When I returned, Gloria was busy with my iPad. “Don’t tell me there’s an app for serial killers?” I said, a little nervous.
“I Googled them and you’re right—Aileen Wuornos and Ted Bundy both died in the Florida State Prison. Over twenty years apart—he got the chair, she got lethal injection. But still.” She looked up at me. “Think it’s something about Florida?”
“Dunno but I really wish you hadn’t done that on my iPad,” I said, relieving her of it. “Google can’t keep anything to themselves. Now I’ll probably get a flood of gory crime scene photo spam.”
I could practically see her ears prick up, like a terrier’s. “You can get that stuff?”
“No.” I moved the iPad out of her reach. “I forbid it. Make do with the crime porn on cable.”
“Party pooper.”
“I get that a lot.” I chuckled. On TV, credits were scrolling upward too fast to read over a sepia photograph of a stiff-looking man, probably a serial killer. Abruptly, it changed to a different set of credits rolling even more quickly against a red background. At the bottom of the screen was the legend, NEXT: Deadlier Than the Male—Killer Ladies.
I grimaced at my sister, who brandished the remote control, grinning like a mad thing, or maybe a killer lady. “Come on, isn’t one of the movie channels showing Red Dawn?” I pumped my fist. “Wolverines?”
Gloria rolled her eyes. “How about something we haven’t seen a bajillion times already?”
“How much is a bajillion?” I asked.
“Like the exact size or the universe or how many times you’ve seen Red Dawn, nobody knows.” She nodded at the iPad on my lap. “Not worried about crime scene spam anymore?”
My face grew warm. “I was surfing on automatic pilot,” I said, which was either half-true or half a lie, depending.
“Yeah, you’re not really interested in any of that gory stuff.”
“The least you could do is microwave us some popcorn,” I said. “There’s at least one bag left in the cupboard.”
She cringed in pretend horror. “This stuff doesn’t kill your appetite?”
“If I pick up some pointers, I might kill you.”
As usual, the ad break was long enough that Gloria was back with a big bowl of movie-style buttered before the end of the opening credits. According to the listings, this was a Killer Ladies marathon, back-to-back episodes into the wee hours. After a teleshopping break from 4 to 6 a.m., early risers could breakfast with Deadly Duos—Killer Couples.
Killer Ladies followed the usual formula but ratcheted up the melodrama. The Ladies in question were all abnormal, evil, twisted, unnatural, cold, devious, and unrepentant, while most of their victims were warm, easygoing, trusting, generous, open, honest, well-liked, down-to-earth, and the best friend anyone could ever ask for. Except for a few misfits who were uneducated, foolish, immature, troubled, reckless, self-destructive, or habitually unlucky, and the occasional ex-con with a long criminal record (no one ever had a short criminal record).
Between bursts of urgent narration and detectives who spoke only in monotone, there were some nuggets of real information, much of it new to me. Of course, I hadn’t known a lot to begin with—the only other notorious Killer Lady I could think of besides Aileen Wuornos was Lizzie Borden. Killer Ladies were a hell of a lot more interesting than their male counterparts. Unlike men, who seemed mainly to gratify themselves by asserting power, Killer Ladies were all about getting away with it. They planned carefully, sizing up their victims and their situations, and waited for the right time.
They were also masters—or mistresses—of camouflage, with the unwitting help of a society that even in these parlous times still sees women as nurturers, not murderers. When not killing someone, many of the Killer Ladies were nurses, therapists, babysitters, assistants, even teachers (remembering some I’d had, I could believe it).
Eventually I dozed off and woke to see a repeat of the first episode we’d watched. Gloria was absolutely unrouseable, so I threw one of Mom’s hand-crocheted afghans over her. Then the devil got into me—I tucked a pillow under her arm with a note saying, This is the pillow I didn’t smother you with. Good morning! before I staggered off to bed.
