Flashback

by Gary Braver

  René handed her a photocopy of the murder story from the Manchester Union-Leader. “I take it you’ve not seen this?”

  Cassie read the article, at one point wincing at something. When she finished, she laid the article on the table and looked at René without a word. René was sure the police had spelled out the details of the killing, but something in the woman’s manner set off uneasiness in her, as if the written words had confirmed the enormity of her sister’s act. “You no doubt know your sister better than anyone else. And I know you visited her at Broadview. I’m just wondering if you saw anything that might explain her behavior.”

  “My sister was a high-energy woman—a fighter, as you can see,” and she nodded to a cabinet full of golfing trophies. “She had a temper and would lash out if she felt wronged. But my sister was not a violent woman or capable of murder.”

  “And as far as you know Edward Zuchowsky was a perfect stranger to her.”

  “Yes, besides, how could she know him, being stuck in the nursing home?”

  “What’s baffling is that she wasn’t on any medications that would have led to such psychotic behavior.”

  Cassie took a sip of her coffee. “But she was demented.”

  “True, and demented people do have fits of violence, but there are always signs of that, and from her records Clara never harmed another patient or staff member.”

  Cassie raised her cup to her face again, her eyes locked on René’s so intently that for a second René felt their heat. Then the woman looked down and the moment passed.

  “Did you notice any changes in Clara while in the home—any alterations in her behavior from visit to visit?”

  “Frankly, I’m embarrassed to admit it, but I haven’t visited my sister in several months. My eyesight is poor and I don’t trust myself on long drives. And to be honest, watching her bump down the staircase is very depressing, as you can imagine.”

  Bump down the staircase. René nodded silently. Depressing doesn’t come close.

  “As I said, she moved in with me after Walter died. And for a while it was fine. Then she began to have memory problems. We had her diagnosed, and within a year she began to get worse—confused, disoriented. She was forgetting things from one moment to the next. It was like watching her being peeled away like an onion. God, what a cruel disease.”

  “Yes, it is.”

  “When it became too much for me to handle, even with visiting nurses and day care, we found Broadview. I must confess that the early visits were stressful. I love my sister, but seeing her disappear like that took its toll. She would flicker in and out, asking me the same questions over and over again until I felt my own mind begin to go. Of course, the driving became an issue. So I stopped visiting her, which didn’t make any difference to her by then.”

  “The last time you saw her, how did she seem in terms of mental abilities?”

  “Half there. She’d sit around the activities table and try to fill in the blanks. The aide would read a familiar adage for patients to fill in the rest: ‘You can’t have your cake and …’ pause. Or’Nothing ventured, nothing …’ pause. ‘A stitch in time saves …’ et cetera.

  “Clara would struggle to beat others to the answers. Sadly, she was a book person with a master’s in history and a doctorate in education. A former high school principal. Most of these books are hers. The last time I visited her she couldn’t read the name on the box of chocolates I’d brought.

  “I have a good dozen ailments, not the least of which is degenerative arthritis of the lower back—which sounds much kinder in Latin. But I don’t know what happened in the genetic throw of the dice that caused her to start blanking out while I’m still festering with useless memories. There are times I envy her. You reach a certain point in life when even your recollections begin to feel made-up. I think Mark Twain said it best—something like, ‘I can’t remember anything but the things that never happened.’”

  “I understand.”

  Cassie took a sip of coffee. “No, you don’t understand.”

  René wasn’t certain what she meant but felt as if she were engaged in some odd sparring match. “No, I can understand the anxiety of seeing her fade. It’s horrible, I know, and there’s nothing to feel guilty about.” René did all she could not to stumble on her words.

  “It’s different. It’s part of your job.”

  “My father died of Alzheimer’s.” The words jumped out before René could catch them.

