The Sisters Montclair

by Cathy Holton

  “How awful for you.” Alice heaved herself up, grasping the handles of her walker. She blinked several times, the corners of her mouth drooping. She looked frail and helpless, and seeing this Stella was seized by an inexplicable desire to wound her.

  “Life is hard for a lot of people,” she said stoutly.

  It was time someone shook the old woman out of her complacency, reminded her how the less-fortunate lived. There was something in Alice’s self-satisfied demeanor, her naive belief in good fortune and fairness that made Stella want to tell her dreadful, shocking things. How do you live to be ninety-four and manage to avoid the unpleasantness of life? By being fucking lucky, she thought. By being born to the right mother. Life was nothing more than a crap shoot.

  The phone rang suddenly, startling them both. Alice sat back down and leaned across the desk to answer it.

  “Hello?” she said. “Hello?”

  Stella turned around and went over to the sink to wash the dishes.

  “Who is this?” Alice said irritably. “My grandson, Tim? Oh hi, Tim, how are you?” Her tone changed, became warm and friendly. “Well, you’re a sweet boy to call. Yes, I’m sitting here with what’s her name.”

  Stella squirted dish soap into the sink and foamed it with the sprayer attachment.

  “Yes, I’ve got a new caretaker. That’s right.” She laughed. “Another one.”

  While Alice talked to her grandson, Stella washed and dried the dishes. Then she put them away and wiped down the counters and the stove.

  Alice said, “You say hello to what’s her name. Your wife. She’s a real sweet girl and you need to be good to her.” There was a moment’s quiet and then Alice said,

  “Okay, honey. ‘Bye.” She hung up the phone.

  Stella walked across the room and stood in front of the walker, facing Alice. She folded the dishtowel carefully in her hands. “Why’d you call me what’s-her-name?” she said.

  Alice looked up at her in some confusion. “Did I?” she said.

  “Yes. You did.”

  “Well, I don’t know why.”

  “Don’t you know my name?”

  “Martha.”

  “No, Alice, not Martha. My name’s Stella.”

  “Oh, Stella, I’m so sorry!” She put her hand to her mouth and her face changed, becoming pink and remorseful. She looked so distressed that Stella was instantly ashamed of bullying her, of trying to make Alice feel in some way responsible for her own unhappiness and insecurity.

  She walked over and hung the dishtowel on the faucet. Then she stood staring at her somber reflection in the kitchen window.

  “Sometimes I forget,” Alice said.

  “We all do, Alice. It’s okay.”

  “I know you’re Stella.”

  “It doesn’t matter.”

  “And you’re from Alabama.”

  “Don’t worry about it, Alice. I don’t know why I said anything.” She turned around and went over to help Alice get up.

  Alice stood, clinging to her walker. Her chin trembled and she looked crestfallen and ashamed. “Sometimes it just disappears,” she said. “Everything that’s in my head floats away and I can’t remember.”

  “We’re all like that.”

  Alice looked at her. “Are we?”

  “Only the lucky ones,” Stella said quietly.

  The girl’s face was filled with bitterness. She looked so lost and forlorn that Alice wanted to rescue her like she would a bedraggled puppy on a rain-swept street. She was just like the other girl. The one Alice could not, would not remember.

  It was hard seeing a young face so filled with rancor. Only the elderly should express such defeat, such battering from the storms of life. The young should be immune from suffering. What was it the girl had said she was? An orphan. The word brought back childhood fears, a fear of loneliness, abandonment. When Alice was just a girl her mother had taken her to the Nashville School for the Blind and Deaf. It was Christmas and they had brought along baskets of fruit and Alice had gone down the rows of neatly made dormitory beds and given out oranges to the occupants. They sat at the ends of their beds, making unintelligible noises, their faces pressed to their oranges, which many of them had never smelled or tasted before. They were not all orphans, although some had been abandoned at the school door, but the rows of sterile beds, the faint scent of unwashed bodies and antiseptic, had made Alice think of orphanage asylums and surgical instruments.

