Mayhem in Miniature

by Margaret Grace

  “Two bedrooms and two bathrooms?” I asked, regretting my shocked tone.

  “I didn’t want her to feel cramped. And once in a while Ernestine or I come and stay here overnight. Not often enough, I realize.” She ran her fingers over Sofia’s dresser, lined with family photographs. A lifetime of memories. Weddings, birthdays, poolside parties, and holiday gatherings filled the light oak surface. I recognized Ernestine’s formal high school yearbook photo in the collection, and one in her robes with Dolores on one side and Sofia on the other. All three Muniz women were tall and large boned. Sofia at eighty-something still had a rather stately carriage. Dolores turned to me. “Geraldine, what if she’s . . . ?”

  I hugged her. “You’ve been a good granddaughter, no matter what,” I told her, basing that judgment solely on the living arrangements she’d provided for Sofia. I tried not to dwell on the various nursing home scandals I’d read about, from people stealing pensions and social security checks to euthanasia at the hands of a well-meaning (or not) orderly.

  I felt uncomfortable, like a snoop in someone else’s home, so I simply followed Dolores around the apartment, observing, as she opened drawers, unfolded and refolded clothes. She checked a large closet in the bedroom Sofia used, and I suspected she hoped she’d find her grandmother there, as if she were playing hide-and-seek one more time.

  “You know, Sofia was never really happy in this place. In fact, she was never completely happy in my new home. I worked so hard to get us from hand-to-mouth survival in an old dump on the south side, to the beautiful home where I live now. And she’d tell me she missed the decaying old apartment.”

  This fit well with what I knew of Sofia. Dolores had bought her a fancy case to hold the materials for my crafts class, but Sofia carried her supplies in an old canvas tote bag. Instead of a state-of-the-art ruled cutting board that Dolores delivered to her in class one day, Sofia used a pile of cardboard as a base when she needed to score or cut. I imagined she wished she could simply discard Dolores’s rich red-wood lawn furniture (I guessed about this) and sit out with her friends on a government-issue porch in a rusty chaise lounge.

  Dolores pushed sweaters and flowered housedresses across the closet rod. “She couldn’t get used to the security at our new place. ‘Like a prison, with visitors signing in,’ she’d say. ‘Why can’t we stay where Ernestine was born?’ she’d ask me.” Dolores grunted. “It was in Nolin Creek Pines, Geraldine.”

  “The housing projects behind the civic center?” The one named after the site of Lincoln’s log cabin birthplace, I remembered. Nolin Creek, Kentucky. Probably no other state in the country besides Kentucky and California had a Nolin Creek, thanks to us.

  Dolores pulled the accordion door closed with a resigned sigh. My grandmother is not hiding in her closet. “That same rat hole. Funny, now I have an office at the back of city hall, so I look out my window and see those streets. It’s a reminder every day of where I came from and where I never want to return.”

  I realized I knew very little about Dolores Muniz, except that she was a single mother with a rags-to-riches story that she usually preferred not to talk about. Not the time to quiz her, however. “Nolin Creek Pines is pretty run-down now,” I said.

  “It started out run-down. But Sofia never cared as long as we were together. Sometimes when she’s tired or not feeling well and her memory is not great, she asks me things as if we still lived there. You know, did the landlord fix the curtain rod in the kitchen? Did I remember to buy grout for the bathtub? Do I think the roof will leak again this winter?”

  I followed Dolores through a set of patio doors to a small balcony. Sofia had a view to the north, not bad this time of year when rainfall turned the hills green. Green-ish, Ken and I called it, remembering the rich, deep green of the Poconos in northern Pennsylvania and of the Catskills in upstate New York. I had a thought to ask a scientist (not that I could think of one among my friends) what made the difference. I wouldn’t have been surprised if Maddie knew. There was a lot of fifth-grade science that was over my head.

  Dolores sat down on one of the white metal chairs on the patio, apparently out of steam for the moment. I took the other chair, not knowing whether to get her talking or let her take the lead. In my mind I was constructing a miniature Nolin Creek Pines kitchen for Sofia. I could model an old-fashioned sink with a skirt around the bottom to hide the pipes. I wondered if the apartment had a radiator— something very easy to construct, with a little gray clay. If I kept it simple, I could have it done in a week, by Christmas, when she’d be back, safe, and celebrating with her family.

