Murder Never Forgets

by Diana O'Hehir

  “Beauty, did you say that, Carla? Yes, you did.” Daddy looks pleased. “In Egypt, there were beauty procedures at parties. They put cones of fatty incense on their foreheads and allowed them to melt.” He eyes one of Mrs. La Salle’s sandwiches and moves his face close for a bite.

  “You are an innocent man,” she holds the sandwich steady. “I wonder, were you always so innocent?”

  “My dear, ripeness is all. That’s a line by Shakespeare . . .” He thinks about this for a minute. “Also, ‘That time of year thou mays’t in me . . . ’” he winds down, looking pleased.

  I don’t like this quoting-and-smiling approach he’s adopting here, it demeans him. Also, he’s beginning to get it wrong. I change the subject: “How about a 7 Up?” He comes back firmly with, “White wine,” so I try a counter-offer, “Diet Coke,” and he goes, “White wine,” again, at which we seem to be stalemated until Mrs. La Salle intervenes, “Carla, now, think. One wine won’t make any difference.” She’s right, of course. Sometimes I can feel myself being bossy, as if Aunt Crystal has planted a Crystal-chip in my brain.

  I have a wine, too. Relax, I advise my inner me, and sip, and remember how, in Santa Cruz, Robbie and I kept a cardboard container of industrial-grade Beaujolais under the kitchen table.

  Those were good years, even if the drinks were terrible.

  Daddy and I, he with his wineglass held high, start our progress through the room. He smiles, he sips, he starts an imitation of his old true-blue self, Dr. Day, archaeologist-scholar. “How nice of you to come,” this to a lady in pink, apparently a perfect stranger.

  Hospital Aide Mona is here, her peroxided hair up to one side and fastened with a green parakeet clip; she’s wearing a purple cloak that must have been bought at the same moon-and-stars bazaar as my T-shirt. I point at the two moon designs, and she bats her eyes confusedly. “Oh, you mean my Astarte cape? Hey, sure. Isn’t this a great event.” She looks at me big-eyed and beseeching, as if saying Please forget our conversation , and then gives herself a minute to flutter at Daddy. “And the dear professor.”

  Mona is pretty creepy. She’s like the little girl in your kindergarten class that tagged around after you, acting as if someone were going to hit her.

  Daddy seems to kind of recognize her; he examines her carefully and then looks beyond, over her shoulder, maybe searching for something else. “My dear.”

  “That woman,” he asks, as we are leaving her, “does she have a belt with scissors on it?”

  A belt with scissors sounds like something a hospital aide might have.

  I agree, “Probably.”

  Mrs. Dexter is at the far end of the next room, propped beside the door and squinting up at Mrs. Sisal, who is skinny and New York-chic in a metallic sweater and orange scarf. Daddy and I start moving toward them, but there’s a traffic jam; some clients want out, some want in, and some just stand around, looking helpless.

  “What are they waiting for?” my father asks. “Is a train coming?”

  “It’s a party, Daddy. Remember?”

  “A party in a train station. Did you get my ticket?”

  He asks about the ticket twice as we maneuver and push and say, “Excuse me,” but when we reach Mrs. Dexter, he’s once again the cordial greeter. “My dear. So good. Thank you for the cookies.”

  Mrs. Sisal has disappeared.

  “I remembered you liked chocolate chip.” Mrs. Dexter has decided to be marginally polite to me again. “How are you, Carla?”

  I say I’m fine. “Did you really bake cookies?”

  She’s defensive. “You can cook perfectly well with a walker, you just line the ingredients up on that little shelf in front . . . Hello, Sally,” this is to Mrs. Cohen, who has come up behind me. “Isn’t this ridiculous?”

  Tonight Mrs. Cohen has a camellia in her hair. “Why, Louise, here we are, all my favorite people. Edward, how are you?”

  “I forget. Carla, may I have my . . .” He pauses and clears his throat, “my drink back?”

  He’s lost it somewhere on our journey through the room. I’d give him mine, except that I’ve just finished it. One look at his face tells me this will be an issue. Sometimes, especially when something’s lost, he needs to talk about it for twenty minutes. “I’ll get it,” I say, and head back toward the drinks table. If I fetch the glass myself, I can control how much goes into it. Or even add some water.

  I think, Please don’t start talking about fishing nets. Another wine could start you up.

