Dust of Eden

by Thomas Sullivan

  Red dust.

  One of those troubling details was taken care of that evening. The inevitable phone call she had feared and feared hoping for came just after seven o'clock. Amber was dead. That Amber. The one in the wheelchair. Apparently she had died just about the hour when nine-year-old Amber returned. Ariel didn't know what to feel. How could she mourn? Even though she knew, for a certainty, that she had killed her adult daughter. Caused her death anyway. Perhaps not even inadvertently. Perhaps she had wished for it and it was implicit in her last painting. Last painting? Hardly her last.

  Red dust, red dust, red dust . . .

  She told herself it was for Amber that she did the next one. Amber needed her father, and Ariel had his photo. Though she never even glanced at it as she painted. Cheerfully, breathlessly, she did it. Did it in the same rapid-fire technique with which she had painted Amber – using the alla prima of which she was a master – as if the thin and delicate coats rendered quickly were required to breathe life into the image. It took longer to dry than to paint, but even that was merely hours. And in this way, Ariel Leppa brought Thomas Leppa back from the dead.

  Unlike Amber, he came back knowing how his story had ended, because there was no killing off to do this time, inadvertent or otherwise. He had died naturally. Finis. Therefore, he remembered everything from his life, and perhaps everything thereafter. This last was a matter of great interest to Ariel: where had he been since the funeral? He wouldn't tell her what it was like. Of course, he was angry, and that might have had something to do with his obstinacy. Angry and afraid. Because Ariel made one slight alteration in the circumstances to which he returned, one little addition (subtraction, technically) to ensure that life—Ariel's life—would be better this time around. Some might have seen some irony in it, almost a cruel joke. Because Amber had come back standing tall and freed from a wheelchair. But Thomas Leppa returned sitting down in one.

  Denny & Martin

  "Happy Y2K," Denny Bryce told his father on New Year's Day, 2000.

  "Happy Y2K," Denny Bryce told his father on New Year's Day, 2001.

  He used the very same words, because you couldn't be sure exactly when the new millennium started—what with everyone arguing about the year zero and all that—and because it didn't matter to his father anyway. Even if his father were capable of remembering that Denny had said the same thing, it wouldn't have mattered. Martin Bryce didn't know which millennium it was, or even which century. He didn't know the year or the month or the day, or what Y2K meant. His father had heard all of these things on the periphery of the chair he sat in, but he didn't remember them, didn't care—though he kept asking the time, like a man waiting for a train. He had given up trying to hang on to the thread of a television show through the commercials, and doing his quarterly taxes, and driving (thank God he had stopped asking where the car keys were!).

  There was only one thing Martin Bryce did care about, his son knew. Something as fundamental as his own identity. His once and forever wife Beth. Beth & Martin. For sixty inviolate years they had been married.

  To the best of Denny's knowledge, his father fell in love with his mother after he retired. Real and true love, that is. Denny wasn't sure what had preceded that. Lust, loyalty, friendship. Something practical and durable, passionate perhaps, but not the absolute and total love that had followed. Not the kind of altruistic love that almost no one ever gets. No. Not gets. Gives. Because you don't get it without being worthy of it, and you aren't worthy of it until you stop trying to get it and just give. It isn't "give until it hurts"; it's give until it stops hurting. Funny that Denny knew that, because at age fifty-one he had never experienced it live and in person. But he still thought he would. If he could just meet the right woman.

  "Beth?" his father still called at all hours with expectation in his voice, as if she would come smiling from the next room. And Denny would remind him, often with aggravation: "Mom's dead, Dad. She died in the car accident two years ago, remember?"