The note I found on my own pillow when I woke later said, Still alive? (One answer only) [__]Yes (we need more cereal) [__]No (we don’t)
The expression on Gloria’s face as I sat down to breakfast made me wince. “Oh, no, not another bench warrant for parking tickets.”
“No, of course not. I took care of that. You took care of that,” she added quickly. “I didn’t sleep very well.”
“I tried to wake you so you could sleep in a real bed. You didn’t stay up all night, did you?” Staying up all night and then sleeping all day was something Gloria was prone to when life handed her lemons without water, sugar, or glasses; I’d warned her that wouldn’t fly with me.
“No. All those Killer Ladies gave me bad dreams.”
For a moment I thought she was kidding, but she had the slightly haunted look of a person who had found something very unpleasant in her own head and hadn’t quite stopped seeing it yet. “Jeez, Glow-bug, I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have left that note.”
“Oh, no, that was funny,” Gloria said with a small laugh. “Did you find mine?”
“Yeah. Yours is funnier, because it’s true.”
“I’ll remember you said that.” She looked down at the bowl in front of her. “You can have this,” she said, pushing it toward me. “I’m not hungry. All night, I kept dreaming about Angels of Death. You know, the sneaky ones.”
“They were all sneaky,” I said through a yawn. “Women are better at staying under the radar, remember?”
“Yeah, but the ones who took care of people, like nurses and aides, they were the sneakiest.” Pause. “I can’t stop thinking about Mom. How much do you know about that place she’s in?”
I shook my head. “Trash TV’s got you jumping at shadows. Better swear off the crime channels for a while.”
“Come on, Val, didn’t all that stuff about Angels of Death creep you out?”
“You’re the crime buff,” I said evenly. “I want my MTV. Or, failing that, wolverines.”
“You didn’t last night,” she said with a short, humorless laugh.
“Touché. But enough is enough. Tonight is box-set DVD night. One of those bizarro things where even the cast didn’t know what was happening—Lost Heroes of Alcatraz or 4400 Events in 24 Hours. What do you say?”
My bad mash-ups didn’t rate even an eye roll so I checked out the morning news on the iPad while I ate her cereal. Maybe getting her own iPad would put her in a better frame of mind, I thought. She’d love the games. Not to mention the camera—although I’d have to make her promise in writing not to upload any sneaky candids to the web.
“Val?” she said after a bit. “Even if I am jumping at shadows, humor me for a minute. How did you find that home?”
The only way to kill shadows was to turn on all the lights, I thought resignedly. That was what big sisters were for, although I’d never imagined I’d still be doing it at fifty-three. “It’s a nice place, isn’t it?” She nodded. “Doesn’t have that institutional smell, residents aren’t wandering around confused or tied to their beds, lying in their own—”
“Val.” She gave me the Eyebrow. “You’re not answering the question.”
“Okay, okay. I didn’t find it—Mom did. She and Dad had an insurance plan through Stillman Saw and Steel—”
“But Stillman went under twenty years ago!”
“Lemme finish, will ya? Stillman went under, but the insurance company didn’t. Mom and Dad maintained the policy and Mom kept it up after Dad died. She knew she didn’t want us to have to go through what she did with Grandma, which was the same thing Grandma had been through with her mother. You were only a baby when Grandma died, so you missed it. But I didn’t.”
Gloria looked skeptical. “I have friends whose parents spent a fortune on polic
ies that never paid them a nickel.”
“Mom showed me everything some years back. Obviously it’s all aboveboard and legit—otherwise, she wouldn’t be able to afford that place.” I decided not to mention that although Mom had seemed perfectly all right to me at the time, she had already felt herself starting to slip. “The policy pays about half the cost, her pension and the proceeds from the sale of her house cover the rest.”
“And when the money from the house is gone?”
“We step up, little sister. What else?”
Her eyes got huge. “But I’m broke. I don’t even have anything I can sell.”
