“The last few nurses we’ve hired have all flaked on me,” Jim said with an exhausted sigh. “Please tell me you don’t plan on flaking.”
I stood in the foyer of the tiny ranch-style house and listened to Jim talk. Like his sigh, he looked tired. The bags under his eyes had bags under their eyes. When I arrived at the ranch, Jim was dressed in a pair of well-worn wranglers, a fading red plaid button-up, and a form-fitting cowboy hat. He was still dusty from a day’s worth of work in the sun. His boots were caked in dried mud.
“I don’t plan on flaking,” I said. “Swear on my life.”
“Forgive me, but they all say that.”
“I moved from Colorado to work here,” I said, “I’m not planning on going anywhere in the immediate future.”
“That’s right,” he said, “the agency said they had to hire someone from out of state. They didn’t have anyone local that could do the job.”
“Really?”
“So they told me. For the life of me, I can’t figure out what’s going on. I mean, my mom is basically a living corpse,” he said, turning towards where his mom was sitting, “no offense, mom.”
I know that sounds cruel, but what a lot of people don’t understand is that dealing with someone in an extreme medical condition day in and day out can numb you. It wears you down. Gallows humor exists because working in the gallows really sucks. Every moment of your day is spent worrying and caring about someone else. Some people can handle it, and some can’t. Doesn’t make you weak if you can’t. It makes you human.
Looking at Jim, I could see he was struggling. Agnes, his mom, was in a catatonic state and needed nearly round-the-clock care. She was non-verbal and had limited use of her limbs. Her body had started to fail in both big and small ways. She needed eye drops in her eyes every hour she was awake so they wouldn’t dry out. You had to move her from her wheelchair to her bed to avoid any bedsores from forming. She needed help eating. Everything was signaling end-of-life care, but her heart and lungs were healthy. She was as “near death” as any healthy people are at any given moment.
“What did the other nurses say?” I asked.
“That they felt uncomfortable in the house. That mom was difficult to manage. I know it’s a lot of work to keep her going, but that’s the job, right?”
“It is.”
“Someone said she was difficult to work with,” he said, shaking his head and laughing, “I still don’t get that. She can’t protest! She can’t fight with you. She can barely move!” He sighed and shook his head. He looked over at his mom, sitting in her wheelchair in front of the big bay window that looked out into the corn fields.
“I just wish,” he started, but his voice caught. He stopped talking, but I knew what he wanted to say. He wished she would just die. It’s hard to admit, but it’s a natural feeling. If you believe a better life is waiting for them on the other side, you want to see their struggle here end.
“I understand,” I said softly. “My grandpa was in a similar situation.”
Jim looked over at me, and I could see his eyes red from tears. He forced a smile, “Life is just a crotch kick for us all, ain’t it?”
We both laughed. He finished showing me around the house and his mom’s medical schedule. His property had two houses, this one for his mom and me, and his house, which was about a hundred yards away. He said if I needed anything, I could come over at any time, and he’d help. I thanked him and sent him on his way.
The house that I would now call my own was very charming. There was a small den crammed with overstuffed couches and a wall-mounted TV. The kitchen was galley style, and there was a small dining nook attached. The home’s three bedrooms and two baths were down a small hallway from the den. The master was Agnes’s room. My bedroom and an old office crammed with odds and ends were on the opposite side of the hallway. Those two rooms were connected by a Jack and Jill bathroom.
The best feature in the house, however, was the large front-facing window in the den. It looked out across an oak tree covered yard that eventually gave way to fields upon fields of corn. The sky was so big in this part of the country you could see storms rolling in from miles away from the comfort of your house. After I put Agnes down for a nap, I would sit with a warm cup of tea and watch the clouds blow across the sky.
Agnes, however, was less charming than the house. It’s a weird thing to say about someone who can’t speak, but there was something off about her. She had bad vibes from the jump, and they spread like a spill on the couch. It spread and soaked in deep.
She was about sixty-two but looked older. Her hair had been a vibrant red when she was younger but had dulled with age and stress. It was streaked with white, giving her hair the same impression as a circus tent. Once taut and glowing, her skin had yellowed and sagged beyond what you’d expect from her age. But the worst feature was her eyes. They were light blue and cut through you like a knife. She rarely blinked, and that nonstop gaze made it feel like she saw through you. I hated it.
