A Lady Under Siege

by B. G. Preston

  “This woman’s faculties are not what they once were. The health of her mind declines. Claire called to report that this day had marked a dreadful turn for the worse. Mother had failed to recognize daughter, and what’s worse, insisted that she had never laid eyes on her before. She could not be persuaded otherwise, despite Claire’s best attempts through story and anecdote to jiggle a key into her mother’s locked mind, and thereby cajole a remembrance. ‘Oh Derek, it was awful,’ Claire lamented. ‘I tried everything I could think of, I showed her pictures of us together, talked to her of me and you and Dad, but there wasn’t a glimmer of recognition from her at all—she just stared at me blankly, and told me to leave her alone.’

  “Now Derek, for his part, did his best to soothe his sister, who was sobbing through the telephone, and promised to visit his mother straightaway, to take her measure himself. And to his credit he did so—he immediately changed his clothes and set forth across the city in a horseless carriage of shining metal. Oh Sylvanne, the wonder of it! Thank you for listening so earnestly, I’m certain this sounds nonsense to you.”

  “Not at all,” she lied.

  “After some time he reached his mother’s place, called a nursing home, a huge edifice chock-full of elderly folk and the servants who care for them. On a high floor he knocked on a door, behind which his mother kept a single small room of her own, and heard her bid him enter. When he did she greeted him warmly. ‘You’ve come, have you?’ she asked.

  “‘Yes, mom,’ he said. ‘How are you keeping?’

  “‘Oh fine. How are you, Thomas?’ That’s right, Thomas—she called him Thomas. Derek was naturally taken aback by this, and so was I, for as she said my name I felt she was looking into Derek’s eyes, and through them looking exactly into my own soul. Indeed, this lady, and especially the look in her eyes, did stir in me remembrances of my own dear mother, God rest her soul. The resemblance was startling, and for a moment I felt as if I were in my mother’s presence once again. Derek naturally had a different reaction. He became agitated, and corrected her. ‘I’m Derek,’ he said.

  “‘But you look so much like Thomas,’ she replied, very matter-of-factly.

  “‘Who is Thomas, mother?’

  “‘He lived a very long time ago, I’ll tell you that.’ She paused as if remembering something. ‘He was a good boy,’ she said. Meghan, I can’t tell you what an odd tingle I felt as she said that. I swear I heard my own mother’s voice.

  “Derek, unnerved, saw fit to change the subject at this point. ‘Claire came to see you this morning,’ he reminded her.

  “‘She did?’

  “‘You don’t remember?’

  “‘No. I’m forgetting some things, and remembering others.’

  “‘You seem lucid enough to me.’

  “‘I’m fine.’

  “‘What have you been up to?’

  “‘Don’t ask stupid questions. What is there to get up to in this prison for the aged and infirm?’

  “‘That’s more like it,’ Derek replied. ‘That’s the cranky old crone I call mother.’

  “‘You watch your tongue. You’d be cranky too, living like this. It’s no life. I’m ready to move on.’

  “‘Mother, really, poor thing,’ Derek answered. ‘You’ve been saying that off and on since Dad died. Twelve years ago.’

  “‘Has it been? Feels like I just—he was in the tub, you know. Always loved a bath. I went to check on him when he didn’t come downstairs. I knew instantly.’

  “‘Yes. You’ve told me before, Mom.’ Then Derek went to her and gave her a very tender sort of hug, a genuinely sweet and sentimental gesture. She felt hollow-boned, like a bird. ‘I’m going to give Claire a call, tell her you’re back to normal,’ he told her.

  “‘Pah,’ she spat. ‘I haven’t felt normal for twelve years.’ And it was just at that moment, as he held her in his arms, that he looked past her onto a shelf, and his eye alighted on a small picture, which those in the future call a photograph—they are like miniature paintings, perfect in their likenesses of those they portray—and there he saw his own self, Derek, holding with obvious affection a woman and a girl.

