The Cove (10 page)

“See yah,” Julia finally said. With that, she swung the door shut, turned on one foot, and all but ran up the walkway to the front door of the house.

“I sure hope so,” Ben called after her, but the passenger’s window was up, and he wasn’t sure she heard him.

He watched as she ducked inside with one last quick glance and a wave over her shoulder, and then the screen door
whooshed
shut behind her. He sat there for a long time, wishing … hoping she would come back out, but the door remained closed. There was no sign of activity inside the house.

He reached up and rubbed his mouth, still amazed that they had kissed. He shook his head, started up the car, and backed out of the driveway to the street.

He didn’t see Julia in any of the windows, but he was sure — he hoped — she was looking out, watching him drive away. He convinced himself that he could feel her gaze on the back of his neck, making his skin prickle.

As he drove home, he kept thinking,
Umm, yeah … I want me some more of that!

T
he smell of disinfectant and human waste assailed Ben’s nostrils the instant he and Louise stepped through the front door of “Grave’s Edge.” He blew his breath out quickly like he’d taken a sip of hot soup.

Holding the door open, he watched as a young woman wearing a hospital smock with a bright floral pattern pushed an elderly woman in a wheelchair down the hall. The old woman, who couldn’t have weighed more than eighty pounds, looked up at Ben. Her eyes had a milky white film and were sinking into her head like marbles in bread dough. Her mouth drooped open on one side, and a string of drool hung from her lower lip to her emaciated chest. Ben assumed she was smiling at him, and he tried to smile back. He waited until they had wheeled past him before turning to Louise.

“Jesus, this place is depressing,” he whispered.

Louise nodded but kept staring straight ahead. He thought maybe this was her way of dealing with it — to shut it all out.

A dozen or so other residents perched in wheelchairs or scuffing along with walkers were gathered in the front foyer. Most of them were staring off at some distant horizon only they could see. One old man shot Ben a toothless grin and said, “
Ahh
.
Comin
’ in for your meds again, huh, Johnny?”

Ben looked at him, trying to place a name with the withered face. The man looked vaguely familiar, but Ben drew a blank.

“Well, well, well, if it isn’t Benjamin Brown in the flesh.”

Ben immediately recognized the voice. Agnes Appleby, an old friend of his mother’s, was seated on a stool behind the counter, reading some pages in a file folder. She closed the file, marking her place with her forefinger as she stood up.

“Mrs. A,” Ben said. “How are you?”

“I can’t complain,” Mrs. Appleby said. Her smile exposed a top row of tiny, yellowed teeth, not much more than stubs. Her hazel eyes sparkled behind the lenses of her too-thick glasses. “Howdy, Louise. Here to see your ma, are yah?”

Ben shrugged and said, “How’s she doing?”

The smile melted away from Mrs. Appleby’s face, and her shoulders slumped. Her sun-tanned face went a few shades paler as she looked away for a moment.

“As well as can be expected, I guess. But truth to tell — she’s declined quite a bit since you’ve been gone.”

Ben glanced at Louise as if to ask if she thought the staff should talk so candidly to family members, especially with other patients close by. Wouldn’t it depress them all the more to hear such negative talk? Or did they know and accept their fate? Or maybe they were so far gone it didn’t matter what anyone said. On some level, they must all know this is the end and none of them would get out of here alive.

Ben and Louise’s mother and Mrs. Appleby had been best friends since grade school. The stories his mother used to tell them about things she and “Aggie” had done together, growing up in the late forties and early fifties, could have filled a book. It struck Ben as patently unfair that his mother, who was still in her early sixties, would be stricken with early onset Alzheimer’s while someone the same age looked perfectly healthy and full of life.

Yeah,
Ben thought,
and who told you life is fair?
His father’s words echoed in his mind as he looked around and saw the stark reality of these people at the end of their lives. He thought of how life ended in Iraq — sudden and bloody, while here it was by decay … and by inches.