  She could hear the girl coming along behind her, her voice low and murmuring. She had forgotten to turn on the light and the hallway was dark, and as Alice walked, clinging to her walker, she saw Bill Whittington standing at the end of the hallway, as solid and substantial-looking as he had ever looked. She had seen him before, of course, but it had been awhile. He was dressed in his golf clothes.

  Well, Old Girl, you’ll have to face it sooner or later, he said.

  Go away, she thought. Don’t bother me now.

  Best to get it over with, he said.

  She ignored him, pushing the walker in front of her like a janitor sweeping trash. She could see his glasses glinting in the darkness. She thought, Why do they keep sending you? Why don’t they send the boy?

  He put his head back and laughed in that old way so that she felt a familiar tug at her heart. Twenty-six years she had lived without him; twenty-six long years of widowhood.

  You don’t get to choose, he said.

  She pushed through him, feeling the chill of his presence against her breastbone.

  Later, as she drifted off to sleep, he was there again, standing in the doorway and beckoning for her to come. She turned her face to the wall.

  The dead are like that. Always leading you down paths you don’t want to go.

  Eight

  At the end of March, a tornado struck Lookout Mountain. The day started out normally enough; the sky was slightly overcast as Stella drove up the mountain, but the dogwoods and azaleas were in bloom and the neighborhoods were filled with riotous color.

  Elaine was in the kitchen writing notes in the binder when Stella arrived. She seemed in a worse mood than usual.

  “Alice was restless last night,” she said. “Once she sat up and said, No, Bill, don’t go. It nearly scared me to death. And this morning she’s in a foul mood.”

  “Poor thing. Bill was her husband.”

  Elaine gave her a long look. “Yes, I know.” She scribbled a few more notes in the binder and then looked up again. “She’s been really restless since you came. I’ve noticed that.”

  There was nothing Stella could say to this. She had the feeling that the more she liked Alice, the less Elaine liked her, although she couldn’t say if it was jealousy on Elaine’s part or something else.

  Elaine grinned suddenly, showing a row of straight white teeth. “It’s not the crazy, confused episodes you have to watch out for though. It’s when they start having more and more lucid moments that you know they’re going to die.”

  “Oh, don’t say that,” Stella said quickly, turning away and going to fill a glass of ice water for Alice’s morning walk.

  “That slip you picked out last night was too long,” Elaine said, all business-like again. She tapped the pen on the counter, her expression brisk, irritable. “It hung down below her dress and she made me change the dress. She just stood there with her arms up and sighed, waiting for me to dress her. She doesn’t blame you, of course, for picking out the wrong slip. She blames me. She always blames me.”

  “I picked the only slip that was in her drawer.”

  “Well, it was too long.”

  “How was I supposed to know that?”

  “Next time you might try holding it up to the dress she’s planning on wearing to make sure.”

  “Couldn’t you just adjust the shoulder straps?”

  “I suggested that but she wouldn’t hear of it. She’d rather throw a big fit and have me change her. I think she likes finding fault with everything I do.” Elaine turned and began to write
something else in the binder, almost as an afterthought. Stella glanced over her shoulder and read; Patient’s dementia seems to be increasing.

  “Elaine, that’s not true.”

  “It’s just my opinion,” Elaine said stoutly. “But I’m entitled to it. I’m entitled to make notes if I think they’re relevant. I’ve been doing this for ten years. I sit with two other patients besides her. You only have her.”

  Stella went to put her purse and backpack away and didn’t say anything else.

  “And another thing,” Elaine called after her. “She claims I broke her lamp, but I didn’t. She likes the shade tilted up a certain way so she can read and today when I tried to do that, I noticed that the shade was sprung. It won’t stay up. I tried to fix it but I couldn’t, and now she’s convinced I broke it. Which I didn’t,” she added fiercely to Stella, who had walked back into the kitchen. Elaine sniffed and rubbed her nose angrily. “I sit with two other patients who are very nice. They like me. Everyone likes me but her. She’s been through twelve caregivers in the last year, including one who had a nervous breakdown and left in mid-shift. It’s her, not me that’s the problem. I won’t give her the satisfaction of me leaving.”

