Flashback

by Gary Braver

  “Seventh what?”

  “I got him for my seventh birthday, dummy.” She shook her head. “Lucy, you were there, and Patty, too. Okay for you if I’m not invited. I wouldn’t go even if I was. So there!” Then her expression sharpened. “And since when have you been black?”

  The black woman’s eyebrows shot up. “Pretty long,” she said and pulled a cell phone out of her bag. The elderly woman looked at the thing and gasped.

  “It’s only a cell phone, for God’s sake.”

  Blinking, the old woman stared at the device. And while the black woman punched numbers, her white companion leaned down toward the elderly woman. “Can you tell me your name?”

  “Jello, you know that.”

  “No, your name, not your puppy’s.”

  The old woman looked around at the traffic grinding down Huntington. They were at a crosswalk to the MBTA Green Line stop at the nearby corner. The traffic was thick and people were waiting for the oncoming train. While she glared across the avenue, distracted by whatever she was taking in, the white student stooped down and read the bracelet. “Mary Curley.”

  The black woman nodded. “I’d like to report a missing person,” she said into the phone. “I mean we found her. We’re in front of the Museum of Fine Arts on Huntington. Yeah. She’s an elderly woman who’s definitely confused. She’s got some kind of medical alert bracelet on. Her name’s Mary Curley; it says ‘I am an Alzheimer’s Patient.’”

  Before the young woman could read the address on the back, Mary yanked her arm free. “Jello?” She reached into the giant Gap bag and pulled out a red mangled slipper. “Here’s Mister Slippy. Come on, good boy.”

  Both women looked behind them, but there was no dog in sight.

  “I mean, like she’s spaced out,” the black woman told the dispatcher. “She’s talking to statues and trees like she’s Mr. Magoo.”

  “Mary, where do you live?”

  But Mary just glared at the street.

  “Jello,” the white woman said, to break her attention.

  Mary snapped her head at her. “Where?”

  The girl took Mary’s shoulders and stuck her face into hers. “Where do you live?” she asked, punching out each syllable.

  Mary glanced at the museum with its four Doric columns and massive granite portico above huge bronze doors. “Four fifty-two Franklin Avenue.” She sang that out in perfect little-girl rhyme.

  The black woman nodded, and into the phone said, “I don’t know. Maybe she escaped from a nursing home. No, I don’t know how she got here, and I don’t think she does, either. She thinks she’s lost her dog. Yeah. And you better come fast … . Yeah, she’s wearing a dress and sneakers and holding a shopping bag. The Gap.”

  Mary glanced back at the spot she had been glaring at—someplace beyond the line of cars, busses, and trucks that inched down Huntington.

  “How did you get here, Mary?” the white woman asked.

  Suddenly Mary jerked out of her trance. “There’s my baby,” she said in that little-girl voice. “Jellooooo? He’s in his house. Where he was all the time.”

  The white girl took Mary’s arm as she started toward the street, when suddenly Mary turned on her and bit her wrist.

  “Shit, lady!” the girl shouted. “Jesus! It’s bleeding,” she said to her friend, who was still on the cell phone.

  Mary shot into the street. Some inner-lane cars screeched to a standstill, and she just made it to the outer lane. But because the cars had stopped bumper to bumper, the college women could not catch Mary, who seemed not to notice the traffic or even the close call as a delivery van screeched to a halt just inches from broadsiding her. It was as if she were following a beam of awareness within a landscape that had nothing to do with the outer world.

  “I see you,” she squealed with delight, and scurried through the traffic. “I see you, my baby.”

  “Jenny, stop her!” the black woman shouted.

  Jenny ran into the street, but neither she nor her friend nor any of the people on the sidewalk could stop Mary Curley because the traffic had made a tight chain of cars for half a block. Without distraction, she moved to the stopped train as if powered by some invisible force. From across the street, Jenny, still holding her bleeding wrist, shouted to her, “Mary, stop.”

  But Mary did not stop, nor did she hear Jenny or her friend with the cell phone or the people in their vehicles or the last ca-ching of the money falling into the collection machine or the train’s doors closing behind the last passengers. Mary had dropped to her knees so she could look into the doghouse.

