A police cruiser? Uh-oh. Did something happen to Zoe? He flew down the outside staircase.
Next to the mailbox at the foot of the stairs, an officer stood with his mother, holding her arm. Flo looked down at her feet but he could see tears staining her cheeks.
“Do you know this woman?” The officer asked.
“She’s my mother. What’s wrong?”
The officer’s voice was kind. “She was wandering around the farmers market at the X, looking confused. She, uh, doesn’t seem to know where she lives, but we found this in her pocket.”
Sam took the folded flyer from the officer, one of dozens Flo had helped him distribute promoting his website design business, offering a discount to neighborhood residents. It had his photo—not your best side, Flo had criticized—and his address.
Sam took Flo’s hand in both of his.
“My bike,” she said, finally looking up at him. “I’ve lost my bike.”
He guided her to the stairs. “We’ll find it, Ma. Later. Come inside. I’ll make tea.” He turned back to the officer. “Thank you.”
Halfway up the steps, Flo stopped.
“Do you need to rest?” Sam asked.
“I’m fine,” she said. “But don’t even ask. Because I’m not going to that place.”
Chapter Twelve
The strobe light snapped into the ceiling bracket with a sharp click, pinching the tender web of skin between his thumb and index finger. Jeremy yelped and yanked his hand back.
“What’s wrong?” Zoe asked. She wheeled to the center of the living room, trailing black crepe paper and looked up at him.
What was wrong with him? Jeremy had been asking himself that question for the past week, ever since a metal fence twisted open and green fingers pulled him into that impossible garden, lush with plants that no longer existed on earth. Afterwards, he dug through his wallet for the card that the nurse practitioner gave him, because maybe he should talk to someone. But he didn’t call, because whatever it was that happened there, whatever hallucination or crossed cerebral synapses, he’d felt happier in that place, more peaceful, than he could ever remember. It felt like a family reunion with all the dead kin come back to say hello, patting his shoulder with their leafy hands and murmuring, “Haven’t you grown into a fine young man?” Sure the kin were dead plant species but still, who knows, he might still be there, growing roots into magical soil, if it hadn’t been for the screaming fire engines and ambulances blasting down the street, breaking the spell, and then he was back on the sidewalk, stunned and shaken and clueless.
But that probably wasn’t what Zoe meant.
Jeremy put his injured hand in his mouth and sucked, then climbed off the stepladder. “I’m clumsy, that’s all.” He showed her his hand and they both watched the blood puddle in the hollow web.
“Purlicue,” Zoe said.
“Huh?”
“That’s what that space is called, between your thumb and pointer finger. You should clean that,” Zoe said. “Bandage it.”
“When I get home. To my parents’.”
“No. Come on.” Zoe turned away. “We’ll do it now.”
Jeremy followed her chair down the hall to the bathroom. Purlicue. He’d never heard the word, but it sounded like her hair looked, curly. Curlier than he remembered. Bouncier. He tried to recall the last time he’d seen Zoe and couldn’t. A couple years at least. Probably at one of Gabe’s soccer games, before he started at UMass and moved into the dorm. However long it had been, she had certainly changed.
“How old are you?” he asked when they squeezed into the bathroom.
“Sixteen.” Zoe turned on the faucet and pushed back, out of his way. “Wash it,” she told him. She pulled sterile gauze, tape, and a small tube of ointment from a drawer. “You don’t want an infection.”
Bossy, he thought, letting her dry his hand and wind it in gauze. He liked her attention. He liked the way her hair smelled, a combination of almonds and fruit, when she leaned over to tape the bandage. Like the marzipan Pippa once helped him and Tim make for a cooking project, back when their commune was good.
“There,” she said. “Don’t get it wet when you shower.”
“You want to be a nurse or something?” he asked, then added, “A doctor?”
“Nah. My Aunt Emily’s a nurse, so I grew up with blood and guts. I want to be a medical researcher, find a cure for birth defects.”
“Like what’s wrong with you?” he asked.