  “I hope you won’t leave,” Stella murmured, not knowing what else to say.

  Elaine went back to say goodbye to Alice, and Stella quickly wrote in the binder under Elaine’s note, I don’t notice any change in Alice’s cognitive abilities. She could hear the two of them arguing on the monitor.

  “Alice, I’m leaving.”

  “Well, all right then.”

  “I’ll see you tonight.”

  “So you’re not going to fix my lamp that you broke.”

  “Alice, I did not break that lamp.”

  “So you say.”

  “You know I didn’t.”

  “Well, all right then. I’ll make do as best I can.”

  There was a flurry of muffled activity and then the sound of the front door slamming. Stella stood at the kitchen window and watched Elaine walk by, her face pale with fury. She walked back to Alice’s bedroom.

  “Good morning,” she said.

  Alice looked up, smiling her most charming smile. “Oh, hello,” she said. “The paper’s there if you want to read it.” She pointed to the other bed where the newspaper lay scattered. She was dressed in a pink knit dress with a turquoise sweater. Her feet, clothed in pink socks and tennis shoes, were crossed demurely at the ankle.

  Stella advanced into the room, leaning to gather the newspaper off the bed. “You’ve had an interesting morning, I hear.”

  Alice pointed at the crazily tilted lamp on the bedside table. “She broke my lamp,” she said.

  “Did she?”

  Alice looked at her mischievously. “No, not really. I just like to get her riled. Sometimes I talk really low under my breath and when she asks me what I’m saying, I say Nothing. That drives her crazy.”

  Stella folded the newspaper against her chest. They stared at each other, grinning.

  “Alice, you’re terrible.”

  “I know, but it keeps life interesting.”

  “I’m glad you don’t treat me that way.”

  “You don’t act like she does. Besides, you’re my favorite caregiver.”

  “I know you say that to all the caregivers.”

  Alice’s smile widened. “I only say it to you,” she said. “You are my favorite.”

  Stella, embarrassed by the pleasure she felt at this statement, glanced out the window at the steadily darkening sky. “It looks like it’s going to storm,” she said.

  “Oh well,” Alice said, going back to her puzzle book. “A little rain never hurt anyone.”

  Later that morning, Stella was sitting in the sunroom when the storm hit. She was trying, half-heartedly, to study for a biology test, wishing now that she had dropped the class when she dropped Psychology of Gender. When she had realized she wasn’t going to be leaving Alice, she called Professor Dillard and explained her situation, promising that she would try to take the class in summer school. It was easier now, not having to see Luke Morgan, not having to rely on him for class notes. She hadn’t seen him since that morning he drove her up Lookout to work.

  She was bent over, reading, when the lamp began to flicker. At the same time she became aware of a strange whistling sound, like the noise an airplane engine makes when it’s readying for take off. The glass of the windows rattled. Looking up, she saw the sky was black and the huge trees surrounding the house were bent nearly to the ground. Swirls of leaves and azalea blossoms swept across the verandah. Staring out the windows in alarm, she became gradually aware of a thundering sound in the distance, coming closer. At the same time a large limb fell from one of the swaying trees and she realized that the sunroom was the wrong place to be. She jumped up and walked through the house toward Alice’s bedroom. As she walked down the long hallway, the lights flickered again, and went out.

  Alice was sitting in the dark, trying to do her crossword puzzles. “The lights went out,” she said to Stella.

  “I know. The storm must have knocked down the power lines.”

  “What did you say?”

  “The storm. Can’t you hear the storm?”

  “I’m sorry. I can’t understand what you’re saying.”

  Stella sat down on the opposite bed, staring out the window. Strange how Alice’s hearing seemed to come and go, almost as if she heard what she wanted to hear, and not the rest. Gray clouds rolled in and rain began to fall, coming in at a slant and striking the windows like pebbles.

  On the opposite bed, Alice said, “Ranting speeches. Starts with a T.” She chewed on the end of her pencil. “I should know this one.”

