In theory, Nana was a backyard resident, though in truth she didn't have much interest in going outside,
much less wandering off, regardless of the weather. It was hard to tell
what
she was interested in since she'd pretty much stopped talking back before Christmas. Still, a few of the aides would periodically plunk her down in a wheelchair and take her for a spin around the grounds.
One or two of the residents on the porch looked familiar and some nodded or said hello as we approached. One of the ladies called out, "Hello, Gia. Brought your little sister today?" even though I am only two and a half months younger, which—statistically speaking—doesn't count as younger at all.
Gia took the opportunity to make herself at home with them, chatting, adjusting lap blankets—old people love their lap blankets, even come August—examining and exclaiming over a scarf one of them was knitting, studying a Scrabble board and providing one of the players with a twenty-seven-point word.
(Demure.
What kind of fifteen-year-old thinks up the word
demure?)
My feeling was that old people are kind of spooky—I mean you can hardly tell what some of them are saying because they've had strokes or they don't have their teeth. And they ask you questions, and you have no idea what they're talking about, and they tell
you
to speak up, speak clearly, stop mumbling.
But Gia, with her plans to go into geriatric medicine, knew what to say to them. And they loved her for it. She promised that if she was still around when
Wheel of Fortune
came on, she'd sit in the lobby with them and watch.
I, meanwhile, just stood there and smiled a lot, while they sat there and thought Gia had an idiot for a sister.
What if,
I worried,
my glasses make me see something I don't want to see?
If ever there was a place that was going to be haunted, it would be a nursing home. If someone started talking to me, I'd have to make sure he was really there before I answered. Some of them looked nearly as old as Tiffanie, but they did whether I looked at them through the lenses or over.
Finally Gia told the people on the porch she was going in to see "our" grandmother. (
Not YOUR grandmother,
I thought, though she probably just figured that was easier than explaining.)
"She's a lucky woman to have two such beautiful and attentive granddaughters," one of the women said.
Yeah, lucky. She didn't even recognize us anymore.
And Gia was both the beautiful and the attentive one.
Nana's room is on the fifth floor, and that's where we found her. She was sitting up in a chair that faced the window, which looked out over the north end of Highland Park across the street, where the lilacs were in full bloom. Her expression appeared alert and intent. But I'd been here other times when she wore the same expression facing the wall.
Her roommate turned her head, though, and her eyes above the oxygen mask followed us.
"Hello, Mrs. Rausch," I said, proud of myself for remembering her name, but thinking,
Wow, she's lost so much weight I wouldn't recognize her.
Gia looked at me in horror and whispered, "That's not Mrs. Rausch. Mrs. Rausch died two weeks ago. This is why polite people don't wear sunglasses indoors." She raised her voice above the hiss of the oxygen tank: "Hello, Miss Lysiak."
The figure on the bed gave a feeble wave.
I was just glad the glasses didn't show Mrs. Rausch still lingering in the room.
Gia took Miss Lysiak's hand, thin as a bird's foot and bruised from IV needles, and leaned over to kiss her cheek. She knew this woman for less than two weeks, and already she felt comfortable kissing her.
I moved in to Nana's section of the room. "Hi, Nana," I said.
No reaction.
Self-consciously, I bent over to kiss her cheek, which was dry and papery.
Still no reaction.
For about five seconds.
Then she raised her hand to touch where my lips had grazed her. But she never glanced my way.
Wake up, Nana,
I wanted to shout, though she was awake.
Snap out of it.
I remembered a time when I'd been four or five, when she'd come running out to the car to greet us on a Sunday visit, me, my mother, and my dad, and she picked me up, tickled my neck with a multitude of extravagant kisses, then twirled me round and round and round until, dizzy, laughing, we'd fallen on our backs onto her front lawn. Then it felt as though we remained still, lying in the fragrant, fresh-mowed grass, while everthing else—the house, the front yard, the apple tree that Papa had planted to celebrate their first wedding anniversary—spun around us.
