Shadow Image

by Martin J. Smith

  “Pegasus,” he said.

  Her hand stopped moving, but only for a moment, then she daubed her brush tip back into the water bowl. She dipped it then into the purple. “Gray,” she said.

  Christensen waited, hoping his reverent communion might build trust. A full minute of silence passed. “You paint very well, Mrs. Underhill,” he prompted. “Can you tell me about this picture?”

  “These paints won’t stay where I put ’em,” she said. “Run all over the damned page.” Her hand moved toward her sun without so much as a tremor. She sat forward in her wheelchair and put her right elbow on the wheelchair’s arm. Across the bleached sun, she sketched a pattern that left a pale trail of diluted purple. The resulting image looked like a melted hood ornament.

  “Are those letters in the circle, or numbers?” he asked.

  She turned slightly toward him, grimacing from the effort. Despite the injuries, despite her years, Floss Underhill was a beautiful woman. Her white hair was pulled into a tight French twist, and he wondered briefly if that or cosmetic surgery might explain the girlish smoothness around her clear blue eyes.

  “You’re Spencer Crean’s boy, Parker,” she said. “Take off that mask.”

  “They told me not to, Mrs. Underhill. Sorry.”

  “You grew a beard, I can tell. For the life of me I can’t see why. They just look like hell, beards. Women don’t like ’em.” Her face suddenly was full of mischief. “You know why, don’t you?”

  Christensen shook his head. She reached out with her right hand, hooked a finger in his shirt pocket and pulled him closer. He caught a whiff of good tobacco.

  “They scratch our thighs,” she said.

  He pulled away, a startled reflex. She winked, then laughed out loud, a deep throaty thing that was part Bette Davis, part Harley-Davidson. She dipped her brush in the purple again and retraced the lines she had sketched earlier across the face of the sun. The shapes were letters, two apparently, but blended in a way that they shared an upright leg.

  “Your parents still have that mare, Sophie, the chestnut with the one white foreleg?” she said. “God, she was something. Took Warren a month just to get her to take a bit.”

  “No, I’m Jim Christensen, Mrs. Underhill, from the Harmony Center. We met in Maura Pearson’s art class. I came by to visit you here at Mount Mercy.”

  “She nearly broke Warren, that one did. Cranky old fart deserved it, too. I don’t care if he is the best goddamned trainer on earth. If I had a dime for every time I caught him cheating at gin rummy—” Her voice trailed off.

  “You’d be rich?” he prompted.

  “I am rich.”

  Christensen laughed. “No, ma’am, you were talking about someone named Warren.”

  She thought about that. “Know how to tell if a man’s a good stable manager?” she said suddenly. “Take a comb, see. Show up at the stables without calling, middle of the day maybe. Don’t let him know you’re coming. Then try to run that comb through your horse’s tail. It’s real simple: The comb snags, you need a new stable manager. The good ones use conditioner. Every day.”

  “Warren was a good one?”

  “The man knew horses like I don’t know what.” Another wink. “Women, too.”

  “Really?” Christensen stifled a smile. This was a side of Floss Underhill he never expected to see, or even imagined.

  “Really.”

  She turned back to her drawing pad, fixing her eyes for a long time on the winged horse at its center. “Warren took Gray away,” she said. “Still can’t figure it. He wasn’t even out that day.”

  Christensen reached an index finger toward the center of the drawing pad. “Gray, that’s the horse with the wings?”

  “Gray could fly,” she said. “Me, too.”

  Christensen caught another whiff of tobacco. The smell seemed especially intense here, in a hospital room where smoking was presumably not allowed. “Mrs. Underhill, have you been smoking?”

  She worked her hand into a pocket of her robe and pulled out something dark and foul. The remains of a cigar as thick as his thumb. As quickly as she pulled it out, though, she thrust it back in. “Macanudo Jamaica,” she said. “Almost Cuban, but don’t tell that man.”

  “What man?”

  She pointed her paintbrush over Christensen’s left shoulder. “That man,” she said. “Old bastard won’t let me smoke.”

  Christensen whirled around, startled to see that they were not alone. Vincent Underhill filled the room’s doorway, his face instantly recognizable even thirty years after he left public office. The hair was whiter, the jawline less chiseled than before, but the former governor was an indelible part of Christensen’s memory, though not, apparently, a part of his demented wife’s. Flustered, Christensen stood up and extended a hand. He pulled it back when it went unshaken.

  “We told you people no paints,” Underhill said.

  Christensen still felt a need to introduce himself. “I’m—”

  “We were very clear on that, as well as on the cigars.” The former governor was fully in the room now. He turned away from Christensen for the moment and patted his wife’s good arm. “Good morning, Miss Florence. Sleep well?”

  Floss seemed to appraise him. “I slept fine. You a doctor?”

  Vincent Underhill offered a tight smile, gave his wife’s arm a little squeeze. With his other hand, he gently plucked the paintbrush from her. He snapped the metal lid of the paint set closed and handed the box and the brush to Christensen.

  “Hey,” Floss protested.

