Murder Never Forgets

by Diana O'Hehir

  “And you think she tried to swallow it, piece of card and all?”

  “Certainly she did. There’s no other explanation for those throat abrasions. And this client has had medication problems before; when she had pneumonia, she could not keep straight the rules about when to take calcium and when to take Cipro.”

  So Mrs. Dexter is being blamed for cutting her own throat with a pill casing; that certainly will take care of any ideas she might get about lawsuits. I feel a flood of anger that I can’t let show because Mrs. Sisal is moving on to the business of the day, hassling me about my father.

  “Embarrassing for him, too,” she says, and “He wanders, he calls out, he is distressed, he is upset, Miss Day, more upset than we find useful. Perhaps he would be happier in Hope House? Hope House,” she gets a fashionable pointytoed foot over the edge of her file drawer, “is our comfortable, controlled facility.”

  I work hard at looking unfazed; I smile gently. It doesn’t do to go weak with these bullying types. The question of who moves to Hope House and who gets to stay here in overstuffed luxury will probably be settled by Mrs. Sisal. “My father has been a very famous man,” I remind her.

  Both she and I know that famous once-upon-a-time has nothing to do with Alzheimer’s now but the reminder works just the same. She relaxes a bit, the glasses turn to their admit light mode; she likes the idea of fame and agrees, “We have many famous people at the Manor.”

  It’s at this point that it happens. The Devil makes me do it. I open my mouth and out it comes. I accomplish something that is totally outrageous and apparently unplanned, although later when I stop and review, I realize that I have indeed been planning toward it.

  I ask Mrs. Sisal for a job. For a job for me at Green Beach Manor. A position as an aide, one of those helpers who assists the old people in taking their pills and finding the bathroom.

  It is ridiculous, and at the same time it’s not.

  I want to be near my father and keep him from talking about his woman on the beach and his eye being eaten. I am feeling guilty about having left him to go off to Baker’s Landing and Habitat for Humanity. My father needs me nearby, a buffer against Hope House.

  He has a lifetime sentence in the Manor, thanks to Aunt Crystal.

  I have no job and no ties except for him; I’ve just had a final and irrevocable falling out with the Habitat boyfriend.

  I thought of maybe working here while I was riding down on the Greyhound bus, and I thought of it again this morning as I crossed the garden toward Administration with the sea air all fresh and vigorous, and one of Mrs. Dexter’s butterflies coming to life among the ridiculous palm trees, and the coastal moss spangling itself with dew. I looked around and thought, It’s a weird atmosphere but maybe a pretty place to be for a while.

  And just now with Mrs. Sisal being so meanly stupid about Daddy and also about Mrs. Dexter, I think of these possibilities again. Perhaps it’s the case of Mrs. Dexter even more than of my father that kicks me forward; You’re an uncomfortable person, I decide, analyzing the glasses, somebody better watch you.

  “This may seem like a complete change of subject,” I tell her, “but actually it’s not . . .” I pause and warm up into my spiel. “A job as an aide. I am very well qualified.” I list my charms, not bothering to be modest: good grades, college animal lab (those lab cats with glasses should be worth something), Habitat for Humanity. Service with others, experience helping people. Et cetera, et cetera.

  I don’t add, I know I’m overqualified, which is true, but I do imply that although highly trained, I’m willing to come down in the world and that I’ll stay for a while (“. . . stable, I have a really great work record”), and generally I’m a terrific bargain. I murmur about a devotion to Sociology, a possible personal future in Aging, “This will be work experience; such a useful field,” I say, all the while chin up confidently, smiling into the glasses.

  Mrs. Sisal mutters about my father, and I reassure her, “Yes, I want to be near him, of course, but, no, that won’t affect my work.”

  “Well,” she murmurs, looking favorable.

  I’m remembering Mrs. Dexter’s stories about someone falling out of a window and somebody else with a gas leak and now her own oyster-glass sandwich, and I think, but don’t say, Hey, if you’re having all these weird accidents, you certainly can use more staff.

  “We cannot pay a great deal.” She takes her foot out of the file drawer; business is beginning.

