by Sue Miller
“I know,” she said. “Even my watch is digital now.” She held her wrist up for him to see. Then she said, as if only idly curious, “I wonder if you could tell me now the three words I asked you to memorize earlier.”
“I have no memory of that,” Alfie said. His voice was dismissive.
“Oh, yes,” Dr. Thibodeau said cheerfully. “There were three nouns I named, and you repeated them for me? I just want to go over them one more time. If you would be so kind.” She curtsied her head slightly, smiling warmly at him.
There was a pause, a long pause. Sylvia was aware of her own tension, of her wish that he do it, that he triumph, and of the quickly dawning, shamefully gratified knowledge that he couldn’t. That she was right: that it was real, his failure.
Alfie finally said softly, “No.”
“All right,” said Dr. Thibodeau. “Let’s move on. That part’s not so important anyway.”
He had a few more tasks to perform. And then Dr. Thibodeau thanked him, as warmly as ever, told him she thought he’d done fantastically, that she was so grateful to him for enduring these assignments, but that they were useful in her thinking about cognitive function. She stood, and he did, too, more slowly. And took the hand she extended to him. “You’ve been so patient with all this,” she said.
“Oh, no,” he said. “It was fine. I won’t say the most interesting interview I’ve ever had, but I didn’t mind.”
Dr. Thibodeau laughed. Her hand moved to his back, and she was gently guiding him, moving with him, to the door. “I’m just going to chat with Sylvia a few minutes about the same tests, so if you can just wait in the aptly named waiting room. I think there’s a Newsweek there. People magazine, too, but I don’t imagine that’s quite your cup of tea.”
He exhaled, a quick, amused sound. No, he said. No.
The door was open now, and Dr. Thibodeau said to the nurse, “Dr. Rowley will wait here for his wife, Liddy. We’ll be a few minutes.”
Just as he turned to go, Alfie raised his finger and smiled triumphantly at her: “Pencil!” he announced.
She laughed. “That’s it! The word was pencil. Right you are. Horse, rose, pencil. Good for you!”
When the door shut, Dr. Thibodeau came and sat in the same chair she’d been in, next to Alfie’s. She swiveled in it to face Sylvia. “You can probably tell that we had pretty mixed results there.” Her face was sober.
“I’m not surprised,” Sylvia said. “But you know, I’m relieved. I’m ashamed to say that, but the thing is, I thought he might just breeze through all this, and I’d be left thinking I was just imagining things. Or exaggerating anyway.”
“No, there’s clearly some real loss. You’re right.” She tilted her head and smiled sadly at Sylvia. “And that feeling you have, of confirmation, really? That happens often. It’s a great relief to people to have some clarity finally. So don’t be ashamed. Not in the least.” Her tone was as warm, as reassuring, as it had been with Alfie, and Sylvia wondered for a fleeting moment whether she ever let go of this, whether she made ironic remarks, jokes, about a patient occasionally—maybe to Liddy. Or at home, to her husband, if she had one.
“So what comes next?”
“More tests, I’m afraid. But these will seem medical to him, and therefore probably be less distressing in some ways. Easier to deal with, to explain to yourself. Blood work, an MRI, some things like that. Liddy will set it all up for you at the hospital.”
“And then what?”
“Well, then comes the hard part. Because there just isn’t a lot we can do. We have a few drugs that can slow things down—slow the progress of the disease. So it’s good you brought him in now. The earlier the better. But as you probably know, the trajectory is set, and the prognosis is not good if it’s Alzheimer’s. It is a terminal disease, after all.”
They talked awhile about the way it usually went, about the timing of the various stages, about how long it would be before the test results would come. Sylvia was growing tense about the notion of Alfie, waiting outside, but she asked, “Why is it so much worse since we moved up here?”
“I’m sorry, I know you told me, but when did you move, again?”
“In May. When Alfie retired.”
“Well, sometimes the kind of changes he’s just gone through, both in his routine and then also in his physical surroundings, can be a trigger for a … lurch forward, I guess you could call it.” She was frowning. Her face was earnest. “Any change, really, is challenging. So this one, well, it might have been a sort of double whammy, sad to say, with the actual move and then the retirement on top of that.”
