Crush. Candy. Corpse.

by Sylvia McNicoll

  It was a statement and a discouraged one at that. I smiled at him. “We’re not engaged to be married.”

  He smiled back.

  “We are supposed to go to his graduation prom together.”

  He pursed his lips. “Kind of like temporarily married.”

  I shrugged my shoulders. “We’ll see.”

  We headed over to the door of the lockup unit and he keyed in the code. Right from the doorway, I heard someone crying. A man.

  “Who’s that?” Cole wondered out loud.

  “Let’s check.” We walked quickly, bypassing all the stone-faced wheelchair gnomes lining the walls. Past Susan rocking her baby, past Fred and Marlene shopping for bread or auto parts. A wide band of yellow tape stretched across the door from frame to frame, blocking off Johann Schwartz’s room as though it were a crime scene or something.

  “He’s by himself for his own protection,” Sheila, the cafeteria goth, told us as she pushed a cart with trays of covered dishes through the hall.

  “What do you mean? I’m supposed to feed him. He can’t do it by himself.”

  “He’s been yelling too much. He upset the others. He can’t eat in the dining room.”

  “I can still feed him though. I’ll do it in his room if he bothers the others.”

  Sheila shook her head. “It’s absolutely against the rules. We can’t be responsible for you all alone with him.”

  Blah, blah, blah. I could hear her talking, but Johann’s crying blocked me from really processing it. I stared at the yellow tape.

  “It’s meant to keep the others from going in there,” Sheila explained. “For his own safety. The tape is enough to stop the others.”

  “But not me.” I couldn’t help myself. I yanked the yellow barrier down and walked into the room.

  In the far corner Johann sat, blue eyes swimming, his left cheek bright red but turning blue near the eye.

  “You can’t be with him by yourself.” Gillian suddenly rushed into the room from behind me.

  “But he’s crying.” I looked back at her. “Why does he have to be by himself?”

  “Jeannette hit him when he wouldn’t stop yelling.”

  “Why doesn’t Jeannette sit alone then?”

  “Last time it was Susan.”

  “Susan hit him?”

  Gillian shrugged her shoulders. “He made her baby cry.”

  Johann sobbed.

  “But now he’s crying. I’ll get him to stop. Then I’ll feed him.”

  She shook her head. “Mrs. Johnson won’t like it.”

  “Then sit down beside me and watch.” I wasn’t leaving.

  She sighed. “We’ll keep the door open and check on you now and again. Sheila, bring the food in.”

  Cole doubled back to look after his grandmother, but Sheila and Gillian took their time leaving. I didn’t wait. I took some tissue from the box in the bathroom and carefully dried the tears from Johann’s face. Then I sang to him in my crummy voice that Jeannette thought was so beautiful. I sang softly in German the lullaby that my grandmother used to sing to me. “Weist Du wiefiel Sternlien stehen am dem blauen Himmelzelt.” The song about how God looks after the stars and loves us too.

  It was the only German song I knew. The lullaby used to comfort me. When Johann settled down, I fed him the plops of different-coloured mush on his plate before he fell asleep.

  When I finally joined Cole and his grandmother, they were having tea in chairs near the courtyard window. Outside a sole snowflake drifted down. Then another and another, more quickly, until it was as if someone had shaken a feather pillow.

  Jeannette stopped by to tell me how beautiful my smile was. My mouth was gripped tightly so that I wouldn’t tell her off about hitting Johann. She shuffled on.

  “It’s not her fault,” Cole said as he took my hand.

  “She understands better than most of them,” I grumbled.

  “Who knows what part of her brain is broken. Which section is covered in plaque. She’s in the lockup for a reason and not just because she doesn’t know a pair of jeans from a skirt.”

  Not her fault. Not in her right mind. Not herself.

  Just like what he said about his mom when she blew up over Helen’s hair colouring. I forgave Jeannette, just like I forgave Claudine Demers then, too.