The first few days were fine. I got into a routine with Agnes that seemed to work out for both of us (or so it seemed, as she couldn’t tell me anything). I was still settling into the house and trying to get a lay of the land. I spent my first night decorating my room. To say it was drab would be an understatement. It was all neutral colors and lacked any vitality. I was a Lisa Frank kind of person in my heart, so I needed some color and personality stat.
That went double for this new location I found myself living in. Like the house, the surrounding area was a bit dull. The plains were, well, flat and devoid of any vegetation outside of a few scattered trees and fields of future produce items. I had been born and raised in Colorado, so anything that didn’t look like a Coors beer commercial was foreign to me. As far as I was concerned, this place was as foreign as it got.
The town was about a ten-minute ride away, and the “downtown” consisted of a few small blocks of short, squat buildings catering to local farmers and ranchers in the area. There were a few bars, two old stone churches, a country western dance hall, a bank, and a few small diners. This felt like the place the New York Times sent reporters when they wanted to find out what “conservative Americans” thought about national politics. I came from Denver, so this vibe was a tad outside my comfort zone.
Just beyond the downtown was a slate of chain stores and restaurants. I found myself drifting there more often than not. It was where the grocery stores were but also the only Starbucks in a fifty-mile radius. Yes, it was inside a truck stop and not the best cup of joe I ever had, but the people watching more than made up for it.
It was an adjustment to what I was used to, but I was adjusting. I often found myself in my room reading the latest book in my murder mystery series, scrolling through Tik Tok or texting with friends back home. I had told people I planned on moving back when this was all over (which is a nice way of saying when Agnes dies), but I wasn’t sure. Denver was nice, but life was too short to spend time in one place. I wanted to see the world, damn it.
The first time I noticed something off was when I entered my room after a long day and discovered one of the posters I had bought had been ripped in half. Part of it was still stuck to the wall. I didn’t know what to think. Agnes wasn’t mobile or lucid enough to do anything, and Jim had been out in the fields all day. Maybe an animal got in here and ripped it, but that seemed unlikely. I was stumped.
I picked up the piece of the poster that had fallen on my bed and tossed it in the trash. When I went to take down the part still tacked to the wall, I felt a cold chill run up my spine. At the time, I didn’t think much of it – the AC ran cold in the house – but what was odd was the wall itself was cool to the touch. Again, I assumed there was an AC duct or something behind the wall and didn’t dwell.
That night, I was face-timing with a friend of mine about nothing in particular when our call started getting interference. It had never happened before, and the signal was surprisingly good in the house. I stood and tried moving to a different spot in the room, but the same thing kept happening.
“What the hell?” I said.
“Maybe the place is haunted,” my friend said, adding, “Boooooooo!”
“Hilarious,” I said, rolling my eyes.
“Maybe Agnes is scrambling the signal?”
“Agnes can barely keep her eyes open most of the time. I doubt she’s well versed in cell signal manipulation.”
“Hey, what was that?” My friend asked.
“What was what?”
“I thought, well, you’re gonna think I’m crazy. Nevermind.”
“Not fair. You can’t say ‘what was that?’ and then not follow up.”
My friend held back a beat and said, “I don’t want to scare you or anything, but…but I think I saw something behind you. On the wall.”
I turned around and looked at the now poster-less wall behind me. There wasn’t anything there but the soothing neutral colors of the paint. I gave her a quizzical look. “What are you talking about?”
“I didn’t even want to say anything,” she said, “you forced me.”
“What did you see?”
“It looked like a face. It was only there for a second, but I thought I saw it.”
I rolled my eyes, “Ha ha. So funny.”
“There it was again!” She yelled.
I snapped back and again only saw a beige wall. “Seriously?”
“I swear on my life. I swear on my dog’s life, and you know how much I love Pop-Tart!”
I did know how much she loved Pop-Tart, and it gave me pause. My friend had a great sense of humor but wasn’t much of a jokester. She never pulled pranks or anything. Plus, if she was acting, she was doing a fantastic job.
“What did it look like?”
“It was so quick, but it was a man’s face.”
“What?”
