Allie and I hope Dean’s with you.”
“Oh, he is. He is. He’s on his way in even as we speak, Jane. You’d better hurry before the cab leaves. Down the hall, and take a right.”
That would take them to the locked door.
Jane blinked, the lights in her eyes went out, and she turned to her companions. “We’d better hurry, ladies. You heard the honey here. The cab may leave without us.”
And they shuffled up the hall, twittering among themselves.
Not long after Allie had moved her father into Lakeview, Jane Russell had come on to him. She had goosed him during a facility event and, later that night, a nurse had found her humping him in his bed as he slept on, oblivious to her overtures. Allie figured that in her day Jane had been quite a hot ticket, a lady about town with money to burn and a creature of her appetites, rather like Allie herself. But now Jane was deep in the throes of Alzheimer’s, her slender hips wrapped in diapers, committed by her son, who had then stolen her money.
And she wasn’t the exception. Her father, God bless him, was surrounded by nutcases like Jane Russell. No wonder he rarely had a coherent thought.
Allie hastened down the hall to avoid any more residents who recognized her—not as who she was, but just as a friendly face in the crowd, someone sympathetic to their cause, whatever that might be. A cab into Manhattan. A way out of the nuthouse. A large penis for some rest and relaxation. Welcome to the Alzheimer’s wing of Lakeview, the place where men and women went quietly mad during the final years of their lives.
Room 33 was her father’s. The staff had made a beautiful wooden sign with his name engraved on it—BILL CURRY, M.D.—that hung on the door. Next to it on the wall hung a shadow box filled with photographs of his life, one of the techniques used with Alzheimer’s patients to stimulate their memories. It didn’t seem to have much impact on her father.
She pushed open the door with her foot, already aware that he wouldn’t remember she had been here for hours. “Hey, Dad, I’ve brought you some food.”
The man who lay on the bed, an arm flung over his eyes, lifted his elbow and peeked out at her. “Who’re you?”
“Your daughter,” she replied, and set the tray on the bedside table.
“Hey, you’re pretty” He raised up.
He wore boxer shorts and a silk shirt with a tie. His feet were bare. But his hair was still thick and white, and when he was dressed properly, he looked like the father she remembered, a strapping man, six foot three, broad-shouldered and handsome. The apple of her mother’s eye.
But right now, he looked like what he was, a seventy-four-year-old man whose lights had gone out. A shell of a man.
“I’ve got some clam chowder, scrambled eggs, rye bread toasted just the way you like it.”
“Not hungry,” he said petulantly.
“Of course you are.”
Allie helped him swing his legs around so he was now sitting up. He blinked his rheumy eyes, cocked his head as though listening to something she couldn’t hear, and said, “Mother’s here.”
Mother was Allie’s mother, not her father’s mother, not her grandmother. Her parents, in their later years together, had called each other by the roles in which they knew each other best: Mother and Father, as though these words were their names.
“Really. And where is she?” Allie asked, tucking a napkin into the throat of her father’s silk shirt.
“Sitting next to me.”
“Uh-huh.” She dipped the spoon into the chowder. “And what’s she got to say for herself?”
“She’s very annoyed with you.”
“And why is that?”
“She says you know exactly why.”
“Oh? And what’s she say, Dad?”
He cocked his head, as if listening. “The Dean business.”
Just then, Allie felt a chilly breath of air on the back of her neck, as though someone were behind her, blowing on the back of her neck, and she suddenly thought of the shape she had seen next to Mira’s bed and how Mira had spoken to her in what sounded like Dean’s voice. Don’t do it, Al. Not in my name. She obviously had imagined the entire thing, just as she now imagined that someone was blowing on the back of her neck. She looked around, but of course no one was there.
She rubbed her hand across the back of her neck, unable to shake off the eerie sensation that his remark had evoked in her.
“Who am I, Dad?”
“Our daughter. Allie. Firstborn.”
Well, the lights had come on. She got several spoonfuls of chowder into his mouth. “And who’re your other kids, Dad?”
