The report said I mounted the truck and that I acted “desperate.” The driver veered to the left when I stepped in front of him and the truck hit the brick wall constructed to keep the view of the dumpster hidden.
They tell me I hoisted myself into it. I doubt it, honestly. A woman my age? With that ankle? All I wanted was a small white plastic bag with papers smeared with my blood. My daughter’s letters. My confession. If it wasn’t for Edward and his weakness in carrying the burden, I might—
Wait.
The story of my family. The fall of my family. What will happen to it?
I can already feel myself slipping, committing to another narrative altogether. When I have to face that stain again, will I change my account, will I assign fault to someone else? I fear I will forget, I will forget all of it, I will tatter about this place twenty years from now, I will continue to ask for Penelope. That’s what I can’t take, the thought of every day before me being just like the days behind me.
My confession. The letters. What happens tomorrow, or the day after? When I don’t recall how and why my daughter plunged to her death. Will I do this all over again? Look for the truth? Should I put a sticky note on a mirror?
But they are shrouded. I don’t recall why.
* * *
• • •
I wake and for a second, I don’t know where I am. The silence is peculiar. I’m alone in the apartment and the only sounds are the birds and their carefree song outside my window.
My mind wanders, trying to make sense of all the pieces that attempt to click into place. A pillow beneath my head, a duvet on top of me. Light seeps through the slits between the blinds, everything is defined and interpretable in the light of day. There are telltale signs that my brain is waking, it gains momentum like an engine that warms, springing to life. There are residues of moments grasping for significance above all others.
When I was a child, I had a rash. Obscure red blotches appeared on my cheeks and turned into fine pink sores that felt like sandpaper. Soon they spread to my ears, neck, chest, elbows, and thighs. Unassuming, taken for a sunburn at first, a diagnosis didn’t come until a week later: scarlet fever. By then I had developed kidney inflammation. After a long recovery, one morning I awoke and the fever had broken and I was on the mend. I didn’t know what it meant to be healthy or sick or getting over a sickness but I knew I was well. I feel like I have overcome a long illness. I wasn’t well but now I am. The stitches have held and here I am, clear in body and mind. Everything makes sense. The mind settles.
The moment my bare feet touch the ground, I understand what has happened. It is irrevocably significant, I can’t quite explain it and I talk to myself as if I’m talking to an audience. I understand what has happened.
A word pops into my head. Velvety, it slithers into my consciousness. I hadn’t thought of it in years but here it is, sliding off the tip of my tongue. Bobeche.
In the big scheme of things the word is quite insignificant, referring to a chandelier part, a glass collar that catches candle drippings and holds suspended glass prisms.
I remember the chandelier at Hawthorne Court, three-tiered, with more crystals and drop pendeloques, baguettes, and fuchsia bells than anyone can count. The metal finish gleamed in silver leaf and was draped with beaded strands of jeweled chains. The bare bulbs were without shades. An Italian antique. Edward had argued with me over the price.
“It’s too expensive,” he had said.
“But it’s imported from Italy,” I had replied. “The glass is handblown and the metal is forged by hand. It’s a marvel of artisan design,” I insisted.
I get up. I don’t remember when I went to bed, when I put these clothes on. What a hideous thing to wear, this smocked cotton nightgown. I would never wear such a thing.
I step outside. A blanket of fog hangs over the Shadow Garden grounds, lingering about, all but swallowing the world. A merry-go-round of random thoughts turn into some sort of order, they take shape like the word bobeche did, it forms in my mind and there it is.
A narrative emerges and if I just think hard and long enough, I’ll make sense of it all.
* * *
• • •
I take stock of my life: hair and nails. Appointments. Chiropractor. My daily run, two if my hip allows. The constant glances at the clock, so pointless really, because no one is demanding of me.
I hear the door unlock, Marleen arrives. The keys jingle as she drops them in her purse. The purse slides across the accent table in the foyer. The gliding open of the kitchen doors. I get dressed. Casual attire, just an early morning walk, nothing more. Breakfast can wait. I pass the kitchen door and Marleen looks up, surprised.
