The Things We Keep

by Sally Hepworth

  “Anna?” I persist, but already the comprehension in her face has fluttered away, replaced by a vacantness so at odds with her young, smooth skin. Her eyes film over, still beautiful but now empty. I stand straight.

  “Eric,” I say, returning to him, “she just said, ‘Help me.’”

  Eric blinks, the perfect picture of surprise. “She did? Are you sure?”

  “Yes. I mean … I think so.”

  “What prompted it?” he asks. “Did you say anything to her?”

  I look back at her. “Just that I didn’t want her to lose her scarf.”

  “I’ll send Carole over,” he says, and a moment later, a staff member is scurrying in her direction. “If there’s something wrong, we’ll get to the bottom of it.”

  I nod and he gestures for us to return to the house. As he holds open the screen door for me, he says, “The upside of dementia, of course, is if she does lose her scarf, she isn’t going to miss it for long.”

  4

  As we drive through the gates of Rosalind House, Clementine’s eyes widen. “This is our new house? Mom, are we rich again?”

  In my surprise, I nearly lose my grip on the steering wheel. Clem had been utterly indifferent when I’d told her I was starting a new job. Utterly indifferent when I’d told her we were moving house. Utterly indifferent about everything since Richard disappeared from our lives. Because of this, when it came to my new work situation, I’d been sparing with details. Now I wonder if I’d been too sparing. “What do you mean ‘again’?”

  “You know. How Dad lost our money and stuff.”

  For a moment, I’m punch-drunk, stupefied. Clem gives me a look that says Seriously? Did you think I was stupid?

  Did I?

  I think of the house as we left it. Boxes lining the walls of the foyer, every room dismantled, packed away, and labeled with a yellow, pink, or green sticker—take, toss, sell. The “sell” stickers were the most plentiful, labeled in green in the hopes it would correspond with the amount of green they’d bring in at auction. Was I a fool to think that Clem wouldn’t have drawn her own conclusions? Particularly now, when everything we own fits nicely into one Samsonite suitcase and four garbage bags.

  She stares at me, her brown eyes curved into inquisitive crescents, far too knowing for a seven-year-old.

  “Clem—”

  “My name’s not Clem,” she says, rolling her eyes. “It’s Beatrice.”

  I wipe at my brow with the heel of my hand. The name thing started a few months ago and is wildly inconsistent—sometimes she keeps a designated name all day; other days she changes it four, maybe five times. For now, it just seems easier to go with it. “Okay, Beatrice, then—”

  “How many bedrooms is it?” she asks.

  And just like that, she is upbeat again. In the past few months, she’s yo-yoed between euphoria (almost exclusively when she was in the company of her best friend, Allegra aka “Legs”) and a sullen, introspective demeanor befitting a teenager rather than a seven-year-old girl.

  As she begins her involuntary bounce, the first part of what she’d said—“This is our new house?”—slips into my consciousness. I glance up at the beautiful house. Of course Clem assumes this is her new home. It looks a hell of a lot like her old home.

  “Clem, wait,” I say as she reaches for the car door handle.

  “Beatrice!”

  “Sorry.” I curse under my breath. “Beatrice…”

  But Beatrice has already swiped up the garbage bag containing her things and is leaping up the stairs. I charge after her, and by the time I get there, like a déjà vu, the gardener is in the doorway.

  “Oh, hello, again,” I say, flustered.

  “Hello,” he says. His eyes drop to Clem. She stares at him, her mouth slightly open, then a little smile starts.

  I can hardly blame her; he really is extraordinarily handsome. I’m suddenly aware of my jeans, my plain white-but-graying tee, my ponytail. My round face is bare of makeup and my hair hasn’t seen a cut or highlight in months, leaving it well past my shoulders and a dirty dark blond. Worst of all, I’m wearing an ill-fitting bra that is digging into my shoulder blades and squashing my breasts into a strange, wavelike shape. I cross my arms.

  “Hi,” Clem says, sliding behind my leg, her bouncy excitement replaced by shy awkwardness.

  “May I take your bag?” Angus asks.

  Clem’s eyes widen. “Are you the butler?”