  Underhill studied the watercolor image on his wife’s drawing pad, then took the pad, too. He closed it, but that he kept. He tossed it onto the bed, away from Christensen, who wondered if, because of his mask, he’d been mistaken for a hospital staffer. He caught Underhill’s eyes searching his chest for a name tag.

  “Actually, the art work is very therapeutic,” he said. “It’ll help with her fine motor skills, and some people think it’s a way for her to connect with some of her lost memories.”

  Christensen couldn’t interpret Underhill’s impassive face, so he continued. “And you probably know about the nicotine studies, how even one cigarette can improve communication between the neurons and the hippocampus. That’s the learning and memory part of the brain.” Still no reaction. Christensen, nervous, rushed to fill the silence. “So, actually, in terms of recall, she may be one of the few people who actually should smoke. No one’s quite sure why it works that way, just that it does. So—”

  “Let me be very clear about this,” Underhill interrupted. His voice was stern but not hostile, a teacher talking to a misguided student. “From now on, please see to it that our family’s wishes are followed. No paints. No cigars.”

  “But the cigars might—”

  Underhill turned away, busying himself with the remains of his wife’s last meal. Christensen surrendered. He still had his anonymity, at least. If he left now, there’d be no awkward explanation of why a marginally involved memory researcher from the Harmony Center was in the private hospital suite of a woman he barely knew.

  “Sorry for the oversight,” he said.

  Vincent Underhill nodded his absolution. “Now if you’ll excuse us, I’d like to spend some time alone with my wife.”

  “You’re not a doctor, then?” Floss said to her husband. “I’m confused.”

  Christensen found the hall a welcome relief. A different nurse, a woman, was at the nurse’s station, but she was on the phone. He set the paint set and brush on the counter without a word or even a wave, and headed for the elevator. He didn’t take off the mask until he got to the parking-lot exit, and then only because the nervous attendant put his hands in the air.

  Chapter 11<
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  The Harmony Brain Research Center was an unappreciated marvel of futuristic architecture hidden like some roosting alien craft in the hills of O’Hara township, just northeast of the city. In miles, it wasn’t far from their new house in Shadyside, but it was, as Pittsburgh natives said, “across the river.” In this case, it was just on the north side of the Allegheny River, removed from the cities and townships crowded into the irregular wedge of land between the Allegheny to the north and the Monongahela River to the south. But in parochial Pittsburgh, the phrase “across the river” was much more than a geographic truism. It suggested some far-off and exotic destination, someplace other than where you belonged.

  Even if you were in the vicinity, Harmony wasn’t the kind of place you visited without a reason. You came only if Alzheimer’s had flared somewhere in your family. In the two months he’d spent doing research there, Christensen had begun regarding the center as the pleasant but inevitable terminus of a thousand slow-motion tragedies.

  He nosed the Explorer up the serpentine drive, rapping out a rhythm on the steering wheel. A nervous habit. He’d willed himself to stop twice already, but he started again each time he thought about Vincent Underhill. What was that about? He tried again to think of reasons why the man would object to his wife’s painting, or to having an occasional cigar that could only goose her faulty synapses and improve her memory function, but Underhill’s genteel hostility had him curious. He knew the family was sensitive to the plight of Alzheimer’s victims—its generous support of Harmony and deep involvement in Floss’s care demonstrated that. Maybe since Christensen was relatively new at Harmony, he didn’t yet have a good grasp of the family dynamics of Alzheimer’s. Or maybe, while monitoring Maura Pearson’s art classes, he’d just overlooked the Underhill family’s resistance to certain activities.

  Still.

  He’d been assigned a temporary spot in the staff parking lot about as far from the entrance as was possible, and he wheeled the Explorer into it at full speed. The front tires bounced off the concrete wheel-stop. He turned off the engine and drew a deep breath. After five more, he opened the driver’s-side door for the long walk. By the time the automated lobby door swished open, he’d decided his first stop was going to be Pearson’s office. She’d dealt with the Underhills for at least two years. She could help him understand what had happened back there.

  “Got a minute?” he said, poking his head around the edge of her open door.

  The art therapist was hunched over her desk in an office that reminded him of a landfill. She looked a lot like Janet Reno after Waco—large and ungainly, desperately preoccupied, a woman who, unlike the Clinton administration’s attorney general, was seemingly anchored to the planet by the ridiculously overstyled Air Jordan basketball shoes she insisted on wearing with the laces undone. At the moment, she was peering through her black horn-rimmed glasses at the palm of her hand, where something brown was squirming.

  “Take the shade off my desk lamp and hold it over him,” she said, nodding toward the wriggling brown thing. “Quick.”

  Christensen pushed his way into the small office, set his briefcase on one of the chairs, and did as he was told. “That’s a mouse,” he said, peering into her palm.

  “Gerbillus perpallidus,” Pearson said. “Hand me those fingernail clippers.”

  The creature was on its back. She was holding it in place with her right thumb, which was wedged firmly against the underside of the gerbil’s chin. Its long tail whipped madly at her wrist as its bony feet scrabbled for leverage.