  “‘Where did you get that?’ he asked his mother.

  “‘What?’

  “‘That photo.’

  “His mother looked upon the photograph, and said, ‘You must have given it to me. You married a beautiful girl, my boy, and little Ginny looks so lovely there. How are they keeping, anyway?’

  “And Derek said, ‘They’re dead, mother. You know that.’

  “His mother for a moment seemed genuinely shocked, staggered by the news. ‘They died in a car crash, seven years ago,’ Derek told her.

  “‘I’m sorry,’ she said to him softly, in the very frailest of voices. ‘I’m forgetting things, Thomas. Remembering others. So much death, and so unfair.’”

  Sylvanne had done her best to feign an interest, but had some time earlier stopped listening to him, and had allowed her mind to wander. She came back to herself now, and found Thomas staring at her expectantly. “Is that the end?” she enquired, in a voice she meant to sound meek and tender.

  “Don’t you see, Sylvanne? Once again, his mother called him Thomas! And once again, I had the sense she was looking through him, directly at me.”

  “Yes, I do see,” replied Sylvanne, straining to sound concerned, and helpful.

  “I hope so,” Thomas answered. “In any case, Derek stayed on for quite a long time, until the daylight faded, and the view of the city from their high window turned into a speckled pattern of lights. In that time they talked of many things, large and small. He bade her sit on a soft chair, while he sat on a stool and massaged her feet. She was very pleased by that. But from time to time he glanced at the photo on her shelf, and memories filled his mind, of happy times with a wife and daughter, and of the grief he suffered at their loss.”

  “Poor man,” she said.

  “Yes. In his own home there are no pictures of them at all. But again, Sylvanne, if I may address Meghan directly once more: I’ve produced here the secret you asked for, gleaned from his now-so-dissolute life: the man once knew the happiness a wife and child can bring. Not so different from me, after all.”

  From the other room Sylvanne could hear Daphne and Mabel happily experimenting with oranges. “That’s all I have to say,” Thomas said finally. “Likely to you just a jumble of disjointed words, all of them meant for Meghan—if you found them overly strange or in any way frightening, I apologize, for it was not my intent.”

  “Don’t trouble yourself,” Sylvanne replied. “I’m not the sort of flower that wilts under a summer’s sun.”

  Thomas studied her. “No, I suppose not. You’ve been through so much lately, and yet you stand as proudly in your posture as any woman I’ve ever met.”

  “I’ll take that as a compliment,” she answered.

  “It is. I’ve noticed the same trait in your twin, the woman Meghan. She carries herself erectly, and her gait is as lovely as that of a young doe. The women of her age do not dress with our sense of modesty, in kirtles that skim the floor, no indeed, they bedeck their bodies in minuscule scraps of fabric, and call it fully clothed. At first it’s shocking, but—”

  “Daddy! I’m walking.”

  Through the door they could see Daphne in a long white nightdress, taking tentative steps across the room, her face glowing with achievement. Thomas eagerly hurried to her, and took her hand.

  “This is wonderful, my darling, wonderful,” he cried. From the doorway between the two rooms Sylvanne watched as he led his daughter around the room, as if escorting her toward some imaginary, celebratory dance floor.

  Mabel sidled over to her Mistress, and in a low voice, enquired, “What did he wish to speak of, Madame?”

  “It doesn’t matter. Gibberish of some sort,” Sylvanne muttered. “I took your advice to heart, and behaved most genially toward him. I pretended a great interest, which encouraged him to jabber about h
is dreams of the future until I nearly lost all track of meaning in his words.”

  “See there?” Mabel said brightly. “It didn’t kill you to make nice.”

  “No, I suppose not,” Sylvanne said. But she felt troubled. In pretending to like him, she had felt her feelings move to a precarious place, a place at odds with her purpose. She watched Thomas chatting playfully with his daughter a moment. “Look at him, so contented. He possesses an abundance of love, or so it appears—it would be child’s play, I now see, to make him fall in love with me. But I sense a risk in this newfound strategy—if I’m to show him kindness, and more, then kind acts might lead to kind feelings within me, the same way charity warms the heart of one who gives.”

