The Impossible Knife of Memory (11 page)

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37
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The receptionist at St. Anthony’s Nursing Home and Care Center clamped a phone between her ear and shoulder and wrote down the arrival time on my form with a wellchewed pen. She pointed to the elevators and held up four fingers, then she told the person on the other end of the phone that she had to work a double shift and some days it felt like she’d never get out of this damn place.

Gracie followed me into the elevator. She hadn’t said a word on the bus. I suspected that was she was a little bit stoned, but she was with me and that counted for something.

The elevator doors closed. “How long do we have to stay?” she asked.
“Benedetti said I need four hours.”
“Four?” Gracie sighed dramatically. “I don’t like old people that much.”
“I bet they don’t like you, either,” I said. “At least an hour, okay? It’s better than going home.”
She frowned as the elevator doors opened. “Barely.”

A nurse sent us to an Activity Room. Whoever named it that had a sick sense of humor. Of the dozen residents there, only one seemed to have a pulse, a lady in a faded flowered dress pushing a walker so slowly it was hard to tell what direction she was moving in. Most of the others sat slumped and sleeping in wheelchairs lined up in front of a huge television screen, all tethered to oxygen tanks like withered balloons. The television was turned off. My nose wrinkled; the room smelled like cherry cough drops, used diapers, and bleach.

A skinny guy in a uniform with a long, black ponytail pushed a cart past us. “First time here?”
“The last,” Gracie muttered.
He pointed to a table in front of the window. “Doris likes to play cards. Mr. Vanderpoole, sitting across from her, is a jigsaw puzzle fan.”
Doris was the size of a garden gnome (minus the hat) with thick glasses that magnified her gray, watery eyes. She stared at Mr. Vanderpoole’s puzzle, a picture of an old-fashioned fair. Half of the Ferris wheel and a few pieces from a cattle pen were missing, but there were no extra pieces on the table. Mr. Vanderpoole, wearing a suit and tie, his face perfectly shaved, slept in his wheelchair silently, like a statue.
Gracie walked over to a low bookcase and examined the puzzle and game boxes stacked there. “Think they have a Ouija board?”
“Why?” I asked.
“More interesting than puzzles, for one thing,” she said. “Maybe the dead will tell me how to deal with my parents.”
“Come on, G,” I said. “The whole point of dragging you here was to get your mind off that.”
She flipped me the “whatever” hand.
I pulled out the chair next to Doris and sat down. “I’m Hayley Kincain, ma’am. Do you want to play cards?’
She blinked like an ancient owl and asked, “When is my sister coming?”
“Um . . .” I looked around desperately for a gnome-sized old lady who looked like Doris or, even better, a nurse.
“When is my sister coming?” Doris repeated. Her eyes puddled up.
“I’m not sure,” I said. “Does she live here?”
“Your sister will be here soon,” Gracie said over her shoulder. “Right now you’re supposed to play cards, Doris.”
“She’s right,” I said with more enthusiasm than I felt. “Bridge or Go Fish?”
Doris smiled and nodded. “I like Fish.”
Crisis over, I shuffled the cards. “How did you do that?” I asked Gracie.
“Do what?” Gracie carried a stack of dented boxes to the table. “Can you believe they have Candy Land?”
Someone down the hall moaned regularly, like a bored ghost. I silently cursed Ms. Benedetti, cut the cards, and cursed again. I dealt seven cards to Doris and looked at my own hand: five aces and two seven of hearts. I opened my mouth to say we needed a different deck but closed it again when I saw how carefully Doris was organizing her cards, and how calm she looked, as if she hadn’t just been on the verge of bursting into tears about her sister.
One minute passed. Two. After a short eternity, Doris finally put one card facedown on the table and pulled another from the draw pile.
“Your turn,” she said.
I looked at my cards. “Do you have any sevens?”
She looked at me blankly. “Why?”
We were clearly playing by Doris Rules. I mimicked her; one card down, another taken from the pile. It was like playing with a three-year-old. (Was that disrespectful, thinking of her like that?)
Gracie lifted the lid off the Candy Land box and frowned. Then she took the lids off the Monopoly box and two jigsaw puzzles. “These are a mess. The pieces are all mixed together. How can they play anything?”
Mr. Vanderpoole snorted and shifted in his sleep.
Doris reached across the table and tapped my hand. “When is my sister coming?”