  Christensen was nearly dumbstruck, and not just because he hated mice. “Gerbil manicure?” he managed.

  Pearson looked up and snorted, the kind of laugh that would embarrass most people. “Yeah, right,” she said, and snorted again. “See those?”

  She pointed her left index finger at the rodent’s yellow front teeth, which jutted over her thumbnail like two half-inch strands of uncooked spaghetti. “If you don’t clip ’em, they get so long the poor things can’t eat.”

  “Maura,” he said, “it’s God’s plan. They shouldn’t exist in the first place. He’s just correcting a mistake.”

  The oral surgery took only a second, reducing the length of the gerbil’s teeth by half. Pearson returned her patient to a mound of cedar chips at the bottom of an aquarium on her bookshelf, then rummaged through her desk’s lap drawer. She found a packaged antiseptic wipe, tore it open, and rubbed it between her hands.

  “Pet-store food isn’t rough enough to wear them down, and chew blocks upset his stomach,” she said. “This works fine. You coming to the opening?”

  A conversation with Pearson could be as hard to follow as a conversation with one of her demented art students. “The opening?” he said.

  She looked exasperated. “The Once-Lost Images exhibit? The Sofa Factory?”

  “I’m sorry. Of course. That’s this week?”

  “The calendars just came back from the printer,” she said. “Want one?”

  Pearson clomped over to a box on her windowsill and pulled a glossy hanging calendar from inside. Its cover read “Once-Lost Images: The Visual Imagery of Alzheimer’s Patients”—the latest fundraising premium for the Three Rivers Alzheimer’s Association. The calendars were to be sold at the first public exhibit of art produced in Pearson’s class at Harmony.

  She offered one across her desk. “You’ve probably seen some of these pieces, but the calendar turned out great.”

  Christensen fanned the pages. He recognized some of the paintings, but he was struck again by their power. Coupled with the artist’s chosen title and description, the images offered eloquent testimony to remembered moments and forgotten feelings. He looked at the painting on the calendar cover: five flowers around a woman’s crude self-portrait, with one dark flower off in the upper left corner of the canvas. The artist, now dead, was a mother of five who lost a sixth child at birth. She’d titled the piece My Beautiful Garden.

  “It’s so damned easy to forget the feelings that are still inside them,” Christensen said. “All those memories. All that emotion. That’s the beauty of what you do, Maura. The art’s like a taproot into all that stuff. You give them a way to express some really profound stuff that their brain just won’t let them understand. It gives them a voice.”

  Pearson looked away, typically uncomfortable with his compliment.

  “Assume you heard about Floss Underhill,” he said, looking for a place to sit. He settled finally on the arm of a chair stacked with boxes of modeling clay.

  “Poor thing,” Pearson said, “but she’s a tough old bird. I’d be surprised if she’s out a full week. There’s a card going around. You should sign it.”

  “Where is it?”

  “I’ll have it for the class to sign later. Do it then.”

  Christensen eyed the gerbil, whose recovery seemed complete and instantaneous. How high were the sides of that aquarium? Could gerbils jump?

  “Actually, I stopped to say hello to her at Mount Mercy on my way here this morning,” he said. “You’ll be happy to know she was painting when I got there.”

  “Phillip came through, then.”

  “Phillip?”

  “Doctor friend. I asked him to take her some watercolors, just in case she had something to say. So she got them?”

  “Well,” he said, “she had them.”

  Pearson peered over the top of her glasses.

  Christensen shrugged. “Her husband didn’t want her to have any paints. Pretty strange scene, really. The guv—ex-guv I should say, not the future guv—got pretty huffy about it.”

  “So what, then? He took the paints away?”

  He nodded. “He asked me to get rid of them. Thought I was a hospital staffer. Are there problems there I’m not aw
are of?”

  Pearson shook her head. “They pulled her out of the class a couple days ago. With the weather turning nicer, Vincent said he wanted her spending more time in the rehab garden. But they’ve really supported the program. He’s probably just upset about everything. Any idea what she was painting?”

  “She was a big equestrienne, right? I mean, years ago.”

  Pearson nodded.

  “There was a horse, like Pegasus, gray with wings. Looked like it had a dark marking on its nose, shaped like a mushroom. The background was one of those weird landscapes they’re always doing. A sun with squiggles or letters or something on it. Nothing too decipherable.”

  “It’s always horses with Floss,” Pearson said. She picked up one of the calendars and flipped to April, then set it in front of him. “A variation on the theme.”

  Christensen read the title and credit: Some Crazy Story about Gray, by Florence.

  “It’s not exactly the same, but almost,” he said. “Same horse. I think Gray is its name. Same sun thing. Florence is Floss’s given name?”

  “Nobody calls her that, but yeah.” Pearson pulled the calendar back and studied the picture again. “She’s done maybe half a dozen like that. She rode jumpers when she was younger. Probably explains the wings.”

  “Plausible,” he said. “She said ‘Gray could fly’ when she talked about the one at Mount Mercy.”

  “The sun thing looks almost like a little rebus puzzle, doesn’t it? With the interlocking letters, the M and the R?”