“But it’s really marked. And he seems so much more … remote now. Very quickly. And he’s had what I guess I’ll have to call hallucinations.”
“Oh, really?”
“Yes.”
“Tell me about those.”
Sylvia did. The shadow he mistook for a dog. The idea he had—Sylvia thought it might be left over from a dream—that their daughter had been kidnapped by terrorists. “This, even though we’d had her over for dinner the night before.”
Dr. Thibodeau said all this raised some other possibilities. She herself had noticed a stiffness in his gait, and also that he still had a good command of language.
“Most of the time,” Sylvia said.
“Yes. And some of these symptoms are a bit different from Alzheimer’s. So it’s possible it’s a disease called Lewy body disease.”
“Is that better? Is it curable?”
“No. No, not really. It presents differently, but the course is similarly downhill. It’s just, if it’s Lewy body, he’ll have days when he seems better suddenly. Or even quick switches in and out in a short period of time. But ultimately a slow decline, just like Alzheimer’s.”
They sat silently for a moment. “I’m so sorry,” Dr. Thibodeau said.
“Yes,” Sylvia said, getting up.
As she left the room, her eye fell on the drawing, Alfie’s drawing of the clock face. It was a rough circle, more an oval, actually, with an uneven, almost deckled edge. Only the top-right quarter of the oval was filled in, an X at 12 and a Roman numeral I about where the 3 would have been. There was a wavering arrow on the left-hand side, somewhere between where the 9 and the 10 might have been. It looked as though a three-year-old had drawn it. Her shock was almost physical.
In the car, Alfie seemed both relaxed and tired, suddenly, and Sylvia decided she wouldn’t go shopping at the supermarket, which was what she had planned. There was enough stuff in the house. She could just stop at Snell’s for what she’d need to tide them over for a day or two. She was mentally reviewing the contents of the pantry and the refrigerator for possible meals when Alfie spoke.
“That young woman,” he said. “What is it that she’s studying?”
“Something about memory.”
“I’m afraid I wasn’t of much help to her,” he said.
“Oh, I think you were, some.”
“I’m surprised you didn’t tell her that’s not my field.”
She ignored his tone. “I don’t think that mattered very much. She said she’d be able to make use of some of it, anyway.”
“Well.” He settled back again. “Good.”
By the time they got to Snell’s, he was asleep, his head dropped forward, his hands resting on his thighs, palms turned up. As she turned off the engine, she wondered what to do about him. She didn’t want to take him in with her, newly awakened, bewildered, and have him traipsing behind her in that state for all to see. But would he be confused if he woke out here on his own? Wonder where he was? Leave the car? After a moment she decided it was better to leave him and trust—hope—that if he woke, he’d recognize Snell’s and know that he should wait for her.
She got out of the car slowly—sneakily, she said to herself—and shut the door as quietly as she could behind her, latching it only partially. She mounted the broad, scuffed wooden steps and went inside, the bell attached to the door announcing h
er.
There were four or five people moving around inside the store. Adrian was working the cash register, and she felt the slight sense of unease she always had at the idea of an encounter with him. He was standing, arms folded across his chest, talking to Loren Spader. They both turned and nodded at her as she came in. She raised her hand in response, and they returned to their conversation. Spader’s loud voice could be heard again as she moved to the back of the store to get milk. He was expounding on his theories about arson, the unavoidable topic everywhere in town. “Just you wait,” he said. “He’ll do his own house eventually, that’s what this is all heading toward, and then who’s going to suspect anything? He’ll be just one of the crowd of victims collecting damages.”
Adrian murmured something, and they both laughed. Then she heard Loren calling good-bye to Harlan Early, who was shelving things close to where she was standing. Harlan called back. The bell on the door jangled again as it shut behind Loren.
Sylvia collected coffee, milk, bananas, oatmeal, and went to the register. Adrian bowed his head once to her. “Sylvia,” he said, and started to reach for her groceries as she set them down.