“On the wall behind you.”
I turned and climbed back on my bed until I was in front of the spot where my friend swore she saw a man’s face. Nothing seemed out of the ordinary. I reached out and touched the wall. It was cool, verging on cold.
“There isn’t anything….”
“Oh my God,” she yelped, “did you hear that?”
“I didn’t hear anything.”
“It was like, I dunno, a muttering. When you touched the wall, I heard it on the phone.”
I touched the wall again.
“There it is!” She screamed.
“There isn’t anything here,” I said. “I swear.”
“Hold on…let me hook up my Bluetooth to my speakers to see if you can hear it.”
She pulled her phone away and messed with everything until she set everything up. “Okay,” she said, can you hear?”
“Yes,” I said, and it echoed off the walls in her room. “Ugh, I hate the sound of my voice.”
“Shut up,” she said. “Okay, touch the wall again.”
I reached out and held my hand in front of the wall. I held my breath but didn’t know why. I hadn’t seen or heard anything. I shook my head and pressed my palm against the wall.
At first, there was nothing, and I almost pulled my hand off the wall, but then I heard it. It was mumbling, soft and hard to decipher.
“There it is!” My friend said.
“Holy shit,” I said. I pulled my hand off the wall, and the mumbling stopped.
“Told you I wasn’t lying,” she said. Then she saw my perplexed face and added, “Are you okay?”
“I…I don’t know.”
“Maybe you should sleep somewhere else tonight,” she offered.
“I don’t know anyone here,” I said.
“What about the other room? You said there was a couch there, right?”
“There is,” I said, “I think I’ll do that.”
“You sure you’re okay?”
“I mean, no, but I’ll live,” I said.
“If you need me, I’m a phone call away. I’ll catch the next plane if I have to.”
I laughed, “I appreciate it.”
We chatted for a bit more before I was going to head to bed. I grabbed my pillow and blanket and walked through the bathroom to the office. There were a lot of boxes and general clutter in the room, but the couch – a well-worn brown leather number – was unencumbered. I laid down and dozed off.
Several hours later, I was woken up when the bathroom light turned on. For a second, I thought Agnes had managed to get herself up and into the bathroom, but then my sleep haze dissipated, and I knew that couldn’t be the case. I thought maybe Jim had come in, but that didn’t make sense either.
“Hello?” I said.
The light shut off.
I sat up in bed and looked for anything I could use as a weapon. I came up empty. I kicked the blanket off my legs and placed them firmly on the ground. If I had to run, I was ready.
That’s when I heard the squeak in the hallway. It was a wheelchair rolling on the ground. I sighed and let out a small laugh. It WAS Agnes. I wasn’t sure how she had done it, but she was in the hallway.
I opened the door to the office. “Agnes, you nearly gave me a heart….” I flipped on the hallway light switch and was stunned. The hallway was empty. Agnes wasn’t there.
“I must’ve been dreaming,” I said to myself as I walked towards her room. “It had to be a dream. Had to.”
I slowly turned the handle to her door and cracked it open. I glanced in and saw Agnes sleeping in her bed. Her wheelchair was next to her. She was snoring.
“Okay,” I said, “it had to be a dream.”
I walked out into the living room to do a sweep of the house just in case this hadn’t been a dream. Everything was in order. No one was in the house. I was about to head back to the office when I saw a shadow move outside the house.
I ducked down and slowly walked towards the big bay window. From where I was sitting, I could see a person walking away from the house. They were smoking a cigarette, and the cherry glowed brightly in the darkness. Jim, I thought. It had to be Jim. Maybe he came in to check on his mom and got turned around? But why would he flip on the light in my bathroom?
Just then, the clouds that had been covering the moon drifted away, and I was able to get a better view of the person in the yard. It was Jim. I wasn’t one hundred percent sure what he was doing out there, but it was him. He took the last puff of his smoke and dropped it on the ground. He crushed it under his foot and headed back for his house.
Nothing was sinister, per se, but everything felt off-kilter. But nothing terrible had happened. Agnes was asleep, Jim was back in his house, and I was okay. I shook my head and walked back to the office. I was exhausted and knew Agnes would be awake sooner rather than later. I climbed back under the covers and crashed.
