Looking for Lily

by Africa Fine

  Looking for Lily

  Africa Fine

  Genesis Press, Inc.

  Indigo

  An imprint of Genesis Press, Inc.

  Publishing Company

  Genesis Press, Inc.

  P.O. Box 101

  Columbus, MS 39703

  All rights reserved. Except for use in any review, the reproduction or utilization of this work in whole or in part in any form by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, not known or hereafter invented, including xerography, photocopying, and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, is forbidden without written permission of the publisher, Genesis Press, Inc. For information write Genesis Press, Inc., P.O. Box 101, Columbus, MS 39703.

  All characters in this book have no existence outside the imagination of the author and have no relation whatsoever to anyone bearing the same name or names. They are not even distantly inspired by any individual known or unknown to the author and all incidents are pure invention.

  Copyright© 2008 Africa Fine

  ISBN-13: 978-1-58571-576-3

  ISBN-10: 1-58571-576-X

  Manufactured in the United States of America

  First Edition

  Visit us at www.genesis-press.com or call at 1-888-Indigo-1-4-0

  Dedication

  For Parker Abraham

  Acknowledgments

  I would like to thank my mother, Gwendolyn Spencer, and my great-aunt, the late Eunice Hopkins (1913–2006) for the inspiration for this story. Although the characters and situations in the novel are fictional, my mother and Eunice’s experiences helped me explore my characters’ emotions. The Alzheimer’s Foundation of America was extremely valuable in my search for accurate information on the disease. Deborah Schumaker and Doris Innis provided many essential suggestions that helped me shape this novel. Jeff, Owen, and Parker are the loves of my life—they support me and believe in me, no matter what.

  Chapter 1

  “Cleveland is home, Ernestine.”

  The first thing I noticed when I walked into the tall, narrow house was the smell. It was the scent of the discarded past: yellowed photographs, thirty-year-old furniture, and White Shoulders perfume, which no one born this side of 1960 wears. Aunt Gillian has lived here forever, my entire life and longer. My childhood and adolescence were spent in this echoing house in East Cleveland, with its ancient hard candies set in rust-colored ceramic bowls on the coffee table and its cream-colored furniture that was not meant to be sat upon. I set down the boxes I carried and waited for my friend Jack to bring in the rest. We were packing up Aunt Gillian’s things and saying good-bye to an era.

  Aunt Gillian raised me after my parents died when I was just six months old. She never thought twice about adopting her sister’s child, but I have to say that neither of us was ever quite what the other wanted. While the mothers of my classmates all had jobs or were going to night school to get their degrees, Aunt Gillian worked nights and took care of me during the day. She believed it would take her undivided attention to mold me into her image.

  “Ernestine, you have to stop climbing trees and playing ball with those boys. A lady doesn’t do those things,” she would say.

  At eight years old, I already knew two things for sure: I hated my name, and I didn’t want to be a lady.

  “Call me Tina.”

  My aunt put her hands on her hips and shook her head.

  “Your mother named you Ernestine, and that is what I will call you.”

  Even then, I realized that I could never win a verbal argument with her. Subversion was the only way to get my way. So I agreed to wear the frilly dresses to school. Once I arrived, I went straight to the bathroom to change into the jeans and t-shirt I smuggled in my backpack. I spent all of recess playing kickball with the boys. And I demanded that all my teachers and friends call me Tina.

  I remember coming home from elementary school to find my aunt engrossed in the details of cooking something I would refuse to eat. I may have been the youngest vegetarian in the history of Cleveland. A PBS documentary on slaughterhouses, watched with secret relish, made me pity the poor pigs whose carcasses populated our dinner plates. Around that same time, I noticed the hives and throat-swelling that visited me whenever I ate fish. I told my fifth-grade teacher, who thought I might be allergic to seafood. She suggested I see a doctor, but Aunt Gillian scoffed at this notion.

  “All that allergy business is just a way for you to get out of eating the perfectly good food I cook for you.”

