The Things We Keep

by Sally Hepworth

  Rosie speaks gently, without judgment, but still, the words feel like a sucker punch. When I open my eyes, they’re full of tears.

  “In the morning, Anna won’t remember that I promised to take her home. All she will know is how she feels. And with any luck, she’ll be feeling safe, secure, and happy.” Rosie watches me, looking for comprehension in my face. “We can make each moment frightening for her with the truth. Or we can lie to her and make each moment happy and joyous. I know what I’d prefer if it were me.”

  20

  I arrive at work four minutes late the next morning, which isn’t disastrous apart from the fact that my eyes feel scratchy and I can’t stop yawning. It had been a late night. Through the window, I can see Angus in the garden with Clem on his heels, catapulting questions at him. He smiles at something she says, then points off at a bush in one corner of the garden. I am grateful that he likes kids, or at least appears to, because this morning I can use all the help I can get.

  I rub my eyes and look at a bowl of fruit on the counter, trying to remember what I’m supposed to do with it. After a few minutes, I yank open the refrigerator and bury my head, hoping the cool air will snap me awake.

  “I hear there was some commotion last night.”

  I grab a carton of milk and reverse out of the refrigerator. Eric is leaning against the doorjamb.

  “Morning,” I say. “Yes. Rosie told you?”

  Eric nods. “I’m sorry Anna disturbed you.”

  “Don’t be.” I set the milk on the counter. “Actually, I can’t stop thinking about it. She was quite upset.”

  “It’s very sad,” Eric says. “A tragic disease, Alzheimer’s.”

  “It is. Last night Anna asked for her mother. She also kept asking, ‘Where is he?’”

  “She did?”

  I nod. “Clearly she was talking about Luke. And I wondered, I mean, is there any reason why she can’t at least visit him?”

  “Why do you think she was talking about Luke?” Eric asks.

  “I don’t,” I admit, “but who else would she mean?”

  Eric shrugs. “You said yourself that she asked for her mother, who is long dead. ‘He’ could have been her father, her brother. Anyone. Anyway, it’s the families’ decision to keep the doors locked at night. There’s nothing we can do.”

  “Yes, but—” A thought rushes at me. Eric said Anna tried to kill herself and then they started locking the doors, but what if that wasn’t the sequence of events? What if the suicide attempt was because they locked the doors? “Was Anna’s suicide attempt before or after you started locking the doors?” I ask. I pause only a second before continuing, so certain I’m right. “It was after, wasn’t it?”

  “No,” Eric says, frowning. “I don’t think so.”

  “Oh.” I pluck a pear and an apple from the fruit bowl and begin slicing them, trying to hide my disappointment. “I just thought it might have explained things. I mean, if I were separated from the one I loved, I’d probably—”

  “Loved?” Eric exhales. “Eve, falling in love requires memory, communication, reason, decision making. It’s very unlikely that people with dementia have these capabilities.”

  I think about Rodney and Betty, the couple Rosie told me had held hands every day. They didn’t need memory to have a connection.

  “But—”

  “Look,” Eric says, “this job can be difficult. These people are at the end of their lives, and it’s sad. Particularly for Luke and Anna, being so young. But in order to do this job, you need to keep a certain distance. You are, first and foremost, a staff member here. And while it’s wonderful that you care so much about the residents, your job is to cook and clean. So leave things to the night nurse from now on, eh? After all, that’s what she’s paid for.”

  “Okay.” It’s hard, but I force myself to meet his eye. “I will.”

  Eric claps his hands, indicating a change of topic. “Anyway, I should get my day started.” He turns toward the door, then pauses. I have an almost overpowering urge to give him an almighty shove to get him out of my sight.

  “So we’re clear about Luke and Anna, then?” he says.

  “Perfectly clear,” I say, even though the one thing I am not clear on is Luke and Anna.