  As I stare across the courtroom, I’m having a much harder time forgiving her today.

  chapter ten

  My lawyer decides he wants to question Donovan, and I switch my attention back to the witness stand.

  “You said you met Sonja two summers ago while mowing the lawn. Can you tell us how she acted towards you?”

  “Sorry. I’m not sure what you mean.”

  “Did she laugh a lot, flirt maybe?”

  “No, she was very quiet. If anything she acted bored mostly. There wasn’t anything for her to do at the condo office. She was supposed to be helping out, answering the phone and opening the mail ’cause her mom was recovering from surgery.”

  “How did Sunny react to her mother being treated for cancer?”

  “I dunno. I thought she was just angry about spending her summer at the condo office. But it was more than that. Like she was just angry at her mother about something else.”

  “When you met her, did she have pink streaks in her hair?”

  “Not right away. That’s something she did after we went out.”

  “Do you think she would have gone out with you if her mother didn’t have cancer?”

  “Objection!” the buzzard calls out.

  “Sustained,” the judge answers.

  Michael smiles. He’s made his point anyway. Maybe I snuck around behind my parents’ backs to go out with a shoplifter, as the Crown showed, but I only did it because my mother’s illness put me in a crazy state of mind. “No further questions.”

  The Tenth Visit — twenty hours left

  I missed feeding Johann today. They shipped him off to St. Peter’s Hospital where they have more staff so they can adjust his medication and get him to stop yelling. Instead I sat with Fred and Marlene and three other residents. I fed two at a time. I’m getting good at this, Mr. Brooks.

  What I didn’t tell him in that journal entry is how it felt when I arrived ahead of Cole and hunted for Johann all by myself. It’s not easy to spot a specific inmate when you’re looking for him because most of them have grey hair, sleep a lot, and slump forward in their wheelchairs as they snooze. I walked the circuit twice, stopping in the recreation room. No ranting or crying in German or otherwise. Then, I remembered, they probably still had him locked behind yellow tape. I rushed past Jeannette.

  “Hello, Gorgeous,” she called after me.

  At Johann’s room, the door was open. The bed had been stripped as though no one lived there anymore. Was he dead?

  “Good riddance.”

  I jumped. Jeannette’s voice came from just behind me. When I turned around, there she stood with her bright lipsticked grin. “The old fool went on a trip.”

  “What kind of trip?”

  She shrugged her shoulders, her grin a smirk now.

  I rushed to the nursing station but couldn’t find anyone. I caught a cleaner by her sleeve and asked about Johann. She told me to talk to Gillian.

  “But I don’t see her anywhere either!”

  “Check the front desk.”

  Gillian wasn’t there, but the hand sanitizing commando, Katherine, had returned to her post. That’s how I found out about Johann’s “trip.” And I might have been relieved, but by the tone of Katherine’s voice, I knew this was not a good thing.

  “Is he ever coming back?” I asked her.

  “I hope so. Not many people do.”

  Cole came in then. When I told him what had h
appened, he just hugged me. Together we headed for the dining room and helped our old people eat. Marlene kissed Fred and he kissed her back.

  “Aren’t we lucky,” she told him.

  “Are you Diane?” he returned.

  She ignored his question as he did hers. Instead she continued to repeat how lucky they were.

  He continued to wonder out loud when Diane would come.

  Finally Jeannette told them to shut up or she would take them both out.

  Leaving Paradise Manor that day certainly made me feel lucky.

  That evening I asked Wolfie for help with my Remembrance Day project.

  “Remembrance Day, seriously?” Wolfie shook his head. “Sunny, that was three weeks ago!”

  “I’m a little late.” More like a month. “But I had trouble with it. I don’t like ‘remembering’ war.”

  “WelI, it doesn’t get any easier if you drag it out. You’re a smart girl. Figure out what you have to do to get your marks.”

  “I did! And Mr. Brooks understands. I told him I wanted to forget about war. And I wanted to talk about losing remembrance instead. He gave me an extension.”