  The next night, she berated me until I gave in and ate a piece of cod. I don’t remember whether she apologized after I swelled up with hives the size of golf balls, but I think she felt bad for me afterwards. She didn’t think she was wrong, of course. She contends to this day that there is no such thing as a food allergy. She had been a nurse before I was born, so you’d think she would have believed the physical evidence of my allergies. Even science couldn’t disabuse Aunt Gillian of her convictions.

  Throughout my childhood, she cooked elaborate, gourmet-quality meals that were flawless in both presentation and nutritional value. Her meals always had names that made them sound appealing. It was never just pasta; instead, we had linguine with shrimp and lemon oil. Instead of baked chicken, we ate chicken vesuvio. Once, I looked in one of her cookbooks and requested home-baked macaroni and cheese, with almond blueberry popovers for dessert. She said it was too fattening and instead set a plate of iceberg with summer tomatoes in front of me.

  I refused to eat what she cooked because I was a vegetarian, because I was allergic, because I was spiteful. It depended on the day.

  “You spend more time pushing your food around than eating,” she said one night. “You’d think you’d be as thin as a stick.”

  I shrugged my chubby shoulders. I was already in the early stages of what would become a lifelong struggle with obesity. I might have starved to death if it wasn’t for the Twinkies and Moon Pies I shoveled into my mouth just before falling asleep each night. Not to mention the taco boats and Starburst candy I bought in the school cafeteria after I’d sold my lunch to a girl named Gretchen, who liked turkey on whole wheat, hold the cheese, hold the mayo.

  Aunt Gillian had no firsthand knowledge of Gretchen, taco boats, and Moon Pies, but she knew something was up. At the dinner table, we were in silent agreement: I was in no danger of starvation.

  * * *

  But her days of cooking were long gone. When Aunt Gillian turned sixty, she announced that she was old enough to let other people do the cooking, although I had not asked about this particular topic. Now she was almost seventy, and I hadn’t lived in Cleveland since I left for college. I was settled in South Florida, far enough away so my aunt couldn’t run my life, but also too far for me to help her. The older she got, the more guilt I felt, but she wouldn’t let me arrange for household help. Instead, she paid local girls to run to the store for her to buy toiletries and pick up her takeout dinners. She told me that I was not to worry about her, that she had taken care of herself all her life and she didn’t intend to stop any time soon. When I came from West Palm Beach to visit her two or three times a year, I took her out to dinner but I never stayed in my old room. I couldn’t face the reminders of childhood, and my aunt didn’t seem to mind me staying at hotels. When I visited her at home, she would rush me out of the house before I could take in the peeling paint on the walls and the cobwebs in the corners.

  This year, I had rescheduled my spring visit to Cleveland to attend a conference. As an associate professor of English at Mizner University, I was obligated to present papers at conferences, and this was not one I could skip. So I came to see Aunt Gillian after the spring semester, at the end of May.

  My aunt was expecting me, but I wasn�
��t expecting what I saw when I got there. I was going to use my key, but the front door was already unlocked and ajar. I found her sitting on the living room floor, dazed and disoriented, surrounded by four or five people I had never seen before. Although the air-conditioning was going full blast, the air in the house was moist and still. Summer had come early to Ohio, and by late May there had already been several ninety-degree days. The day I found Aunt Gillian on the floor—the last day, as it turned out, that she spent on her own—was another scorcher. The air was hazy with impending rain showers, and it was only eleven o’clock in the morning.

  I had expected a relaxed day spent catching up with my aunt. Although we had never seen eye to eye on what was most important to us both, I was looking forward to seeing her. I was single, often alone, with my career and Jack as mild comforts. I wondered if I’d ever have a husband and children of my own, and I wanted to feel a family connection, even if it was with Aunt Gillian.

  But when I arrived at her house, the ambulance had already been called, and my day—my life—was about to change.