  When I get back, the group has been joined by Dr. Kittredge, shoulders straight in a navy blue cashmere jacket with brass buttons.

  My father is singing. “‘Oh, yes, I’m sick, I’m very sick. And I never will be better.’” He has found another wine glass, a mostly empty one, and is keeping time with it. He doesn’t sing loudly; his voice is sweet and not obnoxious, and the whole display is only slightly disturbing and slightly embarrassing. He seems to be aiming his song at Dr. Kittredge.

  “Ah, sure,” Kittredge says. “I haven’t heard that one for a while.”

  “‘Until I have . . .’” my father sings. His face crumples; he hands the empty glass to Mrs. Dexter and says, “I have forgotten the rest.”

  “You’re tired,” Dr. Kittredge says. “That’s what it is. Tired. Totally expected.”

  “Poor man.” The painting teacher, Ms. Deirdre Chaundy, has arrived beside the doctor, and she thrusts out her marvelous bosom under a festoon of amber beads. “Too much on your mind. Such a talented man,” in an aside to everybody; “His history . . . so interesting.”

  Daddy looks at the doctor and smiles uncertainly. Maybe he’s afraid of Dr. Kittredge, which makes sense. I’m afraid of him right now, since he’s a doctor and probably can decide on whether my father goes to Hope House with the other loonies or remains here in coddled comfort. And now Daddy is acting irrational. “The rest of that song?” he asks. “Until I something . . . something?” His voice is getting louder. “Carla?”

  Surprise, Dr. Kittredge is the one who supplies the missing line: “‘Until I have the love of one,’ Dr. Day.” He hums a bar or so. “Ah, the songs of our youth.” Daddy’s song is “Barbry Allen,” a folk piece that got revived in the sixties; I guess the doctor’s youth happened around that time, too. He beams at me, glass in his hand, stomach out, feet apart, handsome Irish head cocked. Maybe he’s trying to figure out just how goofy Edward Day really is.

  “‘Until I have the love of one,’” Daddy tries this in a sweet tenor. Then his face crumples, and his voice begins to rise, “How can that be? It doesn’t seem possible.”

  “Oh.” He stares at me. “There was a time when I knew everything, everything I needed to know. Carla, remember, in Egypt, in the City of the Dead, when we found the coffin lid. It was like a window into another world. I’d been up for three nights, waiting to get the container opened. And the desert around us, and the stars, and down at the silent dead city just a few flickers of torches from people camped, and the white fronts of the small buildings . . .

  “Oh, I used to be able to understand, but now I do not . . . I do not . . .”

  Of course, he’s about to say understand again, but he doesn’t get the chance. I move forward, a new drink extended like a lure, and put my arm around him and get him turned toward the door. “It’s hot,” I call back to our friends, “we need to get outside,” and then we’re through the passageway and into the evening garden and safe out of there at least for this minute.

  Chapter 9

  Once in the garden, silence and peace reign. There is a thousand-watt moon and several traveling rivers of fog. Palm trees dazzle in the mixture of fog and moonlight, showing off their feathery arched boughs. The path ahead glimmers between its rows of white rocks, showing the road like paint-by-numbers.

  My father stands still for a couple of minutes to look at this heady mixture of nature and art. He takes several deep, ostentatious breaths. Then he heads off, lickety-split, across the savannah. Running f
ull speed into the lunar-splashed fog.

  Rob and I used to have a cat that did that on moonlit nights. Dashed madly away, in a declaration for feline freedom. But it’s one thing when it’s your cat and you can laugh and bless him with, “Run, Tiger, run,” and another thing entirely if it’s your aged, dotty father.

  You wouldn’t think an eighty-five-year-old gentleman could outrun his twenty-five-year-old daughter, but he can if he gets a head start and she’s asleep on her feet. Daddy and I cover a lot of fog-splashed garden territory, with me trailing along behind, calling, “Daddy! Watch out! Go slow!” And so on and so forth. I even have a moment to think that this would be funny if I had a sense of humor.

  He has reached the far edge of the Manor property down by the highway before I catch up with him. He’s sitting against a manzanita bush. He has lost his wineglass and one shoe. He stares up at me, moonglow highlighting his rebellious old face.

  I ask, “Are you hurt?”