“Well, if you don’t win the lottery, you’ll have to go to Plan B and get a job,” I said cheerfully. Gloria looked so dismayed, I wasn’t sure whether I wanted to laugh or smack her one. “But we’ll cross that bridge when we come to it. If we come to it.”
“What do you mean by that?”
This was something I’d hoped to avoid until such time as it became moot. “Mom made a living will. She’s DNR—Do Not Resuscitate. No defibrillator, no tubes, no ventilator, no extraordinary measures. Her body, minus useful organs or parts, goes to the local med school. Her decision,” I added in response to Gloria’s half-horrified, half-grossed-out expression. “You know Mom—waste not, someone else would be glad to have that liver.”
Gloria gave a short laugh in spite of herself. “Okay, but Mom’s liver? She’s eighty-four. Do they take anything from people that old?”
I shrugged. “No idea. If they don’t, that’s more for the med students.”
“It doesn’t sound very respectful.”
“On the contrary, Glow-bug—they actually hold memorial services twice a year for all the people who willed their remains to the school. They invite the families and they read out the names of all the deceased, thanking them for their contribution to the future of medicine.”
She looked a little less grossed-out, but no happier. “What happens after, uh, you know, when they … when they’re done?”
“They offer cremation. Although Mom said she’d prefer compost. There’s an organization that plants trees and flowering bushes—”
“Stop it!”
“I’m sorry, Sis, maybe I shouldn’t have told you about that part. But it is what Mom wants.”
“Yeah, but she’s got Alzheimer’s.”
“She was clear as a bell when she set this up.”
We went back and forth. Gloria just couldn’t seem to get her mind around our mother’s rather alternative approach to death. A Viking funeral would probably have been easier for her to accept. From the various things she said, I wasn’t sure whether she felt guilty for being the ever-absent daughter or hurt that no one had thought it necessary to consult her. Maybe it was a little of both.
Or a lot of both. The age difference had always made it hard for me to see things from her perspective. I’d thought it would get easier as we got older, but it hadn’t, probably because Gloria was still where she’d been at twenty-five, trying to decide what she wanted to be when she grew up.
“Sorry, Glow-bug,” I said finally, collecting the breakfast things. “This debate is called on account of my job.”
“I don’t know how you do it,” she said, watching me rinse the bowls and put them in the dishwasher.
“Do what—make a living?”
“Stay awake looking at spreadsheets.”
“It helps to see all the little numbers with dollar signs,” I told her. “I’m sure you can find something to keep your eyes open.” But probably not Plan B yet, I thought as I shut myself in my office and woke the computer.
Doing other people’s taxes isn’t the most exciting work I’ve ever done, but it’s virtually recession-proof and less physically demanding than cleaning toilets. It’s not even really that hard once you know how—although knowing how can be tricky. Every third change in regulations, I added another hard drive to back up my backups. There wasn’t as much paper as there used to be, which was a relief. But I couldn’t bring myself to rely completely on cloud storage—there’s tempting Fate and then there’s teasing it so unmercifully that Fate has to make an example of you. I stuck with CD-ROMs—not enough room on USB drives for sticky notes. One of my younger colleagues had a system using stickers with symbols—a clever idea but I thought I was a little too old for such an extreme administrative make-over. Especially after my recent lifestyle makeover.
In the ten years since Lee and I had come to our senses and called it quits, I’d discovered that living alone agreed with me. But that was over now. At first, Gloria had made vague noises about looking for a place of her own when she got back on her feet—whatever that meant—but I didn’t kid myself. My sister was here for the duration. Even a boyfriend was unlikely to change things. The kind of men Gloria attracted invariably wanted to move in with her rather than vice versa, usually because they needed to.
I heard the car pull out of the driveway just as I stopped for lunch; the usual time Gloria headed out to see Mom. Mom’s appetite was poor these days, but Gloria could usually get a few extra bites into her. It was one of the reasons the staff was so fond of her.
