Calvin Wheeler pushed through the pain of arthritic knees until he stood atop the desk in front of the window. Then, he slid the yellowed roller shade out of the brackets and tossed it on the drafting table. Light streamed over him, refracted through a jagged crack in the glass. It was a sunny day, crisp, with clear blue skies—a day he’d have enjoyed working outdoors. Instead, he was stuck in the office, babysitting the boneyard at the shuttered psychiatric hospital.
From his vantage, Calvin could see the full expanse of the ruins. A once elegant Victorian French Gothic brick building with barred windows constructed during the Civil War, wooden cottages with wide porches from the thirties and forties, a towering concrete monstrosity of the fifties, and a glass and steel “Rehab” building of the seventies—all abandoned.
The buildings had collapsed, decayed, and died almost as soon as the people left. Weeds replaced manicured lawns. Poison Ivy climbed fences. The Golf course became a sagebrush desert. A sunbaked, graffiti-covered water tank stood guard. The rolling acres of tumbledown patient burials stretched out on either side of the back entrance to the grounds.
He squatted, sat, swung his feet to the floor, and caught his breath.
Calvin was a third-generation employee—a skilled tradesman like his father and grandfather. In the old days, when patients lived here, he’d liked his job in the Maintenance Department. You never knew what would happen next. Like the day he and the guys pulled a bedsheet from the plumbing after a toilet exploded, blowing off the stall door and sending porcelain flying. They’d had a few laughs, even though someone could have been hurt—because you had to admit the patient who stuffed the sheet had gotten his point across.
But things had changed. The state hospital had been emptied and sold to a venture capitalist with plans to turn it into an upscale housing development. Most employees were laid off or forced to take early retirement, leaving a handful of the most senior men to keep security while the property changed hands. With a year to full retirement at age fifty-five, they called Calvin a “general mechanic,” meaning he did whatever they assigned him to do. Like watch over the dead.
Between his boss’s edict this morning and the call he’d just gotten from the Medical Records Administrator, he was wedged between a rock and a hard place. No matter what he did, something would turn out badly.
The boss had instructed him to let the buyers do what they wanted—including digging a foundation on property they didn’t own yet. “Best to not do anything that might queer the deal,” he’d said. Then, moments later, the Medical Records Administrator had called Calvin to say a family member—Grace Atkinson—was on her way to visit a grave. “Be kind to her. Show her a grave. She’ll never know if it’s the right one.”
Outside, the bucket truck operator was setting up to dig the foundation for the buyer’s temporary security quarters. Sunlight magnified a pile of numbered bricks, scattered by the blades of the brush hog mowers. Grace Atkinson’s mother’s marker could be in that pile—and the other marker.
He’d searched for that other marker for years—#981645. It was probably long gone.
The taste of metal flooded the back of his throat. He looked away.
Calvin limped to the drafting table and unrolled the window shade—a secret record made by maintenance workers who cared when the hospital didn’t. Numbers and names littered the backside of the shade, the only log of the burials in existence. It seemed to cast a shadow that swallowed the light and sucked the air from the room, making it hard to breathe. He located Grace Atkinson’s mother’s gravesite in the exact spot where the bucket truck was parked, the shovel set to gouge the earth and deposit the remains in a hill of dust and bones.
There was nothing to do but wait.
The coffee pot signaled his brew was ready. He poured, sipped, checked the time. Across the room, a collage of dog-eared posters hung on a bulletin board, remnants from some long-forgotten Martin Luther King holiday. A picture of the man was tacked to the center with a quote. “Our lives begin to end when we become silent about the things that matter.” It reminded him of something his mother used to say. “Always stand up for what’s right, Calvin, even if it means you stand alone.”
“Easier said than done,” he said aloud. He saw himself as a sort of Boo Radley—a ghostly recluse stained with the disgrace of mental illness and powerless to change it. The state senator who had an office down the road was the only person who’d ever stood up for the throwaways. She’d put up a mighty fight when the government closed the hospital and sent patients to other hospitals miles from their families.
He checked the time again. On cue, a round copper-haired woman filled the doorway, tugging a coat around her middle. He shoved the window shade in a drawer.
“I’m Grace Atkinson. They said you’d show me my mother’s grave.”