  He’s not even breathing hard. “Not at all. Are you?”

  “You fell. Here, hold up your foot. Flex, flex.”

  He doesn’t want to flex for me. “I’m fine. Aren’tIagood runner?”

  “I’m taking you by the hospital.” Belle told me that last January he broke a finger, and no one knew about it for almost a week. “Doesn’t complain,” Belle said, admiringly. “Phenomenal.”

  I scramble around behind him, next to him, and find the shoe. “But I can tie my own shoes,” he says, incensed.

  “Come on. Up we get. Hup.”

  He doesn’t want to hup. He wants to sit in his manzanita bush and look at the celestial orb, which is coming and going behind its fog cover.

  “Up we get. What did you do with your wineglass?”

  “I have had a very interesting e-mail.”

  You aren’t supposed to attempt logical argument with an Alzheimer’s patient; the person isn’t logical and will just get confused. I immediately breach this sensible rule. “You don’t have a computer.”

  “Of course not. This e-mail saluted me as ‘O, Powerful King.’ Don’t you think that’s nice?”

  “You are limping,” I accuse. “Where did you lose that wineglass?”

  We are walking, moderately steadily, following the paint-by-numbers.

  A field ahead is the place where, he says, the wineglass got dropped.

  “Here? You remember?”

  He gestures at an anonymous-looking plant. “I noticed. By the aloe bush.”

  So I start feeling around by the aloe bush. Maybe he noticed it especially because the Egyptians used aloe face creams. And me? Probably I’m being so compulsive because I want to teach him a lesson.

  No question, I’m mad at him. Why does he have to pick tonight for a full demonstration of his Aged Adorable Delinquent Parent act? “Stand still,” I command. “Don’t get any more ideas. Stay exactly where you are.”

  “Carly,” he says. He’s standing on the path behind me a little to the left; there’s a curious alert note in his voice.

  “Yes?”

  “Someone is sleeping here.”

  Sleeping? I get up. I start to put an arm around him, but he doesn’t seem to need that. His voice is tight in what I think of as his “archaeology-discovery” tone, the one used for: “This is the entrance to a tomb.” “Shoes,” he says. “Nice ones.”

  The shoes are women’s—small, flat, and thin-soled. The uppers are silver kidskin. There are small, bony feet and legs projecting out of the shoes, but not side by side and neatly arranged; no, one shoe has been almost kicked off, one white-stockinged leg is twisted on top of the other.

  “Father, stand back.”

  My father doesn’t want to stand back. He pushes up right behind me. I kneel down and fight off some of the long grass blades that are bent across the out-flung shape. It lies on its back, arms stretched. Its dress, a blue one with spangles along the shoulder straps, is disheveled. The person in the dress is someone I recognize perfectly well in her patch of bright moonlight. The last time I saw her she was wearing her moon-and-stars cape.

  “Ah,” says my father. I suppose he, like me, has recognized Hospital Aide Mona. Her peroxided hair is splashed around among the grass blades, but the parakeet clip still clings, a darker color in the bright hair. “She’s not wearing her scissors belt,” he says.

  One of the things I didn’t like about working in the Santa Cruz lab was dealing with the dead animals.

  I’ve never seen a dead person before, but people are animals, too, and dead is dead.

  And this person, not-sleeping on her back, really looks dead. Although . . . well, I saw her just recently, didn’t I? Giggling and carrying on in her Mona way, part of a party, drinking a drink?

  I touch the back of my hand to the pulse-place in her neck. Nothing. And then to her mouth. Again, nothing, no moisture.

  But she feels perfectly warm. I bend closer and get my lips near hers. The eyes are half-open; there’s moonlight reflected back in them.

  And now I understand it—the twist of the head. The neck kinked back in that impossible angle.

  Hospital Aide Mona is truly dead. With her head at that peculiar slant, I’d guess she died of a broken neck.

  I notice that one of my hands is shaking. Not my right hand, the left one, the hand that an Egyptian fortune teller once told me had the fate line in it.

  “Daddy,” I say, “we should get back. Quickly.”

  My father is the world’s biggest innocent, but he knows about death, not just because of dead pharaohs but also because of dead archaeology workers, people falling off ladders or getting rocks dropped on their heads or coming down with bilharzia. Sometimes, believe it or not, he had over a hundred workers asking him what to do. Right now, he looks down at Mona and seems to remember some earlier event. “The inspector will be here to investigate. Shouldn’t we do artificial . . .” He can’t think of the word. “This is alarming,” he says.