  “Look at it come down,” Stella said, watching the fierce rain rattle the windows.

  “Tirade,” Alice said gleefully.

  “I thought tornadoes weren’t supposed to hit mountains. I thought they only hit valleys.”

  They sat for awhile in the darkness, Stella watching the storm and Alice diligently working on her crossword puzzles. Far off to the east, the sky was clearing. The rain gradually lessened; it was falling now at a steady pace, straight down. Stella could see a roiling cloud of gray smoke billowing from the shrubs in front of Alice’s house. She stared for a moment, thinking it was only fog, but then she saw a glow of red light, like embers. Fire.

  “Clairvoyant one,” Alice said. “Seer.”

  Stella stood up abruptly. “Excuse me, Alice, I need to make a phone call.”

  “Okay,” Alice said. “I’m ready for snack. Bring it will you?”

  Stella went into the kitchen, miraculously managed to get a dial tone, and called the Lookout Mountain fire department. Then she tried to call Sawyer but his phone was dead. She waited; staring out the kitchen window at the small fire that reflected now against the greenery and seemed to be throwing off sparks. Despite the steady rain, it sparked merrily. A pick-up truck pulled up out front and two men in hard hats got out and walked cautiously toward the fire. They pointed and following their fingers, Stella could see a downed power line, snaking across the end of the drive and into the shrubbery. In the distance sirens wailed.

  Stella fixed Alice’s snack and took it back to her. Alice was sitting in the darkened room, peering at her puzzle book.

  “I don’t know when the power will be back on,” Stella said loudly. She had no intention of worrying Alice by telling her about the downed power line. “There are sirens everywhere. It was a pretty bad storm.”

  “Storm?” Alice said. She put her book down and turned her head to stare out the window. “Is it raining?” she said. “The newspaper delivery man put plastic on the paper this morning and he’s usually right. He always knows when it’s going to rain.”

  “I tried to call Sawyer but his phone is dead.”

  “His phone goes dead when the power goes out but mine doesn’t,” Alice said, opening her packet of crackers. She slid one cracker out and popped it into her mouth,
chewing thoughtfully. She pointed at the drawer of her bedside table. “There’s a flashlight in there,” she said.

  Stella pulled it out and flicked it on to see if it worked. Outside the window, the two men in hardhats were setting up orange plastic cones around the downed power line. Stella set the flashlight down on the table. “Use this if you need it,” she said to Alice who was blithely munching on her snack.

  “I guess that means no TV,” Alice said. “No Wheel of Fortune or Jeopardy.”

  “Well, maybe the power will come back on by then.”

  “Don’t count on it. Last time it was out for days.”

  “We’ll be pioneer women then. We’ll live like they did in the good old days.”

  Alice hooted and shook her head. She picked up her coke, sipped it, and then set it down again. “The good old days weren’t always so good,” she said.

  The kitchen had a gas stove but Stella wasn’t sure how to light it, so she made a cold lunch of tuna salad, grapes, and coleslaw. Outside in the street a large power truck had arrived but Alice seemed unaware of the commotion in her driveway. Half-way through lunch Sawyer called on a cell phone to check on his mother.

  “Oh, we’re fine,” Alice said. “We’re just finishing lunch.” She listened for a moment and then said, “Truck? What truck?”

  Stella held out her hand to Alice. “Let me talk to him,” she said.

  She explained the downed power line and Sawyer said he wasn’t too worried; he just wanted to make sure Al had plenty of canned goods because there were trees down across most of the roads and he wasn’t sure when he’d get to the grocery store again. She checked the pantry and said there was enough to last several days and it wasn’t until they’d hung up that she thought to ask him about lighting the stove. Well, perhaps Elaine would know how. She was sure Elaine would know.

  She fixed Alice a scoop of Rum Raisin ice cream and then sat down beside her. The light falling through the windows was a dull gray and Stella had turned on the flashlight and left it sitting on the desk like a torch so Alice could see to eat. In the harsh light Alice’s face seemed cavernous and ghostly.