All Dressed Up (30 page)

Just a minute,
though. His jaw? Pinky pale? “You’ve shaved,” she blurted out, and
sat back to take a better look. Yes, he had! She’d been so
distracted by the motorcycle and the jacket earlier, she hadn’t
taken it in. She was horrified at her lack of observation, just
when she’d begun to conclude from the blurriness thing that maybe
God was on her side.

Clearly He
wasn’t. She had Alzheimer’s.

Mac blushed.
“Some women don’t like – So I thought – I mean, it can be rough. To
kiss.”

To kiss…

Alzheimer’s
and a second round of puberty at the same time. It was sooo not
fair.

She blushed,
too. “Why didn’t I notice? I knew something was different, but –
”

“Yeah, I
wondered that, myself. It confirmed the decision to shave, I have
to say, because clearly my beard wasn’t nearly as magnificent as I
thought.”

“Oh, it was
magnificent. I told you I liked it, I’m sure I did.”

“You did.” He
smacked the heel of his hand against the side of his head. “When we
had that premature conversation about God. I forgot.”

“We both have
Alzheimer’s. Something in common, at last!”

“But I did the
wrong thing with the beard.”

“No, no. I
like you without the beard, too. You have a good strong jaw. You
can kiss me any way you like. Wearing banana-flavored lip balm.
Through a mouthful of beer. Any way.”

“Hm.” He
looked at her mouth. The atmosphere, which had begun to rocket
along in their shared agitation, slowed dramatically.

Thank you,
God, for the way he’s looking at my mouth.

She
waited.

“Things in
common aren’t important, I don’t think,” he said. He would have
been speaking down into his beard if he still had one. “All you
need is twin hearts.” He reached out and slipped his fingers into
her hair, pulling her closer, still bathing her mouth in that
blue-eyed, promise-laden twinkle of light, and she surrendered to
the total bliss of being kissed in the dark corner of a quiet bar
by a fifty-three-year-old man who still believed in twin
hearts.

Chapter
Thirteen

“He needs his
bed changed again,” Mom told the nurse. She rarely pressed the call
button, but more often darted out to the nurses’ station, or
grabbed someone before they could walk by Billy’s open door. It was
better to make personal contact, she said. “I’m sorry, I didn’t get
the dish to him in time.” At eight o’clock on Friday evening, he
was still vomiting.

“No problem,
honey,” said the nurse.

“You must
really love me, Mom,” Billy said, looking up at her.

“Of course I
do.” She thought about his words for a moment. “Didn’t you know
that?”

“Well, yes, I
did…” He leaned quickly over the dish again.

“You see?” Mom
whispered to Sarah and Emma, and although Sarah couldn’t have put a
name to what they saw – something about the odd ways love proved
itself in a child’s eyes – Mom was right. They did see.

“Go home. Let
me stay over with him tonight,” Dad offered.

Mom shook her
head.

“Go home for a
shower.” He’d brought his guitar and had been playing soft, slow,
acousticized versions of Paranoid and Smoke on the Water because
Billy was a 1970s metalhead in his musical taste. He’d stopped
playing when Billy needed the dish.

“I can shower
here.” To the nurse, she said, “You wrote down the fluid volume? Do
you want me to empty the dishes while you change the bed?”

Every detail
of time and volume went into his notes, but Mom kept them in her
head as well. She issued full reports to Sarah and Emma, and to
Dad, after he came up Thursday morning. “Eleven, then one o’clock
in the morning – that was a big one – then four o’clock, then six,
then again at eleven.” She stood at his bedside for every one of
them, holding the kidney dishes, changing them whenever he gasped
out, “’nother one.”

“Let me rinse
the dishes, Mom,” Emma said.

Sarah followed
her out and they rinsed kidney dishes together in a room full of
metal sinks and green plastic butt-shaped bedpans. “It must be
somebody’s job to do this, Em.”

“I know. And
not a doctor’s. But let me, anyhow.”

She dealt with
the frothy contents of the two dishes and Sarah said, “If you can
handle this I don’t see why you can’t handle being a doctor.”

“That’s
because you’re not one.” Emma looked neat and efficient and
intelligent and a good example to any patient. See, if you take
care of your body, you too can have silky brown hair, a bow-shaped
mouth, and not an ounce of extra weight. “Let me be the judge of
how soon I’d have a complete five-alarm breakdown if I kept trying
to be a doctor.”