“Everything okay, Mrs. Pryor? You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”
“Going for a walk,” I say, my voice lacking enthusiasm. Zipping up my coat, the scarf gets stuck in the zipper.
“But your breakfast?” Marleen’s voice shakes. I’m not supposed to leave the house without breakfast. Blood sugar, I remember. I fainted once, on the back trails. I must have told her, she mentioned it to me the other day. Maybe someone saw me, I can’t be sure.
“Okay,” I say. “I’ll eat something.”
I want Marleen to fry an egg today. Fry an egg. I must have said it out loud because she stares at me. She knows I hate eggs. Hate the smell of them. She had fought me on that in the very beginning. “Toast is not enough,” she used to say. “Protein is what you need.” Eventually she gave up.
She fries not one egg but two. She never quits while she’s ahead.
I sit at the table and watch her. Spatula. Butter. Salt. Pepper. It’s all lined up and I know what does what, know it so well I could do it myself if I wanted to. Marleen heats up the butter in a skillet. She breaks two eggs and they slip into the pan. They sizzle as they make contact. The pan is too hot, the eggs will be tough, I know that not because I cook, but because I’m a picky eater. She reduces the heat to low, watches as the whites set. When the yolks begin to thicken, she slides a spatula under each egg and carefully flips it over. She looks at me with wide eyes, then sprinkles the eggs with salt and pepper.
Does she suspect anything? I don’t know but I doubt it.
“Serve immediately,” I say as if I’m reading instructions from a cookbook. What a pure soul she is, I see that now. But she is also a liar.
Marleen turns around. “Done,” she says and unfolds my napkin.
The calendar on the wall with the closed-out dates tells me today is Saturday. Good. Saturday is perfect. I eat the eggs and the toast quickly, I more or less shove it all into my mouth.
“Going for a walk,” I say and leave.
I hear Marleen call my name but I have long disappeared around the corner.
* * *
• • •
Outside, little wispy clouds move quickly. It’s windy and cold and I’m glad I tied a scarf around my neck, otherwise the wind would leach underneath the woolen coat and chill me to the bone. Sometimes keeping an enemy from entering is half the battle. Down the breezeway, the rat poison is gone. I inspect the area closer and I find bait stations tucked away under the shrubs.
I look toward the buildings in the back of the estate. Straight across from my building, farther back, is the Oasis, and across from it the Gallery. There’re four more, all facing each other like they are keepers of one another, enclosed by a steel fence. The path stops. I wait for signs of life, anyone walking about, but there’s no one to be seen. The gate is latched but not locked and so I enter as if I’m supposed to be here, as if I belong.
Grackles. They are everywhere. They follow my every move with their yellow eyes, tracking me. My presence takes them by surprise, makes them scatter off into the nearby trees. The birds are only the beginning, the catalyst that gives my thoughts oxygen.
I think about my mother. She was diagnosed with liver cancer, and she
refused treatment. I didn’t blame her. Who in their right mind would want to go on, their last months putting their body through hell—what kind of life to be bedridden with strangers performing intimate tasks for you—and so I held her hand and told her about Penelope, how she’d be on her way to see her if it wasn’t for finals at the university, and how perfect she was, how smart, how she was everything a mother could want in a daughter and all I wanted her to say was that she felt the same way about me. She held up her hand to stall the conversation, then looked away as if she knew—though she couldn’t have—but I felt she knew me to be a liar.
“Give her my love,” she said.
And I think about how, toward the end of our marriage, even before the depression, before we separated, that was when I began to slip. How my watch told me what time it was but I didn’t trust it. I recognized that my perception of time was warped—I could clearly remember when a day began but not when it ended. What does one call that? A lapse? A failing? A breach? An oversight? A bungle? The words percolate and more bubble up to the top: a foible, a gaff, a fault, a blunder.