  Wolfie raised an eyebrow. “So what kind of help do you need?”

  I took out my phone. “I want to download these photos and put them in a slideshow.” I showed him the research I’d done and told him my idea. Together we figured out how to put it together and then I practiced in front of him.

  “Sunny, you’re so creative. Are you sure you want to become a hairdresser?”

  “You know I’ve loved playing with hair since I was little. I can be creative with styling.”

  “Well, once you have all the education and training you need, I’ll partner with you to buy your own salon.” That was high praise from my brother. He knows everything about making good investments.

  The next day I stood in front of the class, a large screen behind me. I felt pretty confident presenting my version of a Remembrance project. “Alzheimer’s is a disease affecting one in eight people over age sixty-five. On the left you see a normal brain, on the right is one affected by Alzheimer’s.” I used my laser pointer to show the pockets of plaque.

  “Gross,” Shane called out. “That must be what Jordan has.”

  “See me after class,” Mr. Brooks snapped.

  I smiled and continued.

  “People used to accept forgetfulness and dementia as a normal symptom of aging.” The next slide was a picture of an older man with a brush cut, moustache, and glasses attached to a string.

  “That was until Alois Alzheimer came along and examined the brain of a fifty-one-year-old woman who had exhibited strange behaviour and died in his insane asylum. He discovered this plaque.

  “If I were Alois, I sure wouldn’t want to have a brain-destroying illness named after me because I was the person to discover it,” I commented.

  Julie and Lena snickered over this one.

  “Me neither,” Jordan called out.

  “Class!” Mr. Brooks warned from his seat in the back. They quieted down immediately. “You’re off track, Sunny,” Mr. Brooks told me.

  “Sorry.” I flipped back to the previous slide with the brains. “Because the plaques destroy nerve cells, the patient loses memory and cognitive reasoning. They can’t think. Then eventually they can’t read, walk, go to the bathroom by themselves, eat, swallow . . . or breathe. And they die.

  “But it can take a long time. Seven to fourteen years before they finally forget how to live.” I flipped ahead again. “Here are some photos of the people I’ve worked with at Paradise Manor.”

  I showed them Fred, Marlene, Johann, Jeannette, and Cole’s grandma, and told them what they had been and the things they did now.

  “Wow, that must drive you crazy,” Julie commented.

  “No. But it is hard as a volunteer to even know how best to help them sometimes. You want to humour them, but then they get confused and anxious about whatever you’ve said or done to go along with them. Fred looked like he was going to cry when I gave him the old shifter from my Dad’s Mustang. Jeannette nearly hit me when I suggested she had to make new friends. Sometimes the patients cry, go into rages, laugh on and on, or yell. Or they just sit and sleep.

  “I think the hardest thing about the disease is the effect it has on the family. I mean the person herself is . . . like almost comatose. How much could it bother her at that point? But I’ve seen other people visit their relatives in the home and even I just find it hard to deal with the shell that the victim becomes.

  “I used to be afraid of cancer. My grandmother died of it at the age of fifty-six and my mother is in remission since last summer.

  “Now I’m way more afraid of Alzheimer’s Disease. I’d rather die of cancer.

  “In conclusion, I would like to say that researchers are working on vaccines and pills that carry antibodies for Alzheimer’s. It just takes a long time to see if the medicines work. And while we’re waiting, brain cells die just like that.” I snapped my fingers. “Imaginative and intelligent people turn into zombies.” The last slides showed famous people who died of Alzheimer’s. “Movie stars Rita Hayworth, Charles Bronson, and Charlton Heston; boxer Sugar Ray Robinson; singer Perry Como; famous British dude from World War II, Winston Churchill —”

  “Wait a minute . . .” Mr. Brooks interrupted, “Winston Churchill had Alzheimer’s?”

