The Things We Keep (6 page)

She sighs. “Come on, Anna. Let's not make this difficult.”

Beyond the skinny lady, the door to my room is wide open. Someone trundles past the door on a walker. Does she actually think I'm going to strip naked right here? Is that what she wants me to do?

Clearly it is, because she comes at me, yanking me to my feet. She reaches for the bottom edge of my T-shirt, and I realize in alarm that she's going to undress me.

“Ahhh!” I yell. I know I sound crazy, but I'll take crazy over the humiliation of being showered by this woman against my will. “Ahhh.”

I take a step back, but the wall is behind me, there's nowhere to go. Skinny Lady smiles. (I'll tell you something for nothing: The only thing worse than having someone undress you against your will is to have them do it
smiling.)

I keep shouting, rhythmically and repeatedly. Skinny stands back. “You've got visitors this afternoon, Anna. Don't you want to look nice for them?”

Another person passes my doorway, no walker this time. It's the young guy.

Skinny reaches for my waistband. “How about we start by undoing your—?”

I open my mouth to start shouting again, but then I hear a noise—a smash.

Skinny's arms retract back to her sides. “What on earth—?”

She darts out of the room. I drift after her as far as the doorway and see Young Guy, standing over broken glass.

“Oh, sweetie, what have you done?” Skinny is using a controlled, deliberate voice, but her irritation is only thinly veiled. “Just stand back, I'm going to get something to clean it up. All right, Luke? Stay back.”

Skinny marches off, presumably in search of a broom. The moment she's disappeared around the corner, Young Guy—
Luke
—looks directly at me and realization dawns. It wasn't an accident.

I want to say something—do something—but my mouth just hangs open, intermittently filling and emptying with air, like a grocery bag in the wind. “I'd … be quick if I were you,” he whispers. “Whatshername, she's speedy … with that sweeper-thing.”

We stare at each other a moment and a strange, silent dialogue is transmitted between us. From some primal place inside, I feel a twinge.

There's a rustle as the broom closet opens and Skinny, presumably, rifles through it. I slip out of the doorway and into the bathroom, where I start the shower. And even though my short-term memories are supposed to be the first to go, a few minutes later, as the water pounds against my shoulders and back, I am still thinking about
him.

*   *   *

The good thing, I guess, is that I've known love. At least, I think it was love, but how do you really ever know? I was twenty-eight when I met Aiden. I was stuck at a set of traffic lights in my beat-up old Ford when he pulled up beside my car on a Harley-Davidson. I still remember the ease of him, the way he leaned back slightly, like he had nowhere he had to be. His helmet covered only his head and ears, so I could see his chin, his stubbly jaw, his lips.

I wound down my window. “I like your bike,” I said.

He regarded me curiously. “Thanks. You ride?”

“Not a Harley.”

“But you ride?”

He was cute, this biker guy. I found myself wondering if there were full sleeves underneath his leather jacket. And what else might be under there.

“I've got a Honda 900 cc in my garage,” I said, “just waiting for its momma to come home and take her for a spin.”

Now he leaned forward, assessing me. He seemed pleased with what he saw. “How 'bout you give me your number, and we can go for a spin sometime?”

I found an old ticket on the dash just as the light changed to green and I steeled myself for the honking and cursing. But no one did honk as I scribbled down my phone number. Perhaps it was because Aiden rode a Harley that they didn't want to mess with him? Or perhaps it was because sometimes people were willing to wait for a glimpse of young romance?

I sped Aiden through the early relationship process, from first date to boyfriend without passing Go. We went camping at Yosemite. We hugged the curves of coastal roads on our bikes. We started our days with sex and, if Aiden hadn't been smoking pot, ended them with it, too. But afterwards, when we fell asleep, we were always sprawled out and separate—together in our desire to be alone. It wasn't the love from a romance movie, but it worked for us.

Getting married, I'll admit, was my idea, and at first, it wasn't very well received.

“You want to get
married
?”

I may as well have suggested we bungee jump without a cord. And I understood Aiden's surprise. I wasn't a “white dress” kind of girl—this was out of left field. Yet there I was, close to thirty, and it had been on my mind.