“Ray, Keith, and Dean.” He took the spoon from her, dished it into the bowl she held, and brought the spoon upward, missing his mouth entirely. The chowder dribbled down his chin, his neck, onto the napkin that covered the front of the shirt. “I never see the others. They don’t visit me.” And then he began to cry. “Can’t do shit anymore. Can’t remember. Useless.”
Allie sat back, struggling to ignore his tears, the agony in his voice, the chowder that dripped down his chin. “Don’t cry, Daddy,” she said softly, and wiped gently at his chin, his jaw, the front of his shirt. “Hey, you know who I saw? Jane Russell. She and her cronies are on their way to the Manhattan theater district. They were looking for a cab.”
A year ago, she and her father used to laugh about Jane Russell and her buddies. He called them “inmates.” Now he frowned, his brow wrinkled like the skin of a prune. “Who’s Jane Russell?”
“Oh, just a silly woman,” she replied, struggling to keep her voice light, casual. “I think we should go out as soon as you finish lunch, Dad.”
“I never go out anymore,” he murmured, and opened his mouth like a small, hungry bird.
It took her a while to get him cleaned up and dressed in street clothes. Thank God he was still mobile and she didn’t have to get him to a walker or into a wheelchair. All the years he had spent swimming his three or four miles a day in the family pool in Miami had paid off with mobility and a minimum of other health problems. His joints, eyesight, lungs, heart, kidneys, and liver were all in good condition. Only his brain, the organ he had valued most, was damaged.
In the beginning, when she first noticed how forgetful he was becoming, Allie had put him on Aricept, the so-called wonder drug for Alzheimer’s in the 1990s, and had sent him to a chelation clinic twice a week. She had prescribed a strict regimen of vitamins and minerals and had hired a cook to prepare gourmet vegetarian meals. The combination of traditional and alternative medicine had arrested the progress of the disease. But in the end the disease had won, it usually did. She supposed there were Alzheimer’s patients who had gone into remission, but she hadn’t met one. Now here they were, she and her father, six years down the road, her mother dead, her only living sibling unavailable, and her own life trapped in chaos.
Drive, she thought, and drove—out of Savannah, away from the nursing home. She headed east toward Tybee Island, a spit of sand in the outer banks, a place she had called home for fifteen years. It wasn’t the paradise she had known as a kid, when she and her family used to come up here for the summers, to the house where she now lived. Developers had moved in, walled communities had gone up, dirt roads had been paved, and Hollywood had discovered the place.
Celebrities usually spelled the kiss of death. Sandra Bullock had a home on Tybee and no telling who would be next: Keanu Reeves in his wraparound shades and long leather coat, Russell Crowe fighting gladiators and lions, Julia Roberts with her eighteenth husband. Her dad, of course, wasn’t aware of the changes. Or, if he was, he didn’t comment. His face was turned toward the open window, where the cool air carried the rich, complex smells of the salt marsh. Her father loved the marsh, always had, and at the moment everything about it seemed wonderful to her, too.
The weather was dear, sunny, with a temp of about forty, twenty degrees warmer than Prescott. No snow, just the usual line of tourist traffic, snaking across the string of islands and bri
dges, practically unchanged since she was a kid.
The house where she lived, where she had visited every summer out of her first sixteen or so, had been a cabin in those days, three rooms and a kitchen barely large enough for the family and the pets that accompanied them. She and her brothers had fished from the rear dock, had rowed their rickety vessels into the marsh at high tide, and had walked the soggy marsh at low tide. They had rescued birds, stray cats, and had gone swimming with wild dolphins that had cruised along the shores of the island. When she thought of summer, she thought of these experiences, of the days before Ray had come along, when her family had been whole.
“Dad, how’re you doing?”
“Oh, fine, fine,” he said, his eyes still on the passing marsh. “I don’t recognize shit. But it smells wonderful, doesn’t it?”
“It really does. Are you cold? Should I shut the windows?”
