Sorrow Road

by Julia Keller

  In one room, a lanky man in overalls and work boots was balanced on a stepladder. He was reaching up with a screwdriver to make an adjustment to the sprinkler head, which extended from the ceiling in a small silver ring. He appeared to be in his late forties or early fifties, hence Bell speculated that he was most likely an employee and not a resident. His movements were fluid and assured, and there was a seriousness of purpose in those movements, the kind of focus that was, Bell knew from her reading about Alzheimer’s, generally no longer possible for the people who lived here. He looked down at her and nodded. He had the kind of face she liked—weathered, resolute. No fake smile. She gave a slight wave. She moved on.

  She passed an emaciated woman of perhaps eighty or so who had stopped in the hall, feet spread, body bent and tense. She clutched the wooden rail with both hands, as if she were stranded on a high bridge and afraid of falling. Those hands were as twisted as tree roots. She called out to Bell. Bell turned.

  “Yes?”

  “I have to go home,” the woman said. She wore a black turtleneck, black sweatpants with a white stripe down the side, and white tennis shoes. Her short white hair was combed straight back from her forehead. Her face had collapsed in on itself, the features receding into a conical basket of wrinkles. Her eyes were startlingly blue. But it was an empty blue, the blue of endless sky.

  “I’m sorry,” Bell said. “I can’t help you.”

  “I have to go home,” the woman repeated. “I’m late.”

  “I’m afraid I can’t—”

  “I said I have to go home! I have to go home!” And just like that, the old woman’s agitation clicked in, and she reached out to claw at Bell’s arm while she screamed. “Now! Now! Now! Now! Now!”

  A woman in a pink smock and white polyester slacks swiftly appeared; she had been in one of the resident’s rooms. She artfully wrangled the old woman, securing an arm around the hunched shoulders while prying the desperate hand from Bell’s sleeve.

  “Stop it, Millie,” the aide commanded. Her voice was firm. Coddling would not get the job done. “Let’s go. Come on. Back to your room.” She gave Bell a bleak smile. She looked almost as old as the woman she was subduing, but her eyes were inhabited; they carried rich notes of awareness, of sentience. Duty mingled with sympathy in those eyes, Bell thought. Fatigue, too.

  By now the maintenance man had come into the hall as well. “Everything under control, Amber?” he said.

  “Got it, Travis,” the aide replied. “Thanks, though.”

  “Okay. Just give a holler if you need me.”

  Bell continued her journey. She passed more residents up and down the hall, walking or standing, women and men who seemed as faded and diaphanous as pastel scarves tucked away in a forgotten drawer, their hair wispy, their skin dry, their spines crumbling under the steady assault of gravity and time. Most of them ignored her; some glared. A few smiled. One woman laughed, too loud and too long, and then stopped abruptly. A man cried—softly, with no emotion, and the only way you could know he was crying was the wetness on his papery cheeks. These people seemed like ghosts who returned again and again to a place that was supposed to be familiar, but somehow wasn’t. Ghosts who haunted themselves.

  Bell felt a gradual recognition of memory as more than simply an assemblage of known facts and mastered capacities and recalled experiences, and more, even, than personal identity, but as the very tent pole of life, every life, the solid vertical rod at the center of things. When it collapsed, the fabric gathered in folds around your feet; if the wind blew, everything was swept away. And the wind was always blowing.

  There was sadness here, to be sure, but it was a benign, thoughtful sadness, a sadness that was nobody’s fault. So different from a courthouse, she told herself, where the tragedies were vicious and deliberate, the wretched fates almost always self-imposed.

  If Layman was hiding something diabolical, she had hidden it well.

  In the lobby, the receptionist was dealing with a skinny, middle-aged woman who leaned aggressively over the desk, jabbing a finger in her face. As Bell passed them, she heard the skinny woman unleashing phrases like “know my rights” and “hearing from my attorney” in a dark, threatening voice.