  “It wouldn’t work. Let’s just get back fast.”

  “I’m feeling dizzy.” And I guess he is. I almost have to drag him.

  Mrs. La Salle had seen us coming. She must have been watching through the glass-paneled door. I take a minute, in the middle of everything else I’m feeling, to think about that.

  She’s using her grand-duchess voice and sounds very competent. I tell her there’s been a serious accident in the meadow. “Serious?” she asks. “In what way serious? Oh, my God. Poor Ed,” and at this point my father, whom she’s been supporting by the elbows, starts to topple.

  And Mrs. La Salle, gray electric silk sticking out stiff, sits down on the brick step and scoops him onto her lap. He disappears into an enclosing cowl of gray silk. Noises like all right and there, there emerge from inside it. Mrs. La Salle’s narrow hand, embellished with an amethyst ring, rises to pat my father’s shoulder.

  The lady rocks, she even hums. “Now,” she says. “It’ll be fine.” She cradles his head.

  “Get somebody,” I say, a little weakly.

  After a minute more of ministration, Mrs. La Salle responds by lifting her head and commanding upward, “Somebody come,” in a great volume of grand-duchess-yell.

  Right away a little crowd arrives at the beauty parlor door, jostling down the steps to see what on earth can be happening.

  “A very bad accident in the meadow,” I repeat, projecting up and out, emulating Mrs. La Salle.

  “Get Dr. Kittredge,” I add.

  There’s a lot of commotion and questions as we are pulled and pushed up the steps and into, presumably, safety: Daddy and I each are supplied with a chair while a group goes to find the doctor; people saying to me and to him, “What happened?” and “How did you . . .” and “How terrible!” And I’m finally starting to react. What I’m reacting to mainly is this thought: Accident? That was no accident. You don’t fall and break your neck in an accident, and then lie down on your back. You lie some other way, on your face, with your head pushed askew, or curled in a ball, head cante
d. Not stretched neatly, as if you’d been dragged there. Someone transported Mona to that spot, and then didn’t have the chance to fix her up like an accident. They heard us coming. Maybe part of the time we were stumbling around, they were there, too. Watching. Maybe they were watching us and wondering what they should do about us.

  I watch them go, and then I flash back to that scene on the steps and have a dumb, inappropriate association. They looked like Michelangelo’s Pieta, the lady bent over a cradled prostrate man, like that statue of the crucified Jesus stretched out on Mary’s lap. Latch on to something like that in a moment of crisis, and your brain will go totally numb.

  Because now we really are Observers, major Observers. Also witnesses. Smack at the middle of a quivering spider web. I analyze each person in this room wanting to ask, “Were you out there while I was out there?”

  The doctor arrives, breathless and for once, almost quiet. “Dead?” he asks me. “You could tell that? Do you know what dead looks like?”

  Something in my face must convince him, because he says, “We’ll get you home to bed, baby.”

  Then he has to Irish it up: “Yes, yes. We’ll scoot you past the sheriff. Bed and chicken soup, baby. Okay? That’ll be it, dear one. Bed and chicken soup fer ya.”

  A shot of vodka in this chardonnay would be more to the point, Irish buddy, is what I think at him, staring into his slightly bleary eyes.

  Yes, I tell him, I understand.

  When I stand up, I find I’m stiff. I look down at Susie’s moon-and-stars shirt and decide that I won’t tell her I was wearing it tonight.

  Chapter 10

  Back in my father’s room Mrs. La Salle has him in bed, quilt up under his chin. She’s sitting beside him with a book open on her lap and is reading aloud.

  “ ‘Alone, alone, all all alone Alone on a wide, wide sea,’”

  “My father speaks very good French,” I tell her, somewhat crossly. I can’t figure out what this handsome old lady is up to. She’s not, absolutely not, one of those maternal, loving, nurturing Susie-type matrons. She’s more the hard, brittle, handsome society model. Smart and well-read. But not a big-time doer of good, not a cuddler and purveyor of chicken soup. Mainly out to advance number one, I’d guess. So what does she want with my poor Alzheimer’s impeded father? Does she, maybe, think he’s rich?