  Nothing to feel guilty about. Not true, René thought. She had felt guilty for getting angry with her father when he got confused or abusive; guilty for not being able to give him comfort against the awareness that he was demented and getting worse and that he would never go home again; guilty for losing her patience with him, for not knowing how to act when she visited the nursing home, for not knowing what to say when he wasn’t responding or was unaware of her presence, for hating the fog in his eyes and the slack-jawed mouth as he descended farther into the gloom. Guilty for breaking down in his presence after he’d confused her for his dead wife; when he begged her to remove his restraints and they wouldn’t let her; when in a fit of rage he swung at her cursing; when it got so bad she no longer wanted to visit him. She felt guilty for trying to get on with her life. For allowing the nursing home staff to avoid taking extraordinary measures when he would no longer eat. For letting him die.

  The woman looked at her for a moment as if reading her thoughts. “Then I’m sorry for you. I suppose the only consolation is that the disease blots out the victim’s awareness of one’s offenses.”

  “Yes.” It also has a shared effect on the caregiver: It eventually renders you numb and ineffectual. And you at last come to realize that nothing you can do will stop the deterioration. Yet, ironically, you can’t help but feel that you could have done more. That you failed. Yes, a cruel disease.

  Cassie glanced at the newspaper story. “We had a fine sisterhood that lasted until we were old ladies. Certainly there was the usual sibling rivalry stuff, but there were enough years between us so that I was more the older sister and confidante than competitor. We would talk all night in bed, laughing, sharing stories, little truths, and secrets. And as trite as it sounds, I recall some of it as if it were yesterday.

  “In many ways we were blessed with exceptional parents who were smart and loving and who provided us with a childhood full of laughter and beauty that should have lasted longer than it did, at least until the age when the world begins to dull and harden the child. Unfortunately, that happened much too much sooner than it should for my sister.”

  The woman looked away for a moment. “Clara was raped by a neighbor when she was five years old.”

  “Oh, how horrible.”

  “By a drunken pig of a man who would sit on his back porch and drink beer out of large brown bottles and snort because he had some kind of sinus problem. One day he enticed Clara to come inside because he wanted to show her something. His name was Donald Dobretsky, the man my father lent the lawn mower to, the man whose wife was our mother’s shopping friend. The man we shared Christmas parties and barbecues with.

  “He would encourage Clara to recite jingles, silly rhyming things she picked up from radio and TV like ‘You’ll wonder where the yellow went when you brush your teeth with Pepsodent’—way before your time—or ‘Mary, Mary, quite contrary’ or ‘Ding, dong, bell, pussy’s in the well.’

  “Or ‘Donny Doh, Donny Doh, tsee-tsee go, tsee-tsee go.’ As clear as it was last evening, I remember her small, frightened voice cutting the warm night air of our room. Donny Doh was the name she had given Mr. Dobretsky. Just one of the many sweet names her magical little word box had created for people she knew.”

  “And what’s ‘tsee-tsee go’?” René asked.

  Cassie looked at her point-blank and said, “What he stuck in her mouth.”

  “My god.”

  “It took me a while, but she told me everything. She was still too innocent to know she was being sexu
ally abused but old enough to know that what he made her do was bad. So she never told our parents, and I was too afraid. Besides, back then people didn’t talk about child abuse. The term wasn’t even part of the public lexicon. And if children were abused, nobody talked. And nobody believed kids even if they made such claims. Such things didn’t exist in our nice world of Barton Glen. Today, a little whisper can send a man to jail for life or close down a church.”

  “Was it just that once?”

  “No, no. And the SOB told her that our parents wouldn’t believe her if she said anything. He was clever not to rape her because that would leave torn tissue. But he left her so deeply scarred that for days she wouldn’t speak or eat and had nightmares. Our parents thought she had meningitis or some brain fever and put her under the care of the family doctor because she was wasting away. Of course, all the tests were negative because it was that monster’s filthy pleasure.”

  She was shaking so much that her composure began to fracture. But she took a breath and found her center again. “I tell you this only to explain what’s beneath the layers—a wound that never, ever healed. Whatever it was, something in the encounter with poor Mr. Zuchowsky cut to the quick of that, and she exploded.”