“Nothing’s wrong with me,” she said. “I was born with a spine problem.” She swiveled her wheelchair and pushed out of the bathroom.
He watched her leave, then checked his watch. Three hours until Gabe’s party. He’d better get back to his parents’ place to clean up so he could be back in time to chaperone, whatever that meant. Keep the kids from sneaking off into the bedrooms, he figured, or getting into the liquor cabinet. His assigned job was manning the music system but Gabe had already made a mix of his favorite bands and told Jeremy no substitutions. So he might have a chance to hang out with Zoe.
How do you dance with a girl in a wheelchair? he wondered.
After Jeremy left, Zoe went back to twisting crepe paper. Pippa cut eight-foot-long strands from the roll, tied one end from the living room chandelier, and handed the other end to Zoe. Her job was to twist the crinkly paper and attach the long loops to lamps and plant hooks and curtain rods around the room. Black and blue wasn’t the most cheerful decorating scheme, but that’s what Gabe wanted and it was his birthday.
Gabe had always been kind of strange, which wasn’t all that surprising when you took his family into consideration, his dad in prison and Tian’s other kids, Gabe’s half-siblings, dying like that. Plus Gabe grew up in her house, which wasn’t the most normal situation either. It used to be great, when it was just Zoe and Anna and cousin Emily. When Gabe and Pippa moved in, it grew too crowded, too noisy and cluttered with little boy energy.
Zoe remembered the day she decided to live with her father. She was twelve and came home from school to find Gabe and his friends lying across her bed reading her diary aloud and laughing.
“I’ve had it,” she screamed at her mother. “I’m moving upstairs.”
Gabe apologized and he looked like he really meant it, but the diary was just an excuse. She was almost a teenager and needed privacy. Sam looked shocked when she told him. Stunned and then delighted. His joy bothered her a little. “I’m not so great to live with,” she warned him. The day she moved upstairs she gave up playing spoonerisms and retired her baby-name for her father. No more Papa; now she called him Dad.
Mostly, it had worked out well. Sam was easy to live with even though he worried too much. Sometimes she worried that her presence might scare off his potential girlfriends, but her dad never brought anyone home. He was pretty cute, for a father, with curly brown hair and tanned even in winter. Mom always joked that he tanned from the inside, didn’t even need to be in the sun. Sam looked a lot like Jeremy, actually, although she didn’t think they were related. Hard to tell with their complicated and interwoven families. They had the same coloring, same mop of curls. Maybe that’s why she liked Jeremy’s looks so much. She blushed.
“Hey. You’re falling down on the job,” Pippa said. “Should I hang these?”
Zoe nodded. She’d been daydreaming and twirling, curling and daydreaming, and a mountain of twisted strands lay heaped in her lap.
“Sure,” she said. “I’m going to go upstairs and get dressed.”
“But today’s Saturday, isn’t it?” Flo said into the phone. “The Club meets on Thursdays.”
“Emergency meeting,” Mimi said. “I’ll pick you up in half an hour.”
“What’s the emergency?”
“You,” Mimi said. “You’re the emergency.”
Flo was quiet for a moment before responding. “I’ll be ready.”
Marlene, Fanny and Claire had already claimed one blue sofa at the Coffee Hut. While Mimi stood in line
for their Mocha Delights, Flo settled on the matching couch and watched her friends. As long as she could remember everyone’s name, former career, and hot drink of choice, how bad could her brain be, right? Fanny: divorce attorney, skinny decaf latté. Marlene: Women’s Shelter, skinny decaf latté but she sometimes forgot the skinny part. Claire: still worked part time as a nursing supervisor, green tea, couldn’t speak a declarative sentence.
And Mimi, who handed her the steaming drink. Mimi: used to run the Food Pantry, mocha delight, best friend for more decades than Flo could count.
“Can we talk about our name?” Fanny asked. “I’ve been thinking, how about the Sisterhood?”
“More like the geezerhood,” Mimi muttered.