  Some sheets are summoned into her computer, and she begins asking job-application questions, pecking the answers in rapidly on her keyboard: education, previous employers, (Susie becomes a Marketing dot com). Suddenly, Sisal stops and looks up, inquiring, “There are almost no young people here; will you be lonely? Do you have friends nearby?”

  I hadn’t suspected her of understanding the word lonely, but maybe the question was in her Executives Procedures Manual .

  “I have friends from college in the town of Green Beach.”

  “Oh, good, good.” She returns to the rest of my vital statistics.

  Actually, the friend in Green Beach is Susie’s son Robbie, who is a doctor at North Shore Hospital and thus an adjunct doctor at this establishment, one of the extra ones whom the Manor calls in when they can’t reach the usual guy.

  It may seem the height of coincidence for Robbie to be here and also for me to be here. But it isn’t coincidence at all; it’s cause and effect: Robbie was the one who told Aunt Crystal about Green Beach Manor in the first place, when she was shopping for a residence for Daddy. I’ve stayed away from Green Beach more than I should because Robbie might be around.

  Susie, in the parking lot, when she was saying goodbye to me, almost talked about Robbie; I could feel her take in a deep breath for: “Hey, Carly, say, ‘Hi,’ to Robbie for me,” and “Don’t be mean to my boy when you see him, huh, girl?” But then she didn’t say any of these things. All she did was look doubtful and kiss me. Susie is too nice to torment ex-lovers, even when they’re related to her.

  Mrs. Sisal rips a long page out of her computer and hands it over to sign. “Now you understand . . .” and she enunciates a list of days on and days off and a salary figure (yes, low) and a fraternization rule which means do not have sex with the old men.

  Mrs. S. had smirked at me, “That is our message; you need to project it.”

  She was busy gloating over her new cheap aide and appeared to have forgotten about sending my poor confused father to Hope House.

  He sits in his easy chair looking pink and hopeful, his tweed jacket neatly buttoned, his face a childish round. He’s balancing, slightly too close to his face, a New York Times folded into that standard Times quarter-fold. Although at this moment the paper is upside down. Maybe it hasn’t been that way all these hours since breakfast.

  “Live here, darling?” He lowers the paper and turns to assess his apartment with its oriental rug and redwood window seat and bay window. “How nice, how fine. Of course you live here. I will sleep there,” a gesture at the window seat; “You will have the alcove.”

  “I like a hard bed,” he persists while I start explaining, and then he continues with, “Do you remember, camping at Sharm el Naga, oh, I was such a good camper, Carla, although that woman in the net . . .” Here he seems to lose track of his thought, and I jump in with words like job and experience and temporary. Which results in a big pileup of misunderstanding. “Oh, no, no, not temporary; Daughter, of course you live in my hotel.” And he settles back determined to beam at me.

  “Come see my room, Daddy.” I take his hand and lead him, New York Times and all, down the hall to show him the eight-by-ten space Mrs. Sisal has allotted to me.

  Our way through the hall is wide and plush and overstuffed; someone has been hanging another van-load of those gold-framed pink-and-blue pictures. What is it about Renoir that makes it so easy to do a fake one, all misty and plump?

  He wants to talk about other hotels. “There was one, I wonder where,
they had a replica of a pyramid?”

  The hotel he’s talking about is the El Nil in Cairo, but I don’t tell him that; offering facts sometimes results in extra confusion, as if he doesn’t want to know the real names of things, just the possibilities that shimmer in the back of his head. I’d love to know how memory works for him. I think of it as a random pile of high-voltage electric wires, some of them with the rubber casings peeling off.

  We have arrived at my new room, which is entirely different from the surrounding hall; maybe it was reinvented out of a utility cupboard or guest closet; it’s lined mostly in white fiberboard and contains a sturdy little IKEA bed and cardboard dresser and one of those steel pipe arrangements with colored metal hangers dangling from it. A high window, half-open, lets in ocean noise.

  Daddy looks troubled; he enters my new room; he bounces on the bed. “They can do better than this,” he announces.

  And for a moment, he’s his old academic department-head self.

  “You should speak to them, Carla, dear. I think it quite possible that . . .”

  Here he stops, distressed. “This is quite a good hotel, isn’t it? Did you get the reservation? I think you did; you usually do, don’t you? And a good hotel. You always get good ones?”

