“We come in?” Colleen asked.
“You two are going to work together.” He paused for the full effect, but neither sister reacted. “You’re going to choose a labeled photo and then interview the other person in that photo. Of course there are a few you can’t do that with—like our grandparents who are gone—but mostly you can. You can visit or Skype or just call, but you will show or describe the photo to the other person and ask them to tell you a story about the day depicted in the photo.”
“Brilliant,” Hallie said.
“I’ve had a thick leather scrapbook made. Each photo will take a page and the story will go next to the photo. Dad can read the story, see the photo, and even if his memory is gone, it will be recaptured for that moment, for that reading.” Shane’s voice cracked unevenly and he bent his chin toward his chest, rubbed the back of his neck, avoiding eye contact.
“Shane,” Colleen said quietly, “this is the most beautiful gift. I’ll do anything I can to help.”
He nodded. “You’re the writer, Lena. You can create each story to say what it needs to say. I want to gather some small part of his life this way. To keep his life this way. Even as he loses most of his days, I want to give some of them back to him. And you, Hallie, you’re the organizer. You can help Lena while you’re planning the party, as well as write out the timeline that will go in the front of the book.”
Colleen ignored the use of “Lena”—it wasn’t worth the fight and this was about Dad. Completely about Dad.
Hallie placed her coffee cup on the table and clapped her hands together, folded them into a prayer pose and placed them under her chin, propping it up. This old gesture, one of sincerity on Hallie’s part, caught Colleen’s breath. How many times had she seen Hallie do this as a child? A million or more, most likely. She could blame the sting of the hot coffee on her tongue and back of her throat, but the sudden urge to cry had nothing to do with the coffee at all.
“Ah,” Hallie said. “That’s why you asked me to start putting together a timeline of Dad’s life.”
“Yep, he’ll be able to see his life as a journey, each major event marked on the timeline. You’re so damn good at those things.”
Hallie nodded. “Got it.”
“This is a ticking clock,” Shane said. “If we want to create a decent memory book, we’re going to have to ask him questions even as his answers are slowly disappearing.”
“What do you mean?” Colleen asked, clearing her throat and her mind of sticky memories clinging to both.
“I’m told that Alzheimer’s is characterized by what is called retrograde amnesia. It takes the memories cluster by cluster, going backward, erasing the most recent memories first . . .” Shane’s voice caught on the last word.
“Oh, God.” Colleen sat hard on the chair. “Can’t something stop it?”
“No. Not that they know yet.” Hallie shifted her gaze to the photos on the table. “I don’t mean to sound know-it-all, but we’ve lived with this a bit longer than you, and it’s just that we know there’s nothing that breaks the cycle.”
Anger flared, a little piece of kindling always ready to be lit right beneath Colleen’s ribs. The words, so quick they came to her tongue, but she swallowed them, almost choking on their bitterness. What she’d wanted to say had something to do with why they’d lived with it a bit longer, and how Hallie had lived with Walter and then a nice list of curse words. But instead Colleen saw her dad’s pleading eyes asking for Colleen to forgive, and instead of speaking, Colleen stared at the photos.
“Now let’s get to work.” Shane sifted the photos under his hand.
“But we’ll do other things, too, right?” Colleen asked. “Maybe that doctor will have some answers.”
“What doctor?” Hallie asked, looking only at Shane, her hands gripped in small fists on top of the table.
“The one at MD Anderson; I asked Colleen to take him.”
“I’m going, too.” Hallie opened her fists and set both palms on the table, lifted her eyebrows in the same way their mother had done when she was adamant, when what she said was “the end of the discussion.”
Colleen couldn’t stifle her laugh; the siblings turned to her. “Sorry.” She shrugged. “I just can’t believe how much you looked like Mother right then—with the lifted brow and the earnest proclamation.”
Hallie stared at Colleen for a moment and in that space—that gap between what was said and what would be said—Colleen held her breath.
“I know.” Hallie almost smiled. “Sometimes I can’t believe the things that come out of my mouth when I’m with the girls; it’s like Mother snuck inside me.”
Colleen exhaled. “Yes.”
Shane leaned forward. “Then it’s set—you two take him to the doctor; start the interviews; plan the party. I’ll keep things running here.”
“Because we don’t have any other life?” Hallie asked with a smirk.
“Not right now you don’t.” Shane stood up. “This, right here, our family, is your life.”
“Well, then, as a family we have one problem to figure out.” Hallie held up her hand as if in surrender. “I thought I could figure it out alone, but I can’t.”
“What’s that?” Shane asked.
“His timeline. I’m trying to get it right, but there are spots I don’t understand unless I ask him, and that will give it away.”
“Well, sis, you have exactly thirteen days to figure it out.” Shane tapped on her bag overflowing with papers and notes. “Somewhere in there is the answer.”
Hallie shook her head. “Something is missing.”
“I think the photos will help,” he said.
Hallie’s gaze fluttered between her sister and brother. “All right, but I’m afraid it’s already too late—that he won’t be able to tell us the truth.”