What I don’t recall is the day I left Hawthorne Court. I don’t understand how that can be. Did I leave in the dead of night, or did Edward make me? Maybe we shook hands—which sounds like something Edward would do, he is very clinical and tends to assume the role of a bystander, and there’s a word for that I don’t recall, oh, detachment, I think—and how good he was at that. He lacked something. Empathy. Understanding.
Edward assumed I refused to get well, I know that about him. Dr. Pryor—who could fix butchered patients, cleft palates, and infected saline inserts, a collapsing septum not remotely a challenge, a gangrene wound a mere obstacle to overcome—believed with all his might I refused to get well.
* * *
• • •
Saturdays are a late start for management. Skeleton crews they call it. There’s a guard by the gate, a receptionist answers the phone. No nail appointments, no grocery delivery. A bursting pipe or a clogged toilet will summon someone in due time, yet there’s no maintenance on the premises. Emergencies can be called in, but the offices are not staffed.
I enter the main building and walk down to the doctors’ offices. Dome cameras watch me like bug eyes, in every hallway and at every corner. I wiggle the door to Dr. Jacobson’s office and it is, as expected, locked. Through the glass door, the office suite sits empty, computer screens are abandoned, and printers are shut off. I leave the building and turn down a walkway leading to the Ridge. I pass through the breezeway and between the main building and the Ridge where the pathway comes to a stop, I cross the patch of grass and stay in the mulch beds where the ground covers sit slick with morning dew. No one but the grackles watches me, swooping in low arches, keeping their curious eyes on me. There’s always one ugly side to buildings, the side they hope to keep invisible, where the utility boxes are, the AC units, where the power and gas lines disappear in between the grout of the red bricks.
Dr. Jacobson’s office is the second to last window. I pick up a rock and gauge its weight in my hand. It’ll do. I wrap my scarf around the rock and close my eyes as I swing it overhead against the glass. The impact barely creates a fissure, small, the length of a bobby pin, if that. I run my bare finger over the glass to see if the fracture runs all the way through but it’s just a surface crack. I swing the rock again, this time as hard as I can. The crack widens, others emerge, ragged branches like a spiderweb. One more impact and fragments of glass rain down. My thick wool coat protects me from the tiny shards still stuck in the frame. I hurry and sit on the window frame and swing my legs across.
I expect to find my file by thumbing through the M through P section in Dr. Jacobson’s office. I imagine the tops secured with prong fasteners allowing for two separate filing surfaces. Notes on the left side and labs on the right. I imagine flipping through the right, where my cholesterol and triglycerides are neatly highlighted, my blood sugar levels underlined. Lots of letters N, either Normal or Negative. I imagine finding the words, scribbled, lacking conviction, slanted. But this isn’t the era of paper files, today’s world is computers and passwords and medical information security. I slip into a nearby chair. I stare at the door to Dr. Jacobson’s office. A conversation we once had comes back to me.
Do you know where you are? Dr. Jacobson asked.
I was taken aback by her friendly demeanor, her shallow way of pretense, the way she smiled at me.
Do I know where I am?
I know how this can feel, she said. It can shake the very ground beneath your feet. The mind can grow a little muddled, familiar terrain can become foreign, she said. Everything’s going to be all right.
What a fool I am. I didn’t understand a thing.
A light begins to flash red overhead. I should have known that the moment the rock hit the window somewhere an alarm went off, some blinking display indicating the exact spot of the break-in. A guard comes running, stops, and looks down the corridors. When he sees me, he approaches me. Slowly, as not to frighten me. Because that’s a rule at Shadow Garden; don’t frighten the tenants.
* * *
• • •
I return and find Marleen is about the house. Keeping house. Something about her touches me deeply: her devotion, her resolve, I can’t put my finger on it. I sit at my vanity. I open the folder, the one I’ve been hiding in my vanity drawer. The one I never bothered to read, just skimmed over the pages, admired the font and esthetic of it. The one about the butterflies roosting in the thick canopies of the Monterrey oaks, the very generation that makes the journey south to Mexico isn’t the same generation that went north the year prior, yet they always find their way back. I assume it’s some internal compass in their brain that allows them to end up at a specific location they have never been to.