  “Nice day, isn’t it?” An old woman’s voice broke into my crafty wanderings.

  I knew Dolores was as disappointed as I was to see that the greeting came from Sofia’s neighbor, one balcony to the right, and not from Sofia herself. We tracked the sound to a frail-looking woman with an all-white halo of hair, her voice loud, high-pitched, and scratchy. “Very nice, indeed,” I said, not to be rude. It wasn’t her fault that Sofia was missing.

  Then the obvious occurred to me. “We stopped by to visit Sofia. Have you seen her today?”

  “I’m Sandy Sechrest,” she said, seeming to stand on tip-toes. She pronounced it “seek rest,” which I thought was fitting. The solid walls of the balcony hid all but her head and shoulders. She seemed to be balancing herself by the tips of her fingers (were those mittens covering them, or stretched out sweater sleeves?). “Sofia and I are friends.”

  While I smiled at the image of a Mutt and Jeff partnership, with the taller-than-average Sofia and the diminutive Mrs. Sechrest, Dolores jumped up. I worried that she’d frighten the tiny woman. Or attempt to vault over the space between the balconies, about ten feet, I guessed. But her cool professional training came to her rescue and she slowed down to ask in a calm tone, “Do you know where we can find her this morning, Mrs. Sechrest?”

  “You can call me Sandy. My friends call me Sandy.”

  “Thank you, Sandy. You can call me Dolores. I’m Sofia’s granddaughter.” Dolores took a breath. I was impressed at how well she was doing. “Is Sofia over there, visiting you?”

  Mrs. Sechrest looked perplexed. “No, no. I think she went shopping.” She looked to the hills beyond (focusing her eyes farther than the edge of the earth it seemed). “No, wait a minute. She was down in the garden very late last night with two men. I could see them from here. I don’t sleep much so I sit out here all the time. When it’s cool, I use the nice shawl my great-grandson brought back from India for me.”

  “You were telling us about Sofia?” I reminded her.

  “Yes, Sofia. Maybe they came to take her shopping.”

  “Someone took Sofia shopping in the middle of the night?” Dolores asked. I could tell she was trying not to sound too exasperated.

  Sandy knocked her temple with her tiny knuckle. “Not shopping. I remember now. They were taking her to jail.”

  “To jail?”

  Mrs. Sechrest waved her arms and nearly disappeared below the wall for a moment. She came back up. “Yes, yes, that’s right. One of them was the man who drives the shopping bus.”

  “The big yellow shopping bus?” Dolores asked her.

  Mrs. Sechrest nodded vigorously. “Except this time it was a jail bus.”

  Dolores turned to me and whispered (unnecessarily, since Mrs. Sechrest had the very loud voice of the nearly deaf), “There’s no yellow shopping bus. This woman is out of it.”

  “I’m so sorry, Dolores.” I could see the letdown in her face, her posture, her eyes that were starting to tear up again.

  “At least we have an idea of what to do now,” I told her. “We can talk to some of the other residents. Someone might know what she did last night or this morning. She might have said something that will help us.” That was a lot of somes, I realized. No wonder Dolores didn’t jump at the idea.

  “I can’t just stay here, Geraldine. Can we drive around town again?” Dolores was full of nervous energy, fiddling
with the buttons on her blouse, twisting her watch around and around on her wrist.

  “This might be our best bet to find out what happened last night,” I said. “But if you want to leave, of course I’ll take you.”

  Her answer was to sweep toward the door. I turned to say good-bye to Mrs. Sechrest but she’d left her balcony. Or else she’d simply dropped down to her normal, miniature height.

  We were back in the entryway, ready to leave the suite, when the doorway was suddenly filled: my friend Linda Reed, looking broader than usual in her starched nursing whites (de rigueur at the Mary Todd). She was breathing heavily. I might have thought she’d climbed the four floors from the lobby, except I knew Linda could get winded just hurrying down a hallway. Still, she was a most welcome sight, beehive hairdo and all.