Claire shook her head. “Sisterhood reminds me of the Hadassah, from when I was a kid?”
“We can appropriate their name,” Fanny argued. “Make it ours.”
“I like the girls’ club,” Marlene says. “Or maybe the babayagas, like those old women in Paris who decided to make a commune.”
Flo didn’t care about the name, but wasn’t it upside down that when they were in their twenties and thirties they weren’t allowed to call themselves girls and now in their seventies and eighties it’s okay?
Mimi held up her hand. “We’re here to talk about Flo’s … problem.”
Flo looked at her lap and tried to name the conflicting feelings clogging her throat: Annoyance that Fanny won’t shut up about names. Frustration that Claire thinks that everyone’s health is her concern. Irritation at how bossy Mimi can be, sticking her nose in other people’s business.
Gratitude that her friends came on a Saturday because she has a problem.
What was her problem? Something was wrong but she couldn’t quite remember what. Words had always been her friends but now they deserted her. Without her words, who was she?
Claire reached across the table and patted Flo’s knee. “What’s going on?” she asked.
Marlene nodded. “And how can we help?”
Next to her on the sofa, Mimi leaned close and took Flo’s hand. “Do you want to tell them, or should I?”
Flo felt the heat of their stares on her face. “You.”
Mimi looked from one woman to the next, around the circle. “Flo has been having some problems with her memory.”
Fanny jumped right in. “Of course she has. At our age we all have lapses.”
Claire shut her up with a glance. Claire took her role as the group’s health professional seriously. She was solicitous and generous with advice and offers of help, even when no one wanted it. Flo hid a smile behind her other hand, the one Mimi wasn’t holding, remembering the time she had cataract surgery and Claire came over every morning to read to her. The books she chose were so boring that Flo kept falling asleep, blaming her non-existent pain meds.
“These memory lapses are more serious,” Mimi said. “One day last week she forgot where she lived, couldn’t get home. A policeman rescued her and brought her to Sam’s apartment.”
Flo closed her eyes, remembering the rough curb where she sat for what felt like hours, waiting for a clue about which direction was home, then walking aimlessly until the cop found her wandering through stalls at the farmers market. How shamed she felt when the he talked to her like a little lost girl.
“The thing is,” Mimi continued, “Flo has been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s.”
No one spoke for a long moment. “The dreaded A,” Marlene said softly. “The scarlet letter of our generation.”
Flo knew that word. Alzheimer’s. When Mimi paused and took a sip of her mocha, Flo saw that her own mug was full. She put it down. She wasn’t thirsty.
“Sam has decided that Flo can’t live alone any longer.” Mimi took a sip of her mocha. “He’s looking at Assisted Living facilities. The place he’s chosen is pretty nice, actually, but Flo doesn’t want to go.”
Her voice trailed off into more silence. Flo couldn’t think of a time they had been quiet for this long, not since Mimi’s beloved Joanna died without warning and they were stunned with her into the silent vacuum of profound grieving. This was like a death too, Flo thought, and it was the demise of her brain they were mourning.
Claire reached across again and took Flo’s other hand. “How do you feel about the diagnosis, Flo?”
“How do you think she feels?” Marlene interrupted. “Maybe now really is the time to make our own babayaga commune. My house is big. You could all move in and …” Her sentence disappeared into the sad black hole in the center of the group.
A distant section of her brain flared slightly. Flo pictured a thought being born and pulsing into life. Clumsily, like when Sam was an infant and first discovered that his fingers could move to his mouth and he could suck them and it felt good. Her thought felt good too, if she could just hold onto it long enough to form it into words and push them through her mouth.
“Does it ever happen to you?” she began, the words raw and stubborn and slow. “You are someplace and all of a sudden you don’t know where you are and all the landmarks disappear and you’re lost?”
She faltered and stopped talking. How impossibly hard this was, to try to grab onto something so alarming, so intrinsically wordless, and translate it into sentences. But if she couldn’t tell these women, her closest friends in the world since Charlie, she was lost for certain, so she had to try. “Do you know what it’s like, to try to grab onto a familiar thing—a house or a corner store or a park bench—but things and places turn slippery and they slide away before you can get a good grip?”