  Angus’s eyes meet mine for the briefest of seconds.

  “Oh no, Clem—”

  “No,” he says. “I’m the gardener.”

  “Oh!” She nods and smiles as though now everything makes sense. “Of course! You’re the gardener. Well, you’re doing a great job. The garden looks neat.”

  “Thank you very much,” he says, taking her bag.

  “Eric asked me to pop in tonight to meet the residents properly,” I explain to Angus. His responding shrug makes me feel foolish.

  Clem darts inside and I chase after her into a high-ceilinged dining room. It is louder than I expected for a residential care facility—a cacophony of clangs, dings, and tremulous shouting. Residents and a few staff are parked in front of bowls of what looks like red beans and rice. Eric sits at the end of one table next to Anna.

  “Well, hello there,” Eric says, rising from his chair. “Glad you could make it.” He hushes the room with a wave of his hands. “Everyone, can I have your attention, please? This is Eve Bennett. Eve is our new cook. She has studied at New York’s Institute of Culinary Education, so you are in for a treat. Eve will also be doing some cleaning for us, until we hire someone permanent. I hope everyone is going to make her very welcome.”

  Twelve heads swivel to me.

  “Hello,” I say inadequately. “I’m very pleased to meet you all. From what I understand, you are all fond of your current cook, so I know I have very big boots to fill.”

  “You do realize Gabriela’s not dead?” someone shouts.

  “What did she say about boots?” says someone else.

  “What I mean to say is…” I try again, “this is going to be a steep learning curve for me, but if you’ll help me, I’m sure we’ll do fine. Please don’t hesitate to let me know your favorite foods, and whether there are any foods you don’t like. I look forward to getting to know you all.”

  I end my speech with an awkward nod and an attempted smile. The residents continue to stare at me. I suddenly become aware of Clem, standing immediately to my right.

  “My name is Clementine Harriet Bennett,” she says. “Very pleased to meet you all.” The residents’ faces, blank a moment earlier, start to upturn. “I’m seven years old and I’m in the second grade. I’m also very good at Irish dancing, would you like me to show you?”

  I pat her shoulder. “Clem, we really better—”

  “Is a frog’s ass watertight?” says a gray-blond lady with a Southern accent. “Go ahead, young lady.”

  Clem shifts uncertainly—perhaps waiting for me to reprimand the lady for using the word “ass”—but she recovers quickly. “Okay, but I don’t have my music here, so I need you to clap. Slowly at first, then faster and faster, got it?” A couple of residents nod, but most look puzzled. A man at the back adjusts his hearing aid.

  “Okay, then,” Clem instructs. “Start.”

  As Clem kicks and hops around the room, a few residents clap. It’s not a great clap—it’s a little out of time and doesn’t have much force behind it—but Clem manages to keep it together. I feel a little bit proud. She finishes up with a curtsy.

  “Thank you very much. Tomorrow, I’ll bring my recorder and play some songs. Would you like that?”

  A few people nod, and I marvel at Clem’s unbridled confidence. “It’ll have to be after school, Clemmy,” I say.

  “Yes, yes,” she says, waving as though it were a packed audience at the Hippodrome. “After school.”

  Before we leave, I’m introduced to the night nurse, Rosie, a girl in her mid-
twenties with a blond ponytail so high atop her head, it resembles an erupting volcano. We talk to Eric for a few more minutes, and then Angus walks us to the door.

  “Which one is my room?” Clem asks.

  “This isn’t our house,” I say, quickly and quietly as I can. “We’re just headed there now.”

  “Oh!” Clem covers a giggle and looks at Angus. “I guess I’d better take my bag, then!”

  Angus hands her the garbage bag and opens the door.

  I hurry through it, but Clem pulls me back. “Uh, Mom?”

  “Yes, hon?”

  “Aren’t you forgetting something?”

  For the life of me, I can’t figure out what she is talking about. “What?”

  She pulls on my shirt cuff, dragging me down until my ear is level with her mouth. “A tip!”

  Any hope Angus might not have heard Clem’s stage whisper is extinguished when I see his expression.

  “Tell you what?” he says to Clem, throwing her a wink. “This one’s on the house.”