  Then the stoic old man would hang his head and swallow dryly and the mask would tighten over his eyes—waterproofing. "I forgot," he sometimes apologized in an airy whisper that didn't risk a tremble in his voice. Then, in that brief instant of shock and recovery, Denny would see all of his father, all of the emotional accumulation of the past he kept hidden. Because his father was a walking X-File: trust no one. Denny knew that his grandmother had been murdered when his father was six, and that his mother had tried to fill that void belatedly. There was more to it than he could fathom, but he didn't know how to compensate for his mother's role, and that was why it just killed him when the old man forgot—Beth? . . . Mom's dead, Dad. And the more he hated his father resurrecting his mother in this way, the more the old man did it, remembering what she had done that morning, it seemed, and how he was going to take her to Olive Garden that Sunday, and announcing that she was the best thing that had ever happened to him. And when the illusions collapsed in stark moments of lucidity, together Martin and Denny would have to bury her all over again.

  So Denny Bryce knew the drill. And he knew his father was transferring trust to him. And he knew that he was about to betray that trust.

  He had hung on as long as he could. The toileting, and the logistics of survival, and the endless business envelopes containing bills and statements that were beginning to rain down on him like tombstones. But now his father was wandering, turning up lost at a bank or a supermarket, or coming home in the back of a police car. When Martin Bryce answered the phone and set down the receiver, he never came back; and he left the stove on and water running and doors unlocked. Last week he had melted bacon fat in a Teflon pan, as if it were an old iron skillet, and then forgotten that he was going to fry eggs. The scorch marks from the resulting fire were still on the ceiling. But the most painful part of it was that the old man knew he was slipping and was ashamed and diminished by it. Denny didn't know how to deal with that.

  And it was bad enough to hear meek apologies and hateful self-denigrations from his normally taciturn parent, but it was the thing with the mail that really brought his father's humiliation home to Denny.

  "I've won a million dollars," Martin insisted after studying the contest advisory notice he had received.

  Denny had to read it twice to see all the loopholes and deceptions. Then he made the mistake of laughing. He was laughing at the rhetorical frauds, but his father grew defensive and obstinate about having won, and they argued until the son took the letter apart line by line, resulting in the old man at last waving it off with a declaration of his own worthlessness. If Martin's memory hadn't been hemorrhaging, the tiff might have lingered. As it was, he lapsed into a kind of obedience that seemed to reflect his decreased self-esteem.

  When had the freckle-faced little boy with the pale eyelashes become his father's keeper? Denny didn't like his old man becoming subservient. He wished he had congratulated him for winning the million dollars and just played it out until it was forgotten or they had blown money for the commercial toll call that was part of the scam. The next delusion was even more groundless, and Denny handled it better.

  "The doctors say I need an operation," Martin told him solemnly one morning, and he waved in a general way toward his torso.

  They talked it out, and Denny gently relieved him of the notion, but he could tell by the way his father closed his eyes and sat tight-lipped pretending to sleep that it was another blow.

  And then there was the garage. That was the galvanizing event, the thing that doomed the status quo.

  When Denny came home that afternoon from the school where he worked as a counselor, Martin was gone. He saw that the side door was open, and after a quick check inside, he drove all over the neighborhood before it occurred to him that his father never used the side door except when he was going to the garage. Fearful that he had taken the old Buick Century out, Denny raced back. But when he hit the door opener, the cantilevered panel swung up, revealing first his father's ratty slippers and mi
smatched socks, and then the rest of him sitting in a dusty lawn chair next to the car. The old man pretended he was just resting there in the hermetic gloom of the cluttered garage, but it was clear what had happened. He had raised the door from the button in the house, had gone in and somehow closed it, and then couldn't remember how to open it again.

  Denny disarmed the thing, but he couldn't disarm the world that threatened his father.