  He’s quiet for a minute, long enough for me to decide I don’t like his bent-over posture; then he says, “Daughter, I am worried about memory.”

  Oh, Jesus, here it comes, I think. The Alzheimer’s books all prepare you for the moment when he says, “I’m afraid I’m beginning to forget.” Then, and not before then, you say, I’m terribly sorry, but we think you have a disease; the doctors are working on a cure and the outlook is hopeful and so on and et cetera. Don’t say this before he mentions something specific, some worry about his control of things. Only when he raises the subject himself. How would you like it if you were old and dependent and your young relative suddenly started lecturing you about how incurably forgetful you were going to be?

  But the general subject of forgetting is not the one he wants to raise. I start out with “You know, memory is really complicated,” and he intervenes, “It was down there below. It was a gold net.” His Woman in the Net, that’s what he wants to talk about. “For a while I thought I knew her.”

  “Something Egyptian,” I suggest. “You have so many Egyptian memories.” Maybe the way to reassure him about this net fantasy is to put it in a pleasant context. “Someone from Egyptian poetry,” I blather on. “Or connected with your Coffin Lid Text.”

  The Coffin Lid Text was one of Daddy’s great moments. He found this coffin lid in the anteroom of a “dry” (already explored) tomb in the Valley of the Kings, and while Egyptian coffin lids aren’t usually important, this one was because written on it was a version of the account on the tomb wall, and by comparing the two texts he could deduce the meaning of a whole row of hieroglyphs that had baffled scholars before him.

  The coffin lid is in a nearby museum now. It really belongs to the Luxor Museum, but the owner of Egypt Regained, a weird private California museum, wangled or charmed the Luxor Museum into an indefinite loan. Egypt Regained is run by an eccentric millionaire named Egon Rothskellar, and I’m afraid Egon is interested in the life-extension aspects of Egyptian artifacts. But, hey, my father’s eccentric, too.

  “Coffin lid? Text?” he asks now. “No, dear, I don’t think so. She wiggled. She wiggled around in the net. And then dead. Dead, and I didn’t . . .” He looks up at me, and there seem to be tears on his cheeks. “And someone fell out of a window here,” he adds.

  I don’t like it that his fantasy, his strange, persistent woman-in-the-net obsession has been added onto the lady-out-the-window. That’s just too eerie, I won’t explore it. I grab him by the arm and say, “Listen, let’s go back to your room. You can watch M*A*S*H; I’ll turn it on for you.”

  Returned to his armchair with his quilt and his bay window and a snack package of his favorite peppermint Jelly Bellies, he’s feeling well enough to lecture me again about how my new room isn’t good enough; he will speak to Management. “They’re quite nice at this hotel.”

  I kiss him and go back to my room and survey it some more. It seems all right to me. Sure, it’s a really tiny crabbed space, scraped and minimal, like Orphan Annie living in an piano box over a Manhattan subway grating. So it makes me feel like somebody out of a story.

  I do some unpacking, four garments, two get hung on the pipe-hanger arrangement and two go into the cardboard dresser. I unpack Mrs. Dexter’s piece of glass and put it on the dresser in a plastic yogurt top I’ve had in my backpack. I stand back and look at this arrangement and think that the yogurt installation is an art object and the foundation of my new homestead. In my Santa Cruz esthetics course the teacher said the beginning of an individuated life was a personal esthetic; he meant you should do something artistic that was new and different and yours. Well, you can’t get much more personal than a maybe-murderous piece of oyster glass in a yogurt top, can you?

  Chapter 3

  I’m headed to the hospital to visit Mrs. Dexter.

  Most of Green Beach Manor is Victorian and overdone. But the hospital was added later and simply looks like a standard hospital. I am familiar with the breed because of the one we built in Baker’s Landing; it was white and pink and chrome and looked a lot like this one.

  The Manor Hospital also smells like our Baker’s Landing structure, a combination of lemon disinfectant and instant noodles-in-a-cup. There is an entrance desk and a lot of fluorescent lights, and then down a hall you can see three rooms with two beds apiece. Mrs. Sisal and Co. aren’t set up for a really big epidemic.