I walked out of the room the next morning and was surprised to see Jim and Agnes up already. He would sometimes come by in the morning and check in on her, but he was rarely there before I woke up. He had placed her in front of the window to watch the sunrise.
Jim sat at the kitchen table with his hands cupped around a hot mug of coffee. He had a cigarette tucked behind his ear. When he saw me, he shot me a friendly smile.
“Morning,” he said.
“Good morning,” I responded, “a bit early, huh?”
“Sorry about that,” he said, “I had a hard time sleeping last night and woke up early. Thought I’d spell you for a bit.”
“Thanks,” I said. I paused and glanced back over at Agnes. She just stared out the window, not a care in the world. I looked back over at Jim. “Weird question, but…did…did you happen to come over last night?”
“Yeah,” he said.
I could feel the relief stream out of my body. It had to have been Jim. It was still weird and a violation, but I knew it wasn’t the “face” my friend saw in the wall. “If you come in at night, can you do me a favor and not use my bathroom. It kind of freaked me out last night.”
His smile dropped. He looked confused. “What are you talking about?”
“You came into the bathroom last night and turned on the light. It woke me up.”
“I didn’t come into the house last night,” he said.
“You just told me….”
“I came by the house last night because I thought I saw someone outside. I walked the perimeter but didn’t see anyone. I never came inside. I wouldn’t unless it was an emergency.”
That’s when Agnes started yelling. It wasn’t a scream but a whooping sound, like a human alarm. We both looked over at her, and she was rocking back and forth in her chair. She was trying to speak, but no words could break through. Her whooping was all she could muster, and even that sounded tortured. The muscles she used to talk had atrophied, and she sounded like a broken whistle.
I ran over there and tried to calm her down. This was the most animated I had seen her the entire time I had been with her. I didn’t think she even COULD do this. I looked over at Jim, who had joined me at his mom’s side.
“What is going on?”
“She has fits like this sometimes. Usually before a serious storm.”
“What?”
“I don’t get it either, but she is a human barometer,” he said, rubbing his mom’s back and trying to calm her down. “Hey, little lady, what’s the problem? Why we having a fit?”
Agnes shifted her eyes to Jim, and he smiled at her. He kept rubbing her back in small, circular motions like he was calming down a horse. No shade on my end, it worked. Her rocking slowed and then eventually stopped.
“There you go,” he said softly. “You okay?”
She didn’t respond. Instead, she raised her arm and pointed her bony finger toward the window. I followed her fingers out, and sure enough, I could see gathering storm clouds in the distance.
“Godddamn,” I whispered.
“Told you,” Jim said, “I don’t know what happened when she had the stroke, but it tangled up some wiring in there.” He glanced out at the clouds and whistled. “That ain’t pretty looking.”
“How far off?”
“Few hours, but who knows.”
“That looks huge,” I said, “should I worry about floods or anything?”
“Floods, Nah. We’re too far away from the river. Tornadoes, on the other hand,” he said, trailing off.
“Tornadoes?”
“If one shows up, you’ll hear the alarms. There is a shelter around back. I put in a ramp so you’d be able to get mom down easy.”
“Where does the shelter go to?”
“Under the house.”
“I’m sorry, what?”
“There is food, water, and light down there. You’ll be safe.”
“Is the shelter locked up?”
“Probably. Come on, I’ll show you where the shelter is and unlock it.”
“What about your mom?”
“She’s calmed down now. We’ll only be a bit.”
We walked outside, and you could feel the coming storm in the air. The smell of oncoming rain hung heavy all around us. In the distance, you could hear faint rumblings of thunder. Jim took me around to the back of the house and pointed to the classic-looking storm shelter doors. He unlocked the latch and swung them open with a thud. A swirl of dust filled the air.
“Once you get down there, there’s a light switch hanging in the middle of the room.”
“Are those dirt floors?”
“Yeah. Used to be a root cellar years ago.”
“How big is it?”
“Not terribly large, but it’ll do in a pinch.”
“Wait,” I said, “is this under my room?”
“You’re in the back bedroom, right? Not the office?”
“Yeah,” I said.
He nodded, “Most of the cellar is under that corner of the house.”
“Can you get to it from my room?”