  “Charity can’t be bad, m’Lady.”

  “But it can, I fear. No soldier can afford it, once war’s declared and the battlefield bloodied. War was made against my husband, and though I be a woman, I feel myself the last man standing of his ragged little army. Except for you, dear Mabel, I’m all alone. Alone and unarmed, but I haven’t yet given up the fight. I need a knife, Mabel. Bring me the knife.”

  26

  Derek opened the front door to find Meghan on his step, carrying a heavy leather satchel. “Can I come in for a minute?” she asked.

  “On one condition—you say nothing about the squalor.”

  “I’ll hold my tongue.”

  “And possibly your nose.”

  She followed him down the hallway toward his living room. “I can only stay a minute, so I’ll say this quickly and without a lot of—” she stopped in her tracks, struck speechless seeing his living space for the first time. It looked like an indoor version of his back yard. A pigsty.

  “Now remember what you promised,” Derek said. “As you can see, I’m a packrat, I can’t stand to throw out perfectly good trash.”

  “It’s not that,” she replied. “No matter how it looks, it’s a bit disconcerting, to come into a place with a floor plan just like mine next door, and see how someone else uses it.”

  “Which is a polite way of saying you couldn’t live like this. I know what you mean about identical layouts, though. A dozen near-identical houses run cheek by jowl up this side of the street, and in every one of them the walk from the bedroom to the toilet is three steps north, seven steps east, two south, drop your drawers. I bet at rush hour, seven in the morning or eleven at night, all sixteen toilets flush simultaneously. We might as well all be rats in a Skinner box. Now, what exactly can I do for you?”

  “A couple of things.” She sat herself down on Derek’s old couch, opened up her satchel, and spread several medical books on his coffee table. “These are for you to read,” she said. “I’ve saved you some trouble and marked with Post-It Notes the pages that look promising—there are a bunch of conditions I think might apply to Daphne. They’re all cross-referenced. I hope you can read my handwriting on the notes, sometimes it gets pretty tiny. I’ve been insanely busy with work so I haven’t had time to sit down and go through them properly. You, on the other hand, seem to have all the time in the world, so I’m hoping you’ll have a look at least. Ideally you should read them out loud—I think if Thomas hears them spoken, he’ll be more likely to understand. Thomas, if you hear me, it’s no slight on your intelligence, me saying this to Derek. It’s just there’s a ton of medical terminology, some of which I don’t understand myself.”

  “I thought his daughter was getting better,” Derek said.

  “She is. She actually got up and walked, which is like a miracle. But I still want to cover every angle. She still hasn’t been properly diagnosed.”

  “Speaking of daughters, yours has stopped coming out to the back yard.”

  “I know. She’s been shunning you because of how you treated her the other morning, and now she’s giving me the silent treatment too, brooding in her room. Her father told her he’s going to have a new baby. She’s not taking it well.”

  “I didn’t know that part. I thought you two are still married, that you’d just recently split up.”

  “That’s right.”

  “Guy moves fast.”

  “Guy moves sloppily, is more like it.”

  “And the mom to be? It’s not your former best friend or something sordid like that, is it?”

  “Not exactly. A student of his.”

  “Does Betsy know her?”

  “Why do you care?”

  “I don’t know. I do, a little. I like Betsy. I am sorry I growled at her.”

  “I think she feels she’s been replaced, and her dad’s going to abandon her. And I’m dealing with deadlines and don’t have time to deal with it. Right now I have to run to a meeting, which if it goes well will give me a chance to catch my breath and pay some attention to her. God knows she needs it.”

  Derek nodded, but said nothing in reply.

  “It’s nice of you to worry about her,” she added. “Especially since you told me the other day worry is maggot food.”