“But you’re
still a doctor a little bit. I mean, it hasn’t faded or anything.
Not yet. So can I ask, shouldn’t we see about sending him to
another hospital? Shouldn’t we be jumping up and down demanding
that they operate, or ordering a second opinion?”

“I checked
Hermann’s resume.” She stacked the kidney dishes in the rack for
sterilizing. “And even the other guy’s – the glitch doctor. And
they’re good. I asked around. I called up a couple of my
professors. I yelled at Hermann in the elevator.”

“When did you
do all this?”

“See, when you
think I’m just getting coffee and feeling rejected by Billy, I’m
actually being useful.”

“I thought you
might have been calling – “ Sarah stopped.

“Charlie? No.”
Subject closed. “Listen, he has bowel sounds, they think this
should resolve.”

“So we just
wait.”

“Waiting is
better than surgery, when it’s probably them needing to go in there
with all guns blazing to repair the vein that caused the problem in
the first place.”

“Oh, hi, you
guys, I came to see how things are going,” Brooke said from the
doorway. “You don’t have to do that,” she told Emma, who was
stacking a pile of clean kidney dishes to bring back to Billy’s
room.

“I know.”

“Is he on
fluids again?”

“He was this
morning. But now it’s all pouring out again so he’s back on Nil By
Mouth.”

“Oh, shoot!”
Her uniform looked tired. “I’m on my break and I totally don’t want
a candy bar but I’d be willing to have one with you if you need
company.”

“Candy…” Emma
said vaguely. “Yeah, okay, and coffee.”

So they went
and sat in a line of plastic chairs in front of Brooke’s favorite
vending machine near the elevator, the one with the candy bars not
the one with the bad coffee. There was a parents’ room where you
could get bad coffee for free. You had to be a visitor, or else a
very new and inexperienced hospital relative to pony up for the
vending machine coffee.

Brooke started
talking about her wedding. “It’s not going to be like yours,” she
apologized to Emma.

“Listen,
nobody should have a wedding like mine.” Emma spoke with candy bar
caught in her teeth. “Nobody should plan one, or wish for one, or
inflict one on anyone they claim to love. I was stupid about my
wedding. I deserved what I got.”

“No… That’s
way too strong, honey.”

“Do you see
Charlie?”

“He dropped
around on Wednesday night. He – ”

“No, I mean,
do you see him now? Here? With us?” Emma answered her own question.
“No! You see! He’s not here. And he has reasons not to be here. And
I’m not going to suck up all the emotional energy in the room, this
time, and blame everybody else because there isn’t more of it
available. He’s not here. It’s my fault.” Her voice went foggy and
the candy bar just would not go down. It affected her speech. “I
anh not going to fwinch fwom akfepting vat.” Some caramel ran down
to her chin.

“You’re not
the only woman who’s ever turned into Bride-o-saurus Rex, you
know.”

“All I know
is, if I was Charlie I probably wouldn’t be here, either.”

The elevator
door pinged and opened and out stepped Lainie.

“Yeah, but you
know what?” Brooke said, lowering her voice and leaning into Emma’s
shoulder. “The good thing about Charlie is that he’s not the kind
of guy who says I forgive you, honey, to fob you off…”

Lainie saw
them and waved at them. Sarah swallowed her last piece of candy bar
and went quickly to give her a sticky greeting, in case Emma and
Brooke needed more time on the Charlie thing. The last part she
heard was Brooke telling Emma, “…when really he’s still mad
underneath. He’s rock solid about things like that. When he says he
forgives you, you’ll know he really does.”

But would he
forgive her at all, Sarah wondered.

“I’ve brought
him a Zelda game,” Lainie said, about Billy.

They reached
his room and peered in at the door. He looked to be asleep, thin
beneath the starched white sheets, not getting any better. Dad and
Mom were talking quietly in a corner and Sarah heard her own
questions coming from Mom’s lips. “Should we get him moved down to
Hackensack? Maybe Charlie knows someone we could call in for
another opinion?”

“I don’t think
he’s quite up to a Zelda game yet, Lainie,” Sarah muttered.