  The people standing around, who identified themselves as neighbors, told me that Aunt Gillian had blacked out and fallen. Later, I wished I had asked more questions—questions like who they were and why they were all just standing around her instead of helping. I rushed over to her and said a small prayer, thanking God or fate or whatever it was that sent me to her house on this day.

  I found out later at Holy Cross Hospital that it wasn’t the first time she had fallen. My aunt was, at best, taciturn. At worst, she was completely withholding. She didn’t like to talk about herself or the past. It wasn’t just that she didn’t like it. She refused to do it, no matter how many questions I asked, no matter how much I claimed it was my right to know. She insisted on looking forward, not backward, and she never seemed to consider the damage that her secrecy could do.

  So it wasn’t a surprise to me that I didn’t know about her falls. She was the most independent, self-sufficient person I had ever known. If she had boyfriends, I never knew about them. Her women friends were acquaintances rather than confidantes, which made sense, since Aunt Gillian confided nothing. She didn’t seem to need anyone. Not even me, and we were each other’s only family.

  But at the hospital, painkillers loosened her tongue. She admitted that she had been blacking out and falling often, and by the tired tone of her voice I could tell that she had come to terms with the fact that she could no longer maintain her total independence. It was a bitter admission from a woman who’d prided herself on self-sufficiency for so many years. But she was also smart, and she knew that the next fall might result in something way worse than a bruised shoulder and a damaged ego.

  “I know I can’t live on my own anymore,” she said in a small voice. She had been sleeping since we arrived at the hospital and I was sitting next to her bed, watching and waiting, preparing myself for a fight that never happened. I never thought she would agree to leave her home, the house she had lived in since she was little more than a teenager. I never thought she would welcome my interference in her life because she never had before. After years of pushing away my concerns, she now looked happy to see me. Thank God for Percocet.

  “Where do you want to go, Aunt Gillian? What do you want to do?”

  She turned and looked out the window, where I could see Lake Erie far to the west. The hospital was the best in the city, offering everything a patient could want except the guarantee of health. The walls were painted in pastels and every corner was clean, but the smell of bleach and Lysol were constant reminders of illness. Aunt Gillian was quite well-off, having lived many years on her salary as a nurse. After retiring from nursing, she made savvy investments using money whose source was always a mystery to me. That and Social Security made her economically comfortable.

  “I don’t want to be any trouble,” she said. “I’m sure I can hire someone to come to the house once in a while.”

  I pictured those neighbors who’d been in her house when I arrived. Who would check up on her? I lived hundreds of miles away. What if she fell again, or worse? I knew it was my responsibility to figure out a solution. The only one that seemed viable was also the one that was the most difficult.

  “You’ll come live with me,” I said, my voice firm even though I hadn’t even thought the whole thing through in any rational way.

  “In Florida?”

  She looked at me, doubtful. She had only been to Florida once, last Christmas, and she had complained most of the time. She’d lived in Cleveland since 1956, and I’d never once heard her talk of moving. To me, Cleveland was the worst of what America had to offer: de facto segregation, a bad economy, racial strife, and a staid Midwestern attitude. No Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, sports arena, or lake cruise was going to make me see Cleveland as a great place to be.

  There was a generational disconnect as well. For Aunt Gillian, home was created by circumstance, by responsibility, by convenience. You didn’t worry about whether home made you happy. She scoffed at such ideas.

  “Home just is. You don’t choose it,” she always said.

  I knew other older people who seemed to think the same way. They lived their lives in places they didn’t love, just because. They never considered moving to try to find someplace better. People my age seemed to believe that home was indeed a choice, and one that needed to be made without consideration of obligation. I would never live somewhere just because I had ended up there by accident. When I told this to Aunt Gillian, she frowned.

  “When you have a family to care for, you can’t think only of yourself.”

  When I was a teenager, it seemed to me that thinking of herself is how Aunt Gillian had always operated, but I knew better than to ever say that her.

  To Aunt Gillian, who’d followed her ex-husband here from Howard University, Cleveland was more home than her native Baltimore. She’d spent most of her life here. I had spent most of my life trying to get away.