She could tell by their faces that they didn’t know. And they pitied her.
“We’ll come to you,” Marlene said. “Have our weekly meetings in the place, you know, where you’ll be living. And we’ll visit, lots.”
“I’ll make a schedule,” Claire added.
“Nothing is settled yet,” Mimi said. “But I thought you would all want to know what’s happening. And it didn’t seem right to talk about Flo without her here.”
Flo pulled her hands away from Mimi, from Claire. That was the problem, wasn’t it? Even when she was right there, sitting with her best friends, it happened. The words she needed slid out of their sentences and tumbled from their paragraphs. At some point, soon, all her words would be gone and she would disappear.
Chapter Thirteen
No one answered Sam’s knock. That wasn’t surprising because the volume of music blaring from Anna’s half of the house was impressive. Staggering, even. He always had a moment of disbelief knocking on Anna’s door anyway, after living behind it for years. But that was before Zoe’s diagnosis and birth and all the troubles with Anna culminated in his move to the upstairs apartment on Zoe’s first birthday. Things changed again when Pippa moved in with baby Gabe, and he was even more isolated. So he got it that he hadn’t been invited to Gabe’s birthday party, even though he helped Zoe pick up the strobe light and lugged bags of crepe paper rolls from the party store. He knocked again, then let himself in.
The music blasted from the living room, the pulses of bass melody somehow coordinated with colored flashes from a strobe light and waves of laughter. The red-faced birthday boy was flanked by two girls who were demonstrating a stomping dance step that rattled the walls of the old house. Sam turned left, away from the party, and pushed through the kitchen door.
Four adults sat around the table. Pizza crusts littered their plates. Four faces turned to him, neither surprised nor welcoming. His ex-wife Anna and her cousin Emily sat on one side of the table, long necks held in identical position. When Emily moved to Springfield and needed a place to live until she found a job and apartment, he joked about the long-necked Maine island cousins, but neither found it humorous. Sam didn’t expect much welcome from Tian or Francie either. The first time he met them they were on the receiving end of a police raid in Forest Park and he had—at some risk to himself—taken charge of their twins and brought the boys to safety. Tian had never really thanked him for th
at, but the guy had bigger problems back then. From the way he was fiddling with a jumble of rubber bands around his wrist maybe he wasn’t out of the woods yet.
Anna didn’t look so welcoming either, with that deep, vertical worry crease between her eyebrows. But then, their relationship was so complicated that he never knew what kind of response to expect. The last couple of years though, once she got used to Zoe living upstairs with him, they’d been doing pretty well.
Pippa was the really thorny one, with her spiked yellow hair and old-fashioned glasses. She didn’t look a day older than the afternoon she showed up at the children’s hospital during Zoe’s emergency shunt surgery when she was five. He hadn’t exactly been the knight in shining armor when Pippa was under house arrest, but he did rescue the twins, and they were part of her family, or whatever the commune members called themselves. He had thought, back then, that there might have been something special between them, even though she was still involved with Tian and pregnant with his kid. Then Tian went to prison and Gabe was born and Pippa moved them into this apartment with Anna and Emily and Zoe, and nothing happened with Pippa. The story of his life.
“How’s it going?” Sam asked. “I couldn’t work upstairs with all the noise, so thought I’d come down and see if you need any help.” He looked around the table. “Guess not, huh?”
Anna patted the empty chair to her right. “Help yourself to pizza, Sam. The kids don’t seem to need any of us in there.”
“You got any beer?” Francie asked.
Anna shook her head. “I thought we’d better not have alcohol around, with the party and all.”
“We should still check on them every once in a while,” Pippa said. “Gabe is only eleven, and this is his first, you know, teenager party.”
“He’s too young for this,” Tian said. “If you ask me. Which you didn’t.”
Kinship of Clover Page 9