I threw myself into the armchair and wondered if I should turn on the TV. But Nana was so clearly not interested that it would be obvious I had turned it on for myself.
While Gia talked quietly with Miss Lysiak, I let my gaze wander around the room. On the dresser was Mom and Bill's wedding picture, the two of them
looking radiant, flanked by me and Gia, ten years old and sulky about each other and about the uncomfortable and fussy bridesmaid dresses we'd been forced to wear. I remember we'd squabbled right before the photographer called us up onto the altar to take our picture. Gia had recovered her poise and you'd have to know her to know she was mad. Me ... Well, if I'd realized I'd have this picture to look at for the rest of my life, maybe I could have mustered a more agreeable expression.
There were other pictures stuck in the frame of the dresser mirror and scattered around the room, and also a photo album on the nightstand. I knew that periodically Mom would rearrange the pictures, and exchange a new album for the old one. At first, when Nana had been better, the two of them used to look through the albums together, but the last year it had been pretty clear, even to Mom, that Nana wasn't seeing the pictures anymore. Maybe Mom still brought the albums so that the aides, some of whom changed about as often as the seasons, could glimpse what she'd been like before.
I dragged the photo album over onto my lap. It was one of the older ones, with pictures of Nana's parents and her sister, who'd died of polio when she'd been about my age, and a whole bunch of people I
didn't know. I flipped to the back where her wedding pictures were. I didn't remember Papa at all; he'd died before I was a year old. I only knew him through Nana's stories. And Nana's stories about Papa had been one of the last things that left her. When my parents were still married, Nana had been fine: living on her own, taking care of the house and yard, organizing the women's guild at her church, visiting as Story Lady at the local library. It was after the divorce, actually after Mom married Bill, that there were the first signs of trouble: Nana kept calling Bill "Eugene."
I
thought it was funny. I thought she was hinting that she didn't like Mom's new husband, and that was why she called him by my father's name. I wasn't even worried when Nana called me by my Mom's name, Jeannette. Nana would roll her eyes, smack herself on the forehead, and correct herself by saying "Wendy." Until the day when she didn't catch on that she'd used the wrong name. Until the day she wouldn't believe me when I said that I wasn't Jeannette.
It had all started when Bill and Gia came into our lives. Thinking about it, I knew that was coincidence; but feelings don't necessarily make sense, and they can be stubborn. It was hard—when I was having a bad day about something or other—not to wonder.
Gia finally finished with Miss Lysiak and came and gave Nana a hug and a kiss. "How are you feeling, Nana?" she asked, giving her a quick little shoulder massage.
No reaction to Gia, either, which was petty of me to gloat over.
Gia kept on. "What a pretty sweater you're wearing. I love the embroidery. Is it one of the ones you made? Wow, look at those tiny stitches, Wendy."
It
was
one of the ones she'd made. She'd made me one just like it with the tiny blue forget-me-nots along the bottom border. But mine had been made to fit an eight-year-old, and it was given away to the Salvation Army so that another little girl could enjoy it. I wondered if yet another child had it now, or if it was at the bottom of someone's closet, or if it had been thrown away.
Gia plunked herself on the edge of Nana's bed and lifted the photo album away from me. "Oh, I love this album," she said. "This is the one where you were growing up. Here, let's look at it together." She was positioned between the two of us, but Nana continued to look out the window, and I leaned back and stared at the ceiling.
As Gia chattered away about the pictures, I wanted to tell her:
She's not like the others. You can't
charm her. Not only does she not know who we are, she isn't even aware we're here. You can be as personable as you want, and she won't care.
That gave me a certain amount of satisfaction—to know that Nana couldn't be comparing the two of us and liking Gia better.
Gia said, "Oh, and here you are in that blue and white dress that was handmade for you in Italy. We still have that, you know, and a couple other of your special dresses, like your Japanese kimono, and the green suit you wore when you and Papa got married. Look at all these handsome young men you knew. I bet they were all courting you."
