Lost in the City by Edward P. Jones

Author:Edward P. Jones [Jones, Edward P.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction
ISBN: 9780060795283
Google: qNeDtgAACAAJ
Amazon: 006219321X
Goodreads: 11752
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 1992-01-01T05:00:00+00:00

With her directions, Samuel drove out of Washington and found the Baltimore-Washington Parkway, heading to Laurel and the center. He and his car smelled heavily of cigarette smoke. All that May the days had been wonderful gifts, and that day was no exception. After they had crossed into Maryland, after there was enough fresh air blowing through the car to force out the smoky air, she relaxed somewhat and lay back in her seat.

“I been tryin to get up the nerve to come see you for a long time,” he said at one point, “but I guess it took spring to give me the nerve I needed.” He drove with his hat cocked back on his head. It was a sight she remembered from somewhere, but she did not know if it was a memory of him from before they had stopped being a family or from some movie she had seen with Curtis. “It ain’t like goin to the store and buyin a loaf of bread, I know that.”

Before long, she directed him onto the center’s grounds and he parked in front of the infirmary. The infirmary was a one-story brick building of offices and wards where the city people kept the most severely retarded residents, those children and adults who could not talk or walk or feed themselves or communicate. There, too, were the patients from other buildings who had been beaten by the staff or other residents or who had been injured accidentally or neglected to the point where they could no longer care for themselves.

On the lawn there was a family fussing over a fellow who could have been five or in his teens or a man of thirty or so, and who was sitting in the lap of a woman who may have been his mother. Two cars down from where Samuel parked, a man was working deep under the hood of an ancient car. The woman raised her arm and gave an uncomfortably loud hello to Madeleine and Samuel.

Inside the building, they saw no one until they had walked far down the hall to D Ward. All the way down they could hear the crying and cackling and laughing and shouting of those in other wards. Madeleine realized that she had come without some treat—pieces of fruit or a small box of cookies, something that Curtis usually remembered to bring. At D Ward, after the attendant had wheeled the child Sam out of his ward and left without having spoken one word, Samuel bent down and kissed the boy on the cheek, which embarrassed Madeleine. Sam blinked once and then after a few seconds he blinked again. In the ward, those patients not in their beds were in wheelchairs, gathered around a very loud television set propped up on a dull blue bureau that had no drawers. The only person in the room who seemed interested in the television was an attendant painting her fingernails.

Samuel took the handles of the wheelchair and they went outside.

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