  21

  Anna

  Twelve months ago …

  “P-promise me something,” Young Guy says as I pull a sheet over my chest. We’re in my bed, a squeeze for two grown bodies, but we are managing pretty well. I don’t know what time of day it is, and I don’t care. I don’t have anywhere to be. I have Alzheimer’s disease.

  “Sure.”

  He watches me carefully, his face becoming hard-lined. “Promise we’ll … be together. R-right until the end?”

  I smile, because I can’t help it when I look at him. “I can’t promise that. And neither can you.”

  “I c-can.”

  “Okay, you can. But just because you say it doesn’t make it so. When we get worse, they could separate us very easily and we’d have no idea.”

  “We would.” He props himself onto an elbow. “We’ll … make an order. Do not s-separate.”

  “Like ‘do not resuscitate’?”

  “Y-yes.”

  I laugh. “Who will we leave the orders with?”

  “Eric. Our f-families.”

  “Come on! We’ll be so gaga, they could put us in cardboard boxes and we wouldn’t know. They could call the family dog Anna, and you wouldn’t know the difference.”

  Luke doesn’t laugh.

  I groan. “You make me feel like such a black cloud, you know that? I’m a positive person! Around you I’m like … Negative Nora.”

  I hope Luke is right, that we will know each other. But I’m not convinced. I’ve already forgotten so much. “When I stop remembering you, I want to go. To flick a switch and end it. Why stay any longer, you know?”

  “N-never s-say—”

  “Why not? Do you really want to keep going to the miserable end, when your entire body has forgotten how to function and you piss and shit your pants and some stranger has to clean it up? That’s what you want?”

  He nods.

  “Even if you don’t remember me?” I ask.

  He gets that look in his eye like he’s looking right through me, past my skin and hair and bones and right through my chest, into my soul. “I w-will.”

  “Were you always so sweet, or is it the dementia?”

  He dips his head. “P-promise me we’ll be together in the end,” he says. “No switching a button, no ending it. Promise?”

  I groan. But his face is determined. There’s no arguing.

  “Fine,” I say.

  “Say … it.”

  I roll my eyes. “I promise. We’ll be together in the end. Batshit crazy. And together. I promise.”

  * * *

  In the morning, after Young Guy has stolen across the hall into his own room, I sit at my table. My notebook is in the drawer and I get it out. Briefly, my mind wanders to the last time I sat here to write. Things feel very different now. This time, I’m writing a letter to myself. My future self.

  November 1, 2013

  Dear Anna,

  Today you made a promise. You promised the young guy with the tea-colored eyes that you would stay with him until the end. No cutting out early, no taking the fast exit. It’s hard to believe you agreed to that, right? I can hardly believe it as I write this.

  So why did you agree?

  You agreed because this guy is the one you didn’t know you were waiting for. You agreed because, as it is, you’re not going to have long enough together. And you agreed because this guy is a pretty good reason to hang around.

  Soon you won’t remember this promise—that’s why I’m writing this down. So if you are reading this now, there’s something else you should know: Anna Forster never breaks a promise.

  Anna

  22

  None of the residents said anything the first time Young Guy held my hand
in the big front room, but I know they noticed. Baldy flew into a coughing fit. Southern Lady’s eyes narrowed, then widened. Really Old Lady smiled, but then, she always smiles. (She probably wouldn’t smile if she knew what we got up to at night.) But after a while, they start to like it. I start to like it. And, it might be dementia, but I can’t actually remember a time before his hand rested on mine.

  Today it’s the usual suspects in the big front room. And the guy who does the garden. Every now and then, he comes inside with flowers and hands them out. The ladies love that. But today the garden is covered in white stuff, so he must have gotten the flowers sent from somewhere warm.

  “Gabriela!” he says when Latina Cook-Lady walks past. He hands her a special bunch of flowers wrapped in brown paper. “Congratulations.”

  She gives him a big, happy smile. Today she announced that she has a baby in her belly, and everyone is really excited. I know I should feel excited, too.

  Next he gives me a flower. “How are you this morning, Anna?” he asks.

