Mystery Writers of America Presents the Prosecution Rests (27 page)

A crime of murder took place, and there is never, ever an excuse for taking the life of another.

That means, ladies and gentlemen, your only choice will be to render a verdict of… guilty.

____

H
IS CERTAINTY SOLIDIFIED
the day she forgot the children’s names. It was strange, because she’d always accused
him
of being absentminded. Before, they’d always laughed self-consciously, but for a while now, she’d been forgetting little
things. This time, forgetfulness seemed more than absentmindedness.

He convinced himself the first episode wasn’t so bad, but less than two weeks later, he found her speaking to her mother,
as if her mother were actually standing there, as if his wife were once again a little girl. It was startling; she was eighty-three,
and her mother had been dead for twenty years. When, finally, his wife had come around, he comforted her and they’d cried
together.

He felt frightened. For days, he debated whether to say anything more about it. Could he even be certain of connecting? But
how could he not talk this out with her? After fifty years, sharing every thought had become an ingrained habit.

In the end, as with so many things, she was the one who brought the matter up.

“I’m changing, love. I’m afraid I’m slipping. In fact, I’m… afraid.”

He sat silently, listening, as he had done so often. She was the one who could articulate, the one who could express thoughts
he could never put into words.

“My forgetfulness, the mistakes… the other day I brushed my teeth with that dandruff shampoo out of the tube. And last month
I burned myself. Sometimes I feel I’m losing my mind, that I’m disintegrating.”

He smiled grimly at that, remembering once years ago when he’d blindly shampooed not Head & Shoulders but toothpaste into
his scalp. Of course, he’d been thinking out a research problem, and everyone had smiled indulgently at yet another anecdote
proving him the proverbial absentminded professor. They’d joked about it, said no one would be able to tell when he became
senile. But this couldn’t happen with her. “Come here,” he whispered to her.

She was only seven or eight inches away, but she melded against him, crushing her silver hair against his cheek. The fresh
scent of her, which he knew so well, filled his nostrils, and he felt the warm trickle of her tears upon his neck.

He had loved her for so long. It was more than fifty years since he had been the self-absorbed rake, the boy who couldn’t
keep it in his pants. Stern fathers locked up their daughters and hid away their wives, while mothers whispered about him,
one or two with a burning gleam in the eye.

Then, he’d met
her
. Today, six decades later, he found it hard to remember a time without her smile, without her voice, without her cheek against
his.

“I’m so scared,” she wept, softly sobbing. “I don’t want to lose what we have.”

“We won’t, we can’t; we worked too hard to find it. We learned it, we earned it, remember? Besides, don’t we have what those
young TV psychologists call ‘co-dependence’? Think of all the psychiatry we would have to endure to unlearn all this.”

She nodded. Poor spoiled little rich girl and spoiled little poor boy; she’d learned about loving from him and he’d learned
about living from her. They continued learning, every minute, every hour, every day.

He said, “It’s only temporary, just a phase—like adolescence or menopause.”

“No. No, we both know better. It has a name—only… only I forget what it is.”

Glancing at her, he found her smiling. Her humor was one of her attractions.

“I seem to recall that our worst fear was we might be reduced to wearing Depends someday,” he said.

“I’ll be happy to trade.” She nuzzled his neck; let her hand slip down his lanky frame.

He relaxed a little. Thank God she was again her old self. She wasn’t impaired, mentally or otherwise, not really.

“Without Viagra, ‘depend’ is about all that happens these days. But I appreciate the thought.”

She straightened. “Darling, let’s see a doctor, a gerontologist. Let’s hear what he has to say. This week, okay?”

____

“S
UNDOWNING, IT’S CALLED,
” said the geriatrician, speaking as if she wasn’t there. “Her experience of agitation late in the day is not uncommon. Keep
her quiet during the day, reduce the stress at night. Sundowning may come from fatigue, or it may be related to shadows; we’re
not exactly sure. See that she naps in the afternoon. Cover the mirrors so she won’t see a face she doesn’t recognize.”

“But my wife’s prognosis?”

