Murder Never Forgets (4 page)

People are around us in a circle. Someone is saying, “Call the infirmary,” and someone else, “Doctor, get the doctor.” Poor Mrs. Dexter will hate this, being on display.

I get up to go to my father, whose voice I hear threaded through the other babble; he’s saying, “If she lies there, they will come for her. When you lie down like that is when they grab you.”

Chapter 2

I spend a bedraggled night churning across a Manor guest-room bed and staring up into a fluted ceiling. What’s going to happen to my poor confused father? And to gallant, paranoid Mrs. Dexter? And what’s with that piece of glass? Because it
is
glass; it sits now, wrapped in toilet paper, in the front pocket of my backpack, looking like a sliver of that microwave-safe milky stuff they use to make baking dishes.

I don’t want to believe that Mrs. Dexter’s dramatic warnings are fact-based. Four A.M. flickers across the motel-type clock before I turn out the light.

But the next morning I get up feeling okay and go off to find Daddy, who seems moderately glued to reality, although he wants to talk too much about Horus’s Eye, which is a hieroglyph of an eye with stylized markings below it. We have breakfast sent to the room, and he cracks the top of his egg and worries about the eye: “It represents eternal renewal, did you remember? An image of hope, of course.” Snap, off comes the top of the egg. “You know, I think I am in danger.”

“Surely not, Daddy.” This has to be more of Mrs. Dexter’s paranoia. “The Manor,” I enthuse, “such a safe place.” I gesture at his small-paned, mullioned window, elegantly old-fashioned.

“Hmmm,” says my father. “They may send me somewhere to keep me safe.”

I don’t like this talk one bit, but I decide the way to handle it is to ignore it. I kiss him and position him in his easy chair in front of the TV, and by the time I leave for my appointment with Manor administration he seems perfectly all right, clucking over the timber construction of the prairie mansion in
This Old House
.

 
The appointment with Manor administration is the one where I’m supposed to discuss what to do with my father.

They want to send him off to Hope House, and I want them not to. It seems to me that he has paid for the luxury of residence in the good parts of the Manor, and he should have that for a long while more.

Manor administration is a lady named Mrs. Sisal, who has an asymmetrical haircut and is wearing a long-waisted black suit. She focuses on me in her lozenge-shaped glasses and lets me know that I am famous. “Excellent thinking last night,” she says. “Admirable.” She sounds as if it hurts to say these things. “We are going to have to give Mrs. Dexter medication lessons,” she adds right away, being the kind of administrator who needs to balance any nice thing she accidentally does with a mean one.

I ask, “Medication lessons?” and she agrees, “Yes, of course,” and goes on to explain: “We have had many clients—the people we work with here are not
patients
, Miss Day, but
clients
—we’ve had many clients who did that. Forgot. Tried to swallow a pill inside its aluminum casing.”

I’m lost here. “A pill in an aluminum casing?”

Mrs. Sisal moves her head irritatedly. “Some of the medications are arranged on an aluminum-covered card. You have to separate the sections, which are sharp. And after that, you must pry the pill out.”

“And you think she tried to swallow it, piece of card and all?”

“Certainly she did. There’s no other explanation for those throat abrasions. And this client has had medication problems before; when she had pneumonia, she could not keep straight the rules about when to take calcium and when to take Cipro.”

So Mrs. Dexter is being blamed for cutting her own throat with a pill casing; that certainly will take care of any ideas she might get about lawsuits. I feel a flood of anger that I can’t let show because Mrs. Sisal is moving on to the business of the day, hassling me about my father.

“Embarrassing for him, too,” she says, and “He wanders, he calls out, he is distressed, he is upset, Miss Day, more upset than we find useful. Perhaps he would be happier in Hope House? Hope House,” she gets a fashionable pointytoed foot over the edge of her file drawer, “is our comfortable, controlled facility.”

I work hard at looking unfazed; I smile gently. It doesn’t do to go weak with these bullying types. The question of who moves to Hope House and who gets to stay here in overstuffed luxury will probably be settled by Mrs. Sisal. “My father has been a very famous man,” I remind her.

Both she and I know that
famous
once-upon-a-time has nothing to do with Alzheimer’s now but the reminder works just the same. She relaxes a bit, the glasses turn to their
admit light
mode; she likes the idea of fame and agrees, “We have many famous people at the Manor.”

It’s at this point that it happens. The Devil makes me do it. I open my mouth and out it comes. I accomplish something that is totally outrageous and apparently unplanned, although later when I stop and review, I realize that I have indeed been planning toward it.

I ask Mrs. Sisal for a job. For a job for me at Green Beach Manor. A position as an aide, one of those helpers who assists the old people in taking their pills and finding the bathroom.

It is ridiculous, and at the same time it’s not.

I want to be near my father and keep him from talking about his woman on the beach and his eye being eaten. I am feeling guilty about having left him to go off to Baker’s Landing and Habitat for Humanity. My father needs me nearby, a buffer against Hope House.

He has a lifetime sentence in the Manor, thanks to Aunt Crystal.

I have no job and no ties except for him; I’ve just had a final and irrevocable falling out with the Habitat boyfriend.

I thought of maybe working here while I was riding down on the Greyhound bus, and I thought of it again this morning as I crossed the garden toward Administration with the sea air all fresh and vigorous, and one of Mrs. Dexter’s butterflies coming to life among the ridiculous palm trees, and the coastal moss spangling itself with dew. I looked around and thought,
It’s a weird atmosphere but maybe a pretty place to be for a while
.

And just now with Mrs. Sisal being so meanly stupid about Daddy and also about Mrs. Dexter, I think of these possibilities again. Perhaps it’s the case of Mrs. Dexter even more than of my father that kicks me forward;
You’re an uncomfortable person
, I decide, analyzing the glasses,
somebody better watch you.