His hands moved quickly, smoothly, touching the items, punching in numbers. Without looking at her, he said, “Alfie got himself a gun yet?” There was something mocking in his tone, making fun of the notion of Alfie, the city boy, being able to use a weapon.
It annoyed Sylvia on Alfie’s behalf. “Why would he get a gun?” she said. “He’s not going to shoot anyone.”
“I’m planning to.” There was a satisfied smirk on his face. “I’ve got one right by my bed. The guy gets near my house, the sensor lights go on, and boom! he’s dead.”
“Hmm. Remind me not to come calling on you at night.”
His hand stilled. There was a long pause. Adrian was looking at Sylvia, looking at her as he hadn’t in perhaps fifty years—directly, honestly. His eyes were the same, the pretty, gentle bluish gray, and she remembered her feelings for him then, all of them.
When he spoke again, his voice was lowered, soft. “I don’t need to remind you of that, Sylvie,” he said.
And then he turned back to the cash register, his hands moved again, he pushed her groceries past him, and rang up what she owed him.
11
THE SEVENTH FIRE BEGAN on the front porch of the Froelichs’ house. It consumed the rug that sat just outside the door for people to wipe their feet on, and then a rag rug that sat just inside, redundantly—both of them soaked with the lighter fluid that had been squirted around on the porch and through the gap underneath the door. Inside, the fire hesitated a bit, licking the drops that had sprayed out beyond the doormat, and then it leaped over to the larger straw rug that sat under the living room furniture. It ate this slowly and then began hesitantly on the couch, producing mostly just a slowly thickening, dark, roiling smoke.
There was a second fire at work in the dining room, started soon after the first. It flared up at the windows, where the fluid had been splashed in through the screens—the Froelichs had forgotten to close those windows in their rush to get to a dinner party they were late for. She had been angry at him because he’d come home messy and well past the hour he’d promised to return, wanting to show her the fish he’d caught; so the windows were, as she explained later, the last thing on her mind. She’d done well to remember to shut the dog into the little study under the stairs where he stayed when they were out—though she came to regret that deeply, since that was where he suffocated.
The fire rode the sheer dining room curtains to the ceiling, where it turned, flattened against the plaster surface, and made its way sideways, searching out the oxygen at the open stairwell, beckoning the living room fire to follow it. It rushed up the stairs, lighting the curtains at the staggered windows in the stairwell that looked out over the Froelichs’ driveway to the dirt road in front of the house.
Where Franklin Goodyear, known to the teenagers in town as the Goodyear Blimp, was driving by on his rounds as a volunteer patrolman and saw it. He stopped his car, got out, and walked up toward the house and the flames flickering in the stairwell windows. He stood there stupidly for some seconds—he’d never seen a house burning before, and it had, he thought, a certain beauty—and then turned and ran back, drove fast to the next house down the road, the Edmondses’. He drove directly across their lawn to the back door and banged on it. Margaret Edmonds heard him, though Shelley did not, something that confirmed for her again that he was going deaf. She stopped briefly at the hall mirror to pat her hair in place and went to the door. When she opened it, Franklin Goodyear gestured wildly. “Your phone, your phone, your phone. Where is it? There’s another fire!”
The first firemen arrived within fifteen minutes, and though the damage was considerable, the house wasn’t destroyed. It lived to tell the tale, as Davey Swann said. The state arson squad was able to say with assurance that yes, this one had been set.
But Bud had barely written that story when the eighth fire occurred, this one in Marjorie Griffith’s tiny writing studio, up a long driveway in the woods, its slow burning invisible until it was nothing but a charred pit in the ground. “I think he decided the seventh one was too close to the road, too easy to spot,” Davey said. This, too, was in the July 18 issue of the Pomeroy Union.
“All eight of these fires are now presumed to be arson by local police and state arson officials, as are the earlier brushfires of the spring,” Bud had written. “According to Fire Chief Davey Swann there’s a distinct pattern that’s emerged over time. Most of the fires seem to be carefully planned for maximum property damage and minimal loss of life, the fire at the Coolidge house being the major exception. ‘In almost every one of these fires there was no one home at the time and we’re grateful for that,’ Swann says. ‘But that also means there’s no one there to report it and so we’ve got us less of a chance to put it out.’
