The Fountain of Age Read Online Free PDF Page B

to help Henry to his feet. He was a dour young man whose name Henry hadn’t caught. DiBella said, “Where’s Carrie today?”
    “It’s not her day with me.”
    “Ah.” DiBella didn’t sound very interested; he was already prepping his screens for the next volunteer. Time on the MRI, he’d told Henry, was tight, having to be scheduled between hospital use.
    The dour young man—Darryl? Darrin? Dustin?—drove Henry back to St. Sebastian’s and left him to make his own way upstairs. In his apartment, Henry lowered himself laboriously to the sofa. Just a few minutes’ nap, that’s all he needed, even a short excursion tired him so much now—although it would be better if Carrie had been along, she always took such good care of him, such a kind and dear young woman. If he and Ida had ever had children, he’d have wanted them to be like Carrie. If that bastard Jim Peltier ever again tried to—
    It shot through him like a bolt of lightning.
    Henry screamed. This time the experience hurt , searing the inside of his skull and his spinal cord down to his tailbone. No dancing, no embroidering, no meditating—and yet others were there, not as individuals but as a collective sensation, a shared pain, making the pain worse by pooling it. He couldn’t stand it, he was going to die, this was the end of—
    The pain was gone. It vanished as quickly as it came, leaving him bruised inside, throbbing as if his entire brain had undergone a root canal. His gorge rose, and just in time he twisted his aching body to the side and vomited over the side of the sofa onto the carpet.
    His fingers fumbled in the pocket of his trousers for the St. Sebastian panic button that Carrie insisted he wear. He found it, pressed the center, and lost consciousness.

    FIVE

    Carrie went home early. Thursday afternoons were assigned to Mrs. Lopez and her granddaughter had showed up unexpectedly. Carrie suspected that Vicky Lopez wanted money again since that seemed to be the only time she did turn up at St. Sebastian’s, but that was not Carrie’s business. Mrs. Lopez said happily that Vicky could just as easily take her to shopping instead of Carrie, and Vicky agreed, looking greedy. So Carrie went home.
    If she’d been fortunate enough to have a grandmother—to have any relatives besides her no-good stepbrothers in California—she would treat that hypothetical grandmother better than did Vicky, she of the designer jeans and cashmere crew necks and massive credit-card debt. Although Carrie wouldn’t want her grandmother to be like Mrs. Lopez, either, who treated Carrie like not-very-clean hired help.
    Well, she was hired help, of course. The job as a St. Sebastian aide was the first thing she’d seen in the classifieds the day she finally walked out on Jim. She grabbed the job blindly, like a person going over a cliff who sees a fragile branch growing from crumbly rock. The weird thing was that after the first day, she knew she was going to stay. She liked old people (most of them, anyway). They were interesting and grateful (most of them anyway)—and safe. During that first terrified week at the YMCA, while she searched for a one-room apartment she could actually afford, St. Sebastian’s was the one place she felt safe.
    Jim had changed that, of course. He’d found out the locations of her job and apartment. Cops could find anything.
    She unlocked her door after making sure the dingy corridor was empty, slipped inside, shot the deadbolt, and turned on the light. The only window faced an air shaft, and the room was dark even on the brightest day. Carrie had done what she could with bright cushions and Salvation Army lamps and dried flowers, but dark was dark.
    “Hello, Carrie,” Jim said.
    She whirled around, stifling a scream. But the sickening thing was the rest of her reaction. Unbidden and hated—God, how hated!—but still there was the sudden thrill, the flash of excitement that energized every part of her body. “ That’s not