Fifty hands of Doris Rules Go Fish later, Gracie had spread out the contents of the boxes on an empty table, sorted the pieces into piles, and gone to the Activity Room at the other end of the floor in search of the missing pieces. Doris was in a happy world of her own, picking one card from the deck at a time, laying them down, and announcing “I win” every once in a while. She talked to herself quietly. Once she said “Annabelle.” Another time it sounded like she mumbled “cotton candy.”

I wasn’t sure why I had to do this in order to graduate, but the longer I sat, shuffling and dealing, shuffling and dealing, the less pissy I became. This room had no connection to the outside world. Did Doris know what year it was? Probably not. Did the old people in this room know who the president was, the price of gas, which war we were fighting now? How many of them could even remember their names?

I shuffled. Dealt another hand. I wound up with six aces (two hearts, two spades, a club and a diamond) and the jack of hearts. Doris hummed and put her cards in some kind of order that made sense to her.

If Gramma had lived, would she have wound up in here? I’d spent so many years trying not to think of her that I could barely remember what she looked like. I didn’t even know how old she was when she died. Did it happen in the grocery store? Was I at school? Did I find her? I’d remember that, right? The questions filled in the glacial pauses while Doris decided which card to lay down. A wristband poked out from the sleeve of her cardigan. It had her name printed on it, along with the name of the nursing home and a phone number. Did Doris really not know who she was or where she lived? Which was better: being alive (if that was the right word) but not remembering anything, or being dead?

That was a Finn question. He’d probably answer it with an obscure quote from
The Tibetan Book of the Dead
or gibberish about runic interpretations, but there was a chance he’d really think about it and then we might get somewhere.

Half an eternity later, a nurse wearing a top decorated with dog cartoons walked over, crouched down to next to Doris, and asked if she wanted to go to the accordion concert before dinner.

“Will my sister be there?” Doris asked.
“I hope so,” the nurse said kindly. She helped Doris stand and said to me, “Thanks for coming. Janine’s on the desk. She’ll sign your form.”

Nurse Janine wore a plain beige top, no dogs. When I walked up to her, she closed the binder she was writing in and said, “Let me guess. Belmont?”

“How did you know that?” I asked.

“I have a sense about these things. Do you want to be a nurse?” she asked. “Physical therapist? Pharmacist?”
I shrugged. “Never really thought about it.”
She rolled her eyes. “I told them to stop sending kids like you. We only want volunteers who care about this kind of work.”
“I’ll tell my guidance counselor.” I handed her my attendance sheet. “Does Doris’s sister live here, too?”
She scribbled on the paper. “Annabelle? She died more than seventy years ago.”
“That’s awful.”
“Not really. Doris loves her. She always thinks that Annabelle is going to walk through the door in just a few minutes. Imagine how awful it would be if she realized that she’d never see Annabelle again.” She handed the paper back to me. “Bus comes on the half hour. Tell your guidance counselor to send you to the Girl Scouts next month.”

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I found Gracie sitting on a wooden bench bolted to the patio in front of the nursing home. I sat next to her and waited, but she just stared, sniffing, at the river flowing at the bottom of the hill.

“Nurse Janine told me not to come back,” I said. “It’s not like they can afford to be picky,” she said. “She didn’t like my career goals.”
Gracie wiped her nose on her sleeve. “Do you have career goals?”

“Of course. I plan on lifting the zombie curse from our fellow students.” I pulled a wadded-up tissue out of my pocket and handed it to her. “Don’t tell Ms. Benedetti.”

She blew her nose. “Okay.”
“You gonna tell me what’s wrong?” I asked.
“They have three Candy Land games and no red pieces.” She kept her eyes on the river. “Everybody wants to be red, the whole world knows that.”