“This may seem like a complete change of subject,” I tell her, “but actually it’s not . . .” I pause and warm up into my spiel. “A job as an aide. I am very well qualified.” I list my charms, not bothering to be modest: good grades, college animal lab (those lab cats with glasses should be worth something), Habitat for Humanity. Service with others, experience helping people. Et cetera, et cetera.

 
Sisal is a very cool, not to say chilly human being and can’t let herself be amazed that I might change the subject so suddenly, nor that I might want to work at her establishment.

I don’t add,
I know I’m overqualified
, which is true, but I do imply that although highly trained, I’m willing to come down in the world and that I’ll stay for a while (“. . . stable, I have a really great work record”), and generally I’m a terrific bargain. I murmur about a devotion to Sociology, a possible personal future in Aging, “This will be work experience; such a useful field,” I say, all the while chin up confidently, smiling into the glasses.

Mrs. Sisal mutters about my father, and I reassure her, “Yes, I want to be near him, of course, but, no, that won’t affect my work.”

“Well,” she murmurs, looking favorable.

I’m remembering Mrs. Dexter’s stories about someone falling out of a window and somebody else with a gas leak and now her own oyster-glass sandwich, and I think, but don’t say,
Hey, if you’re having all these weird accidents, you certainly can use more staff
.

“We cannot pay a great deal.” She takes her foot out of the file drawer; business is beginning.

Some sheets are summoned into her computer, and she begins asking job-application questions, pecking the answers in rapidly on her keyboard:
education
,
previous employers
, (Susie becomes a Marketing dot com). Suddenly, Sisal stops and looks up, inquiring, “There are almost no young people here; will you be lonely? Do you have friends nearby?”

I hadn’t suspected her of understanding the word
lonely
, but maybe the question was in her
Executives Procedures Manual
.

“I have friends from college in the town of Green Beach.”

“Oh, good, good.” She returns to the rest of my vital statistics.

Actually, the friend in Green Beach is Susie’s son Robbie, who is a doctor at North Shore Hospital and thus an adjunct doctor at this establishment, one of the extra ones whom the Manor calls in when they can’t reach the usual guy.

It may seem the height of coincidence for Robbie to be here and also for me to be here. But it isn’t coincidence at all; it’s cause and effect: Robbie was the one who told Aunt Crystal about Green Beach Manor in the first place, when she was shopping for a residence for Daddy. I’ve stayed away from Green Beach more than I should because Robbie might be around.

Susie, in the parking lot, when she was saying goodbye to me, almost talked about Robbie; I could feel her take in a deep breath for: “Hey, Carly, say, ‘Hi,’ to Robbie for me,” and “Don’t be mean to my boy when you see him, huh, girl?” But then she didn’t say any of these things. All she did was look doubtful and kiss me. Susie is too nice to torment ex-lovers, even when they’re related to her.

Mrs. Sisal rips a long page out of her computer and hands it over to sign. “Now you understand . . .” and she enunciates a list of days on and days off and a salary figure (yes, low) and a fraternization rule which means
do not have sex with the old men
.

 
I leave Mrs. Sisal’s office loaded down with directions, schedules, a chit for the laundry room where I’ll get an aide’s smock, a room key, and an armful of gold-embossed literature about
The Manor System, Your Way to New Life
. “Seize the Day,” the brochure says. “Live the way you’ve always wanted to live.” And it supplies a long list of classes you (that is, Daddy and the other clients like him) can take to do this. Besides an online stock-trading class, so useful to those of us with early-stage Alzheimer’s, there are sessions in Watercolor, Found Sculpture, Tai Chi, Macrame, and Contract Bridge.

Mrs. S. had smirked at me, “That is our message; you need to
project
it.”

She was busy gloating over her new cheap aide and appeared to have forgotten about sending my poor confused father to Hope House.

 
 
After I get my uniform and move my backpack into my new, minimal, utilitarian little room, I stop by Daddy’s apartment to give him the news. “Guess what? I’ll be living here now.”

He sits in his easy chair looking pink and hopeful, his tweed jacket neatly buttoned, his face a childish round. He’s balancing, slightly too close to his face, a
New York Times
folded into that standard
Times
quarter-fold. Although at this moment the paper is upside down. Maybe it hasn’t been that way all these hours since breakfast.

“Live here, darling?” He lowers the paper and turns to assess his apartment with its oriental rug and redwood window seat and bay window. “How nice, how fine. Of course you live here. I will sleep
there
,” a gesture at the window seat; “You will have the alcove.”

“I like a hard bed,” he persists while I start explaining, and then he continues with, “Do you remember, camping at Sharm el Naga, oh, I was such a good camper, Carla, although that woman in the net . . .” Here he seems to lose track of his thought, and I jump in with words like
job
and
experience
and
temporary
. Which results in a big pileup of misunderstanding. “Oh, no, no, not
temporary
; Daughter, of
course
you live in my hotel.” And he settles back determined to beam at me.

“Come see my room, Daddy.” I take his hand and lead him,
New York Times
and all, down the hall to show him the eight-by-ten space Mrs. Sisal has allotted to me.

Our way through the hall is wide and plush and overstuffed; someone has been hanging another van-load of those gold-framed pink-and-blue pictures. What is it about Renoir that makes it so easy to do a fake one, all misty and plump?

He wants to talk about other hotels. “There was one, I wonder where, they had a replica of a pyramid?”

The hotel he’s talking about is the El Nil in Cairo, but I don’t tell him that; offering facts sometimes results in extra confusion, as if he doesn’t want to know the real names of things, just the possibilities that shimmer in the back of his head. I’d love to know how memory works for him. I think of it as a random pile of high-voltage electric wires, some of them with the rubber casings peeling off.