Courting.
I sniffed. That fit along with
demure.
Still, I glanced at the page Gia was looking at, where Nana was a young woman, surrounded by friends, all laughing and having a good time.
How many of them were dead now? Were any in the same state as Nana? Probably not. Nana was lucky enough to be suffering from
early
Alzheimer's. Like regular Alzheimer's wasn't bad enough.
I was feeling claustrophobic and I stood up.
Gia seemed as oblivious to me as Nana was.
When will Mom get here?
I wondered.
And how much should I tell her about what's been going on?
She wasn't likely to let me transfer to a different school starting tomorrow without
some
sort of explanation.
If I didn't have the glasses tomorrow, if I told Tiffanie and Julian that I'd thrown them away because they gave me a headache and made everything look blurry so I could hardly see anything, would they believe me? And leave me alone?
On the other hand, what would they do to me if they didn't believe me?
"I need to go for a walk," I announced.
No one was interested.
I went back down to the main floor and was trying to decide whether I should go into the back garden or out onto South Avenue when I saw, through the glass door, Julian coming up the front walk.
I froze like a deer startled by headlights. But I snapped out of that when I thought of what happens to deer that don't move out of the way of traffic.
I had to do something—but what?
I could scream for help, and—when the aides or nurses came—explain that Julian was stalking me.
Which he would deny, of course.
But I could always tell
why
he was stalking me. I could demand, "Look at him through these glasses."
Except for that nagging worry that nobody else would see what I saw.
He'd paused just on the other side of the door,
talking with—or being talked to by—the residents on the porch. With the sunlight outside glaring on the glass, I was pretty sure he hadn't seen me yet.
I could run for the elevator, but if it had been called to a different floor, I'd be stranded there waiting in the wide open when he came in. And even if the elevator came, what then? Go upstairs to Nana's room? Did he know her name? I realized he didn't need to know it.
Two girls come here,
he could say, and either describe us or give our names.
And who do they visit?
he'd ask. Gia's fan club would assume he was in love with her, just as they were, and they would think that was sweet, and they would tell him,
Oh, that's Helen Vogt's granddaughter you're looking for, up in room five fifteen.
There was no reason for Julian to harm Nana or Gia, so if I ran, it wasn't like I was abandoning them. But run where?
I could zip into one of the resident's rooms on this floor to hide. And hope there was nobody in the room who was susceptible to heart attacks or who would scream at my sudden entrance.
You're being ridiculous,
I told myself. What could Julian do to me here?
But there was a good chance, with those pointy ears and fickle facial features, that he wasn't human.
There was, in truth, no telling
what
he could do. And if one of the residents later said,
A hysterical girl came into my room, then a young man followed her and chopped her into little pieces and flushed her down my toilet,
was anybody going to believe a nursing home patient? They'd give her an aspirin and extra Jell-O for dinner and tell her to watch
Wheel of Fortune
from now on, and not the SciFi Channel.
Was the library any better? If, for any reason, he chose to go there, I would be trapped, for there was only the one entrance.
Kitchen? Too far down the hallway, given that the front door was already moving as Julian pushed on it to come in.
I turned and dashed for the side exit, the one that opened into the backyard. I knew it was enclosed, but—after all—that wall was meant to contain geriatric patients, not fleeing-for-their-lives fifteen-year-olds. At the very least, it was a half acre with trees and bushes and a little windy path that had park benches every ten feet or so, which would afford some amount of cover. And if I was really lucky, Julian would be concentrating on finding the elevator and wouldn't even see me leave the building.
"Wendy!" I heard him call.
So much for luck.
I hit the door and almost bowled over an aide assisting a man with a walker. "Hey! Slow down!" she yelled after me.
"Sorry," I called over my shoulder as I kept on running.
Ignoring the path, I ran straight: onto the grass, into a cluster of trees. There really weren't as many as I had hoped. Which made sense if you remembered the whole purpose was to air the patients without losing them.