“Late in the early stages,” said the doctor, making the onset sound like an oxymoron. “I’m terribly sorry, but you have to
face the facts: from now on, I’m afraid you’ll continue to observe further deterioration. I recommend you start looking for
a good resident care program. I’ll provide you with a list of suitable facilities. You’ll want to start on this right away.”

He
wanted
no such thing. Their greatest fear was separation, of being alone as the darkness descended.

____

“L
ET’S TAKE A
trip,” she said brightly. “New Hampshire, Vermont, and see the changing leaves. Let’s see America, cruise across the Midwest
perhaps, maybe Indiana, Iowa. It’s autumn and the autumn of our lives; let’s enjoy it.”

And so from Maine they swept across New England into Pennsylvania, where for the second time she wandered off during the middle
of the night. He sat terrified, staring at her picture on television, waiting for news. Any news.

Thank God, the police found her, wandering and confused, without a clue as to where she was. Unfamiliar, yet facelessly identical
as fast-food restaurants and malls, motels confused her. With reluctance and tears, they turned homeward.

____

I
N HER OWN
house, she seemed to do better. She was almost her old—or rather younger—self, he thought. As before, she cooked a little,
listened to music, and dressed herself for church. One month passed, then two. Other than a minor episode instigated by the
replacement of the old stained coffeemaker with a new model, she talked and acted as if her brain had mended.

He began to feel hopeful.

Then, one day, he noticed her favorite magazine opened to an article. About euthanasia. In the Netherlands. There, apparently,
putting one’s life in the hands of others was an acceptable practice. Even if—even if your relatives might be in a bit of
a hurry to, well, to polish you off.

That same evening, the news broadcast a segment on Jack Kevorkian and his Alzheimer’s patients.

He changed channels.

“Wait,” she said. “Go back. No, not that channel. Not that one either. Oh no, it’s over.”

After breakfast he locked the house and strolled down to the library. He didn’t understand why everyone seemed to think computers
were too much for the elderly to handle. The Internet was a hell of a lot easier than using microfilm machines.

Before looking it up, he’d been under the impression Dr. Kevorkian’s victims were terminal cancer patients. He was wrong.
Dr. K’s early subjects had been fearful of Alzheimer’s. A number of articles suggested Kevorkian had been, to put it generously,
precipitous.

He sat back and considered the gray irony, the bitter Catch-22 of old age: anybody frightened by the appalling effects of
senility had too much mental clarity to be considered a candidate for euthanasia. On the other hand, if the afflicted were
past understanding their own Alzheimer’s symptoms, they didn’t have the mental capacity to make sensible decisions and therefore
weren’t ethically rational enough to give their consent.

He signed off the computer and pondered the
should
and
should not
, the right and wrong of it all.

____

“D
ARLING
, I
WANT
you to do one little thing for me.”

“Now, now, my dear, I don’t know if I’m up to it.” He winked a mock leer her way.

“If anyone could, you would, but that isn’t what I meant.”

“No, I suppose not. What do you want me to do for you?”

She hesitated. “If I worsen… I mean worsen a lot… I don’t want you to let me go on like this. And I don’t want you to agonize
about it.”

Tears stung his eyes.

“Poor dear,” she said, “you’re agonizing now, but listen, I have no one but you, no one else to rely upon. Always, I was afraid
of losing you, that you’d go first, that I’d have to live out the rest of my life alone with only memories to comfort me.
But this—no memories at all?”

He couldn’t speak from the acrid torsion of his throat.

She dipped her fingers in the pooled tears from his eyes and drew them to her lips. “Don’t cry, love. I know what I’m doing.”

“None of us knows. Not you, not me.”

“I know I don’t want to succumb to Alzheimer’s. We’ve read so much about it. Remember that Florida case? We watched those
TV movies about it.”

He knew she couldn’t feel as controlled about it as she made it sound.

“Poor baby, I know,” she continued. “What will you do without me? But think, love. What will you do
with
me if I’m incapacitated?”

He pushed the thought away. “But you’re not, and you won’t be. For better or worse…”

“This is decidedly worse, for we’re talking about a cruel disease. We’re talking about dignity. About quality. About life.”