  “Maybe you could move back home.”

  There was a long pause after she said this. We both took time to digest how difficult it was for her to ask this of me. Aunt Gillian had never asked me anything in her life. She demanded, cajoled, threatened. To now be in a position to ask showed me just how serious the situation was.

  I shook my head. “I have a good position teaching at the university, and faculty positions are not easy to come by, not in this economy.” And I hate Cleveland, I wanted to add but didn’t.

  “Cleveland is home, Ernestine.”

  Aunt Gillian had never been one to give up on an argument, especially not one as important as this. She was still the only person who ever called me Ernestine.

  But she was weak, and her voice shook when she spoke.

  It hit me then. Aunt Gillian was getting old.

  Our discussion continued for a few days, during which my arguments grew stronger and hers weakened. I realized that she wanted to come to Florida, but it was impossible for her to say so. Her pride, while wounded, wouldn’t allow it.

  On her third day in the hospital, she was due to be released. Her doctor was the one who gave us the means to make the final decision.

  “Mrs. Jones, your head is fine and you were lucky not to break anything. But I don’t want you living alone anymore. It’s not safe.”

  I was sitting in a chair by the window as he spoke, looking out at the gray skies, watching the heat make waves in the air above the pavement, wishing I were back in Florida. I looked over at my aunt. Her shoulders slumped.

  She didn’t answer the doctor, just nodded. He looked at me for a moment, and then smiled as he turned to leave.

  “I’m sure your niece will take excellent care of you, Mrs. Jones. You’re very lucky.”

  I almost laughed. This was the first time Aunt Gillian had ever been told she was lucky to have me.

  “What about my house?” she asked after the doctor left.

  “We’ll close it up for now and decide what to do about it late
r.”

  “I don’t want to be any trouble,” she said, still proud. “I can take care of myself, no matter what that doctor says.”

  I shook my head. “Of course it’s no trouble. We’re family.”

  Here I was a week later, standing in Aunt Gillian’s house, ready to clear out her things in preparation for her move to Florida. In my more forgiving moments I looked up to my aunt, who, all on her own, had supported herself—and then me—after her ex-husband, Jeremiah, left her years before I was born. When I was feeling loving, I saw toughness in her, instead of a mean spirit. And I could sometimes see humor in the biting jokes about my weight and my hair. I tended to take things too personally. On nights when sleep was elusive, I saw fragility in my aunt’s insistence on independence. Now that she needed me, I couldn’t walk away.

  Jack, who volunteered to fly to Cleveland to help us pack up, did not think moving Aunt Gillian into my house was a good idea.

  “You don’t want to put her in an assisted living facility?” he had asked when I called him to tell him that my aunt was moving to Florida. I’d just relayed all that had happened, and he asked patient questions.

  “A nursing home.” I said this as if the idea had never occurred to me, although it had over the past few days. I tried, but I couldn’t picture myself taking Aunt Gillian to a facility.

  “It’ll work out,” I told him.

  There was long pause.

  “You could convert the downstairs office into a bedroom for her so she doesn’t have to climb the stairs,” he said. I could hear the smile in his voice, and I knew what that smile meant. It meant that he would help me even though he was sure I was doing the wrong thing.

  “As long as you do the converting.”

  But I already knew that he would help, even do most of the work. Jack and I had known each other for five years, and I had grown to depend on him. The role fit him—he was a caretaker, a problem-solver. Although my life seemed pretty together on the outside, I had a lot of problems that needed to be solved. Struggles with weight, concerns about my teaching career, worries that I would never have a family of my own, a man of my own to take care of me the way Jack did. When we first met, I thought Jack might be that person. I hoped he would be that person. But things never worked out between us, whether it was because of my own insecurities or his lack of interest. I only admitted to myself, on nights when I was feeling especially lonely, that I still had feelings for Jack. But I was convinced that he saw me as just a friend, so I pretended to feel the same.