The Map of True Places (25 page)

Z
EE COULD HEAR
J
ESSINA
downstairs, the sound of silverware clanking as she cleaned up. Breakfast was over, and she was baking something.

Zee noticed the scratch marks she had left on Hawk's back. She felt bad about it, hoped he wouldn't take off his shirt at work today. But watching him half dressed and sitting on the edge of the bed, something stirred in her again, and she wanted to reach out to him.

“Do you have to go?” she said to him, and he laughed and turned to face her.

“I've got to get back to Rockport,” Hawk said.

She reached out and pulled him onto the bed, unzipped his pants and went down on him. He groaned.

“Shh,” she said, hearing Finch's walker below, heading toward the kitchen.

“I'm not the one who needs shushing, am I?” He grinned as he moved slowly on top of her. And when he was close and when she started to moan, he clamped his hand over her mouth and pressed hard. She arched her back and rolled onto him and bit down hard on his hand, and he didn't pull it away. And she didn't care anymore if Jessina heard them or even if Finch did, because she was no longer here.

 

T
HEY'D BEEN SLEEPING TOGETHER FOR
almost a month. Zee knew that Mattei would tell her it was obsessive, especially so soon after Michael. Mattei would tell her that Hawk was her drug of choice. But she didn't want to think about Mattei or about Michael or Finch downstairs with Jessina still hand-feeding him his meals and Zee letting it slide. Zee knew she shouldn't let her do it, because he needed to be able to feed himself, to hold on to that skill. She had been here for six weeks now, and things with Finch were clearly slipping. She couldn't help but let them slip, because there were so many of those things, too many details to manage. Everyday tasks the rest of us take for granted, from buttoning a shirt to getting up from a chair, had to be watched and aided. So when Zee could escape for a while into another world with Hawk, she did so gratefully.

If Hawk was her drug of choice, then he was her only vice. She couldn't get enough of him. She lived in two worlds, or so it seemed. Her days were filled with the business of caregiving and all the things that went along: ordering food from Peapod, diapers and lotion so Finch's skin wouldn't break down, a soft washcloth to bathe him, prunes for constipation, Oreos for treats. When Finch wandered, which he did whenever he got to the tail end of a dose, she followed him, making sure he didn't fall with each unsteady step.

She couldn't get him to use the railings that Hawk had installed. It wasn't that he wouldn't use them, more that he couldn't seem to figure out how, or couldn't make his hand grasp the rails that would steady him. Instead Zee kept placing his walker in front of him, reminding him softly each time he moved to “use the walker.”

Most of the time, she felt as if she were talking to a child, though she knew full well that he understood her words. This was her father, yet it wasn't. It was a duality she had stopped trying to resolve. Finch was now both child and father. She realized that her need for a father was profound. But with so much unresolved between them, theirs had
often been an uneasy relationship. Still, he had always been there when she needed him. And now he was the one who needed her.

The tender feelings she had for Finch, when they came to her, seemed to come from that vulnerable place she recognized in him, a place that may have always been there but that was now the more prevalent part of his otherwise thorny personality. Finch had always used his intellect to distance himself. When things became too much for him, he had often spoken in quotes or riddles, a quality that seemed to amuse Melville but one that Zee had found frustrating. And now, once the new drug had left his system, the one that caused the hallucinations, he had stopped speaking as Hawthorne, but he had pretty much stopped talking altogether, though she could tell that he still understood her. When he spoke, his speech was perfect, but he chose to do so less and less, and he uttered not much more than single syllables if possible when Jessina was in the house, though Zee could tell that Finch liked her.

“You don't need to talk down to him,” Zee said. “He may not be talking much, but he can understand you well enough.”

“I'm not talking down to him,” Jessina insisted. “I would never do that.”

Jessina bathed Finch and dressed him in the mornings, then came back again to feed him dinner and put him to bed. In the long hours in between, Zee read books to him, something she knew that Melville had done, though Melville had had better success with it than Zee. Mostly, when his meds were at their peak, Finch dozed. She would get up, prop a pillow under whichever side his head flopped to, and sit back down again, reading more quietly now so as not to disturb his sleep but not altogether stopping in case her words might drift to someplace in his subconscious that might still be vibrant, a place she could not often reach when Finch was awake.

She did not presume to read Hawthorne to Finch. The book she picked from Finch's shelf was Proust's
Remembrance of Things Past,
partly because she had never made her way past the first volume and partly because she thought the words might jar Finch's involuntary or Proustian memory. She wondered whether she could get Jessina to make madeleines, if Zee could find a recipe.

When she found herself unable to read any longer, Zee would put on the soft music she knew that Finch favored: Tchaikovsky's
Swan Lake,
or sometimes Puccini.

When his meds wore off, Finch grew agitated and felt compelled to walk, though it was the worst possible time to do so. He had fallen twice already. Luckily, neither fall had hurt him, but falling was a serious threat to the elderly in general and to Parkinson's patients in particular. Though Finch was only in his late sixties, and far too young to be experiencing the extreme effects of aging, the Parkinson's seemed to be moving much faster than Zee had expected.

And so Zee followed him as he walked through the house, accompanying him everywhere—to the kitchen, to the bedroom, to the bath—trying to afford him some privacy but being careful that he didn't get up and wander, leaving the door partly open so she could hear him if he needed her. “Leave me,” he would often say.

“I'm sorry,” she answered. “I know how much you hate this.”

She tried to explain what the VNA nurses who came once a week had told her: “It's important to keep him clean. It's important that he get dressed every day.” She understood the first but wasn't altogether certain she agreed with the last. It was just too difficult sometimes, she thought. He didn't want to do it. He would have preferred to remain in his robe and pajamas, which would have seemed fine to Zee.