  The receptionist, however, was holding her own. To every point the visitor tried to make, she shook her head slowly, continuously, like a white-haired, pink-smocked metronome. “I’m sorry, Miss Ferris,” the receptionist said, in what was clearly a practiced spiel, “but you know the requirement. You agreed to it. Unless we have a staff member available to accompany you and your father to the lounge, or unless you bring along a third party, you have to stay here in the lobby. We won’t allow you to be alone with him. And one of our employees just went home sick, so we’re shorthanded. I’m sorry, but we can’t accommodate you today.”

  “I don’t have to put up with this crap,” the woman muttered. “You know what, lady? I got nobody to bring with me. I got friggin’ nobody, okay? I used to have my brother Nelson, but he—” She broke off the sentence. She shook her head. “Stupid friggin’ rules.”

  An elderly man waited at the other end of the reception desk. He was slender, and his clothes had a slouchy-casual look about them, giving him the relaxed aura of a retired golf pro: checkerboard driving cap; loose-fitting, yellow V-neck sweater; cuffed khaki trousers. Hands resting lightly in the pockets of those trousers, he seemed oblivious to the quarrel taking place just inches from him. Must be a resident here, Bell thought, basing her assumption on his vacant eyes and abstract, mindless smile, his lack of normal affect.

  Before she had quite reached the front entrance, Bell took a quick look back. The old man winked at her.

  “Hello there, sweet thing,” he said.

  Chapter Seven

  Digital recorder.

  Check.

  Notebook.

  Check.

  Pen.

  Check.

  ID.

  Check.

  Brochure explaining the oral history project.

  Check.

  Had she forgotten anything? Carla switched off the engine. She’d had no trouble finding a place to park along the run-down, curbless street on the west side of Acker’s Gap.

  She wanted to wait a few more minutes before she got started. She sank back against the car seat. She closed her eyes and recalled her meeting with Sally McArdle yesterday morning. Especially the last part, right after McArdle had said, “Okay, fine, you’re hired. Don’t make me sorry I picked you.” McArdle then scooted around in her chair so that she could reach into the bottommost bin of a file drawer. Grunting from exertion, she had drawn out a sheet of paper with a checklist on it. She read the items aloud to Carla—“You might want to be writing some of this down, Miss Elkins, if it’s not too much trouble”—and Carla had brushed aside the sarcasm and did as she was told. Sarcasm was Sally McArdle’s chief means of discourse. She didn’t allow it in others, but she gave herself permission to indulge at will. It was her shield, her way of deflecting the world’s gaze—a gaze either judgmental or pitying, and both were equally repugnant to the old woman. Carla knew that, and was prepared to deal with it in her new job. Sarcasm and Sally McArdle were old pals. They’d gotten acquainted right after McArdle’s leg was amputated and now they were inseparable.

  Carla thought about the items McArdle had enumerated yesterday, matching them up with her own list: Got it, got it, got it, got it … Had she skipped anything? Oh, right. The release form. McArdle had handed her a stack of pages. The people Carla would be interviewing had already agreed to participate, but she still had to have them sign the form. It authorized the library to post the material on its Web site.

  Carla grabbed her slumping backpack from its place on the passenger-side floor and hoisted it up on the seat beside her. She rummaged through the motley contents—billfold, paperback copy of 1984, ChapStick, an extra pair of gloves, cell charger, earbuds, tube of moisturizer, oatmeal raisin Clif Bar—until she found the release forms. She fin
gered one from the top of the stack. The paper was wrinkled, a natural consequence of having been thrust into a backpack. She smoothed it out against her right knee.

  She was actually excited. She looked out the car window at the small brown one-story house set back from the narrow street. The house needed a new roof, and new siding, and a new front porch that did not tilt violently sideways, but the same was true of just about every house in this neighborhood. And all of them, Carla knew, had an equal likelihood of getting those things—a likelihood which stood at zero.

  According to the list of names and addresses McArdle had given her, this was the home of Jesse and Annabelle Harris, aged seventy-five and seventy-eight, respectively. He was a retired employee of the Jiffy Lube over in Blythesburg. She was a retired cafeteria worker from Acker’s Gap High School.

  Maybe I’ll recognize her from school, Carla thought. Abruptly, she wondered if that was okay. Or was she only supposed to interview people she’d never met before? Would that somehow taint the interview? Dammit. Why hadn’t she asked Sally McArdle about that?