“You’re not crying about the red pieces.”
“No.” She tucked her hair behind her ear and sighed. “Mom blew up my phone ’cause I wasn’t on the bus. Left a million messages begging me not to go to the quarry.”
“Why would you go there?”
“Every couple of years someone jumps and kills themself. If you ask me, there has got to be a better way to go. Anyway, I called Mom back to tell her I hadn’t killed myself and then we got into a fight. Why? Because I didn’t make my bed this morning. That’s when I started crying again.” She tossed the tissue at a trash can and missed. “And now I’m a lump of snot.”
“A useless lump of snot who can’t even throw out her Kleenex.”
“Jerk,” she said with a faint smile. “Who won the card game?”
“I never figured out the rules.” I picked up Gracie’s used tissue and a couple of cigarette butts and threw them in the trash. “The nurse thinks that Doris is lucky because she can’t remember her life. She doesn’t understand how much she’s lost.”
“My nonna died of Alzheimer’s,” Gracie said. “The last ten years of her life she didn’t recognize anybody, not even Grandpa, and he visited her every day.”
“Was she in here?” I pointed at the building.
Gracie shook her head. “Connecticut. A week after we buried her, Grandpa died, too. Mom barely talked for a month after that.”
“What made her start again?”
“Talking?”
“Yeah.”
“Garrett.” She pulled a pack of gum out of her purse, handed a piece to me, and folded a piece in her mouth. “One day he told Mom he wanted to visit Grandpa in his grave. We packed a lunch and ate it at the cemetery. At first I thought it was gross, but it was actually kind of sweet. Hanging out with our dead grandparents became a thing. We go a couple times a year now.”
“You go to a cemetery on purpose?”
“Yeah,” she said. “Isn’t that the point?”
A gust of wind rose from the river, shaking the last gold leaves of the fragile birches planted around the patio.
“Sounds creepy.”
“It’s not like we dig them up. We have a picnic. Tell them what’s going on in the world. Garrett brings his report card and soccer photos. Haven’t you been to your grandmother’s grave yet? Didn’t your dad take you?”
Gracie had spent months patiently weaseling the hows and whys of our return to Belmont out of me. She didn’t know everything, of course, but she knew enough to be able to ask questions that could mess with my head.
“Time to go.” I stood up and pointed. “The bus is coming.”

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Dad and I had spoken only a few words to each other since the bonfire incident. This was becoming more of a habit, the not-talking, but it still made me uncomfortable. Nottalking with him was like trying to walk after my foot had gone to sleep. Everything felt weird and heavy.

I took a deep breath and knocked on his door. “You awake?”
The door opened. He was dressed in jeans and a longsleeved Syracuse Orangemen shirt and he was freshly shaved, to my surprise. Over his shoulder, I could see an open email on his computer screen, but it was too far away to see who he was writing to or what he was saying.
“You’re home late,” he said. “Everything okay?”
He smelled of soap. Not weed or booze, not even cigarettes. This was another part of his apology, maybe, for what had happened on Saturday.
“Where’s Gramma buried?” I asked.
His eyes opened wide. “Don’t remember the name of the place. It’s near the river. Why?”
“I want to go there,” I said. “Now.”
“Can’t. It’ll be dark soon.”
“I don’t care.” Pins and needles shot through me, that dreadful, awkward feeling of something waking up inside. “I really want to see it.”
“We’ll go tomorrow,” he said. “After school.”
“You don’t have to come with me. If you draw me a map, I can ride my bike there.”
“What’s the rush?”
“I was at the nursing home after school,” I said, “for my volunteer hours. It made me think of Gramma and I don’t know why, but I really want to see where she is. It’s important.”
I hadn’t planned on telling him the truth. It had become easier to lie about most things because it didn’t hurt as much when he ignored me. In my defense, I hadn’t planned on finding him clear-eyed and sober, either. It was hard to know how to play the game when the rules kept changing.
He looked over his shoulder at the window. “We’re gonna need jackets.”