But every morning Jessina happily picked outfits for him, dressing him like a little doll, in vibrant color combinations Finch would never have chosen for himself. Jessina seemed to have a genuine affection for him.

Zee rarely left Finch alone, not unless she prearranged it with Jessina, who was glad to oblige when she could. But Jessina was the single
mother of a teenage boy, and she didn't feel good about leaving her son alone for too long. She could almost see her house from Turner Street, but the neighborhoods were vastly different, and there was all sorts of trouble Danny could get into if left unsupervised.

And so most of the time it was just Finch and Zee. He didn't want to go out anymore, didn't even want to go for rides in the car. As bad as his reaction to his meds had been, Zee sometimes thought she preferred his Hawthorne hallucinations to the quiet depression he seemed to be experiencing now.

For her own mental health, Zee had to get out of the house every day and used the two sessions when Jessina was with Finch to escape. Salem was a great walking city. Sometimes she walked down to the harbor or over to the Willows for a game of skee ball at the arcade, a game she had loved as a child. Sometimes she met Melville for coffee or walked over to the gardens at the Ropes Mansion. This was her city more than Boston had ever been. Its diversity of person and place suited every mood she was having that summer. There was part of her that simply felt better here.

On the occasions when she could hire Jessina for more than a few hours, she would escape for longer periods, usually to the beach or to Winter Island, often coming back to find Jessina and Finch sitting in the den watching the Lifetime Channel. It was out of character for her father to watch television at all, let alone such estrogen-based dramas. Still, they seemed to be among the only things that captured his interest, and he sat, eyes glued to the set, his reactions intense and perfectly timed to the story, as if the whole drama were unfolding not on a small screen at all but right here in his den.

 

Z
EE HAD BEGUN TO SLEEP
in Maureen's room even before she started seeing Hawk. Finch's sundowning was getting worse, he'd begun to have the hallucinations so common to Alzheimer's patients
that was a sign of the crossover the doctor had been telling her to watch out for. After the sun went down, Finch grew more and more agitated and confused. He often wandered, waking her, and she could never get back to sleep.

It didn't happen when she stayed upstairs. Finch couldn't climb the stairs anymore, and he wouldn't try, but still she would worry about him waking up, so she checked on him every few hours. As a result she was still often exhausted and grouchy from lack of sleep. For a while she raised the side rails on the hospital bed the OT had ordered, but then the VNA nurse talked her out of it.

“The problem is, they try to get out anyway,” the nurse said. “I've seen more hospitalizations because one of my dementia patients tried to climb over the bedside and got himself tangled and ended up breaking a bone.”

It was Jessina who suggested the alarm. “They use them at the nursing home,” she said.

The next time Jessina came in, she brought one of the alarms with her. It clipped to Finch's bedclothes and to the bed. When the connection broke, the alarm went off. Finch clearly hated it, but it served its purpose. Zee began to sleep through the night, waking only when she heard the buzzing.

 

Z
EE OFTEN TALKED TO
M
ELVILLE
either in person or on the phone about what was happening to Finch. And she consulted with several doctors who basically told her what she already knew, that there was nothing much that could be done.

Mattei left messages on her cell. She returned the calls when she could bear to do so, which was less and less often as time went on. She didn't want to talk about Finch or about Michael and how the whole situation made her feel. She remembered something one of her patients
had replied when she asked him how he felt about the illness of a parent:
How do you think I feel about it? I feel fucking awful.
By the end of each day, Zee could feel an inescapable heaviness descending on her. It was about Finch, of course, but it was about Lilly, too, and about Michael and her career and basically about all the choices she'd made in her life so far that were either not well enough thought out or just altogether wrong.

Now, for the first time she could remember, there were no choices to be made. Instead of trying to fix things or plan her life, she only needed to be present for her father, something she found easier than she might have expected. She couldn't remember ever spending this much time with Finch.

And so every night when Jessina put Finch to bed, Zee would give him his first sleeping pill and take her evening walk. When she got home again, she would give him the second pill, telling him what was new in town, talking about what she'd seen. She would kiss him good night, lingering for a minute with her hand upon his shoulder. Then, after Jessina had gone for the night, Zee would go upstairs to her other life, drawing herself a long bath and waiting for Hawk. Though a simple set of stairs connected the two worlds, they could not have been more different.

 

E
VER SINCE EARLY
J
UNE, WHEN
she'd told Hawk who she was, Zee had been having dreams about Lilly: Lilly on the bridge. Lilly being chased by Adam. So when she started having her recurring dream about Maureen's story again, she was almost relieved. The night she started up with Hawk had been several weeks ago, back on June 10, the first really warm night of the season.

Zee had been too tired to sleep. She was so exhausted, and it was far too hot upstairs. Every time she settled down, her legs would jump
her awake again. Desperate, she'd taken one of the sleeping pills Mattei had prescribed.

And then she'd had a dream about the
Friendship,
a dream she'd had off and on for years. Zee dreamed about the lower level of the ship, as Maureen had once imagined and described it, with very specific details: the hold, the bunks, a lantern that hung from a chain.

When she woke up, Zee became obsessed by the idea of seeing the
Friendship
for herself and finding out how accurate Maureen's description had been. The fact that she didn't want to wait until morning, when she could pay her admission and go aboard the historic vessel, should have been her first clue that the obsession was a reaction to the sleeping pill. Everyone had heard stories of people who'd done odd or unusual things while under the influence. But the drug was still in Zee's system, and so her compulsion to immediately see the
Friendship
seemed logical.

Her mother had never set eyes on the
Friendship,
or rather on the replica of the 1797 merchant ship that the City of Salem re-created in the 1990s. Maureen had died back in the 1980s, long before the plans for building the ship were even drawn up, though money was beginning to be raised for the project. Tonight, for some reason, Zee was obsessed with discovering how accurate her mother's detailed description had been.