“Only if you want to lose your hands.” He laughed as he said it, something from the old days, when he was her father and not a patient.
May I touch it, Daddy? She would ask her father about some bug or flower or tree they saw on their nature outings.
Only if you want to lose your hands.
She laughed, too, and for a few moments she enjoyed the illusion that she was twelve and he was healthy.
“We should put the leather on the stove,” he said suddenly, and glanced over at her, worried.
“What?”
“My feet are cold.”
The window of clarity, she thought, was closing. Welcome to the world of Alzheimer’s. Allie turned on the heat and the floor blower. “What do you remember about Dean, Daddy?”
“Dean ate a bean. Dean was lean. Dean was seen.” He slapped his thigh and laughed and laughed.
“What about Ray?”
“Ray’s the day. Ray went away.” He sniffled and began to sob.
Allie passed him a pack of Kleenex and he busied himself with it, blowing his nose, wiping his eyes, then tearing the tissue to shreds. And when there was nothing left to tear and bits of Kleenex blew around the inside of the car like snow, his fingers worried at his jeans, pinching, smoothing, rubbing.
She had to make one stop before Tybee, a ramshackle restaurant on the water. She pulled into the dusty lot and parked at the back. “Dad, stay here, okay? I’ll be right back.”
“Here, dear,” he replied. “I smell food.”
“It’s from YoYo’s on the Marsh. We’ve eaten here a lot, remember?”
“Oh, sure,” he replied vaguely, and she knew he didn’t remember at all.
“Just stay put. I’ll be back in five minutes. Promise?” “Uh-huh.”
Allie got out and went up to the scratched wooden rear door. She rapped three times and when it opened, the chain was on and a bearded man with bloodshot eyes peered out. “Yeah?”
“I’m here to see YoYo.”
“And you are?”
“Allie,” she said.
“YoYo,” the man shouted. “Allie’s here to see you.”
“Let her in,” a voice called back.
“Hold on.” He shut the door, the chain clattered, then the door opened just wide enough for her to slip inside.
The room was meticulously tidy, with half a dozen computers set up against the far wall, and every available space taken up by shelves that held machine parts of every type and shape and variety. Speakers were mounted at the four corners of the room and early Beatles music surrounded her. At the far end of the room, a man in a wheelchair turned around and waved at Allie.
From the waist up, YoYo was a handsome, muscular man in his early forties, with a winning smile, frizzy dark hair, and tragic eyes. From the waist down, he looked ancient, used up, with shriveled legs that had been misshapen since birth. Allie had met him in the ER several years ago, when he had been brought in after a boating accident. She had saved his life and YoYo, being the kind of guy he was, had felt permanently indebted to her.
“Doc, just finishing up.” He gestured her over. “Take a look.”
Allie made her way between endless shelves of boating equipment, old computers and monitors, car engines, transmissions, and all the other stuff that YoYo fixed. He also owned the restaurant, but his first love was his repair shop.
She paused next to his wheelchair. From a drawer in a desk, he brought out her original passport, smoothed it open. “Now here’s the new one.” He plucked a duplicate from a shelf, smoothed it open. “Pretty damn good, huh?”
Allie picked up both passports, studying one, then the other. The original had her married name on it: Allison Hart. The new one identified her as Sandra Bedford. And Sandra had short reddish hair and dark eyes, the result of a wig and contacts that she’d worn the day YoYo had taken her photo. “Fantastic,” she said.
“I have to admit, Doc, I like you better with long hair.”
“Yeah, me too.”
“And here’s a license in Sandra’s name.”
“This is great, YoYo. I can’t thank you enough.” She reached into her bag and brought out five grand in cash and three bottles of Quaaludes. “I think this is what we agreed on.”
He gently kissed the back of her hand, then took the ‘ludes, counted out three grand, and handed it back to her. “I can’t charge you the full price. So when’re you leaving?”
“I may not.” Leaving belonged with Plan B and High Springs and at the moment she was sticking with Plan A. “But I want to be prepared. You know how it is. If Dad passes away anytime soon, I just want to disappear.”