“Well,” I said. “Not if this is your reaction.”

It wasn't that I'd expected Aiden to drop to one knee and pull out a huge rock and get all choked up. God, if he had, I'd probably have said no. But I
had
started thinking that if we were going to do it, now would be a good time. Mom had been a year younger than me when she got married. By my age, she was pregnant.

“Okay, just forget it,” I said.

“Now, hang on a sec, let a man catch up.” Aiden's frown morphed into a grin, and he pointed at it. “What if this is my reaction?”

He was sweet, Aiden, and if I'm honest with myself, easily led. He was happy to go along with my plan. But in the end, marriage wasn't enough.

“I want a baby.”

They say something happens to a woman when she reaches thirty-five and her fertility starts to ebb. Even the coldest, least maternal women start to feel the twinge. Maybe that's what it was? Kids weren't exactly something I'd always wanted, but all of a sudden, I started noticing pregnant women. I started looking in strollers and smiling at grubby faces.

Unfortunately, when it came to having a baby, Aiden was less easily led. “Let's wait a few months,” he said. But a few months became a year. The clock was ticking, and not just the biological clock. I was forgetting things by then. There was no firm diagnosis, but the writing was on the wall.

“Jesus Christ, Anna!” it became, after a while. “Will you let up about a fucking baby? Am I nothing more than a sperm donor to you?”

I wanted to be outraged. To ask how he could even ask me that. But by that stage, we both knew it was an accurate description for what he was. We rarely talked about anything meaningful anymore. The motorcycle trips were a thing of the past. We'd put our old camping equipment out on the sidewalk on garbage day. I may as well have put my ovaries there, too.

So I agreed with Aiden that a baby was a bad idea. And a few weeks later, when I was officially diagnosed with Alzheimer's, I left.

*   *   *

It's visitors' day at Rosalind House, and we're in the garden again—a practical decision, as with Jack and Helen and all the boys here, we couldn't all fit in my room. Apart from the sun, which is shining right in my eyes, I like it out here. It's Sunday, and most of the residents have visitors. Southern Lady sits opposite a woman who bears such an uncanny resemblance to her—from the floral dress to the puff of yellow hair—that she
has
to be her sister. Really Old Lady has a visitor, a young man in gray sweatpants who, age-wise, is most likely a great-grandson, or even a great-great. Young Guy is flanked by an older woman who is either a mother or a grandmother and a younger woman, about my age. And Eric swans around the lot of us, like a King visiting his villagers.

“Can I have a ride in your wheelchair, please? I mean, if you're not using it.”

My nephew Hank beams at Really Old Lady. Clearly he's very proud of himself for saying please. He's definitely not expecting the pinch on the arm that he gets from Helen. “Ow, Mom! What?”

Really Old Lady fiddles with her hearing aid. “What did you say, young man?”

“Nothing,” Helen says hurriedly. “Nothing at all.” She takes Hank by the arm and drags him away, toward the far end of the lawn, where Ethan and Brayden are playing.

Jack leans back on his garden chair and stretches his arms out. “So? How's it been?”

I blink into the sun, wishing it would go behind the tree. “Not bad. Actually, it's been better than I expected.”

“Seriously?”

“The fact that you look so surprised doesn't bode well for you, considering you were the one who tossed me in here like a piece of rotten fruit.”

Jack laughs. “As I recall, you tossed
yourself
in. I just found the place.” He looks so happy, I'm worried he might cry. “Hey, I think this place is great. I'm only surprised because I didn't expect you to … adjust to it … so soon.”

We both drop our eyes. By “so soon,” he means before I started to really lose it. Before I forgot that he, or any of them, existed.

“Eric says you've started to get into the swing of things,” he tries again. “That you've come out of your room a few times—”

“More than a few,” I tell him. “I've even made some friends. That lady over there”—I nod at Southern Lady, who is surrounded by a cluster of little children and teenagers— “and him.” I point at Young Guy, whose eyes lift at that exact moment to meet mine. Quickly I point to another couple of residents that I've never seen before in my life. “Her and him, too.” Since I don't remember anyone's names, I might as well include them all.