  “No, Mary! Noooo!”

  Jenny and her friend were scrambling over the hoods of the stopped cars screaming at Mary to stop.

  But Mary was down now and crawling under the massive coupling that connected the two Green Line cars. “There’s my good boy.”

  52

  An elderly woman from Brookline killed herself yesterday by crawling under the wheels of an MBTA train in Boston …But authorities are still baffled how the seventy-eight-year-old woman suffering dementia had managed to find her way to Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts three miles from her home.According to her daughter, Mary Curley had been furloughed from Broadview Nursing Home in Cobbsville. Somehow she had managed to slip out of her Brookline home and found her way to the museum.According to witnesses at the scene, Mrs. Curley appeared to be delusional and did not realize she had crawled under the Green Line train … .

  IT WAS THE FOURTH FLASHBACK-RELATED DEATH. This had to stop, Nick thought and clicked off the radio.

  He pulled into the parking lot of Broadview Nursing Home, thinking that maybe Peter Habib was right—that this was a flawed drug that should be tabled.

  He parked and made his way inside, where he stood in the lobby waiting for his party to arrive. Also burning like an ember in the forepart of his brain was the report about Jack Koryan. It was as if he had been raised from the dead, and with impossible recall—with an incandescent hippocampus that might harbor stuff that could turn things topsy-turvy.

  My God!

  Nick shook the dark possibilities from his mind as he watched the GEM group march up the front walk from the parking lot for the two P.M. meeting. This was not going to be good.

  Gavin Moy was in the lead, his bulldog face preceding him like the grille of a Mack truck. He was dressed in an olive green sport coat, and with the dark glasses he looked like a military commander striding his way toward the front. Flanking him was Jordan Carr, moving in steady cadence like Moy’s shadow in the afternoon sun, and behind them marched Mark Thompson, the GEM Tech medical director, and Mort Coleman, chief legal officer for the company.

  Nick met them at the door, then led them across the lobby, a spacious and well-lit area newly furnished with padded chairs and sofas upholstered in bright floral patterns and clustered around coffee tables and large floor plants discretely arranged for attraction and privacy, giving the room the feel of an upscale country inn. And, like the rest of the wing, all provided by the generous grant money of GEM Tech, according to a plaque hanging in the entranceway.

  They took the elevator to the second floor and passed through the security doors leading into the Alzheimer’s unit. Although Jordan Carr had worked on the ward in the early days of the trials, he had been back only a few times since Nick had taken over the site. And he was here because Gavin, with his penchant for corporate hierarchy, had named Carr assistant principal investigator of the trials.

  This was Gavin’s second visit to the home since the GEM-sponsored renovations. But it was not why he and his entourage were here. For the benefit of the others, Nick walked them through the ward for a quick overview before they got down to business.

  The new dayroom, nearly twice the size of the original, was a skylighted cheerful area set up with clusters of chairs and tables, a wide-screen television set, and bookcases with a surround-sound system that was currently playing some soothing, innocuous instrumental CD music meant to keep patient
s calm. A whole collection of easy-listening and memory-lane CDs filled the shelves—from The Fabulous Fifties and Favorite Irish Ballads to collections of Perry Como, Johnny Mathis, Nat King Cole, and the big bands. Safe, soft nostalgia.

  The unit was now fully air-conditioned and equipped with an elaborating lighting as well as a fail-safe security system, ceiling-mounted cameras at the elevators and all exits. No more repeats of Clara Devine.

  Nick could feel Moy’s restlessness as they made their way through the ward. But Nick kept up the pace and the tour-guide chatter not out of perversity but to humanize the issue for Moy and his suits—and to show where GEM’s grant money had gone.

  Nick flicked a wall switch twice, turning on a primary then a secondary bank of fluorescence. “Double lighting because afternoons are stressful,” he explained. “The sun goes down, and they get agitated. It doesn’t always work, but it helps.”