I read on.
Once I finish, I throw the brochure in the bin underneath the vanity. I strip the mirrors of the sheets but I don’t look. Not yet. What is the opposite of shrouding, I wonder, the antonym? To lay bare.
A moment comes to mind, the night at Hawthorne Court when I mistook a sliver of moonlight in my daughter’s room for something it was not. My hands then seemed like something I had never seen before, old and gaunt. Bones protruded, veins bulged on the backs.
I look up into the mirror and stare at myself. I lean closer. I concentrate on my clavicle. My face. The skin is crepe-like, in stark contrast to my immaculate honey-colored hair and nude nails.
There’s this man who sits outside by a table. I see him almost every day, pass by him as I go for my walks and runs, but I’ve never spoken to him. Vera and I refer to him as Watcher. Vera told me he lives alone but has kept all his late wife’s belongings. I now understand him to be a man allowed to live in the past, surrounded by the fondest memories a man his age can have: his wife, her things, as if she still lived there, her underwear in the drawers, her bras lined up.
The framed dress above my bed, the Miss Texas gown, the sash. Nothing but lies. Made up. I’m not a former beauty queen. I staged the house with lies. I bought the dress and the sash, a facade to display in a mansion. Money buys you anything you want.
I have arrived at the truth: there are no smells of toilets, disinfectants, or overcooked foods. There’s a private movie theater, a luxury spa, and a library stocked with books. This place is some warped Disney World where they immerse us in a world of normalcy, a theme park with everything we could possibly need, all we can possibly remember. The children and families in the park, the ones I see occasionally, are visitors. Employees are caretakers, not maids and chauffeurs. Vera Olmsted, not a friend but a fellow resident. My neighbors, eccentric at best and mainly obsessed with their privacy, are not tenants but patients tucked away where all seems well and no one is reminded that something is amiss.
The puzzle pieces fall and snap into place. The brochure states what not to do: never command, always ask. Don
’t argue, but agree. Never force, but reinforce. Surround them with things so that they recall their youth and happier times. Triggering positive memories helps calm anxiety, soothe aggressive behavior, prevent wandering, and improve quality of life. Never remind them their loved ones are dead.
Shadow Garden, as the brochure states, is a “living community” where we can spend the day exploring, safe and secure behind a fence. And if one dies, one does not speak of such things, as such talk unsettles us. Discover independently, the brochure says—nail salons and barbershops, literary readings, hikes, apartment spaces furnished with beloved furniture and mementos, familiar settings in a controlled space, safe confines, and expert supervisors. Reminiscence therapy makes those with dementia more content and happier because their minds return to a time in their lives when their memory was intact and they did not feel lost.
The day Edward dropped me off, I thought all those years I’ve lived here but I never knew this place existed.
That vase.
That ugly thing.
That’s my daughter’s urn.
What a shit show.
62
EDWARD
Donna’s left Hawthorne Court but Edward isn’t back to square one. He had his chance and he blew it but he’s no longer concerned with the facts. Is Donna declining in a clinical sense or is she playing a cat-and-mouse game with him? She’s ill. He can’t know exactly what it is but she is ill. Donna isn’t that good of an actress. He wishes he could tell her that and that it would register, one last ugly feeling for her to have.
Fuck if he cares. Whatever it is, it no longer matters. All those months, weeks, sleepless nights he’s spent on cracking this puzzle have been in vain but the constant gush of emotions has stopped. He’s almost at peace. Almost. And he’ll get there, eventually he’ll get there. There’s no longer this space within him that needs filling with something, anything to help him see the bigger picture and move on, he no longer needs to approve of himself as the one who didn’t fail his daughter. He had circled the wagons, what else could he have done?
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