  Mrs. Gould closed her eyes for a moment. When she opened them, she seemed recomposed. “Besides, Clara’s nearly gone, so it doesn’t matter that I tell you.”

  She suddenly looked very tired and old, as if she were staring into the narrowing corridor of her own last days. René got ready to leave. “What happened to this Donald Dobretsky?”

  “Died of old age.”

  “I’m sorry to hear that.”

  “Me, too. And a perfect stranger paid with his life.”

  8

  DIED OF OLD AGE.

  The phrase stuck in her mind like a thorn—all the way to Rose Hill Cemetery.

  Well, my father didn’t die of old age. I let them pull the plug on him.

  Rose Hill was located in Paxton, a small town outside of Peterborough, N.H. The place consisted of narrow tree-lined lanes like an arboretum. Since her father’s death, René had been coming here maybe once a month and on special days such as Memorial Day, Father’s Day, or Christmas. This day would have been his eighty-second birthday.

  Her mother was also robbed of her golden years, dying of cancer three years before her father, two years after he was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s. She was buried beside him.

  René had always been close to her father, but never so much as when he began to fade and especially after Diane died and his dependency fell full-weight on her, his only child. She had made regular visits each week to her parents’ home. She had arranged for visiting nurses, then hospice when her mother’s condition had begun to worsen. After her mother’s death, René moved her father into a long-term-care home, where he rapidly declined into the disease. She cleaned her mother’s headstone and laid down a pot of geraniums, then moved to her father’s.

  “Hi, Dad.”

  With paper towels she wiped the headstone, a black marble speckled slab that still glistened like glass in the sunshine. She removed some dead leaves and set down the second geranium pot.

  THOMAS S. BALLARD BELOVED FATHER AND HUSBAND

  She wished they had picked a less generic inscription. Three-quarters of the headstones had the same wording, just change the gender terms. She wished she had selected lyrics of one of his favorite songs—maybe a few bars of “As Time Goes By” or “Let Me Call You Sweetheart” or “Bridge Over Troubled Waters” or a hundred others. But the funeral director had talked her out of it, which made sense, since they’d probably have had to get copyright permission. And wouldn’t that look cute: a footnote with something like “© 1931 Warner Bros. Music Corporation, ASCAP, Music and Words by Herman Hupfeld.” Dad would have appreciated that.

  “Well, eight weeks on the job, and I’m caught up in a murder investigation because one of my patients escaped from a locked ward and killed a guy. Half her records are incomplete, there are patients on the ward that shouldn’t be, and everybody’s stonewalling while my head’s on the block. Otherwise, it’s been a great week.”

  She finished buffing the stone.

  The end was in sight when he began to stop eating, something common with dementia patients. Most of his cognition was gone, but he had had no medical condition and was strong enough physically to shuffle about the ward on a walker or to sit up in a wheelchair. Hoping to stimulate his appetite, the nursing home staff treated him with antidepressants, which worked for a while. But eventually he refused food no matter how much they encouraged him. Sometimes he’d spit it out or he’d keep it in his mouth, not chewing. Or he’d chew it and not swallow, pocketing the mash in his cheeks. Because René was at pharmacy school fifty miles away, she couldn’t visit as often as she wanted—a fact that ate at her heart like acid. But when she did, his mood would perk up and he’d eat a little for her, sometimes recognizing her, sometimes just responding to a smiling face that encouraged him to cooperate. But without her, staff just could not get him to eat.

  Eventually the options wore down to two: aggressive invasive measures—tube feeding and IVs—or letting him starve.

  Because René was a pharmacy student her father had given her power of attorney. She had discussed the options with her father in the early days of his disease. Emphatically he said he did not want aggressive medical treatment. He did not want to simply hang on with tubes down his throat and wait to become riddled with infections. He did not want to put her through this.

  “Promise me this,” he had said, taking her shoulders in his hands. “When I get really bad, you’ll let them do what has to be done to let me go out with dignity, okay? Promise? I don’t want to end up just some gaga thing attached to a diaper.”