Although the
word Zelda did get Billy as far as opening his eyes. “How are you,
honey?” Lainie asked, and he shrugged and closed them again. “Okay,
I won’t stay,” she murmured to Sarah after another couple of
minutes.

“I’m sorry he
didn’t say hi.”

“Oh, for
heaven’s sake! Poor guy, he doesn’t have to speak if he doesn’t
want to.”

They talked
for a couple more minutes just outside his room, and Sarah filled
Lainie in on how they were all doing. She finished, “I’m going to
bring take-out for Mom in a bit.”

“Walk me to
the elevator?”

They both saw
Brooke and Emma still locked in heart-to-heart poses.

“Billy’s glad
to know that people are thinking about him,” Sarah said, “but he
doesn’t want them to see him looking so ill. He said he’s glad his
friends are in Jersey.”

“But I did
want to tell you… I found out a little more about the ballet camp
seller for you.” Pause. “That is, only if you’re interested.” She
watched for Sarah’s reassurance.

“No, no. I
mean, yes, I am. Interested enough to know what happened.” Sarah
waited for the sick feeling she’d experienced when she toured the
place, but it didn’t come.

“Frances
Townley inherited a fifty percent share in the property six years
ago, when the previous owner Celia Schutz aka Cecilia Tarantovie
died.”

Sarah laughed.
“My God, she had a fake ballerina name! I should have guessed!”

“Schutz rhymes
with putz, I guess.”

“You’re right.
Not good.”

“The other
fifty percent went to Ms Schutz’s brother and Miss Townley bought
him out, but this apparently left her without enough capital to run
the place and she had to close it down two summers ago. She’s
pushing eighty years old, anyhow.”

“I should
think so! She seemed ancient to us twelve years ago.”

“She’s brought
down the asking price, but those Christian retreat people are
looking seriously at a place in Vermont.”

“I feel sorry
for Vermont. I hope Miss Frances finds a buyer. But it’s not going
to be me.”

Lainie patted
her arm. “You have other things to worry about, with your
brother.”

To Sarah, this
sounded like a threat to bring the subject up again at a better
time. She pressed the elevator button. “Is Charlie still at your
place?”

“He went back
to the city Thursday morning. Sometimes he has to take himself
away, out of the picture. I don’t know if it’s to send a message,
or to work out what he wants, or what. He’s done it before. It
hurts. I don’t know if it’s acceptable, you know? I don’t know how
Emma should feel.”

Sarah went
back to Billy’s room, passing Brooke saying, “No, I’m not having
monogrammed napkins or any of that stuff.”

Billy slept.
His breath gave a little hiss and whistle each time, the loudest
sound in the room. By the window, Dad said to Mom, “Go home for a
shower. I mean it, Terri, you know you have to keep something in
reserve for the tie-breaker in the third set.”

On Saturday
morning, Emma opened one of the cans of herring in tomato sauce and
persuaded Sarah and Dad to share it with her, on toast for
breakfast.

“Why now, Em?”
Sarah asked, half-teasing, half-something-else. “Why today?”

Dad took a
delicate bite and commented, “The after-note of rust adds an
interesting complexity to the taste.”

“To help Mom?”
Emma said. “You know those cans torture her.”

“Because
they’re an encapsulation of her flaws?”

“Yes, so I’m
trying to be nice, taking one of her burdens away.”

“Next time
you’re in Saddle River, I can call your attention to a few items in
the pantry,” Dad offered. “There’s a jar of English Branston Pickle
I’m a little scared of.”

“I should have
warmed these up,” said Emma. The herrings tasted thick and fishy,
and there were textures in there that you couldn’t trust.

“I guess it’s
all part of the whole fixing old mistakes program, or something,”
Sarah suggested.

“Warming up
the herring?” Dad hadn’t received any of the memos on Emma and
Sarah’s canoeing conversation from Monday, and other recent
discussions.

“Eating them.
It’s the only way to correct the mistake of buying them in the
first place. Emma and I have been talking a bit, Dad.”

“Some people
like canned herrings.”

“But not us.
Even warmed up.”

“I think she
had an idea that if we were ever stranded here in a snowstorm, we’d
need rations,” Dad explained.

“Even when
we’re just talking about canned fish you like to cast Mom in the
best possible light, don’t you, Dad?” Emma said. She rubbed his
arm. It was hairy and thick, but not as firm as it used to be.