  “I didn’t say I practice what I preach,” he smiled. “I’m a human being. We’re all liars and hypocrites.”

  “Not always,” she protested. “Sometimes we’re good. Thank you for asking about her. I’ll tell her you did.”

  “Whatever. Is that it?”

  “No. There’s something else. Thomas has spoken to me. He spoke to Sylvanne, exactly as I asked him to.” She hesitated, searching for the right tone. “It was very cute. He was amazed you brush your teeth.”

  “Jesus Christ. He’s going to have to do better than that.”

  “Oh he did, he did. He’s smart enough to figure out tooth brushing isn’t all that rare and exotic in this day and age, so he moved on to something else he saw you do yesterday. You went to visit your mother, because your sister asked you to. She was worried because your mom didn’t recognize her anymore.”

  Derek raised an eyebrow.

  “Your mom’s only seventy-seven, but she must have some kind of early-onset dementia. Her memory is going. She lives in some kind of home. A big building with lots of floors, lots of elderly folks.”

  “Uh huh.”

  “And when you got to her room, she was thrilled to see you, and you were quite relieved that she recognized you—and then she called you Thomas.”

  Derek’s open face turned thoughtful. “Know what?” he said. “This is getting weird.”

  “That’s what Thomas said too—he looked at your mom and was shocked at how much she looked like his mom. But he felt a connection when she looked at you—at him—and then when she said his name he knew she felt the connection too. He just knew it.”

  Derek studied her face carefully, looking for some hint that this might still be an elaborate practical joke. If not, what was it? She met his gaze, and they locked eyes.

  “What is your game?” he asked.

  “It’s not a game.”

  “Whatever it is, it’s pretty good,” he said. “Except for one thing. There’s an orderly on her floor named Thomas. As we walked to the elevator she said hi to him. Did your Thomas tell you that?”

  “No, he didn’t. Don’t tell me you’re still holding out on me, Derek! That orderly is irrelevant, he wasn’t in the room when you spoke to your mother. No one was, except you and her. Now how could I possibly know all the intimate details of a conversation that only you and your mother shared? How could I know what your sister said to you on the phone?”

  “I don’t know. You’re not the type to hack a phone line, you wouldn’t have the skill set. But you could have hired someone—tapping into a cordless is easy as tuning into a radio. Or you could listen in by putting your ear to our common wall here—I’m loud when I’m on the phone, and I pretty much repeated the conversation to my sister when I got home. Or maybe you’ve drilled a hole through the wall, or hidden a mini-cam. Maybe you’ve hired a private detective to stake me out, tail me across town. I’ve seen the movies, I know what lengths an obsessive female will go to, to ferret out a man’s secrets.”

&nbs
p; “What reason could I have to obsess about you?” Meghan cried in exasperation. “Have you looked in the mirror lately? Have you looked at how you live? Have you looked at where you live? You know what this room screams to me? Three things—cockroaches, bedbugs, and head lice. All harmoniously coexisting in perfect, squalid harmony. I’m sorry, Derek, squalor is not attractive, to me or to any other woman on the planet.”

  “I have no trouble finding women, thank you very much.”

  “Right. You bring them in at two a.m. and they’re out by three. But this is all beside the point. The point is, I came over here with what I thought was clear and obvious proof, thinking you’d finally have to accept the truth—why can’t you face up to it?”

  “Put it this way,” he said. “I’d prefer if you turned out to be just plain old-fashioned nuts. It’s not even pejorative. More like welcome to the club.”

  “I’m not nuts,” she answered. She took a deep breath. “Look, I’m sorry I got my back up. I’m the guest here, the one intruding into your space, your life, and it’s not my place…” She hesitated, like a high jumper staring at the bar, visualizing what it would take to make the leap. After all the cutting things she’d said to him just now he stood before her without malice. He still looked upon her with an open, unguarded face, willing to hear her out. She felt her nerve almost fail her, and then she spoke. “In your mother’s room there’s a photo. Of your wife and child. They’re dead.”