yourself.”

The last thing Lou wants to do is eat, but she does it anyway, more out of shocked habit than anything else. She puts the empty plate back on the table when she's finished, drinks the rest of her water, and then shuts off the TV, levers herself up out of the chair and lies on her bed, which is covered with a white blanket she knitted when Curtis was only a baby.

It's holding up well for a piece of work that's more than sixty years old, she thinks, stroking it softly. She'd taken the bus downtown to buy the yarn for it, with Curtis dressed in his best clothes and strapped safely into his stroller, and bought them an ice cream to share after. That had been a good day, probably a better one than she'll ever have again. A happy day, a day with everything still ahead of them.

She plans to pretend she's sleeping when Molly comes back, but the events of the morning have worn her out, and she dozes off for real, waking up in late afternoon to find that Molly has been and gone, taking the lunch plate away and refilling her water glass. Her arm aches deep down inside from the pinching, but it's not bruised yet. That will come later, she's sure.

The lengthening shadows creep across her floor, stretching out toward her. They're dark, but Lou has seen darker, inside the hole.

Is it still there? Is it the same? Is it worse? Or is it what Curtis said, only a trick of the light?

She's going to find out, but not right now. First, she has to fool Molly, and through Molly, Mrs. Hernandez, into thinking she's being good. So she sits and watches television through the rest of the day, eats her dinner when it's brought to her, has her evening bath, and goes to bed.

Just a sweet little old lady, she thinks. That's me, Miss Molly. Just a sweet little old lady without a thought in her head.

---

In the night, she dreams about the hole, growing and stretching, expanding until everyone is floating in its lightless void except for her. She's standing on the only bit of solid ground that's left anywhere, watching people drift aimlessly past. There are almost eight billion people on Earth, or so the History Channel says. When you set them all loose from gravity, they look like fish, a school of blind fish in the dark.

Molly floats by, calling Louise! Louise!

What do YOU want?

Let me stand there with you. Let me stand there or I'll pinch you.

No, I don't think so, Lou says. Only room on this spot for one of us.

Molly is just close enough to touch if Lou stretches out her right arm, the bruised one. She gives the girl a push–just a tiny, gentle nudge, nothing dramatic–and watches her float away until her voice fades to nothing.

---

"All right, time for your morning meds." Molly hands her the little paper cup and Lou obediently takes it, swallows the pills with a gulp of water, and opens her mouth to be inspected. She's doing her best impression of Vivian Mackie: mute, but compliant.

"Good." Molly reaches for her arm. Lou flinches without meaning to, but Molly is only pushing up her sweater sleeve, turning her arm this way and that to examine the skin.

"Hardly even a mark. You're tough, Louise." Molly's voice is grudgingly admiring. 'Well, keep doing what you're supposed to do, and we won't have to have any more punishments, will we?"

Lou, still channelling Vivian, says nothing. It crosses her mind that Viv may not actually be that doped up after all; perhaps she's just made the same calculations as Lou and is acting in self-preservation.

Satisfied with her docility, Molly leaves. When she's gone, Lou gets up and closes the door, then makes her way into her bathroom and closes that door too. This is going to be unpleasant, but she doesn't see what else can be done about it. Lifting up both the lid and the seat, she leans over–it's a good thing she's got all her own teeth, she thinks; she remembers Grammy losing her upper plate into the toilet once when the stomach flu was going around–and gets rid of those pills the only way she knows how.

When she's finished, she makes her way back to her chair and sits down to rest, hoping the shaky aftermath of being sick won't last too long. Closing her eyes, she leans her head back against the cushion, worn and shiny from constant use. What was it Molly had said before she went? We won't have to have any more punishments, will we. It's a strange thing for a girl Molly's age to say, she thinks, like something she's heard from an older person.

For the first time, she wonders if Molly pinches because someone did it to her in the past, maybe a schoolteacher or her own mother. It would have been awfully mean if they did. Sure, Lou had spanked Curtis when he misbehaved, so he'd learn how to act right, but she'd never have done anything like that, not something so cruel.

She pictures Molly as a little girl with those daisy clips in her hair and fingerprint-shaped bruises on her arm. It's a sad image. But, Lou thinks, you can't let yourself feel too sorry for people who are hurting you. Not even if they were taught to do it by someone else.

You just have to stop them from doing it, any way you can.

---

When the lunch prep hour comes, Lou slips out of her room again, taking her cane with her this time. She sees Vivian Mackie's door open a crack and then close quickly as she passes. When things have settled down, she thinks, she's going to pay a call on Viv, make sure she's okay like a good neighbor should.

The climb upstairs feels twice as long today, but the cane helps, and her own determination does the rest. On the third-floor landing, she stops short, careful not to get too close to the gaping void that now consumes nearly the entire wall before her. There's still a rim of wallpaper around the edges, but somehow it looks as out of place in its shabby ordinariness as the hole itself. The hole is so wrong that nothing else can be right.

She looks down at her feet and thinks about standing alone on that outcrop of ground, watching the bodies float by.

"Louise!"

"What do you want?"

She turns her head as Molly steps up onto the landing beside her. Molly looks angry, but also very tired, and paler than usual. No fancy clips today: her hair's pulled into a thick ponytail with an elastic band.

"What are you doing up here?" Molly says. It's the wrong line, she's supposed to say let me stand there with you, but Lou ignores that. She points instead.

"It's bigger."

"For the five hundredth time, Louise, there's no hole in that wall. Even your son said so. You're seeing things that aren't there. Now you get back downstairs before I–"

"No, I don't think so," Lou says.

She doesn't push Molly. She wouldn't do that outside of a dream. But she does take a shuffling step to one side when Molly grabs for her, and she doesn't do anything to stop what happens next, as Molly stumbles and pitches headfirst into the hole in the wall that no one else can see. She doesn't think Molly sees it even now, as she disappears into it, swallowed up in an instant without a gasp or cry.

When Molly's gone, so is the hole. The rose-wreathed wallpaper is as flat and whole and unblemished as if nothing was ever there. Lou hesitates, then touches the spot where it was with tentative fingers, but feels only the paper and plaster a person would expect to find.

Well, she thinks. I guess that's all right.

Picking up her cane, she returns purposefully to her room, There, she unties her robe, hangs it on its hook, and climbs back into bed, even though it's nearly noon. The white blanket is soft and warm, like a hug from her past self, the one who could knit and look after babies and take buses alone. In a minute she's asleep.

When she wakes up again, Curtis is there, bending over her bed.

"Hey, baby," she says. "You're late."

"Sorry, Momma. Have you seen Molly? Mrs. Hernandez said she's been texting and calling her and looking everywhere, but she can't find her. Did she come in here earlier?"

"Not since she brought my pills." Lou pulls the blanket closer around herself. Her arm still aches a little, but she's sure it will feel better soon. She should turn on the television. Her soap opera is about to start, and she needs to see what's going to happen next.

"And you don't know where she is now?"

"No," Lou says with perfect honesty. "I really couldn't tell you just where Molly has gone. Maybe I didn't even see her earlier at all." She smiles up at him.

"Could've been a trick of the light."