  “I’m okay.” I feel bad for not remembering his name. I do, however, remember the name of the flower. “Lovely alstroemeria.”

  His face tells me he’s impressed, and I feel pleased.

  “Well, well,” he says, “you know your stems. Let me guess, you used to be a florist?”

  “Do I look like a florist?”

  He considers that. “Now that you mention it, no. What did you do?”

  “I was a paramedic.”

  I may as well have said that I was the person in charge of the United States. Southern Lady’s mouth pops open, her husband’s eyes widen, Baldy even stops chatting to his imaginary wife.

  “You know what a paramedic is, right?” I say, chuckling. “I didn’t say…” I try to conjure up the title for the person who goes to the moon, but it’s temporarily—or permanently?—just out of my reach, “you know, a space person.”

  “It must have been exciting,” says Really Old Lady. “Speeding around in those buses with sirens and the lights flashing.”

  “Traumatic, more like it,” Baldy says. “Who do you think scrapes the bodies off the street after they leap from those tall buildings?”

  “There was some of that,” I say. “But it wasn’t all sirens and dramatics. There was a lot of looking after people who’d had too much alcohol to drink. A lot of routine transfers from places like Rosalind House into the hospital.” Or the place where they keep dead people, I don’t say. The residents start to look a little bummed, so I decide to afford them what they are looking for. “But it had its moments. Once I had to help restrain an A-list famous person who went off on a drug-fueled rampage in a hotel room. And”—I can’t help a smile at this one—“I delivered a baby once, right on the floor of a shop-center place.” I can still see the slimy little thing—a boy—peering up at me from between his mother’s legs. The newspaper had run a story on it, but I’d let Tyrone pose for the picture. The bright lights liked him more than they liked me.

  The residents coo and I sit a little taller. It’s been a while since anyone has listened to me like this. Like I know what I’m talking about. “And there was one time—”

  “There you are, Grandpa!” We all turn to look at a young girl with spiky yellow fuzz on her head, hovering in the doorway. “Sorry to interrupt. I just really need to talk to my grandpa.” The girl is looking at Baldy, but then her eyes scan the room and stop at me. “Oh. Hello again.”

  It’s weird. She’s definitely looking right at me, but she doesn’t seem even slightly familiar. She must have mixed me up with someone else.

  “I’m glad I ran into you,” she says. “I wanted to thank you. Your advice worked.”

  I study her. She’s too young to be a friend of mine, and if Baldy is her grandfather … I don’t get it. No, I definitely don’t know her.

  “I came into your grandmother’s room, remember? A few months ago? I took a wrong turn on the way to the bathroom and found you, and we started talking and you gave me some wonderful advice—”

  “I’m sorry,” I say, “I think you’ve mixed me up with someone else.”

  Baldy, suddenly, is beside the girl. He pats her shoulder.

  “I’m sure it was you,” she insists. “You must remember. I told you that Grandpa was worried I’d be cursed if I got married, and you told me to tell him that I’d rather have a year of true happiness than die without knowing what happiness was. And it worked, we’re getting married, right here in the garden of Rosalind House next year!”

  As someone with Alzheimer’s, I’d be lying if I said it didn’t feel good seeing a “normal” person get confused. See, I want to say, it can happen to anyone. This young woman seems perfectly together, of sound mind, and still, she is confused.

  “My grandmother isn’t a resident here,” I tell her, grateful for this nugget to hold on to, proof that I’m not the one who is confused. “I am.”

  There’s a strange sudden stillness in the room. The girl’s gaze bounces to Baldy’s, then slowly slinks back to me.

  “I … see,” she says finally. Her cheeks are a little pink, and I hope I haven’t embarrassed her. “I must be thinking of someone else.”

  * * *

  A few minutes after Baldy has gone off with his granddaughter, Young Guy and I trundle toward my room. We make the decision to do this without a word, just a look and a nod. Like an old married couple. Given the fact that we’re not likely ever to be an old married couple, I’m glad we’re getting the opportunity now. White flakes are fluttering down outside, and it’s cozy in here. As we walk, he takes my hand. I’ve never been the sentimental type, but the hand-holding is growing on me.