“Good!” Jack's enthusiasm is tragic. It reminds me of the way he used to cheer when Ethan finally went on the potty. “That's … great.”

“Yep. There are lots of things to do. There's a bus that we can take to town, as long as we have a … a person that goes with us … and there's bingo on Friday nights.”

At this, Jack's enthusiasm is replaced by suspicion. “Bingo?”

“I mean … I didn't play or anything, but they have it, so that's good.”

I need to backpedal, fast. I want Jack to think I'm happy, not crazy. But I get the feeling that, with bingo, I took it too far.

Helen and the boys run up, saving me at the eleventh hour. “Anna do you have one of those beds that goes up and down?” Hank asks.

“Bed goes up, bed goes down. Bed goes up, bed goes down,” Brayden and Ethan chant.

“Why don't you go have a look?” I suggest, because I have no idea if I have one of those beds. For all I know, I've been sleeping on a lump of clay since I arrived—beds have not been at the top of my mind.

They jog toward the house, trailed by Helen, and I watch them go. There's a floor-to-ceiling window, I notice, way at the top of the building, directly above the paved courtyard. I zero in on it.

Back when I was a paramedic, I'd once been the first to reach a woman who'd leapt in front of a train. Her right leg had landed over the track and had been sheared off at the knee. On the way to the hospital, she slipped into a coma.

Tyrone sat beside her, shaking his head. “You gotta feel sorry for this one. This wasn't no cry for help. She wanted out.”

I nodded. “I think you're right.”

“She needed height.”

“What?”

“Height,” he repeated. “You fall from a certain height, you're dead. You don't need to be worryin' about the speed of the train or the amount of pills or the strength of the rope. You just need a bridge or a tall building. It's foolproof.”

I stare at the window and think about what he told me. All of a sudden, I have my plan.

“Anna?”
someone is shouting. “Do you have any gum?”

I look away from the window at Ethan. “What?”

“Gum,” he says. “Do you have any?”

I blink. Gum? Do I have gum? The sun is still pounding down on me like an unrelenting beast, and I can't think. I close my eyes, but it just continues to beam, turning my eyelids red.

“Can someone turn off that
damn sun
?”

There's a silence. I feel my chair being dragged along the grass, and a second later, blissfully, the sun is gone. “Well,” I say. “Praise be to God.”

I open my eyes. Ethan is staring. “
What?
What are you staring at?”

“You're being weird,” Ethan says. “Isn't she, Dad?”

Jack looks at Ethan and slowly back to me. Typical attorney—when you don't know what to say, say nothing.

“Is it because you're in this place?” Ethan asks. “With these old people?”

Jack touches Ethan's shoulder. “Buddy—”

“It's my fault, isn't it?” he says, ignoring Jack. “Because I got burned?”

His eyes get shiny.

“Eath,” I say. “Nothing is your fault.”

“Of course not,” Jack says, finding his tongue. “Anyway, this place hasn't made Anna weird. Anna has always been weird.”

“He's right,” I say. “In seventh grade, I was voted Weirdest in the Whole School.”

This isn't true, but I figure, it doesn't matter. Ethan lowers his hands and sniffs. A tiny pathetic-excuse-for-a-smile appears on his face.

“How's this for weird?” I lean in toward him, bulging my eyes as wide as they go and waggling my eyebrows.

His smile swells. “Pretty weird.”

“Told ya,” I say proudly. “Your dad tried to beat me, but year after year, Anna Forster won for Weirdest. He's always been pretty sore about it, too.”

“Yeah, well, Dad's a sore loser. Sorry,” he says when Jack frowns at him, “but you are.” He looks back at me. “So you don't hate it here?”

“Nope. It's actually pretty nice. Don't you think?”

“I guess. I like the garden. And that's a good climbing tree.” He looks at me. “Remember when we told Dad that we were stuck up that tree at the park, and we made him climb all the way up to rescue us even though we were fine?”

His face is so happy that I have to smile back. But it's a stretch. Because I have no recollection of what he's talking about. Not even the foggiest, haziest hint of a memory.