Shane lifted a photo of Dad and Bob fishing. “I’ve discovered he’s most lucid in the familiar places—so maybe you can talk to him at home or in the pub or out on the river.” Shane then turned to reach into a high cabinet and bring out a leather-bound book that he plopped onto the table. “Here’s the book,” he said. “The clasp is a seashell I found in Dad’s bedroom. I think it was Mother’s.”
“This is amazing,” Hallie said in a voice full of wonder, the tone she’d have used when Colleen told her a story about the mermaids that might live in the river behind their house.
Colleen opened it. Thick creamy paper had been hand-sewn into the spine. On the first page was an image of Dad on the day of his birth, a black-and-white photo of a crumpled baby in a bassinet who looked more like a shrunken old man than a newborn. He was wrapped in a white blanket and only his little face with his squinted eyes and furrowed brow appeared. A blurry sign was posted on the end of the bassinet with BOY writ larger than his name. In neat calligraphy next to the photo read:
Gavin Aengus Donohue
April 16, 1956
Richmond, Virginia
“We are going to fill the rest of these pages,” Shane said.
“His life full of love,” Colleen said. She paused to find what she was trying to say as she looked at the photo that had already been pasted in, as the weight of the beautiful and terrible past, and the unknown future, swelled inside her. “Alzheimer’s can’t take away that—not the love.”
Chapter Nine
The leaves of memory seemed to make A mournful rustling in the dark.
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, “The Fire of Drift-Wood”
The siblings continued to sort through the photos until the glissandi of a harp brought Colleen’s glance around to search for its source: Hallie’s cell phone on the kitchen table; her ringtone with one word on the screen: hubby.
As Colleen’s stomach lurched upward, she rose and hurried to the bathroom, which was still foggy and warm from Shane’s shower. She slammed shut the door and inhal
ed the fragrance of soap and shaving cream, a memory aroma of her parents’ bathroom, a comfort.
Damn. Damn. Damn.
The word “hubby” should have brought images of Walter, but oddly it hadn’t. It brought forth, steaming from the past, another time when Colleen hadn’t been chosen, a brief slice in time when she knew their mother loved Hallie first and best. When there was solid-as-the-ground proof that Hallie was the favorite daughter.
The backyard had glittered with fireflies, the sun flirting with the edges of the horizon, holding tight to the day just as Lena, Hallie and Shane were. They ran barefoot through the soft grass, catching those lit-up bugs and scooping them into Ball jars, the metal tops having been poked full of holes by Dad’s awl. It was a contest—who could grab the most fireflies? Colleen was losing because with each capture she felt a twinge of guilt; she didn’t want to trap beauty in a jar, although release would come at night’s end.
Only Dad had joined them in the backyard that night, since Mother volunteered at the library. They were laughing—Colleen couldn’t remember why—when a black police car appeared in the driveway. All three children stood as still as though they were playing freeze tag. A cop car wasn’t good, right? Their gazes flew to one another, as frenetic as the flies in their jars.
Mother climbed out of the back of the car, her arm in a sling and a Band-Aid over her left eye. Panic filled Lena at the sudden realization that the woman who held the family together could herself come undone. Nothing was certain.
The policeman stepped out also, removing his blue hat and holding it over his chest; smiling, he nodded at Gavin and the children. Then Mother bent over, placed her hands on her knees and called for her children, for two of her children. Hallie and Shane bolted to their mother and she gathered them to her while Dad sidled over to Lena and wrapped his arms around her. She shuddered. Something more than an injury was awry in the world that, only moments before, had been warm, safe and secure. Then, as if slapped, Mother gazed up and called for Lena. “Come here, my big girl.”
It had been a minor car accident, a fender bender caused by a teenager driving his daddy’s truck without permission. They’d had a good laugh about how Mother’s car had to be towed while the tanklike truck drove away without a mark. An ambulance had squealed into the town square in response to Mrs. Farley’s 911 call from the post office. The paramedics had justified their presence by giving Elizabeth a sling for the bruise on her right wrist and a Band-Aid for the small cut that had nothing to do with the accident and everything to do with a mosquito bite she’d scratched too often.
All was well, but Colleen never forgot the moment when her mother initially called for two of her children, and not for the third.
Now, standing in Shane’s bathroom, Colleen felt the aftershocks of the memory; a shaking of her internal world. It was like picking up a mended pottery mug that had been glued together, pouring hot liquid into it and watching it break again.
Shane banged on the door. “You okay in there?”
“I’m fine. That coffee hit me wrong. I’ll be out in a second.” With deep breaths, Colleen stood in front of the mirror and squeezed some of Shane’s toothpaste onto her finger. She rubbed it on her tongue and swished water around her mouth and then spit it out, watching it flee down the drain. If she was really going to stay and help her brother with this project for her beloved dad, she must find a way to get control of the emotions that swelled and surged with every prod. “Get it together,” she said to her image. “Right now.”
She opened the door and joined her sister, who averted her gaze, and her brother, who had a plan to save their dad. “Okay,” Colleen said, “tell me everything the doctor told you about this disease. I need to know before we do one more thing.”
Shane sat and slumped with the weight of this discussion, as if it was a bag of concrete held between his shoulder blades. “This has been killing me, Lena. But I’ve been the one dragging Dad from doctor to doctor until we landed at the neurologist.”