“I wish everyone’s family was like her,” a young nurse named Jill Franklyn had confided on my last visit. “She doesn’t treat the staff like servants and she isn’t texting or talking on the phone the whole time she’s here. And even if most people had the time to come every day, they probably wouldn’t.”
I couldn’t help feeling slightly defensive. Two visits a week was my self-imposed minimum, although I tried to make it three more often than not. I didn’t always succeed, something I was usually too tired to feel guilty about. Which was what I felt guilty about instead. Meanwhile, Mom kept saying that I should think less about twice-weekly visits and more about a week or two in the Caribbean.
Tempting, but the web meant that my work could follow me and probably would. The last time I’d gone away, a five-day stay in a forest lodge had become half a day when I got a panicky text from a client whose house had burned to the ground just before he’d been called in for an audit. Well, I’ve since heard mosquitoes in the Maine woods grow to the size of eagles and sometimes carry off small children.
Of course, a mosquito with a seven-foot wing span might pale next to work that had been piling up for two weeks. Or not. There was only one way to find out.
Funny how I’d started thinking about taking time off again now that Gloria was here. So she didn’t have a job and probably wouldn’t get one except at gunpoint—she had lightened my load from the start. If she kept it up, I might even be able to revive my all-but-dormant social life—call friends, go shopping. Eat out. See a new movie in a theater. Just thinking about it gave me a lift.
Gloria was still out at five, so I spent another hour at my desk finishing work I’d have otherwise left for the next morning. When she hadn’t come back by six, however, I started getting nervous. For all her faults, my sister was an excellent driver, but that didn’t make her immune to bad drivers or, worse, bad intentions. Was there a fee to trace a LoJack, I wondered, or did the car have to be reported stolen first? Or could I do it myself? I vaguely remembered registering the navigation software; was there a Find My Car app, like Find My iPad?
Fortunately, I heard her pull into the driveway before I tried something stupid. “Anybody home?” Gloria called, coming in through the kitchen. “If you’re a burglar, clear out.”
“No burglars, just me,” I called back.
She bustled in, curls bouncing with happy excitement, and held up a bag from Wok On the Wild Side. “You’ll never guess what I did.”
“You’re right,” I said, making room on the coffee table. “So you’d better just tell me.”
“I got a job.”
My jaw dropped; all hope of taking even a long weekend out of town evaporated as my social life rolled over and went back to sleep. “You … got … a job?”
She was busy taking little white cartons out of the bag and pu
tting them on the table. “What, you didn’t think that was possible?”
“No, it’s just—I didn’t know you were looking for a job.”
“Relax, big sister,” she laughed. “It’s not a real job.”
I blinked at her. “You got an imaginary job?”
“What? No, of course not. I am now an official volunteer aide at Mom’s home!”
“Official—seriously?” I wasn’t sure I’d heard her right. “Are you qualified?”
“As a matter of fact, big sister, I am.”
This was probably the most startling thing she’d said in the last two minutes. Or maybe ever—qualified was not a word I associated with my sister. “How?” I asked weakly.
“Did you actually forget that I was a lifeguard almost every summer when I was in high school?” she said with a superior smile. I’d already been living away from home then, so I hadn’t forgotten as much as I’d barely known in the first place. Mostly what I remembered was how Gloria practically lived in a swimsuit from May till September. And how even when I’d still looked good in one myself, I’d never looked that good. “After graduation, I taught swimming at the Y and for the Red Cross,” she was saying, “and I’ve been lifeguarding and teaching swim classes on and off for years.”
I still didn’t get it. “The people at the care home go swimming a lot?”
She rolled her eyes. “I know CPR, you idiot.”
Heat rushed into my face; I felt like two idiots.
Gloria laughed again. “Guess you won’t faint after all. For a minute there, I wasn’t too sure.” She went into the kitchen for some plates while I sat on the couch feeling like a bad person as well as an idiot.
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