by Matthew Dexter
Mrs. Milner took one last look at her naked body before it collided with the floor. She was hoping she would never have to see those wrinkles in the mirror, but could only watch the lines grow clearer as they shook. The image of an elderly lady was one she had seldom admired, especially her own. The bony contours exposing the top of a torso so ghostly. Those purple veins that defined the bottom of her legs in the shape of an octopus. She had never hated gravity so much in her life. A bag of bones, Mrs. Milner watched it all fall, as if she were an athlete in slow motion, knowing all the while she had never looked better.
She was a skeleton. So skinny and delicious to all the lonely old men with the dead wives who attempted to seduce her every time they saw her in the hall. All the good that had done her now. The bathmat was in the drying machine. Her hip was broken, probably along with a few ribs, and her head was bleeding. “Well Jesus almightily I’ll be damned,” she said, “at least the glass didn’t shatter when I crashed into the shower door.”
She smiled at the full length mirror and looked around at all the objects and furniture, as if it were some sort of inside joke only the bathroom could understand. Of course it was only plastic because Mrs. Milner had been stricken with intimidation at the very thought of anybody seeing her in the shower. She had spent hours trying to convince the contractor how she could never live in a bathroom with a glass shower, even though it would cost a thousand dollars to put in a different one.
The joke only lasted a few seconds before she was consumed with a sensation deeper and more intense than the initial impact of the fall. She was terrified. The wicked witch mask she had recently worn with relish taunted her from the wicker laundry basket. She had won the best costume award for the third straight year. It must have been a curse. Now she was wedged precariously between the toilet and the door. Nothing was as it had ever been before. She remembered the slender sword fish hanging in the corner of her former husband’s office. He was a doctor and a sport fisherman. She was a chicken. That’s exactly what she looked like too.
“You’re a stupid little chicken now Margaret Milner, aren’t ya?” she observed. “Helpless old baby with nothing–an elegant body with the brain of an elephant.”
The worst part was that the bathroom was full of mirrors. Not just one or two like most bathrooms, but nearly a dozen. It was like the Hall of Mirrors in the Palace of Versailles, where she had fallen in love with him. Paris had made their sudden meeting and subsequent engagement the spontaneous arrangement of a lifetime. She had made it a generation without seeing her Henry, and she missed him little less as the years diminished into decades. Now Mrs. Milner had to do everything on her own.
She had to call for help. Crawling face first across the floor, she proceeded with the pace of a crippled turtle, leaving a tiny trickle of blood and doing her best to avoid looking directly into the mirrors; for she had turned into a vampire. With great exertion and patience Mrs. Milner eventually made it. She placed her finger on the emergency call button and held it there for a few seconds, as a new and sadistic urgency ate away at her nerves like a demented rat.
Certainly she could not let anybody see her in this condition, not naked and bloody without makeup or perfume. Of course she would have to prepare herself before calling for help. She could not bare to call anybody to help her until she was all dressed. With that in mind Mrs. Milner decided to treat her wound with a bandage and some pain pills from the cabinet beneath the sink. There was nothing she could find in the bathroom that would diminish her modesty.
She could crawl to the phone, but who would she call? All her closest friends were gone, most of them having lost ferocious battles with cancer. Mrs. Milner lay there in the bathroom searching for the answer, wondering how she found herself in this calamity. She grew tired and finally decided a nap would do her best. A clear mind and some rest was what she needed. The towel was the perfect pillow. The pain pills blanketed the suffering and disguised the entire urgency of the situation.
A few minutes later she decided to crawl to the phone. The antenna was hanging over the edge of the countertop. She had wasted nearly an hour on hold and merely five minutes fighting with Immigration and Customs Enforcement about the cleaning lady at her retirement community while she was preparing for her shower. She didn’t even have time to make the bed and clean the kitchen from breakfast. Upon reflection this made her livid, since a clean house was close to godliness according to Mrs. Milner.
Like a gypsy summoning a fortune, she dialed the number slowly, reading it from the steam that clung to the inside of the shower door. The maid answered on the first ring. “Si senorita, ya voy–por supuesto…I’ll be there in veinte minutos.”
Fabiola didn’t work at the retirement community but knew where it was. Her husband helped construct it. She hadn’t seen Mrs. Milner in at least six years, ever since Mrs. Milner moved into White Willows Village and the staff maids took over. Fabiola had seen plenty of homes which were complete disasters, but never Senorita Milner’s, who was the cleanest white woman that Fabiola had ever known. She didn’t even need a cleaning lady, except maybe to show the neighbors that she had one to take out the garbage. Fabiola was eager to see Senorita Milner again. She packed the duct tape and the shovel with the orange handle into the back of her 1988 Honda Civic and speed off in a cloud of dust and cigarettes.
The door was locked but Mrs. Milner had taken the liberty of calling down to the front desk to give Fabiola the spare. She said an old friend was coming by to pick up some clothes for donation to the homeless. Mrs. Milner could have mentioned the fall from the shower but she was powerless to her naked body. Fabiola was in the lobby in about fifteen minutes, and with two minutes left ticking on Mrs. Milner’s vanity clock she heard a knock and the key digging into the lock. Mrs. Milner covered her body with the towel as best she could and tried to fix her hair a little. She didn’t want to look too disheveled.
“Dios mio senorita, que hiciste?” Fabiola asked, dropping to her knees.
“Two minutes early…dos minutos, that’s my girl.” Mrs. Milner answered, with the praise of a Sunday school teacher rewarding her best pupil for learning the day’s lesson.