Calvin’s throat went dry. His own mother had passed when he was twenty-two. “No, ma’am. The graves don’t have names on them. Just bricks with numbers.”
“Then you can cross-reference my mother’s number with her name—Ruth Duncan.”
He shook his head. “Can’t. No records. Besides, the cemetery wasn’t kept up, if you get my meaning. The bricks have kinda moved around.”
The bucket truck’s engine cranked and fired, startling him. He spun toward the window and watched the operator jump to the earth and light a cigarette. The man would finish his smoke and begin digging.
Calvin turned back to the room. Grace fixed an unfaltering gaze on him, and, to his surprise, she took off her coat, threw it over the back of a chair, and sat.
“So, what makes a person devote a lifetime to a place like this?”
The question angered him. He was tired of hearing how special he must be to work with “those people” at “that place.” It was the same as saying he must be a loser. The fact was, he’d graduated from high school and had a good job, one you could only get with family connections.
He answered too fast. “Because most people won’t, and these people need help. They deserve respect.” It didn’t make him a hero. In some ways, he had failed.
She smiled. “Then let me tell you my story. I’ve been looking for my birth mother for a decade, and I’ve found her. My adoptive mother died and left me a letter containing a long-held secret—my birth mother’s name. I looked up her death certificate and traced her here, but the hospital has refused to show me her records. All I have is her gravesite. Are you going to say ‘no’ to me, too?”
“It’s not that I want to say no…”
“Listen to me. It was a shock to find out I was born here. But I realized she gave me away so I wouldn’t grow up in this place. She protected me. I need to see where she’s buried. I need to give her a proper headstone. I won’t let my mother be erased.”
An image of his own mother standing at the sink, smoking a cigarette, drinking beer from the bottle, and laughing at her own jokes floated through Calvin’s mind. You’re the best thing that ever happened to me, Cal.
His mother had protected him, too. He studied his feet. They should’ve put a social worker at this post, not him.
“Well?”
Calvin glanced through the window at the bucket truck lifting and dumping shovels of earth—and pictured glistening white shards, the cracking of bones.
Grace followed his gaze and paled. “What’s going on out there?”
Calvin wet his lips and struggled to answer.
“There? That’s her spot?”
He shrugged. “Dunno.”
“Do something! Make him stop digging.”
Guilt chewed at his insides. But it’d be pointless to tell the bucket truck operator the boundaries were wrong, since the boss approved the site. “No rocks. Nicely composted,” he’d said. Besides, Calvin had never been a man that other men paid any mind.
“Me? That’s not my call.”
“Sometimes you have to come up on two feet, regardless of whose call it is.”
“He works for the buyer. I’m not allowed…”
“If you don’t stop him, I will.” She grabbed her coat and charged through the door.
It struck him Grace was doing was exactly what his mother would have done. But because Grace was willing to stand up to the bucket truck operator alone, didn’t mean it was right for him to do nothing.
He called after her. “Ma’am, he won’t listen to you. Please let me deal with this. I’ll call you when it’s done.”
She half-turned and looked at him. “If I leave, you won’t do anything.”
“Give me some time. I swear I’ll handle it. I can do it.”
“You weren’t so confident a minute ago.”
“If you can do it, I can do it.” He’d caught her off-guard, and she laughed. “The truth is, the buyer doesn’t own the place yet. He has no right to dig up anything here—especially graves.” He rested his hand on the drawer containing the window shade and waited for her to respond.
She searched his face, maybe looking for something more than his promise. “My mother shouldn’t have been hidden away until she died, with no thought to her dignity in life or death.”
“No, ma’am. That was wrong. I’m sorry.”
She nodded, as if to accept his apology for all of it. “What would you do if it were your mother?”
Calvin hesitated. He wanted to tell her about his mother, but he knew he shouldn’t. His voice softened. “Come with me. I want to show you something.”
He took her through the front door, piloting her away from the cemetery and the bucket truck, to a footpath. They followed a steep rise to the reservoir, taking in the views of the Catskill Mountains and the Hudson River.
“This is where I come when I’m thinking things through.”