  Help at last, I thought. Like me, Linda knew Dolores through our crafts work. Dolores was an enthusiastic supporter of our fund-raisers and did her best to move quickly on publicity, arrangements for permits, and other city hall- based details.

  “Did you find my grandmother? Is she all right? Is she here?” Dolores dropped her purse and grabbed Linda’s hand, as if to hold fast to our only decent source of information.

  “We found her,” Linda said.

  Anxious looks all around. Dolores seemed to hold her breath. The phrase dead or alive? hung in the air. Then Dolores blurted out, “What happened? Is she all right?”

  “She’s getting settled in the care center.” Linda pointed to the south wing of the home. We followed her index finger. Dolores drew her breath in again. “It’s mostly good news.”

  A long exhale from Dolores. A questioning look from me, who had focused on the word “mostly.” Dolores didn’t seem to hear it, but then she didn’t have my habit (the sometimes curse of an English teacher) of picking up on every word, every nuance. She grabbed her coat and put it on while juggling her purse and heading for the hallway. “I’m going to see her.”

  “Let’s walk and talk.” This from Linda, who had taken a team-building course last fall.

  I was ready to do both.

  To get to the south wing where the care center was located, Linda explained, we’d have to go down to the first floor, cross the lobby to another set of elevators, and go up three flights. I was reminded of too many airport parking garages. Which in turn reminded me of the San Jose Airport where I’d pick Maddie up this evening. I gave my watch a surreptitious glance. Though we hadn’t seen Sofia yet, I felt the crisis was over and I could allow myself the pleasure of anticipating my only grandchild’s visit.

  Between now (eleven fifteen) and then (four o’clock) I’d have to squeeze in a makeup tutoring session with Lourdes (no Christmas recess for serious students), shop for kid food and party supplies (we always had a family gathering with Beverly and Skip on the first and last nights of Maddie’s visits), and keep my schedule for delivering Mary Todd (the former First Lady, not the home) decorations around town. If anything could be dropped from today’s list, that would be it, I decided. I could take Maddie with me to deliver tomorrow. The decorations would be up until New Year’s Day, so there was no big hurry to have them there this afternoon.

  “They found her at Nolin Creek Pines,” Linda said. I shook my head. They found Sofia, not Maddie, I told myself. Linda pushed the DOWN button for the lobby.

  Dolores snapped her fingers. “All that talk about the Pines neighborhood, and I didn’t think of looking for her there.” Her mood was cheerful, though we hadn’t yet reached the part where the good news was only “mostly” and not “totally,” as my twenty-eight-year-old nephew and his friends would say.

  “Who found her?” I asked.

  “Our van driver, Gus Boudette. It happens a lot that old people go back to where they came from. They checked her records and found that old address.”

  “You have that address?” Dolores sounded like one whose shady past had been uncovered.

  “Since you called, we knew she wasn’t at your current address, so they checked through her records for previous residences. You probably don’t remember filling out those forms when we did our intake for Sofia. You had to go back fifteen years with employment and residence information.”

  “Are you sure the van didn’t just happen to find Sofia there while they were searching the whole town?” Dolores asked, in a snappish tone, as if Linda had stolen the information. Given how sensitive Linda was, I was surprised she didn’t give Dolores a caustic retort. “I have no recollection of giving you that address.”

  “It was three years ago, so I can see how you’d forget.” This was Linda being professional. I was impressed.

  “Hardly,” Dolores said, still unhappy.

  As we boarded the elevator, single file, I caught Dolores biting her lip. I heard a mumbled question, one that sounded like, “Will I ever really escape that neighborhood?”

  We had the elevator to ourselves this time, and the whole lobby, too. I imagined the residents at morning classes, workout sessions, and spa appointments. Or maybe waiting in their rooms for their daily doses from the on-site pharmacy Linda bragged about.

  We passed through the lobby, an ecumenical wonder, with menorahs, Christmas wreaths, and Kwanzaa candles interspersed. As we walked by an arrangement of flowers in front of a large hallway mirror, Dolores slowed down a bit and checked herself out. She smoothed her perfectly coifed dark hair and brushed her coat sleeve. Cleaning up after bad memories.