“Let me walk you down to her room,” Mrs. Appleby said. She placed the file folder she had been reading onto the desk and came around the edge of the counter. Then she turned and strode purposefully down the corridor to the left of the desk, leading the way. Wending their way between more residents in wheelchairs and walkers, Ben and Louise followed a step or two behind. She moved fast.

“She should be in her room,” Mrs. Appleby said. “But — well, as you know, Louise, she’s quite the wanderer.”

Ben shot a questioning look at his sister, but Louise shifted her eyes sideways. Either she didn’t catch it or else she was ignoring him.

“I want you to be prepared, Ben,” Mrs. Appleby said. “You haven’t seen her in a while and — well … I don’t want you to be too surprised, is all.”

Ben was about to say that he was confident he could handle pretty much anything after what he’d seen in Iraq, but suddenly he wasn’t so sure. He didn’t say anything until they arrived at the door. He was surprised to see a photograph taped to the door, one of his mother that had been taken when she was much younger, probably not long after she graduated from high school. She was standing outside her family home on Main Street wearing a sleeveless shirt and laughing at the camera. Her long hair fell in waves to her shoulders. Ben had never realized how pretty his mother had been back then.

“Why the old picture?” he asked, tapping it lightly.

Mrs. Appleby hooked her forefinger and scraped back and forth beneath her nose.

“People with Alzheimer’s often don’t recognize recent photos of themselves, but they do recognize themselves when they were much younger. Their memories get stuck at certain ages, usually in the late teens or early twenties.”

“Really?” Ben said. He had never heard that before, but he guessed anything was possible.

Without knocking, Mrs. Appleby pushed the door open and walked in ahead of them. They followed behind. The medicinal smell in the room was like a solid wall. The shades were drawn, and the room was cast in gloom. It took Ben a moment to realize the bed was empty.

“See?” Mrs. Appleby said as she walked to the window and drew the shades. The sudden blast of light hurt Ben’s eyes. “She’s off somewhere.”

She shook her head as though gravely disappointed and walked past Ben and Louise and out the door. Once in the corridor, she cast a glance up and down the hallway, and then started back toward the front desk.

“Does this happen a lot?” Ben asked Louise as they followed along behind. Mrs. Appleby was moving fast, and they had to hustle to keep up.

“It’s been kind of a problem,” Louise said keeping her voice low, like she was in a library.

“Kind of? And they don’t keep tabs on her?”

Louise shook her head.

“She can’t go very far. There’s always someone at the front desk, and the other doors are locked. You’d set off an alarm if you opened them.”

“I’m not worried about me. I’m worried about Mom. It’s not safe for her to wander around like this.”

By this time, they were back in the front foyer. They followed Mrs. Appleby down another short hallway to another door. She shouldered it open and entered. Even before he went inside, Ben could hear the blare of a TV show. It sounded like a soap opera. When he entered the room, his eyes darted from side to side, and for an instant, he felt like he was on patrol and had busted into the home of an Iraqi family.

In the flickering blue wash of light from the TV, Ben saw only four people in the room. Two women were sitting side by side in wheelchairs, their faces enraptured as they stared up at the TV screen. An old man was seated on a couch. He was watching something on the ceiling with as much intensity as the two ladies were watching TV. The fourth person was in the far corner, her back partially turned to the door as if she was trying to hide in the corner but had nowhere to go.

“There you are, Lil,” Mrs. Appleby said in a quiet but cheerful tone. “You have visitors.”

The woman in the corner turned away so she was facing the wall. Her shoulders shivered like she was standing outside in the cold.

“Hey, Ma,” Ben said, taking a few cautious steps toward her. She reminded him of a frightened animal, and he didn’t want to spook her. He looked first at his sister and then at Mrs. Appleby as if asking for instructions. Neither one of them said or did anything, so he turned back to his mother.

