Treading Lightly

CHAPTER 5

The sunlight streamed across her face, and the sound of an ambulance screaming outside her window woke her up from her troubled sleep. Looking around, she saw that she wasn’t in prison for tax evasion, but was still in her own home. Thank God it was only a dream. A nightmare, really.

She pulled herself out of bed, threw on a robe and stumbled to the kitchen for her morning jolt of caffeine. Passing the table, she looked for the pad and found her morning note from Craig.

Not yet, Mom. I can still take ya!?

Don’t let Grandma get you down.

You’re smart, talented, and beautiful in my eyes!?

Smiling, she was glad he couldn’t see her at that moment. She looked down at the old, worn terry-cloth robe with pulls and stains, and fingered her dirty hair. He wouldn’t find her so beautiful right now. But perhaps she was wrong. When he had bed-head and crusts of sleep in his just-wakened eyes, she found him quite adorable. Beautiful. The only time she found him more beautiful was when he was sleeping. Because when he was asleep, he was without any defenses. He was her son, her child, the being she had given life to—pure and open. He was still her baby when he slept.

She looked down at the pad again and smiled. How could her mother think this boy was anything but terrific? Look at the sweet message he’d left her, knowing she was stressed and tired and feeling crappy about herself.

She shuffled over to Mr. Coffee, measured out some coffee and thought of her son as she stood there waiting for the pot to fill. The heavenly aroma filled the small, drab kitchen, and she found renewed strength in the blissful fragrance. When the trickling sound ended, she poured herself a cup and padded back to her room, mug in hand, to get her e-mail messages. Once she’d responded to anything urgent (like hopefully the response from her agent Sid), she’d get to her walking.

She logged on and brought up her e-mail program, sipping the hot coffee while waiting for the messages to come through. Looking for anything important, she was a bit miffed that she hadn’t heard from Sid. “Damn it! When I was making money hand over fist for the man, he answered my e-mails within minutes!” Lately, if she heard back from him within a week, she felt honored. “Has my latest work been that stinky?” she wondered aloud as she deleted the mortgage offers, the porn-site insertions, and the other nonpersonal spam that flooded her in-box. Feeling depression start to sink in, she put on her mannish-looking walking shoes and sports bra—no use having anything droop further, time and gravity were doing enough to help in that department—and climbed aboard her treadmill.

She popped in the videotape of Family Feud that Craig had recorded for her daily and started walking. Family Feud was on twice each weekday, which made one hour of tape. If she timed it right, she could walk about forty-five minutes worth in an hour. If she was lucky. The time discrepancy was due to her usual pit stops—which she took every ten to fifteen minutes or so. Having a bladder the size of a thimble, she could only get about a quarter mile done—tops—before she needed a bathroom break.

“House! HOUSE, you moron! How can you not say house?” she yelled at the doofusy-looking man on her TV screen. “Where do you live? In a cave?” she shouted, gasping for breath. “In an island hut? In a cell? You moron!” She shook her head. “People are idiots!” she sputtered. “Where do they find these people to go on this show? Under a rock?” she muttered, and made a face that was a cross between severe pain and the immediate aftermath of finding out your son has head lice while you’re lying with him on his pillow to talk about his day. “You don’t deserve to win the twenty thousand dollars. You’re too stupid!” she told the man on her screen.

When she had first started walking, Craig tried to show his support by sometimes sitting on her bed while she walked, watching Family Feud with her as she plodded along. The television volume needed to be way up to be heard over the noise the treadmill made, so he’d join her, casually saying it was so loud in the apartment, there was nothing else he could do without hearing it anyhow. He’d laugh at her disbelief at the answers people came up with on the show, and funny as it first was (watching his mother tromp like a hamster in a wheel while screaming obscenities at a taped game show), it lost its appeal pretty quickly.

One day, when he was in his room doing his homework, she was screaming, “Now, now! NOW!” and he’d thought she was screaming, “Ow, ow! OW!” He came running in to help his poor mother, only to find her not lying in a crumpled heap at the base of the treadmill as he’d expected, but red faced and screaming at the TV, her hands balled up in fists, as her sneakered feet pounded away. It was just as well she hadn’t hurt herself, because he’d wondered how he was going to carry his mother—who was wearing her usual workout attire of nothing but old panties, a sports bra, and ugly walking shoes—to the hospital.

After he complained that he couldn’t hear himself think over her pounding feet, the squeak of the treadmill, her screaming at contestants, and the blaring television, she tried to get her walking done first thing in the morning while he was at school. This way he would have no excuse to not do his homework; nor could he ever say he didn’t have the peace and quiet to do it well. Plus, she figured in case she did hurt herself or keel over and die, it would also save Craig the embarrassment and logistical problem of getting her to either the hospital or the morgue. In the “getting hurt” case scenario, she’d have all day to figure out a way to get herself to a hospital independently, and in the “keeling over and dying” case scenario, well, she’d be dead, and there’s not much anyone could do about it.

The afternoon after making that momentous decision to walk mornings while he was at school, she’d instructed him to dress her adequately before calling the police should he ever come home to find her lying dead in just her sports bra, old, big underwear and walking shoes. When she’d tested him, by asking him to choose an appropriate outfit for the situation, he’d failed miserably. Who’d get caught dead in an olive-green velvet blazer and old, faded gray sweatpants one had worn during a pregnancy more than a decade before but kept and still wore because they were comfy? Yes, he was right, they’d be easy to slip on her prone, stiff, dead body. But to be caught dead in that outfit! So ever since, she kept a neatly folded pair of black slacks and a fresh, crisp blouse on a chair nearby, so he would dress her appropriately should the need arise. The black slacks were slimming, and the blouse was supposed to be wrinkle free. It was truly the perfect outfit to be caught dead in. She also threw out the olive-green velvet jacket.