  Before she’d switched schools for her senior year Carla had probably passed through the lunch line—what, two hundred times? Three? She tried to recall the face of a single cafeteria worker. Just one.

  Nope. All that came to mind was a blur of hefty women in hairnets; in white uniforms that ballooned out like tents; in hard, black, lace-up shoes that must have been hell on swollen feet. Women with hairy forearms and big hands, ladling out beans and corn and Brussels sprouts into square indentations stamped into beige plastic trays. Women who never reacted to the insults and complaints from teenagers dreaming of fries and Diet Cokes.

  I don’t remember any of those cafeteria workers, Carla told herself. Not one. I was too selfish, too self-absorbed. I can’t even remember if their faces were black or white or brown. I won’t know her.

  She was troubled by this epiphany, and then she was relieved by it. She was free to do her work. Annabelle Harris was a stranger to her—even though she’d probably passed the old woman many, many times, day after day, in the cafeteria of Acker’s Gap High School, a place that smelled like ammonia and burned tater tots and sometimes—when the flu was at high tide—vomit.

  Yum, Carla thought.

  She suspected that Sally McArdle’s sarcasm might be contagious.

  She gathered up her equipment. She had already put on her cap and buttoned the top button of her coat—it was monstrously cold out there, or as Carla had described it in a text to her mom that morning: friggin FREEZING—and she might very well be shivering on that porch for a while, if Jesse and Annabelle were slow in getting up to answer the doorbell. Creaky arthritic limbs can’t be rushed, right?

  Her cell rang. Carla slipped off a glove and dug a hand into her coat pocket. It was probably her mom, checking to make sure she was okay. Carla would act all perturbed at the overprotective parent stuff—but the truth was, she kind of liked it. She liked the idea that Bell was there.

  She looked at the caller ID.

  She recognized the number—but it wasn’t her mom.

  Carla felt a hard torque of panic in her stomach. The blood rushed out of her head, or so it felt, as if somebody had pulled a cord and emptied the lot. The rigid chill that overtook her had nothing to do with the temperature.

  She had to get hold of herself. She had to do her job. She had to carry on. She had to. And so she did what she’d been doing for the past week and a half, which was to ignore it, to pretend it wasn’t happening.

  I can do this, she said to herself. Chanting it, really: I can do this. I can do this.

  She turned off her cell. She opened the car door.

  * * *

  Ava Hendricks was waiting for Bell at the courthouse. She sat on the small butternut couch across from Lee Ann Frickie’s desk, feet flat on the floor, hands flat on her lap. Bell had never met her. She’d never seen her picture. But based on their brief phone conversation two nights ago, and on the extraordinary poise she witnessed now, the name “Ava Hendricks” came into Bell’s mind the moment she saw the visitor.

  “This is Dr. Hendricks,” Lee Ann said. Her secretary did not get up. She was typing on her computer keyboard, and she simply lifted one hand and motioned toward the couch. “She’s been waiting an hour and a half. Wouldn’t let me call you.”

  And I bet she hasn’t moved a muscle in all that time, Bell thought.

  Ava’s expression did not change. “I know how annoying it is to be interrupted in the middle of work,” she said to Bell. “I didn’t mind waiting.”

  She had crinkled, shoulder-length black hair that widened out from the top of her head in a frizzy A-frame, a small flat nose, and wire-rim glasses with lenses the shape of slender ovals. Bell put her age at somewhere between forty-five and fifty—same as her own. Same as Darlene’s. Her suit was royal blue. An expensive-looking winter coat was folded on the seat beside her.

  “I thought you might come yesterday,” Bell said.

  “Remember that eight-year-old? The one I told you about?”

  “You operated on her.”

  “Yes. She took a turn for the worse. I had to go back in. I wasn’t free to leave the hospital until today.”

  “Come into my office,” Bell said. She glanced at Lee Ann, knowing her secretary would understand: no calls.

  As soon as they’d resettled themselves, Bell offered coffee.

  Ava grimaced. “I don’t drink caffeine. It’s been definitively linked to hypertension and gastrointestinal motility.”