“Last, all these fires have occurred in summer homes, the homes of people who don’t live in Pomeroy year-round. Whether this is because there’s a greater chance of no one’s being home in one of the houses of a part-time resident or because the summer residents are being singled out is something Swann doesn’t care to speculate on. ‘Someone lots smarter than me’s going to have to figure that one out,’ he says modestly. ‘All I know is, I’d get up here fast if I lived somewhere else, and I’d stay put for the rest of the summer.’ ”
What he’d actually said was “I’d get my goddamn summer ass up here fast,” but Bud didn’t feel obliged to quote him entirely.
“The state police are more willing to speculate,” Bud had written. “A source there who wishes to remain anonymous told your reporter that the divide between year-round and summer residents could offer a possible motivation for what otherwise seems a series of motiveless crimes. ‘It could be that there’s some kind of resentment at the heart of this. Class resentment.’ ”
Bud had gone on to write up the officer’s other theories, too. Insurance was one, “though we’re getting kind of beyond the pale for that with the numbers of fires you got here.” Some sort of land grab was another possibility. The trooper also mentioned his personal theory about the widespread pyromania of volunteer firefighters. “Half of them are nuts. It’s a well-known fact.”
Bud had mentioned this notion to Davey Swann to get his response. Davey said he was certain that his firefighters would be willing, “to a man,” he said, to take lie-detector tests. Bud quoted this in the article, too.
“I’m here to drop off the paper,” he said. He’d been parked in his car outside her house—her sister’s house—for about twenty minutes, passing the time by reading the New York Times. He’d told himself he could stay for half an hour, and here she was, with time to spare. He got out when he saw her coming down the hill, walking slowly through the long grass. The sun was in her face, so he wasn’t sure she saw him until she stopped partway down the hill, as if startled, and then, apparently recognizing him, started down ag
ain, a smile altering her face.
“That’s very kind of you,” she said now. Her hair was wet, in ringlets. She was wearing jeans and a big shirt, unbuttoned. It flapped open to reveal a black bathing suit. She carried a towel draped over one shoulder. “But I thought the deal was I was going to find the paper waiting on the porch.”
“Well, I tossed it, but I missed the porch.”
She grinned. “But I’d never have known that if you just got out and put it on the porch.”
“Then I thought I’d say hello,” he said. “You’ve been swimming?”
“My parents’ pond.” She gestured behind her. “I’m the only one who uses it, now that my sister and her kids are gone.”
They stood a moment. There was a pleasant, slightly algal smell coming from her. He said, “I wanted to ask if you’d seen Loren again, among other things.”
“I have. I should have told you.” She said he’d stopped by only two days before with a series of photographs, clearly taken by Loren himself with a not-very-good camera—shots of cars parked in a variety of situations. One, she said, was in a yard full of discarded junk and startled-looking dogs. One was in a driveway. One, slightly blurry, was taken on a road, the top of Loren’s dashboard visible in the foreground.
“I was not helpful, I’m afraid. Any one of them could have been the car I saw. I mean, they all had a version of the slant I sort of remember. I couldn’t really distinguish between them. Among them. There was only one I knew for sure wasn’t the right car.”
“Well, maybe it gave him something to start on.”
A little silence fell between them, and he was suddenly aware of the noises in the air—the faint stirring of the trees, distant birds calling. Abruptly she asked him if he wanted to come in.
“Sure. I confess I’ve been curious about this house, watching it go up.”
She led the way onto the open porch. She opened the door and indicated that he should precede her. He stepped directly into a large, open room, partially finished, the walls striped and dotted with dried white joint compound. The furniture was clearly secondhand, but somehow charming to him in its improvisational quality. A floppy bouquet sat in the middle of the table in a glass jar, small blue and white flowers. “This is pretty much it,” she said. “Two bedrooms there.” She pointed to a little hallway, an opening off the big room. There was a bathroom straight ahead, the door open to reveal an old sink suspended from the wall. He could also see partway into one of the bedrooms, just the Sheetrock wall lit by sunlight.