  Baldy and his granddaughter are in the entry-hall bit. If Baldy ever possessed the ability to whisper, he has lost it now, and I hear the words “dementia” and “sad.” They’re talking about us.

  “I just feel so sorry for them,” she says. “They’re so young.”

  I keep walking. I understand that people feel sorry for us. I’d probably feel the same if it had happened to someone else. But Young Guy stops, and because of our interlinked hands, I stop with him. Baldy and the young woman look at us.

  “You don’t need to feel sorry for us,” Young Guy says. “We’re a l-lot luckier than most.”

  Then he gives me a little tug and we walk together to my room.

  23

  Clementine

  Our guests are lined up against one wall of the gymnasium. Mom is at one end, wearing jeans and flat shoes. Even though we were allowed to invite anyone we liked, most of the boys have brought their moms and the girls have brought their dads. I’m the only girl who has brought her mom.

  “Good evening, everyone,” Miss Weber says. She’s wearing a dress, like most of the moms, and pink shoes with ribbons that tie around her ankles. “Thank you so much for coming to our Family Dance Night. We’ve been working very hard on the decorations. Doesn’t the room look great?”

  Our guests clap. I notice Miranda’s dad is holding a bunch of flowers. Reds and purples and whites.

  “We would like to thank the Heathmonts for donating the materials for our banners and artwork, and the Andersons for providing the trestle tables. And to everyone who brought along cakes and cookies today.”

  I grin at Mom. She brought red velvet cupcakes with creamy vanilla icing—I can see them on the table, stacked up into a triangle. Mom’s red velvet cupcakes are the best.

  “Soon we’re going to start the dancing, but first, I thought you might like to hear some singing. We’ve been practicing very hard, haven’t we, class?”

  Last year we sang a song, too. I can’t remember what it was. But I remember looking out at Daddy in the crowd. The other parents were whispering and nudging and taking videos on their phones, but Daddy just watched. Afterwards, he said he didn’t need to record it on his phone, because it was already recorded in his memory forever.

  This year we sing “Firework” by Katy Perry. When we’re finished it�
�s time to dance with our special person. Freya’s dad picks her up and she wraps her legs around his waist. Miranda’s dad spins her around in circles so her skirt floats all around her. Legs stands on her dad’s feet. I put my arms around Mom’s waist and we sway a little.

  “Sorry,” Mom says. “I’m not a very good dancer.”

  Afterwards, Mom talks to Harry’s mom, and Harry and I eat red velvet cupcakes and Harry gets vanilla icing on his nose.

  “Harry!” I say, giggling. “You’ve got—” I’m laughing too hard to finish.

  Harry laughs, too, even though he doesn’t know what’s so funny. “What?”

  “Your nose!”

  “Oh!” He wipes his nose, but only gets a little bit of icing off. The rest is still there. We laugh so hard that Harry’s face goes bright red.

  Then Miranda and Freya come over with their dads. The dads shake hands and smile at Harry’s mom. They look at my mom, but they don’t shake her hand or smile.

  “Our dads don’t like your mom,” Miranda whispers. She’s standing beside me, helping herself to a red velvet cupcake.

  “Yes, they do,” I say.

  “They don’t,” Freya says. She also has one of Mom’s cupcakes and she takes a bite. “They really don’t.”

  I look over at Mom. Harry’s mom has started talking to someone else, and my mom is standing by herself. I remember her standing by herself at the school gates.

  “Why don’t they like her?” I ask.

  “Because she is dith-spicable,” Miranda says. “That’s what my dad said.”

  “Dith-spicable,” Freya repeats. “Just like your daddy.”

  Harry frowns. I start to feel hot. I don’t know what “dith-spicable” is. But they are standing really close, and I want them to go away.