  “So the staff was on it, looking for Sofia the whole time?” I asked Linda.

  “Once Dolores called this morning, yes.” Linda, puffing to keep up with us two long-legged walkers, was looking pretty pleased with herself and with her employer. “Not that Dolores believed us. We figure it’s better not to involve the relatives anyway unless it’s necessary, especially when we have the experience. They’re always just wandering and eventually the police pick them up or Gus and his crew find them.”

  Linda made “them” sound like errant beads or globs of museum putty, but I knew she cared very much for the residents of the Mary Todd. She’d never been happier than lately, working in one place full time, giving her the opportunity to build a relationship with her patients.

  Linda’s strong point was helping the sick and infirm. At times she could be ill-tempered beyond understanding with her friends, but I’d never seen her behave or talk in anything but the most compassionate way toward her patients. And toward a patient’s granddaughter today, I noted. And especially to my “patient,” Ken. We’d seen her generosity during the many years of our friendship, but especially once Ken was diagnosed with leukemia. I couldn’t have managed without Linda’s comforting presence and very practical nursing support.

  I couldn’t stand it any longer. As we rounded a corner and proceeded toward the second elevator, I threw caution to the wind. “Linda, you said there was mostly good news about Sofia. What did you mean?”

  Dolores bit her lip again. I realized she wanted to see Sofia in the flesh before hearing anything but good news. I was sorry I upset that fantasy, but Linda was well on her way to a full explanation.

  “Sofia had a lot of blood on her. Her arms and legs and her clothes were all covered with blood.”

  Dolores picked up the pace of her stride, forging ahead of us. She bumped into Mr. Mooney and his walker, thus nearly disabling the only man in my crafts class.

  “See you tomorrow,” I called to him as we hurried past.

  “I love the Wandering Irishman,” Linda said, with a chuckle.

  I knew of Mr. Mooney’s reputation for walking uninvited into many corners of the home—administrators’ offices, the pharmacy, and any unlocked room he came upon—possibly sleepwalking, or more likely a natural-born snoop. I’d found him searching through my crafts tote one day. “Just looking,” he’d said, with a pleasant smile that made it hard to think ill of him.

  “Well, of course Sofia had blood all over her,” Dolores said (without a thought of or an apology to Mr. Mooney). “That whole neigh
borhood is full of trash and bodily fluids.”

  “This was more—”

  “Never mind.” Dolores’s cell phone rang as we approached the elevators in the south wing. She ignored both Linda and her phone. “There are all kinds of ways to get scratched in that slum.” Dolores pushed the UP button. She looked at me with disapproval, as if it had been my question that had spilled blood all over her grandmother.

  We kept silent on our ride to the third floor.

  “Thing is,” Linda said as soon as we exited (had she rehearsed this in silence?), “Sofia doesn’t appear injured.”

  “So she’s fine,” Dolores said, marching with her arms across her chest.

  “She has some minor cuts on her arm, but nothing that would have bled so much.”

  “Do we have to talk about this now? Maybe she bumped up against some bum at the Pines. There are enough of them there, God knows. They’re all dirty, bloody, smelly . . . I just want to see my grandmother.” There was that wailing sound again.

  A large sign pointed the way to the patients’ rooms. Dolores widened the gap between us and strode down the hallway.

  Case closed, I thought.

  Then Linda tapped my shoulder. She had to stand on tip-toes to whisper next to my ear. I felt the stiff strands of her heavily sprayed hair (a la the sixties, when Linda was in high school) across my cheek. “Whether Dolores believes it or not, Gerry, that blood is a problem.”

  “What kind of problem?”

  “It’s not hers.”

  I didn’t know whether to be glad or worried.

  Chapter 4

  The care center was decidedly less plush than the quarters in the main wing of the Mary Todd. More like a hospital, its halls were pale green and white and unadorned except for an occasional bulletin board with notices and schedules. Brief glimpses into examining rooms reminded me too much of Ken’s last days struggling with cancer. It amazed me that, even more than two years later, simple things like a blood pressure monitor, a stethoscope, or a hospital-style scale could spark that memory. Fortunately, jars of tongue depressors and cotton swabs now reminded me more of my crafts table at home.