“I hear you, Doc.”
“How’re your legs behaving these days? You still have pain?”
“Now and then. But the acupuncture has helped. And the ‘ludes,” he added with a grin.
Allie dropped both passports and the new license in her bag. “You take care, YoYo.” She hugged him quickly and left.
Her father wasn’t in the car. He was strolling along the seawall, hands in his pockets, an old guy out for his daily constitution. Allie hurried after him. “Dad, c’mon, you need to get in the car.” She took his arm and he yanked it free.
“Who’re you?” he demanded.
“Dad, it’s me, Allie. Your firstborn. Remember?”
The light winked on in his eyes. “Oh.” He laughed. “Allie. You left me, honey. Why’d you do that?”
“I’m here now, Dad. C’mon, let’s get in the car.”
“Love the smell of the air here,” he remarked, sniffing at the air like a dog.
She got her dad back into the Rover, then drove onward toward Tybee, worried about what her dad would do if she had to implement Plan B. Money for his care wouldn’t be an issue and she could hire someone to come in once or twice a week to take him out. But it wasn’t the same thing as family. With luck, though, it wouldn’t come to that, she wouldn’t need this passport or the license. Those items weren’t in the current pattern. She just wanted to return to her job, to her house on Tybee, and continue on with her life, her brother’s death vindicated.
But she had to be prepared.
And why’s it so important, Allie? asked a small, niggling voice within. Why’s it so important to vindicate Dean’s death? Because.
She shook the thought away and turned right on Campbell Street, a narrow road wedged between two salt marshes. It was shaded by huge trees that rose on either side, their lush branches reaching out across the asphalt, as if to shake hands. The homes along here were old, set back from the road, and everyone who lived here knew everyone else. At the very end of the street, a gate and wall had been erected, and behind it lay an expensive development, one of the least attractive signs of progress and development on the island.
As she turned into the driveway of 192, her father leaned forward and peered through the windshield. “Lori should be home now. She was going shopping.”
Lori was Allie’s mother, dead now for years. But she wasn’t about to remind him of that. It would only bring on more tears. She felt mildly encouraged that he seemed to
recognize the house, that he associated it with her mother.
“I thought you might like to sit out on the back porch for a while, in the sun. It should be comfortable out there. The tide will be high now. I’ll get you the fishing pole.”
“What’s running these days?”
“I don’t really know, Dad. I don’t fish much.”
“Hey, Doc, good to see you,” someone called from the road.
Allie glanced around and saw Fred Pringle, the elderly neighbor who had lived here forever and watched the house while she was gone. “Hi, Freddie. I brought Dad out to fish a little.”
Old man Pringle hurried over, his cat trotting alongside him like a dog. “Bill, good to see you, good to see you.”
Her father smiled and nodded and said hello, but Allie could tell by the expression on his face that he didn’t have a clue who Pringle was.
“Got some mail for you, Doc. Left it on the kitchen table. You back for good now?”
“No. I’m going back to the mountains to finish up my vacation. I just took a day out to see Dad.”
“He don’t remember me,” Pringle said quietly, watching her father as he made his way through the side yard.
“It’s nothing personal. Most days he doesn’t remember me, either. Could you keep bringing in the mail till I get back?”
“Sure thing. You still returning after the new year?”
“Probably around the second of January.” Unless I go to Plan B.
“You two enjoy your visit, Doc.”
The stilted wooden house had changed somewhat over the years. Allie had put on a second story, adding two rooms, a second bath, and a balcony, and she had enclosed the downstairs porch in glass, making it a sunroom. Here were her herbs, her magical garden, which old man Pringle watered for her when she was gone. The dock where she took her father jutted out into the salt marsh, an alien, self-contained world of tall reeds and grasses, where water from the Atlantic rose and fell with the same rhythms that powered the oceans. Birds swooped through the light, gulls shrieked and pin-wheeled against the soft blue sky.
Total Silence Page 20