Her hair was shorter than he remembered. It glowed silvery blue in the light of the TV. Short, thin wisps fanned out like wind-blown spider webs. She was hunched over, but it was obvious she had lost at least twenty pounds if not more since he’d last seen her. She raised her left arm, which was no thicker than the handle of a baseball bat, and covered her face with her hand, trying to hide behind it.

I can’t see you, so you can’t see me.

“How you doing there, Ma?” Ben asked.

He took a few steps closer, but he had a strong impulse to turn and leave. He couldn’t believe what he was seeing. How could this be his mother? It wasn’t just the physical change. If his mother had been herself, if she had been mentally there, her face would have lit up, seeing him.

“Lou and I brought some pictures from the boat launch to show yah,” Ben said. He turned to Louise, but she made no move to take her digital camera from her purse.

“Do I know you?” Lilly asked, her eyes widening as she turned around and stared at Ben. The whites were glazed with distance.

“Ma. It’s me. Benjamin.”

“Benjamin?”

She looked as though the name simply didn’t register. When she cocked her head to one side, she reminded him of a bird, looking for a worm or bug in the grass.

“Hey! You wanna keep it down?” one of the women watching TV said, glaring at them.

“Sorry,” Ben said, but just as quickly, Mrs. Appleby said, “Now Susan. You mind your manners.” Then she moved over to Lilly and placed a hand on her shoulder.

“Benny’s come to visit you, Lilly,” she said. “What do you say we all go down to your room so we can talk?”

Ben’s heart was breaking as he watched his mother’s reaction. She looked at Mrs. Appleby, the distant glaze filming her eyes over like a skim of ice as she struggled to put this all together.

“Benny’s here?” she said, and then she looked all around the room as if she didn’t see him standing a few feet in front of her. Without a word, Ben moved closer and made as if to hug her, but she shied away from him.

“Let’s go see Benny,” she said. “Is he waiting in my room?”

“I’m right —” Ben started to say, but Mrs. Appleby hooked her arm and led her gently away. Lilly’s feet, in pink fur-lined slippers, scuffed on the carpeted floor.

“That’s right. He came here to show you some pictures.”

“Pictures,” Lilly said. “I like pictures.”

They managed to get Lilly to leave the TV room, but she was reluctant to walk down the corridor back to her room. Her eyes kept shifting from side to side like a trapped animal looking for an escape route that wasn’t there. Finally, with some gentle coaxing from Mrs. Appleby and Louise, they got her past the front desk and heading down the hall to her room.

In the hallway, staying a few steps behind her, Ben took the time to study his mother. It staggered him to see how much she had changed in so short a time. He remembered her as tanned and fit-looking from working out in the yard all her life, but now her skin was almost translucent, like there was a layer of clear jelly below the surface. Thin blue veins lined her arms and the backs of her hands like twisted strands of faded yarn. Her fingernails had no nail polish, and the cuticles had grown halfway up the nail, making them look like talons.

Once they were back in her room, Mrs. Appleby directed Lilly to the easy chair next to the window. She sat down and looked at each of them as though she had no idea who any of them were. Then she focused on the wall across the room, her eyes on some middle distance like her memory was a book, and she was flipping through the pages, trying to read. Her eyelids made faint clicking sounds when she blinked.

She smacked her lips as though preparing to say something, but then she stopped. Her lips were cracked, and a thin line of bubbly drool ran down her chin from one corner of her mouth. Mrs. Appleby snapped a tissue from the dispenser on the table next to the bed and wiped it away.

“I thought I’d drop by and see how you were doing,” Ben said. “I just got back from the war.”

“The war,” Lilly said, nodding but looking as though she had absolutely no understanding. She inhaled slowly through her nose, the air making a watery wheezing sound in her chest.

Ben cast a worried glance at Mrs. Appleby, who regarded him with an expression of deep sympathy. She shrugged and said softly, “We do the best we can, but …” She let her voice drift away like a wind-blown leaf.