“False dignity! And what kind of quality?” He was angry. “It’s you that made our marriage what it is. You kept us solvent
following the Depression. Your letters kept me going during the war. You prayed for our sons in Vietnam and our grandchildren
in Iraq. You worked so hard and had faith in me when I started the business. Do you think I could give up on you, even if
I’d never loved you? I couldn’t bear to let you stay in a nursing home.”

“I’m not talking about a nursing home. I think you know that.”

That was when he truly understood what she was getting at. He said, “How could you expect that of me? Me? I won’t even kill
a spider, and you ask me to destroy what I love most? Discard you like laundry?”

“No, my dear, not destroy it, save it. Other cultures have remarkable concepts about choosing when and where to end one’s
own life. I’m not so sure those ideas have any place for the young, but they have meaning for the old.”

“I won’t. This is madness. I can’t.”

She continued as if he hadn’t spoken. “This is what I want you to do. I bought a little bottle. It’s in the cupboard, next
to the aspirin. When I can no longer…
function
… function normally… I want you to get the bottle out. You don’t even have to give it to me. Just set it out, here on the
bedstand. When I’m lucid, I’ll know.”

He shook, and cried, and argued, and in the end, she held him, petting him, cradling him as she’d done so often. By the time
they’d exhausted themselves, if not the subject, he hadn’t agreed, but he hadn’t flatly refused.

____

S
HE SEEMED RELIEVED
, and for a while she was much, much better. It was he who suffered, feeling a dark gray mass hovering over them. Her clasping
him close, her snuggling, her gentle teasing only temporarily dispelled the clouds.

Throwing the bottle away, or filling it with vitamins or perhaps sugar pills, crossed his mind. But she wasn’t anyone’s fool,
not even now. She would know. Dejected, he sensed discarding the vial would only hurt her.

Then, with a flash of insight, he had the revelation. He suddenly understood the bottle was an ironic lifeline for her, an
escape, a way out, a kind of hope. Even if he never set the bottle out, it seemed to comfort her to know it was there.

He watched as she grew more peaceful at night, almost content. She slept with her arms around him, spoon fashion, as they
fell asleep. He prayed she couldn’t feel the rivulets of tears sear his cheek, couldn’t hear his heart break. He was sad and
already lonely.

Numbness crept in around them both, stealing over them like the too-sweet redolence of day-old flowers.

____

T
HE ONSLAUGHT WAS
sudden and fierce. By Wednesday, she began losing names and the occasional word from her vocabulary. Unexpectedly, she burst
out crying in frustration. On Sunday, she wandered off after church. He found her minutes later, traipsing around the churchyard,
the hem of her skirt clutched tightly in her hand, as if she were dancing, babbling to no one that Daddy let her hitch the
horse. She prattled on like that the rest of the day.

During the afternoon, he cradled her, rocked her, walked her to the bathroom, and brushed her hair. He knew it wasn’t her,
not really, but he could no longer touch and talk to the woman he loved, the woman who’d defined who he was for all these
years.

The edges of his life were turning brown, wilting like the fringes of autumn leaves.

He didn’t dare trust her to cook. She confused salt with sugar, cinnamon with cumin. One evening she made a cream sauce recipe
and measured in two cups of flour instead of two tablespoons. She fled weeping to their bedroom and refused to try again.

Shopping became a catastrophe. By the end of the month he’d stopped taking her along—it was too difficult tenderly managing
her while trying to get the task done. But when he left her alone and returned home, he was terrified he would face some new
crisis.

The crisis came in September, after a quick trip to fetch groceries. She didn’t answer when he tapped the door with his toe.
He could hear her inside, singing “After the Ball Is Over.”

Setting down the bags, he let himself in. Smoke hung heavily in the air. He turned off the burner under the smoldering remains
of a forgotten dish towel.

His darling sat spread-legged in the middle of the living-room floor, with a large pair of shears and her dress in tatters,
remnants pinned to her antique rag doll.

“Hi, Papa.” She looked up and smiled. “Papa?”

He suppressed a flash of exasperation.