  “Yeah, well—I guess I like to live on the edge.” Bell rose and fussed with the curmudgeonly Mr. Coffee machine on top of the file cabinet. There was no sink in here; she kept a full carafe of water by the pot, ready for service.

  A few seconds later the space was invaded by a loud hissing wheeze that sounded like a row of old men simultaneously blowing their noses. Then the lapel-grabbing aroma of brewing coffee hit the room.

  “Damn,” Ava said. “That smells pretty good. Maybe just this once.”

  Bell gave her a thumbs-up sign and scrounged in her desk drawer for a second mug. Good, she thought. Ava was human, after all. Her perusal of the hyper-impressive biographical information that Rhonda compiled had made her doubt it.

  “I want to tell you again,” Bell said, “how sorry I am about Darlene.”

  Ava did not answer. Bell was mystified. There were indeed all varieties and manifestations of grief, as she had pointed out to Rhonda, and it was true that each person grieved in her own way, but this was downright peculiar. An observer with no information would have assumed that the person named “Darlene” had been a causal acquaintance. Nothing more.

  She handed Ava the filled mug. “It’s hot. Be careful.”

  Her visitor nodded. “You know,” she said, “we were probably two of the most mismatched people in the world. But I knew right away. And so did Darlene.”

  She stared at the front of Bell’s desk. Her voice was low and soft, imbued with the faint tremolo of reminiscence that often comes, Bell knew, when people talk about the past and its most precious elements. Once again, she was knocked off balance by Ava’s behavior.

  “I’m very calm,” Ava went on, as if she had read Bell’s mind. “Restrained. I have to be. My work requires it.” She said nothing about the challenge of being a woman in a field dominated by men, but Bell was sure it was not easy. “Darlene, though,” Ava said, “was a hothead. She had a fierce temper. And she needed to be in motion all the time.”

  Ava looked meaningfully at Bell, who by now had taken her own seat behind the desk.

  “You knew her,” Ava declared. “You know what I mean. She couldn’t sit still.” She sampled the coffee. Nodded. “We never talked about it, but if I had to guess, I think that’s what alcohol did for her—it settled her down. Smoothed her out. She didn’t drink to feel good. She drank to feel normal. Like the rest of us.”

  “You said I knew her. I have to be honest—I don’t think so. I
never knew about her alcoholism.” Or about you, she wanted to add, but held back.

  “No one did. I didn’t know myself, until we moved in together.”

  Bell gave her a surprised look.

  “It’s true,” Ava said. “Once she trusted me, she told me the story. She realized she had a problem when she was still an undergraduate. Joined AA right after she started law school. There were…” She was trying to decide how to phrase it. “There were times when she went back to it. She fought it with everything she had, but sometimes it got the better of her. When she read stories about problems back in West Virginia, for instance. I think she always felt a bit guilty about not going back and helping, once she had her law degree. Or when her father was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s. Emotions—she had a hard time with those. Facts in a court brief, she could handle. Feelings—not so much.” Ava’s voice grew more thoughtful, with a baffled-sounding awe at the back of it, like the wind in the sail. “She was a very different person when she drank. Completely transformed. I still loved her with all my heart—but I barely recognized her.”

  Bell let a brief period of silence settle over the room. She considered the things she might say to this woman—about how no one ever really knows another soul, no matter how much you try or how close you are to each other—but the words, even unspoken, sounded inadequate to her, and far too glib. Almost insulting in their assumption that a relationship could be summarized in slogans, and that grief could be assuaged by homilies and aphorisms.

  The great mystery at the heart of the world, Bell reminded herself as she regarded Ava’s impassive face, was why people did what they did—not only the bad things, when they seemed driven by demons, but also the splendid things, the lovely, mysterious things, such as when and whom they chose to love. Psychology and probability could only take you so far. After a certain point the science broke down and simple magic took over. How else to explain how Darlene Strayer, a driven and haunted lawyer from Barr County, West Virginia, had fallen in love with Ava Hendricks, a brilliant and accomplished neurosurgeon from Boston, Massachusetts?