  Clem giggles her thanks and scampers down the steps. But when Angus lifts his eyes to me, his expression isn’t quite so warm.

  * * *

  It takes twenty minutes to drive to our apartment. Clem frowns as we press open the glass door set in a narrow gap between a pizza shop and a convenience store. The stairs are covered in worn carpet and curved like a row of sad smiles that sink and creak with each step. One patch of carpet is so sunken, I wonder if there’s even a floorboard underneath. I make a mental note to avoid it in the future.

  At the top of the stairs, I jiggle the key in the old lock and crack it open. Clem charges in first, does the circuit, then stands before me, all puzzled looking.

  “This is it?”

  I bustle inside with the garbage bags. “What do you think?”

  I’d put off bringing Clem to the apartment for as long as I possibly could. Mother and I had been slowly moving in the few pieces of furniture I had left into the place, hoping we could get it looking cheerful before Clem saw it. I’d lined up her toys on the windowsill and put out pictures in frames. But even the bunch of daises on the table and the Frozen poster on the wall weren’t enough to brighten up the place.

  “It smells like salami.”

  CLEAN, FUNCTIONAL APARTMENT, the advertisement had said. Which meant a brown vinyl kitchen with electric hot plates, an open-plan living room with brown-flecked carpet tiles, and a shower room boasting a matching wooden toilet seat and vanity. And …

  “There’s only one bedroom,” Clem says.

  I sit my purse on the counter, trying to find something that Clem will like about the place. But there’s nothing. If Richard were here, he’d have made her laugh; he was the expert at that. But Richard wasn’t here.

  Clem’s white-blond pigtails bob as she does another scan of the room. “Well … where am I going to sleep?”

  I glance over her shoulder at the double bed. All the parenting books I’d read when Clem was a baby had warned of the perils of letting a child sleep in your bed, and dutifully, I’d heeded their advice, choosing to spend evenings rocking her in a recliner, driving around the block with her in the car, even lying beside her crib on the floor rather than bringing her into the forbidden marital bed. When I lamented to Mother, she’d practically spat her tea. “For Heaven’s sake, Evie! Wouldn’t anyone prefer to sleep in warm, comforting arms rather than behind bars in a dark, scary room?” Now, more than ever, I was inclined to agree.

  “Where do you think?” I ask, then tackle her, tickling until we both crumple onto the bed.

  5

  Anna

  Fourteen months ago …

  My room at Rosalind House isn’t an entirely unpleasant place to be, which is good, since I spend so much time in here. As much as I don’t want to admit that the dementia is getting the better of me, I find myself more worn out than I used to be. Once, not so long ago, I would do a twelve-hour shift in the ambulance and still have an entire night ahead of me to dance, drink, and socialize. These days, I leave my room for a meal and upon my return, I am ready for a nap.

  Now I drop into my chair and lean back, closing my eyes.

  “Good girl. You decided to wait for me today.”

  I open my eyes, sit up straight. The skinny lady—Trish, according to her name badge—is standing in front of me.

  “Excuse me?” I say.

  “Would you like to undress in here or in the bathroom?”

  I blame the exhaustion for the fact that I haven’t checked the laminated sheet for shower times. In truth, I’d actually forgotten the laminated sheet existed. Now it comes back to me like a fist in the gut. “I’m fine,” I say. “I don’t need a shower.”

  She sighs. “Come on, Anna. Let’s not make this difficult.”

  Beyond the skinny lady, the door to my room is wide open. Someone trundles past the door on a walker. Does she actually think I’m going to strip naked right here? Is that what she wants me to do?

  Clearly it is, because she comes at me, yanking me to my feet. She reaches for the bottom edge of my T-shirt, and I realize in alarm that she’s going to undress me.

  “Ahhh!” I yell. I know I sound crazy, but I’ll take crazy over the humiliation of being showered by this woman against my will. “Ahhh.”

  I take a step back, but the wall is behind me, there’s nowhere to go. Skinny Lady smiles. (I’ll tell you something for nothing: The only thing worse than having someone undress you against your will is to have them do it smiling.)