Colleen collapsed on a chair. “I feel so . . . left out.”
“I think you left us out a long, long time ago.” Hallie spoke while staring at the table, not meeting anyone’s eyes.
Colleen had every perfect comment to return—she’d had years to perfect those comments—and right now she would say, I think you were the one who left me out on my wedding day. Least that’s how I remember it. But instead she stared at her sister, screwing her back molars together so tightly that she felt the tension in her scalp. “Don’t,” she said to Hallie.
“Say it,” Hallie said, her mouth quivering. “I’m ready. You’ve held it in all these years and I want you to say it all. Say everything cruel you’ve ever wanted to say. Please say anything you want. I just can’t stand the silence anymore.” She wrapped her arms around herself as if in protection of what might come next.
Sure, there’d been times throughout the years when Colleen had practiced the speech she should have uttered in the back hallway of that church with the champagne puddling at their feet and soaking through her ballet slippers. Once, Colleen had learned the word “heartseer,” which meant the pain of missing someone so desperately that it felt like an illness. For years, that word was the one she used to describe how she felt about her sister, and of course Walter.
On sleepless nights when she missed the rushing song of the river outside her window, when she wanted to weep, Colleen would replay the scene in the back hallway of the church, and in her imaginings she’d always found the words she could have said—always new, always fresh and never spoken.
The questions she’d carried, baggage as heavy as the rocks that they’d piled at the water’s edge to keep the river from encroaching onto the soft earth of their backyard, rose again. How did you two get together? How did you fool me? How?
But now, with her sister in front of her, Colleen dug into the debris of the past for different words. “I just want to help Dad. Not fight with you. Please.”
Hallie’s stunned expression was no different from the one when she’d been discovered in that tiny alcove room with Walter—pain and shame melding together with half-closed eyes and quivering lips. “What?”
“I don’t want to do this anymore. I don’t want to be mad and sad. I don’t want to have to run away from the home I love so very much. I’m exhausted of it all. Let’s just accept that we will never be close again—but we can be polite. That has to be good enough.”
Shane slammed his hand on the table, the photos scattering. “No, that is not good enough. Not good enough at all.”
Hallie bent, plucked up a fallen photo and placed it gently on the table. She opened her mouth to speak, but nothing came out; she slumped back defeated, her cheeks red as if she’d just finished running a race.
Colleen stood then. “I think I need to go.” She felt it—the urge thrusting her out the door. Run. Get out. Don’t look. It was a voice she’d been heeding for a long time.
Shane placed his hand on her shoulder. “You are not leaving here, Lena.”
Colleen hugged him and grabbed a photo of her dad and Aunt Rosalind from the pile. “I’ll take this one. But right now I am leaving. I don’t want to fight or talk. I can’t. I’m going to the house. This evening I’ll bring Dad to the pub instead of Bob.”
* * *
• • •
Gavin routinely arrived at the pub by three thirty in the afternoon. His days had always belonged to his family, but the evenings eternally belonged to the Lark. Other dads were present for their kids at bedtime and for soccer games and ballet recitals, but Colleen, Hallie and Shane had considered themselves lucky because their dad was around for breakfast and rides to school, for lunches and summer mornings on the johnboat.
And of course the pub belonged to all of them.
As soon as school let out, all three would rush to the Lark, located within walking distance of both the junior
high and high schools, which were housed in drab brick buildings side by side. When they were younger, Mother would pick them up from the pub while other mothers sat in car pool or walked to the school. Often Colleen would beg to stay and do her homework there, and Mother usually allowed this. By fifteen years old, Colleen knew the difference between whiskey and bourbon and could distinguish the aromas of various types of gin. She wasn’t allowed to taste anything until she was sixteen, but by eighteen she could identify a brand of whiskey blindfolded. This particular skill had impressed more first dates than she could count.
Colleen knew the way to the Lark from every spot in town—a touch-point as familiar as her childhood home. And she drove there now with Gavin in the passenger seat.
Gavin stared through the windshield, his hands flat on the dashboard in some muscle-memory need to place his hands on a steering wheel. “When the heck is my car going to be ready?”
“I’ll ask Shane,” Colleen said and hoped her dad couldn’t see her face flush as she swallowed past the thickness of the lie.
“And when is your husband coming back to help me clean out the shed?” Gavin twisted in his seat and gently touched Colleen’s arm. “He promised he’d finish with me weeks ago. Such a good man, that Walter, always chipping in.”
Colleen neared the stop sign and stepped too hard on the brake, both of them lurching forward into the safety of their seat belts. “Whoa!” Gavin pressed his hands into the dashboard.
“Sorry, Dad.” Colleen took in a deep, shaky breath. “Walter is not my husband.”
Gavin squinted at her and set his mouth in a straight line. “Of course he’s not. Why would you say that? I know that.”
Colleen stared at her dad until the car behind them honked and she gently, very gently, pressed the gas to move forward, and then swerved the Jeep to miss a pothole. They both shimmied to the right, Gavin grabbing on to the side door handle. “Sorry, Dad, I don’t drive much at home,” she said.
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