  A short, skinny peroxide-haired person in blue whose name tag identifies her as “Hospital-Aide Mona” gushes up to me with the kind of gush you don’t expect in a hospital. “You’re Carla; you were so wonderful,” she emotes. “You were the one who saved her. So great. So quick-thinking. We’re just so, so proud.” She extends a scrawny birdlike be-ringed hand, which she latches on to my wrist to pull me down a pink hall. “So wonderful,” she says, presumably meaning me, not the hall.

  Down at the end is a white room where Mrs. Dexter sits propped against pillows, her face scrunched into a vinegary, rubber grinch-mask, her body surrounded by a mountain of magazines, newspapers, and dangerously tilting glasses holding bent straws.

  Mrs. Dexter stares for a while, glumly, and finally raises a hand, palm out, Indian fashion, and says, “How.” She winces, she’s hoarse; you can tell that even this one syllable hurts her throat.

  Mona continues to hover, “What a shame. I was so upset when I got back from Provo, Utah; I’d been visiting my sister, and when I got back from Provo and heard—such a dreadful accident. But you were so wonderful.” Mrs. Dexter hides behind her sheet while Mona won’t stop. “Oh, that was so terrible. I nearly died when I heard about it. And now there’s this silly, silly rumor—something about glass? And your dear father, they say he’s been complaining?” She turns to me, her eyebrows raised. She has the kind of eyebrows that you paint on afterward.

  When I don’t answer, she says, “Well, I’m really upset about this, but I’m really glad I was in Provo.”

  She’s hitting that button about being in Provo pretty hard. She has her mouth open to babble some more, but I level a thousand-watt scowl and she backs away saying, “Oh, well. Oh, yes.” That scowl is the one I think of as my Aunt Crystal look. Aunt C. was very good at squelching people.

  “Pretty weird,” I tell Mrs. Dexter, since that’s what I think she wants someone to say, sort of like supplying subtitles for a foreign film. She doesn’t react much. This experience has damped her down.

  I sit on the bed and remark, “Well.” We stare at each other. “I guess you’re better than you were last night,” I venture.

  She contorts her face. Of course it’s a dumb remark, but how do you make small talk with someone who can’t even say “uh-huh” without hurting? That, however, isn’t what she’s contorting about. She
lifts her hand again in the Indian or traffic-stopping gesture, swallows, moves her head, and whispers, “Thank you. For saving. My life.”

  I lean over and hug her, which I guess she hates; she makes her body uncooperatively stiff. But, I’m sorry, Mrs. Dexter, a person has to do something and “No problem,” or “You’re welcome,” is not a good response.

  I like older people, I might interject here, especially older women. That was part of my success at Habitat—I got along with the seniors. Probably it’s because I’m looking for a mother. What a bore. I hate dragging all that ancient history around all the time.

  When I emerge from the hug, I say, chaotically and too fast because I’m embarrassed, “I thought about you last night. About you and those questions you had. How you had suspicions and talked about them and were trying to listen in and maybe investigate. And then this awful thing happened to you.” I stop and take a good look at Mrs. Dexter.

  She’s making pained, everything-hurts faces and giving me the palm-out gesture. She mouths, carefully, lips very controlled, “Accident.”

  “Accident?” I repeat, not sure I’ve read the lips right. “Oh, but, hey. I mean . . .”

  I’m about to go into an explanation of That was a real piece of glass: I’ve got the little bit in my room now . . . But she preempts me again, shakes her head vigorously, shapes the lips. “Accident. I was. Wrong.”

  It’s a funny thing. Up until now I’ve felt tentative; yes, it is strange, suspicious even, that Mrs. Dexter should have noticed the accidents in the Manor and talked about how she was listening and spying and then should have had an accident herself. I wasn’t ready to say that all this necessarily added up, just that it gave me an aware feeling. Until now, when Mrs. Dexter protests, “Accident. Accident,” and I don’t believe her. Something clicks; I tell myself that there’s too much accident and denial around here, it adds up, damn right it does. That piece of glass is a real piece of glass. Mrs. Dexter has to have known that it was alien and sharp and didn’t belong in her oyster. And now she’s acting scared and paranoid. I don’t like this set of facts.