  How could he protect him without abetting the irony of being alive but not really living? He had to do something for this man who had fathered him, who had gone to work each day to provide for him and sacrificed without limit for his family's well-being. He had to care for him. No question about that. Only how could he do it when he himself had to go to work each day? How could he stand guard through the nights when his father, having slept most of the day, suddenly got up? So he did something a Bryce male never did. He reached out to others. He reached out to everyone. The parade included a volunteer elder aide, Meals on Wheels, then Medicare, an agency and a visiting nurse, who assigned a visiting caregiver. But it was all stopgap, and then one day after school had ended for the semester and the counselors had finished their year-end record keeping, Denny Bryce found himself driving around to the assisted-living complexes and nursing homes whose mailings he had steadfastly thrown away over the past decade. Enlightenment was ghastly.

  Most of the homes maintained common areas suitable to the mobile and the sentient, but go beyond that and you were in the corridors of the damned. Here were urine smells and feeble calls for help and waxy flesh straining to coat skeletons and an infantry of nurses maneuvering two-wheeled personnel carriers. You talked above hoary heads and studied antiseptically clean linoleum or looked at light caught in the sheers of windows that never seemed to brighten the interior. You pretended these were not warehouses for the dying. Welcome aboard the Titanic! In the end, Denny could not consign his father to such a place. He just couldn't do it.

  And then he came upon New Eden.

  KNEAL the small hand-painted placard below the rural mailbox read. If he hadn't stopped at the turnoff while trying to find his way back from Mankato, he wouldn't have noticed. He had gone to Mankato hoping that Golden Years Senior Living was the answer, and he had left in despair, grasping at straws, praying for deliverance, ready to trade in the Yellow Pages list of facilities he had been using for cues and omens. And suddenly here was this unimposing sign with that phrase again, that shibboleth that promised there wasn't a contradiction between freedom and confinement: "Assisted Living." Kenyon New Eden Assisted Living. KNEAL. Out here in the middle of nowhere.

  It looked like a wood-frame farmhouse, but there was a long wing built of bricks, and it was pastoral and refreshingly distinct from the urban compounds and contrived façades of green over gray that clamored for the abandoned and the dying. Still you couldn't take the place seriously with that tiny sign, an afterthought, as if it needed to fulfill some regulatory declaration but didn't really want to be discovered. Maybe they were hiding a good thing. Maybe God had finally stepped in with a few misleading road signs to facilitate an answer for him. KNEAL. He was too frustrated and desperate not to pay attention.

  The driveway was an archipelago of surviving chunks of asphalt that eventually led to a barn, but there was no parking area—no cars, in fact. And then he saw the last vestiges of a curb that ran parallel to the red brick addition. Goosegrass and dandelions were growing on the compacted area, and there were no tire tracks. What was going on here? A permanent bed and breakfast for enfeebled octogenarians? Some informal home-care facility qualifying for funds by listing itself as assisted living? It just couldn't be legit. Probably be out of business next week. But all he really knew was that it wasn't what he had already seen at a dozen geriatric prisons across the state.

  He parked his Tercel under the umbrella of a willow and strolled up to the porch. Nothing stirred in the windows and the house was strangely mute, as if caught in its afternoon nap. Maybe everyone inside had died a decade ago, he thought; maybe he was walking into a mausoleum. He almost felt he should knock, but you didn't knock when you went into a business, so he turned the flecked metal handle and stepped across the threshold . . .

  And it was like coming home.

  In fact, he still wasn't certain he wasn't trespassing on someone's living room. But that wasn't all bad. Because the white-glove cleaning patrol, and the smell of disinfectant, and the receptionist with the lily who probably did double duty as an instant mourner, and the rattle of trays on gurneys, and the snail line of wheelchairs at the elevators, and the donated National Geographics and Reader's Digest books, and the WanderGuard detectors behind plastic plants, and the flashing call lights screaming silently on a switchboard or unanswered above a grim portal where the grim reaper leaned on the doorframe—all these were missing! True, you could just call this place ill equipped, but he liked the homey informality. Did it actually run? It came down to the people, didn't it? And that was when he realized that he was looking at two of them.