  “Some people say that. Others argue that it was a different version of dementia. And the fortieth American president, Ronald Reagan.” I paused to look around the room and make eye contact one final time. “Thank you for listening to my presentation on Alzheimer’s.”

  Everyone clapped politely, the way we were taught.

  “Thank you, Sunny,” Mr. Brooks said when the applause ended. “Good work. Any questions or comments?”

  Lena asked if there was any way to prevent people from getting the disease.

  “I don’t believe there is. You’re supposed to exercise and keep your blood pressure and weight down. But that’s the doctors’ answers to everything. Just like washing your hands.”

  “What about blueberries? I heard eating them improves your memory,” Julie asked.

  “Vitamin E,” Brittany called.

  “Fish is brain food,” Jordan argued.

  “You’re supposed to do puzzles, like crosswords or Sudoku,” Shawna said. “My grandfather likes word searches.”

  I shrugged my shoulders. “Nobody really knows yet. And there are some really smart people in Paradise Manor. I mean they used to be smart. I don’t think they chowed down on junk food or anything.”

  “I heard that if we don’t find the cure, baby boomers will bankrupt the healthcare system as they get Alzheimer’s.”

  “What do you think about that, Sunny?” Mr. Brooks asked me.

  “I don’t know. But scientists are curing all the diseases that used to kill us before getting to the point where our brains started rotting. Maybe we’ll have to decide when to put people to sleep. The residents I volunteer with sleep most of the time anyway. We do it for our pets. We decide they’re suffering too much and put them out of their misery.”

  “But Sunny, aren’t these seniors well looked after? Are they really suffering?” Mr. Brooks asked.

  “They’ve lost their memories and the lives they used to know. They’re mixed up, sad, and anxious sometimes. Yes, I think they’re suffering a lot.”

  Mr. Brooks gave me an A+ on this presentation. I felt sure I was almost home free on the volunteer requirement and journal. When I was charged, though, the principal decided my forty hours at the residence couldn’t be counted. Or my journal either. Unless I was acquitted.

  chapter eleven

  “The crown calls Alexis Meredith to the stand.”

  Alexis is my best friend,
despite everything that’s happened. She’s stuck with me throughout this whole year no matter what the other kids said. My lawyer said if she hadn’t agreed to testify for the Crown, they would have subpoenaed her anyway. Still, what can the buzzard ask her that will make me seem in the wrong?

  She states her name and swears on the Bible. Alexis keeps her hair its natural golden colour. She wears a minimal amount of makeup: a clear lip balm and mascara only because her eyelashes would otherwise appear white. But her eyes are large and blue and she’s wearing a navy blue V-necked sweater over a white shirt paired with navy slacks. The sweater looks soft, angora maybe? Anyhow, the total effect is that Lexie looks angelic. The jury’s going to like her.

  The buzzard starts. “Miss Meredith, what’s your relationship to Sonja Ehret?”

  “She’s my best friend.”

  “And what kind of things do you do together?”

  “Oh, you know, hang out, play Wii games, Guitar Hero . . . We shop.”

  “She invited you to Paradise Manor, did she not?”

  “Yes, one time when we decorated trees for a raffle. Sunny is always good with that kind of thing.”

  Only one time. Yes, I had been small-minded about keeping her away from Cole. I didn’t invite her back for the party.

  “How did you find Sunny treated the residents?”

  “She was really nice to them. She humoured them, you know?”

  “Would you say she would do anything they asked?”

  “Objection! Leading,” my lawyer shouts.

  “Sustained,” the judge answers.

  “What about Cole? Were you able to form an opinion on how he treated his grandma?”

  “He was really kind to all the seniors. Gentle with his grandma.”

  “Can you tell us of any specific behaviours?”

  “Sure. He helped her put on a sweater. Got her another cup of tea when she spilled the first one. Held her hand.”

  “Did he give her things to eat?”

  Alexis stays quiet. Her lips purse.

  Heh, heh, the plaid-shirted guy coughs.