They could see the full sweep of the grounds, but it had been a terrible mistake to bring her here. He could scarcely imagine what the vista of abandoned and deteriorating buildings must look like to her. “You have to picture what it used to be,” he mumbled, feeling heat rise from his neck into his face.
“Tell me about it.” There was kindness in her voice.
He pointed out the buildings where patients had lived, a golf course and tennis courts, greenhouses and fallow fields, chapels, a boathouse, a recreation hall and a bowling alley, a movie theater, a library, a community store.
“Those activities were for the employees.”
“Nope. They were for everyone—patients and staff. See those buildings over there? In their day, they had crystal chandeliers, terrazzo floors, marble fireplaces with chestnut trimmed mantels, and elegant dining halls, all for the patients.”
“Like a country club.” She looked dubious.
He frowned. “Not exactly.” She was smart, and she’d have realized there were inequities, like the best cuts of meat going to employees while the patients ate gruel.
Grace sighed. “And your job was to fix things and keep the place running.”
“Not all by myself.”
“Of course not. Everyone who worked here fixed things—and people.”
It was a funny thing to say, but she was right. He didn’t need to mention the things they used to fix broken people, like restraint sheets, electroconvulsive therapy, lobotomies, and psychotropic medication. She already knew.
“It wasn’t perfect, but your mother was cared for.”
When she didn’t answer, he realized she was waiting for him to say more. “The truth is, you’re a better daughter than I am a son.”
Something passed between them, and he imagined she sensed the bond they shared and saw the determination in his eyes to make amends.
Neither spoke for a while, then Grace said, “I think it must be a strange kind of love that drew you to these people and this place, Calvin. I think that love is why you’ve spent a lifetime here.”
He swallowed, and tears pricked at the corners of his eyes.
“I believe in you, Calvin. Find my mother. I trust you.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
They walked down the hill in silence to Grace’s car, and she left. He went back to the office, stood at the window watching the bucket truck—and a memory arose. He had attended the unveiling of a bronze memorial at the site of the county poorhouse, dedicated to the forgotten souls buried in unmarked graves. The statue—Aging Woman—portrayed an elderly woman draped in a shroud with butterflies, dragonflies, and grasses at her feet, suggesting the field where she’d soon be buried.
What tribute could the occupants of the hospital’s Potter’s Field claim with only the markings on a window shade to prove they’d lived?
He wrenched the window shade from the desk drawer and scanned the chart again. When he had first discovered Anna Wheeler’s name among the burials, his breath had stalled and his stomach lurched, even though he’d known it would be there.
His Ma wasn’t from around here. She came from across the river to attend the hospital’s School of Nursing. Pa always said that was why she thought she was better than others, but Calvin liked that she had dreams. He liked that she was tough and would stand up to anyone. Except when she stood up to Pa, she got knocked down.
It wasn’t Ma’s depression that got her admitted to the hospital; it was that she fought back. Calvin hadn’t thought about the day that everything went wrong in a long time.
Ma had gone into hiding in her bedroom again, no doubt with the covers pulled up and a chair-back tilted under the doorknob. She’d spent more days in bed than not since Calvin’s baby sister was born, and Pa had had it “up to here,” as he was inclined to say.
The whole thing started with Pa banging on the bedroom door with his fist, hard and threatening. “You come out of there this instant, Anna, or I swear I’ll break the door down,” he hollered.
Ma was suffering, but Pa gave no latitude. He was a cauldron at full boil, and when he got that mad, there was no telling how much damage he’d do. He raised his voice again. “Get out here right now and get to work.”
Ma stayed put.
“I’m gonna count to three, and then I’m coming in. Do you hear me, Anna? One. Two. You better get out of that bed and come to the door this minute. Three.” Pa kicked the door, and it exploded, splinters flying, hinges pulling free. He tackled Ma, ripped the blanket off her, and dragged her across the floor. Then he pulled her to her feet, and they crashed through the doorway together.
Seeing Pa drag her by her hair and push her down the hallway to the kitchen had been too much for Calvin. He slammed a fist into Pa’s face and shattered his nose. Pa let go of her and came for Calvin, kicking and punching like a wild man. Even with blood running in his ears, Calvin made out Ma’s screams. “Stop! Don’t hurt him!”