  A few elderly women were in chairs, some talking to each other, some talking to themselves. One woman in green sweatpants and white sneakers sat in a wheelchair holding a doll. One man paced by the rear windows, looking outside and muttering to himself. A few others shuffled on wheeled walkers.

  Of the forty-eight patients on the ward, more than half were on Memorine. Because the trial was designed to be a single blind study, patients did not know if they were receiving the active drug or a placebo. And great care had been taken that the placebo tablet looked like the active medication. The reason, of course, was to prevent patients from acting differently because they knew they were taking an experimental drug. Although some medical staff knew who was in the control group, the participants were randomly assigned; and all effects observed—beneficial and troublesome—were documented then analyzed with cold, hard statistics. Even for those staffers who did not know which subjects were on Memorine and which were not, the distinction became progressively apparent over the months, especially since some of the more recovered patients, particularly those with no other morbidities or physical infirmities, were beginning to wonder why they were still in a nursing home.

  Nick showed them a few sample rooms. The interiors were neat and cozily appointed in soothing pastels. Most had three beds, some two; a few were singles. Stuffed animals were bunched on the pillows in some of the women’s rooms. The walls and bureau tops held personal belongings—toiletries, religious statues, bowling trophies, war medals, and photos of the patients and family members from earlier times. One man had Red Sox banners and an autographed photo of Ted Williams. Most photographs had labels naming those in the pictures, including the patients themselves. Many residents not receiving Memorine forgot who they were.

  Around the beds in one room were crayon drawings, some saying, “I love you, Gramma.” There was also a sheet with a poem, “To Aunt Wanda.” On the wall beside one bed was a cracked black-and-white photo of the patient as a little girl in pants and floppy hat posing with a pony. The name on the label was “Margaret, age 9.” She was the woman outside in the dayroom with the rubber doll in her arms.

  “She’s a real gabber, this one,” Nick said. “Born in Ireland and can tell you lots of good tales from her childhood.”

  “Is she one of ours?” asked Moy.

  “Yes,” Nick said. “Three years ago she couldn’t recall the last four decades of her life, including the death of her husband and daughter. But you’ll be happy to know that she’s coming back.”

  Moy nodded with pleasure, the smile relaxing his scowl.

  “What’s interesting,” Nick added, “is that she recalls her early days like they were yesterday.”

  They left the room. As in most homes, the nursing staff had made every effort to individualize the patients. So outside of each room was a computer-printed biography of the residents.

  Margaret O’Bannion was born in Ireland on January 30, 1921, and retired as a history teacher at Arlington High School. She enjoys her family and activities. She has 3 children and 7 grandchildren. She has a great sense of humor and enjoys rock-and-roll music and playing cards.

  The next room’s bio read:

  Herbert Quinn was born in Lawrence, Mass., and worked in the mills as a young man. He is a very proud grandfather and likes to sing and socialize.

  The door of the next room, a single, was closed, apparently because the patient was taking a nap. Outside of it was this bio:

  Louis Martinetti was born in Portland, Maine, but lived much of his life in Woburn, Mass. He’s a decorated soldier from the Korean War. He has a wife, Marie, a daughter, Christine, and a grandson, Steven. He likes oldies music, history, and baseball, and he enjoys playing cards and watching movies.

  Nick led them into one of the large activities rooms where eight patients sat at a table as a recreational therapist instructed them in cutting and pasting pictures onto construction paper. “Hi, ladies,” Nick said, as they entered. “Hope we’re not disturbing you. I’m just showing my friends what a lovely place you have here.”

  “How are you girls doing today?” Moy asked. He walked up to the table smiling and inspected their artwork.

  “Fine,” two women said in unison.

  Some others just nodded. One woman squinted at Moy and muttered something. Nick flicked the switch to double the lighting. “Oh, he’s adorable,” she said, nodding at Gavin Moy. “He looks just like my Jimmy without his hair.”

  “Jimmy’s my cat’s name,” another woman piped up.

  “That’s not a cat’s name, Jimmy.” She made a face and turned toward Gavin Moy. “What’s your name?”

  Before Moy could answer, the other declared, “Yul Brenner. He’s Yul Brenner.”