“Si, tres minutos, pero senorita what happened to you? Let’s call the ambulance. The man downstairs didn’t look scared–where’s the phone?” Fabiola took control and grabbed the cellular.
“It’s dead my dear,” Mrs. Milner answered. And indeed it was, she had just taken out the battery. She was delirious and told Fabiola to give her a few hours to clean herself up before calling for help.
“No way senorita, I won’t do it.” Fabiola said.
“The hell you won’t…this check for twenty thousand dollars says you will.”
Mrs Milner ripped the check from the little black book inside her golden purse and handed it to Fabiola. Fabiola shook her head until the numbers bleed through the ink and left her right index finger black from the pen that had just made her an offer she could never refuse. She entered into a state of responsibility, made a sign to the heavens, and tucked the check between her breasts as she rose up to help dress the old lady.
“As you know, I always write the numbers, sign it–and let the others fill in their names,” Mrs. Milner explained.
“Dios mio…loco old lady.” Fabiola said as she dressed Mrs. Milner and tended to her wounds as best and delicate as she could.
“I’ll be ninety years old next summer,” Mrs. Milner said, as she rested her head against the wall and closed her eyes. When she awoke the pills were all over the floor. The cleaning lady must be a drug addict. There was no other explanation for it. “Fabiola, donde estas…where the hell are you my dear?” Mrs. Milner asked.
The maid appeared, rising like a ghost out of thin air from the chair in the closet where she was hiding. “Senorita, I’ve been waiting for you to wake up for an hour now,” Fabiola said, “dios mio, I’m calling an ambulance.”
“The hell you are, a deal is always a deal in this country Fabiola,” Mrs. Milner said, “and if you talk I’ll just say you were too busy robbing me to call the police.”
“Senorita Milner, you wouldn’t dare.”
“Just try me…” Mrs. Milner said, “…and Immigration’s on the way.”
Mrs. Milner had never seen Fabiola run faster out of a room in her life. Not even when she found the maid kissing some stranger in the living room. They both claimed they were only chasing spiders in the curtains, but it looked mighty friendly for that.
Mrs. Milner fell asleep again and woke up with her hands tied behind her back, duct tape covering her mouth. Fabiola was in the bedroom filling Mrs. Milner’s luggage with jewelry, pills, and other valuables. “Senorita my dear, is there anything else I should take before I leave?” Fabiola asked when she noticed the old lady awake. “You take too many naps senorita.”
She was right about that. Mrs. Milner dozed in and out of consciousness for nearly a week. She was given food three times a day by Fabiola, who was waiting for the old lady to remember the combination to the safe.
One morning Mrs. Milner woke up early and knew she was buried alive. The air was very difficult to breath, and the smell of rubber was suffocating. Something was covering her face. Mrs. Milner cried and tried to move, when she noticed a ray of light, then another. She was ecstatic to discover that she was not buried at all, but only wearing the wicked witch mask.
Shaking her head to align the eye holes, Mrs. Milner found framed photographs of her late husband in a circle around her emaciated body. Candles were lit around the pictures and the figures in the wax told her that Fabiola was still in the house. She could hear the television in the living room. Fabiola was laughing to the sound of Mexican soap operas. The worst part was that Fabiola had only helped Mrs. Milner get half dressed. Being in your underwear is just as bad as being naked for Mrs. Milner. She couldn’t call for help till she was decent, and with her hands tied it would be very difficult to do both.
After a couple more days the situation was just too much for Mrs. Milner to endure. She crawled across the floor, knocking down candles and shattering glass pictures of the most treasured memories of her life as she crept. The glass cut through her skin, marking a bloody trail toward the emergency button. All the while Fabiola was in the living room laughing like an idiot, waiting for the combination and not even worried about the old lady any longer.
Pointing her elongated witch nose like the bill of a sword fish, Mrs. Milner scrunched the enormous appendage into the button and collapsed to the floor. Within minutes her door was open and a succession of men surrounded her half naked body, each one obviously more important than the next.
“What the devil happened Margaret?” asked her neighbor Milgrid.
“I’ve been here for seven days,” answered Mrs. Milner, “she kept me hostage the whole damn time just to torture and rob me.”
“Who did?” Milgrid asked, as the Phoenix police department instantly took an interest in the situation.
“My maid,” Mrs. Milner said, “she’s in the living room right now.”
With that the police drew their guns and combed the apartment. Mrs. Milner fixed her hair and made Milgrid cover her with a blanket from the bed.
“There’s nobody here,” the police returned to confirm, as the ambulance arrived and the paramedics came to take Mrs. Milner away.
“Of course she’s here!” Mrs. Milner told them. “How else did these candles and photos get into the bathroom? I can’t even leave this room, and see how messy it is out there? I didn’t even have the opportunity to clean before I fell–tell them Milgrid how clean I am…go ahead now!”
Milgrid looked around as they wheeled Mrs. Milner toward the door. “But everything is so perfect and clean Margaret…except for the bathroom and those suitcases in the living room.”
“Ah-huh!” Mrs. Milner said. “See, that means she was here. Fabiola must have jumped out the window when she heard you barge in.”
“Um, alright honey,” Milgrid said, exchanging a pitiful expression with the police and paramedics.
“Who’s Fabiola?” one of the policemen asked.
“Where can we find her?” asked the other.
Mrs. Milner grabbed her chest and gasped for air as they rolled her down the hall.
“Bless your poor heart child, nobody will ever find her,” Milgrid told them, as she placed her hand to her neighbor’s chest to help hold her down, reaching discreetly into Mrs. Milner’s bra to secretly lift out the check she had written to her maid, “Fabiola’s been dead for years.”
About MatthewBDexter