  I keep shouting, rhythmically and repeatedly. Skinny stands back. “You’ve got visitors this afternoon, Anna. Don’t you want to look nice for them?”

  Another person passes my doorway, no walker this time. It’s the young guy.

  Skinny reaches for my waistband. “How about we start by undoing your—?”

  I open my mouth to start shouting again, but then I hear a noise—a smash.

  Skinny’s arms retract back to her sides. “What on earth—?”

  She darts out of the room. I drift after her as far as the doorway and see Young Guy, standing over broken glass.

  “Oh, sweetie, what have you done?” Skinny is using a controlled, deliberate voice, but her irritation is only thinly veiled. “Just stand back, I’m going to get something to clean it up. All right, Luke? Stay back.”

  Skinny marches off, presumably in search of a broom. The moment she’s disappeared around the corner, Young Guy—Luke—looks directly at me and realization dawns. It wasn’t an accident.

  I want to say something—do something—but my mouth just hangs open, intermittently filling and emptying with air, like a grocery bag in the wind. “I’d … be quick if I were you,” he whispers. “Whatshername, she’s speedy … with that sweeper-thing.”

  We stare at each other a moment and a strange, silent dialogue is transmitted between us. From some primal place inside, I feel a twinge.

  There’s a rustle as the broom closet opens and Skinny, presumably, rifles through it. I slip out of the doorway and into the bathroom, where I start the shower. And even though my short-term memories are supposed to be the first to go, a few minutes later, as the water pounds against my shoulders and back, I am still thinking about him.

  * * *

  The good thing, I guess, is that I’ve known love. At least, I think it was love, but how do you really ever know? I was twenty-eight when I met Aiden. I was stuck at a set of traffic lights in my beat-up old Ford when he pulled up beside my car on a Harley-Davidson. I still remember the ease of him, the way he leaned back slightly, like he had nowhere he had to be. His helmet covered only his head and ears, so I could see his chin, his stubbly jaw, his lips.

  I wound down my window. “I like your bike,” I said.

  He regarded me curiously. “Thanks. You ride?”

  “Not a Harley.”

  “But you ride?”

  He was cute, this biker guy. I found myself wondering if there were full sleeves underneath his leath
er jacket. And what else might be under there.

  “I’ve got a Honda 900 cc in my garage,” I said, “just waiting for its momma to come home and take her for a spin.”

  Now he leaned forward, assessing me. He seemed pleased with what he saw. “How ’bout you give me your number, and we can go for a spin sometime?”

  I found an old ticket on the dash just as the light changed to green and I steeled myself for the honking and cursing. But no one did honk as I scribbled down my phone number. Perhaps it was because Aiden rode a Harley that they didn’t want to mess with him? Or perhaps it was because sometimes people were willing to wait for a glimpse of young romance?

  I sped Aiden through the early relationship process, from first date to boyfriend without passing Go. We went camping at Yosemite. We hugged the curves of coastal roads on our bikes. We started our days with sex and, if Aiden hadn’t been smoking pot, ended them with it, too. But afterwards, when we fell asleep, we were always sprawled out and separate—together in our desire to be alone. It wasn’t the love from a romance movie, but it worked for us.

  Getting married, I’ll admit, was my idea, and at first, it wasn’t very well received.

  “You want to get married?”

  I may as well have suggested we bungee jump without a cord. And I understood Aiden’s surprise. I wasn’t a “white dress” kind of girl—this was out of left field. Yet there I was, close to thirty, and it had been on my mind.

  “Well,” I said. “Not if this is your reaction.”

  It wasn’t that I’d expected Aiden to drop to one knee and pull out a huge rock and get all choked up. God, if he had, I’d probably have said no. But I had started thinking that if we were going to do it, now would be a good time. Mom had been a year younger than me when she got married. By my age, she was pregnant.

  “Okay, just forget it,” I said.

  “Now, hang on a sec, let a man catch up.” Aiden’s frown morphed into a grin, and he pointed at it. “What if this is my reaction?”

  He was sweet, Aiden, and if I’m honest with myself, easily led. He was happy to go along with my plan. But in the end, marriage wasn’t enough.