So now she walked in the mornings. Currently, she was alternately screaming “Brad Pitt” and “Tom Cruise” at a woman with a foot-tall, bouffant hairdo from Idaho who had just given the answer “Fred Astaire” to the question: Name a famous actor. Who did she think they polled? One hundred people from a nursing home? When her husband, wearing a light blue polyester suit, said “Charlie Chaplin” she decided to take her second bathroom break. “Will Smith, Russell Crowe, Keanu Reeves, Mel Gibson,” she muttered to herself as she walked to the bathroom. “Or, if you wanted slightly older—which it seems you do—how about Robert DeNiro, Paul Newman, Harrison Ford, Clint Eastwood!” she huffed.

Upon her return, she climbed onto the treadmill and started again, disgusted by the couple who obviously lived under a rock in Idaho. Suddenly she heard a terrible clunk and was almost thrown from the treadmill when the walking tread came undone and the front bar that held the tread part in place arced up and lifted on the right side—perpendicular to the walking platform.

“Hmm. That can’t be good.” Not good at all. Now what the hell was she going to do?

She tried stepping on the bar to push it back in place, but it didn’t budge. It just stood there, poking out, the tread all wavy and askew.

“Damn it! This sucks,” she muttered as she got off, no longer thinking about how badly the Idahoans were playing, which had been all consuming mere seconds ago.

Not knowing what else to do, she thought of her maintenance man.

Throwing on some clothes, she steadied herself for the trip down to the building’s basement.

The basement was where the tenants kept their stuff in small, partitioned cages. In their particular compound, Craig kept an assortment of sporting goods and miscellaneous stuff he’d collected that she’d insisted were not to be kept in the apartment. Her particular donation to their assigned pen was her clothes from the off-season, stored in large, rectangular containers.

She hated going to the basement. Her self-assigned, floor-specific claustrophobia always made her overactive imagination envision the entire building collapsing on top of her with her not being able to get out. Needless to say, just hitting the B button in the elevator brought feelings of suffocation for her.

This wasn’t the only outlandish visualization she had. She had lots of peculiar Janine-induced mental pictures. Quite a few were rather inspirational. But as unlikely as they all probably were, they freaked her out nonetheless. If the basement brought impressions of asphyxiation, the sub-basement brought more atrocious visions of terror. For below the dreaded basement…was the sub-basement. The sub-basement was a totally creepy, dark, dank place where the building’s maintenance man, Mr. Franklin—a friendly enough old coot—could usually be found. Rumor had it that his office was there, but she’d always had a sneaking suspicion that the strange old man lived down there, too.

Janine shivered with fear and repulsion as the elevator doors opened to that floor.

“Mr. Franklin?” she called, a slight echo following her words.

Taking a few steps into the sub-basement, she could smell the mold, and hated the look of the rusty, exposed pipes traversing over her head. The ceiling was low, as though the building had already settled or had a mini-collapse, squashing the space originally designed. Was that water she heard dripping? Maybe the pipes had already broken with the pressure of the building that was surely starting to collapse.

The sooner she got out of there, the better. “Are you down here, Mr. Franklin?” She heard the panic in her voice, but was too creeped out to disguise it. Try as she might, she couldn’t stop picturing the rats that were probably scampering around her feet at that very moment. The Black Plague started here, I’m sure.

“May I help you, ma’am?” A young man appeared out of nowhere, scaring her to the point where what little was left of her hair almost stood on end. He wiped his hands on the dirty rag hanging from his shoulder.

“I’m looking for Mr. Franklin.”

“I’m he. I mean him. I’m him. Mr. Franklin.”

She stared at him. “Unless you’ve taken some kind of youth elixir, had hair plugs, and dyed whatever little tufts were already there from gray to black—you’re not Mr. Franklin.”

He laughed. “Oh. You must be referring to my grandfather. Gramps retired to Florida.”

“He did? When did that happen?”

“Eight months ago.”

“Oh.” Shows how observant I am.

“I’m Mr. Franklin, too, but I think that sounds so officious, don’t you? Please, call me Ben.”

“Okay, Ben,” she said, trying to recall if she’d ever heard a maintenance man use the word officious before. She might not acknowledge their presence—or lack thereof—but she did notice their speech patterns and chosen vocabulary. Her job made that a habit and a necessity. “So, Mr. Franklin, I mean, Ben.” She stopped speaking. Something was off, amiss, but she couldn’t put her finger on it. “Wait a minute. Your name is Ben Franklin?”

“Ironic, huh?” His smile was lopsided.

“Well, yes.”

“I’ve yet to invent anything useful, although I’ve spent my lifetime trying to come up with something.”

She felt sorry for him. “Most of the good things are already invented.”

“Don’t I know it,” he said with a huff, looking totally dejected.

“Keep at it, Ben Franklin. You’ll think of something.”

“Thanks.” He grimaced. “It’s a hard name to live up to.”

“I’d imagine so. It must feel like a curse for someone in your line of work.”

“Yeah. Welcome to my world.” His head hung low for about three seconds before snapping up with new life. “So, how can I help you, Miss Uh…”

“Ruvacado. Janine Ruvacado. Fifteen D.”