  They sat on an ottoman as still as lamps. Two white faces—a man's, a woman's—trained on his, but with radiance awakening in their eyes. The woman especially seemed to glow at his presence, her eyes huge behind Hollywood glasses with glitter on the frames. She was a tiny woman in shrieking colors, and her red lipstick had rubbed onto a prominent eyetooth.

  "Got a cigarette?" she asked hopefully.

  The man—burly, leathery, in a shirt buttoned to the neck—leaned forward also intent on Denny's answer.

  "Sorry," Denny answered.

  "She won't let us smoke in here anyway," the woman murmured dryly.

  She.

  And suddenly there was another woman in the archway, a good deal younger than the other two, fiftyish, though nothing else about her suggested the formality of staff, except that her calves and forearms were plump and muscular, as if she were a twist balloon put together in segments. She had a shoe button nose, liquid brown eyes, jet-black hair with two white streaks like meteors in the night, and her voice held a hint of challenge: "May I help you?"

  "I saw your sign," Denny said. "I'm inquiring."

  "About . . . ?"

  "Residency for my father."

  "Does he smoke?" piped the woman on the ottoman, and the man next to her grinned.

  "Now, you know we don't have any openings, Beverly," said the plump woman by way of informing Denny.

  "How about a waiting list?"

  The pair on the ottoman laughed.

  "We don't keep a waiting list either."

  "Plenty of room, Molly," the burly man put in. "You ought to ask Ariel."

  Denny gestured loosely. "I didn't see you listed in the phone book, but you've got that sign outside—"

  "We're a private home."

  "Just what I'm looking for. How do people apply? You must be regulated or you wouldn't have that sign."

  The word "regulated" entered the room like a hornet looking for a place to land.

  "Wait here," Molly said warily and squeaked back through the arch in her ripple-soled sneakers.

  Beverly, the tiny woman with the Hollywood glasses, stroked her chin with an age-spotted hand. "She's gone to get Ariel," she said. "Haven't seen that before, eh, Paavo?"

  Paavo danced his feet on the floor—one step each—and nodded, his hands folded between his knees, his mirthful expression directed straight before him.

  "Is Ariel the manager?"

  "Oh yes. She manages us." Beverly nudged her glasses back up her petite nose. "You're almost a redhead," she assessed with the tactlessness of the very bored.

  "Almost."

  "I had red hair once. Naturally red hair. You wouldn't know it now, of course, but it was my best feature." She turned to her companion. "Apparently Ariel didn't like it."

  The burly man restrained his amusement. He had square, pink fingernails and a strong face that was just starting to collapse with gravity. "Your hair's not all she may not like," he said to the woman.<
br />
  "Aaah, to hell with it. I'll say what I like."

  "Do I detect a Norwegian accent?" Denny addressed the man.

  "Paavo's a Finn," said Beverly. "Paavo Seppanen. His wife is Ruta. She was a Lanoki before she married this old galoot."

  Denny nodded too many times. "How long have you lived here?"

  "About a year."

  "You came at the same time?"

  Paavo's smile seemed to freeze.

  "Just about," Beverly said.

  "So, do you like it here?"

  "Hell, no. I'd like to be twenty-four years old and on the French Riviera, that's where I'd like to be. But it's better here than where I was."

  "How's the food?"

  "Food's good," Paavo said.

  "And the medical staff?"

  Again the tandem exchange of faint smiles. "Infallible," said the woman. "No one gets sick here. Not for long anyhow."

  And that was when they heard the cane thudding on the wooden floor, and Denny saw their eyes go down. Molly reappeared in the arch, followed by a somewhat regal figure—a woman, tall, thin, gray hair cut short, and wearing a dress that a dowager empress might have worn in another time. She had very white skin and her hawkish nose seemed aimed at Denny like the bowsprit of a ship.

  "Bring him back," she crackled at Molly.

  They took each other's measure for the first time not in an office but in a kitchen, Ariel on one side of an immense worn butcher's block, Denny on the other. The looks between them were guileless.