  She could barely get out a yes.

  She told the nursing staff that she knew how her father viewed life and that he wanted it this way. So she signed the papers:

  Do Not Resuscitate—DNR

  Do Not Intubate—DNI

  Do Not Hospitalize—DNH

  Some days her recollection of her father was so vivid that she could not accept the fact of his death. And she could still recall that first day as if it were last week, when she realized that her father—former mechanical engineer, a man of extraordinary discipline, a book lover, a good-time piano player and crooner, an avid fisherman, a jokester, and a gentle, loving, fabulous parent—was beginning to bump down the staircase.

  And in an instant René was in the backseat of his Lincoln Town Car, listening to him.

  “You must remember this, a kiss is just a kiss, a case of do or die. The fundamental things in life as time goes by. Dah DAH dah DAH dah DAH …”

  “Come on, Dad, you’re spoiling a great song. For old time’s sake.” It was his birthday, and she was home from college.

  “Only if you lead.” He had pulled up to the stop sign at the top of their street.

  “Yeah, like you don’t know the words. You could have written them, for God’s sake.” She was hoping he’d kick into an old sing-along as they did on long trips when she was a girl. But for some reason he wasn’t interested. And her mother sat in the passenger seat looking tense. “‘You must remember this, a kiss is just a kiss, a sigh is just a sigh …’”

  “Oh, that version,” and he gave her a wink in the rearview mirror.

  Her dad was still such a kidder. “You big goof.”

  “What time are the reservations?” Diane had asked, her voice devoid of inflection.

  Because of traffic, René had arrived late, which probably explained Diane’s mood. Her face was out the window and she dug in her handbag for a cigarette.

  “Seven-fifteen.” René tried to ignore Diane’s grimness, especially on her father’s birthday. “Okay, from the top. ‘You must remember this, a kiss is just a kiss …’ Mom, feel free to join in. ‘A sigh is just a sigh …’”

  Her father sang along haltingly, as if waiting for René’s prompting.


  “‘No matter what the future brings …’ Dad, you’re punking out.”

  “He doesn’t want to sing.”

  “Yes, he does. Right, Dad?”

  “Actually, I’m a little fuzzy on the lyrics,” he said to the mirror.

  “How could it be fuzzy? It was your wedding song.” It was also part of their “repertoire”—old Sinatra, Bennett, and Johnny Mercer numbers.

  He didn’t respond.

  “Right,” Diane said under her breath.

  His head jerked and he turned into the northbound lane of 6A. They were heading for the Red Goose, a favorite restaurant near their cottage in East Sandwich. It was a glorious midsummer’s evening with a soft, sultry sea breeze. In spite of a growing uneasiness, René persisted. “Then how about ‘I Remember You’?” She could hear the note of desperation not to let go of their old-time ritual.

  “Sorry, Honey. My voice isn’t what it used to be.”

  “You’ve got a great voice, Dad.”

  Diane snapped her head around and hissed, “He doesn’t want to sing.”

  It was as if she had stung René with venom. All she had done was try to lighten the air. Then she saw something in Diane’s eye just before she turned forward again. Something was wrong. Diane muttered under her breath to her father.

  “What?”

  “Next left.”

  “You don’t have to tell me, for chrissake.”

  “You passed the street.”

  For a split second it occurred to René that her father was joking, that this was one of his elaborate charades to twist Diane’s tail—something he’d do when she was in a bad mood. It was slightly perverse but it always got her laughing. Like when he’d pretend that his leg had fallen asleep and that he’d have to limp to the movie or restaurant, stopping every so often to whack his thigh awake, then suddenly stop limping as if he were one of those miracles at Lourdes and look up to the sky in a gaze of beatific gratification. It would send both of them into laughing jags. Or the time he spent the entire evening speaking like Peter Sellers’s Inspector Clouseau because René was taking French lit. And the more Diane asked him to stop, the more he pretended he didn’t understand English until she cracked up. That was it: One of his routines—playing Daddy Dumb-Dumb.