“Nope. If a twister comes, you gotta run outside to get to the shelter,” Jim said, adding, “It’s the safest place in case of a storm, though.”
“Should I be worried there’s going to be a tornado?”
“For now, Nah. Just keep the local news on. They’ll tell you when it’s a watch or a warning.”
“What’s the difference?”
“Watch means conditions are right for a funnel. Warning means one’s formed.”
“So, pray for a watch?”
Jim smirked, “Pray the storm blows south.”
“Sounds good,” I said.
“Wanna go down and check it out?”
I looked down at the dark hole in the ground. I saw the dirt floors and felt the chill creeping up the ramp. It suddenly clicked that the cold I felt the other night probably came up from the ground. Why the wall was cold. I still didn’t have an answer for the mumbling.
“There a radio down there?”
“I think so,” Jim said. “It’s been a little bit since I went down, but I thought we put a hand-cranked one down there.”
That could account for the mumbling, too. Maybe there was a small, stored charge in the hand-cranked radio, and it was going off last night. As terrifying as the prospect of being underground in a small, dark hole might be, this trip also helped set my mind at ease. Everything had a reasonable explanation.
We went back inside the house, and Agnes wasn’t sitting in front of the window anymore. She had somehow moved while we were gone. At first glance, I couldn’t see where she had gone. More to the point, I didn’t know how she had moved. Jim had mentioned that she could, in a pinch, kick her leg and move the chair but that it wasn’t expected.
“Agnes,” I yelled. No response.
“Mom,” Jim followed, “where did you run off to?”
That’s when I heard the door to the office swing open. I thought I had closed it when I woke up, so there was a good chance that’s where Agnes had shuffled off to. We both walked over to the door and opened it wide.
Agnes was there. She had somehow wheeled herself through the boxes strewn across the floor and settled in front of the leather couch. She was staring up at a box-lined shelf on the wall.
“How did you get in here, mom?”
Not surprisingly, she didn’t respond. She just kept staring at the shelf. Her eyes never blinked. It was unsettling. I grabbed the back of her chair and turned her towards me. I squatted down to get on her level and shot her a smile.
“You want to get something to eat?”
Agnes trained those dead eyes on me. I felt my blood run cold. The energy in the room was off. Despite wanting to turn and run, I kept that fake smile plastered on my face. If the patient is calm, your work day is calm.
“How ‘bout it, mom?”
Then, Agnes shot her arms out and wrapped her boney feelings around my collar. I tried to pull back, but her grip was tight. I fell back on my butt, and her wheelchair rolled forward, nearly running me over. Jim snapped into action and grabbed his mom’s arms.
“Let go, Mom!”
“Agnes, please let go!”
Her strength shocked us both. Instead of Jim quickly pulling his petite mother off me, Agnes fell on top of me. I tried to scramble away, but Agnes pulled her mouth to my ear. In a long, ragged breath, she said, “I…diiiiiiid itttt. I diiiiid ittttt.”
Agnes suddenly closed her eyes and went limp. Her vice grip on my collars went slack. A distraught Jim pulled his mother back into the chair and started checking her breathing. He looked back at me, his eyes wild with fear.
“She okay?”
I got off the ground and put my fingers on her neck to check her pulse – it was strong. She was also breathing normally. She had passed out. It was like she had used every amount of stored energy she had for that moment. Her body went into a protection sleep mode to keep her going.
“She’s okay,” I said, still gathering my wits about me.
“I’ve… I’ve never seen her do that. She hasn’t been that mobile in years.”
“What did she mean ‘I did it.’?” I asked.
“I don’t have a clue. This whole thing is very unsettling.”
“I’d say a bit more than unsettling.”
“Don’t tell me you’re going to leave too,” he said, his eyes pleading with me to stay.
Not going to lie, it crossed my mind. But I didn’t have anywhere to go, and this whole thing felt like the exception, not the rule. She hadn’t done much of anything since I had been brought on, and if this was the worse she could do, I could handle it.
Plus, I saw how desperate Jim was to get some peace. Having a loved one in his mom’s position wears you down. It’s worse if you can’t find reliable help. I didn’t want to leave him in a lurch if I didn’t have to.
“No,” I said, “I’m still here.”