No one saw her go for the knife.
Pa recovered from being stabbed in the chest, but he complained the men at work called them a bunch of throwaways and had a laugh at his expense. He blamed Calvin for the lot, and Calvin blamed himself, too. But none of that stopped Pa from moving his girlfriend in to take care of the baby.
From then on, he and his father bumped through the house, avoiding each other. Calvin finished his plumbing apprenticeship and started working at the hospital three years later. He was just seventeen. He asked the boss not to assign him jobs with his father, set his sights on a double-wide in a trailer park with an above-ground pool, and moved out. For company, he rescued a stray, part-collie and part-German shepherd, and named him Ralph.
Ma kept begging to come home. Pa kept refusing. Calvin visited Ma for a few years, but eventually, he barely recognized her and he stopped going, too.
Abandoned and forgotten, she hanged herself with a rope of braided shoestrings slung over her ward’s bathroom door.
He wasn’t the only employee with “history.” Some staff had spent time as inpatients themselves. Many had family members “inside” that were their first connections to the hospital. A grandmother—or a mother like Calvin’s. But that didn’t help him feel better. The fact was, the staff were all mixed up with the patients—they were one big unhappy family of throwaways.
He should forget that morning and the memories it stirred. The worst had happened. Grace Atkinson had arrived just in time to see the bucket truck desecrate her mother’s grave. Just in time to stand up for a mother she’d never known.
I believe in you, Calvin.
He should put the window shade back up and mind his own business. But he couldn’t pretend anymore. Removing the shade had shined light on a bleak place in himself, a place that knew the compulsion to stuff a bedsheet in a toilet. One thought echoed in his mind: No one should be a throwaway.
Coffee backtracked from his gut, and he threw up in the trash.
Somehow, he had enough will to do one just thing before he retired.
His body stepped away from his mind. The door flew open, the sound of feet pounding across the boneyard. Calvin stumbled to his knees. The big scoop hoisted, set to lower. He came up on two feet, arms waving as if they didn’t belong to him.
To Calvin’s amazement, the bucket stopped mid-air, and he heard himself say, “You can’t dig here, mister. This is holy ground.”
“Not your call.”
“Today it is my call.”
“Why don’t I just call your boss?” The man swiveled in the compartment, dropping his legs through the truck’s open doorway.
Calvin raised a tightened fist. “Sure. And why don’t I give the newspapers a ring?”
“Okay, man. Don’t get riled.” He retreated into the cab. “It ain’t necessary to involve any reporters. But your boss is gonna hear about this from my boss. Get it?”
“Just get this machine outta here.”
Calvin waited until the operator drove the bucket truck away, then walked back to the office and picked up the phone. “I need to speak with the Senator. We have an emergency over at the state hospital she’d want to know about.”
She spoke to him as if he was someone important. Someone who’d done the right thing. “I thought maybe a nice bronze statue,” Calvin had said. “What?… oh yes, I have proof. I’ll bring it to you.”
They ended the call. It was a moment—his moment. From here on out, it would get ugly. When that happened—when the consequences kicked in—he would remember he’d once held his ground against the machine about something that mattered. He’d stood up for his mother, Grace’s mother, and their memory.
Tonight, he’d cook a steak for he and Ralph in celebration, not so much for the victory—although there was that—but more for the relief. His knees had even stopped hurting.
Calvin stowed the window shade under his arm, locked the door to the Maintenance Department behind him, and went back to the torn and dug-up places the bucket loader had left behind. He unrolled the window shade and searched for Ruth Duncan’s name and the number on her brick. When he found it, he collected a few bricks from the pile made by the brush hog blades and marked the place in the earth where she might have been buried. Tomorrow, he would look for her brick in that pile, and he would call Grace Atkinson. At least, he could give her that.
He took a last look at the window shade before turning it over to the Senator. Then he rolled it up and moved through the grass toward his car in a dirt parking lot screened by woods. When he reached the edge of the boneyard, the clouds opened up, and rays of sun splintered through the leaves of maple trees. Looking up at the sky, he stubbed his toe and stumbled. A strange prickle beneath his scalp made him stop and look down. He picked up the brick and read the numbers—marker #981645. Anna Wheeler.