The old headstones at the front of the cemetery were so worn that the blue jays and chickadees mocked me for trying to read them. We walked quickly for a few minutes, then Dad stopped at a crossroads where the stones were easier to read. He was squinting against the falling sun, trying to figure out the right path. I studied the family plot.

abraham stockwell 1762–1851
rachel stockwell 26 feb 1765—22 feb 1853
thaddeus stockwell 1789—12 nov 1844 rest in peace sarah d. 1827
Four small headstones topped with stone lambs lay on

the other side of Sarah.
baby 1822
baby 1823
baby 1825
baby 1827
“Know what they call this?” Dad asked, his voice back in teacher mode.
“A graveyard?”
“No, silly. This time of day.”
“Sunset?”
“When the sun is below the horizon, but it’s still light enough to see, it’s called ‘civil twilight.’ There’s another word, too, an older one, but I can’t remember it.” He reached up with his right hand and rubbed the back of his neck. “They’re farther back, I think. Next to some pine trees. Let’s hustle, it’s almost dark.”
“They?” I asked. “Who’s they?”
He was already six strides ahead, despite the limp. I caught up with him at the top the hill.
“Found them,” he said quietly before heading down the other side.
I shivered. A wide valley of the dead spread out below me, hundreds of them gently tucked into the ground in neat rows, their whispers frozen into the stones above them:
I am here. I was here. Remember me. Remember
.
I zipped up my jacket and jogged down the hill, past graves decorated with flowers—some plastic, some real and faded—and small flags on wooden sticks. Dad was waiting by a headstone speckled with pearl-green lichen near a row of tall, dark pine trees. He knelt and tried to brush off the lichen. It was stuck fast, like it had been growing for a long time. He took out his pocketknife and scraped at the words and dates with the blade:
rebecca rose rivers kincain 1978–1998
barbara mason kincain 1942–2003
“I didn’t know that she was here.” I pointed at the top name. “My mother.”
(The word sounded like a foreign language. Like I had pebbles in my mouth.)
“Becky got along so well with Mom that it seemed like the right thing to do,” Dad said. “Your grandmother taught her how to cheat at bridge. That’s what I imagine they do in heaven.”
“Where’s your dad buried?”
“Arlington. Mom didn’t want him there, but he insisted. Always had to do things his way.”
I studied the names again, waiting for tears to bubble up. It was hard to figure out what I was feeling. Confused, maybe. Lonely. I wondered if Gramma could see us standing there, looking lost as the shadows grew deeper around us. I tried to picture her. I didn’t remember what she looked like and that made me more upset than anything. “Do you miss her?” I asked. “I mean, them?”
“I miss everybody.” Dad stood up, folded his knife and put it back in his pocket. “Doesn’t do any good to dwell on it.” He brushed his hands together to clean off the lichen. “Should have come sooner to clean this up.”
I pointed to the headstones in the next row. “How come those have vases built into them and ours don’t?” “Mom ordered the stone when Becky died,” he said. “She didn’t like cut flowers, my mom. Preferred flowers that were planted. Maybe that’s why she didn’t order the kind of grave marker that came with a vase.”
“We should do something to make it look nicer.” “I guess.” He stood next to me and pointed to the empty grass to the left of the grave. “That’s where you need to put me when my time comes.”
I swallowed hard. “You’re not going to die.” I leaned my head against his shoulder. “Not for a hundred years.” He put his arm around me. I closed my eyes and took a deep breath of pine and damp earth. Only a few birds were singing and far away, an owl called. Leaning against my father, the sadness finally broke open inside me, hollowing out my heart and leaving me bleeding. My feet felt rooted in the dirt. There were more than two bodies buried here. Pieces of me that I didn’t even know were under the ground. Pieces of Dad, too.
“Gloaming,” Dad said.
“What?”
“That word I couldn’t remember. Gloaming. That short, murky time between half-light and dark.” He hugged me quickly and let me go. “Night’s here, princess. Let’s head home.”