  “Yul Brenner?” another said, her eyes squinting at Moy. “Nahhh, go on. That’s not Yul Brenner.” Then she scowled at him, when suddenly her eyes widened. “Oh, oh. Omigod, it’s Yul Brenner!” and she burst into snickers.

  “No, it isn’t.”

  “Yes, it is—”

  “Thank you very much, ladies,” Moy began. “I’m flattered, but—”

  Sudden shouting behind them cut off Moy. Nick shot outside.

  Margaret, the woman in a wheelchair, was sobbing uncontrollably as a nurse and two aides at her side tried to comfort her. “He’s not breathing,” she blubbered. “He’s not breathing.”

  “Who’s not breathing?” Moy asked. “Who she talking about?”

  “He’s dead!” Margaret cried. “He’s dead.” And she began to wail.

  “The doll,” Nick said.

  Lucille, one of the nurses, moved over to Margaret. “He’s not dead, Margaret,” she said, and put her hands out to take the doll. “I just think he’s just sound asleep.” Then, as everybody watched, she gently pried the doll out of the woman’s clutch and laid it on the floor where she began to stroke the doll’s chest as if performing CPR.

  “Look, he’s beginning to breathe,” one of the aides said. And the others, like a Greek chorus, agreed. “Oh, yeah. He’s breathing again.”

  Lucille continued rubbing the doll for a few more seconds, then handed it back to Margaret. “There you go, little guy. He was just in a deep sleep, but he’s fine now.”

  The others cheered quietly, as through huge eyes Margaret reexamined the doll for a second. Then she kissed it on the head and pressed it to her chest as if nothing had happened.

  “Very good,” Moy said. And he gave a thumbs-up sign to the nurse.

  “Something about fighting fire with fire,” Nick whispered.

  “We’ve had several dress rehearsals,” Lucille said.

  Nick was about to tell Moy that Margaret had lost an infant child decades ago, when somebody shouted, “It’s a goddamn doll.”

  Louis Martinetti.

  He had stepped out of his room in a bathrobe and pajamas. “Just a stupid doll, anyone can see that. She’s nuts. She does this five times a day. You can’t even get any sleep around here.” Then he shouted, “I want out of here!”

  One of the aides went over to Louis in an effort to console him. “Oh, Loui
s, poor Louis, were you asleep?” Yolanda asked. “We’re sorry.”

  “Goddamn loony bin in here,” Louis continued. “Take that thing away from her. She’s only going to do it again.”

  Margaret scowled at Louis, clutching the doll to her chest, trying to block its eyes against the bad man.

  “It makes her feel good,” Lucille explained.

  “Thing’s made of rubber,” Louis said. Then to Margaret he yelled, “Rubber. It can’t be dead, right?”

  Margaret began to whimper and sway with the doll clutched to her breast.

  “Oh, forget it,” Louis said. “Just don’t get so damn noisy next time.” Then he rubbed his face in exasperation. “I want out of here,” and he glared at Nick. “I don’t belong here and you know that. I’m all better.”

  He started back to his room when his eyes fell on the men with Nick. Instantly Louis froze. His eyes filled his glasses as he glowered at them. “Uh, uh, uh!” he muttered.

  “Louis, what’s the problem?”

  Suddenly he became very agitated, muttering to himself and cowering. “Louis, calm down. What’s wrong?” The nurse tried to take his arm but he yanked free, then began to chop at his forehead with his right hand.

  “What the hell’s he doing?” Moy asked.

  Louis looked possessed, standing there in a slight crouch with his eyes bulging while muttering nonsense syllables—“koppy choppy tu san ingee jop jop”—all the while chopping the side of his forehead.

  “Louis, calm down,” Nick said. He tried to take his hand, but Louis jumped away. “Come on, Louis. Everything’s okay. Nothing to be afraid of.”

  Louis glowered at them, and for a moment he looked as if he were about to attack. Then he seemed to realize something. “Buster,” he muttered.

  “What’s that?” Nick replied. But Louis shook his head, then let out a howl and bolted back into his room, slamming the door.