Flashback

“Seventh what?”

“I got him for my seventh birthday, dummy.” She shook her head. “Lucy, you were there, and Patty, too. Okay for you if I’m not invited. I wouldn’t go even if I was. So there!” Then her expression sharpened. “And since when have you been black?”

The black woman’s eyebrows shot up. “Pretty long,” she said and pulled a cell phone out of her bag. The elderly woman looked at the thing and gasped.

“It’s only a cell phone, for God’s sake.”

Blinking, the old woman stared at the device. And while the black woman punched numbers, her white companion leaned down toward the elderly woman. “Can you tell me your name?”

“Jello, you know that.”

“No, your name, not your puppy’s.”

The old woman looked around at the traffic grinding down Huntington. They were at a crosswalk to the MBTA Green Line stop at the nearby corner. The traffic was thick and people were waiting for the oncoming train. While she glared across the avenue, distracted by whatever she was taking in, the white student stooped down and read the bracelet. “Mary Curley.”

The black woman nodded. “I’d like to report a missing person,” she said into the phone. “I mean we found her. We’re in front of the Museum of Fine Arts on Huntington. Yeah. She’s an elderly woman who’s definitely confused. She’s got some kind of medical alert bracelet on. Her name’s Mary Curley; it says ‘I am an Alzheimer’s Patient.’”

Before the young woman could read the address on the back, Mary yanked her arm free. “Jello?” She reached into the giant Gap bag and pulled out a red mangled slipper. “Here’s Mister Slippy. Come on, good boy.”

Both women looked behind them, but there was no dog in sight.

“I mean, like she’s spaced out,” the black woman told the dispatcher. “She’s talking to statues and trees like she’s Mr. Magoo.”

“Mary, where do you live?”

But Mary just glared at the street.

“Jello,” the white woman said, to break her attention.

Mary snapped her head at her. “Where?”

The girl took Mary’s shoulders and stuck her face into hers. “Where do you live?” she asked, punching out each syllable.

Mary glanced at the museum with its four Doric columns and massive granite portico above huge bronze doors. “Four fifty-two Franklin Avenue.” She sang that out in perfect little-girl rhyme.

The black woman nodded, and into the phone said, “I don’t know. Maybe she escaped from a nursing home. No, I don’t know how she got here, and I don’t think she does, either. She thinks she’s lost her dog. Yeah. And you better come fast … . Yeah, she’s wearing a dress and sneakers and holding a shopping bag. The Gap.”

Mary glanced back at the spot she had been glaring at—someplace beyond the line of cars, busses, and trucks that inched down Huntington.

“How did you get here, Mary?” the white woman asked.

Suddenly Mary jerked out of her trance. “There’s my baby,” she said in that little-girl voice. “Jellooooo? He’s in his house. Where he was all the time.”

The white girl took Mary’s arm as she started toward the street, when suddenly Mary turned on her and bit her wrist.

“Shit, lady!” the girl shouted. “Jesus! It’s bleeding,” she said to her friend, who was still on the cell phone.

Mary shot into the street. Some inner-lane cars screeched to a standstill, and she just made it to the outer lane. But because the cars had stopped bumper to bumper, the college women could not catch Mary, who seemed not to notice the traffic or even the close call as a delivery van screeched to a halt just inches from broadsiding her. It was as if she were following a beam of awareness within a landscape that had nothing to do with the outer world.

“I see you,” she squealed with delight, and scurried through the traffic. “I see you, my baby.”

“Jenny, stop her!” the black woman shouted.

Jenny ran into the street, but neither she nor her friend nor any of the people on the sidewalk could stop Mary Curley because the traffic had made a tight chain of cars for half a block. Without distraction, she moved to the stopped train as if powered by some invisible force. From across the street, Jenny, still holding her bleeding wrist, shouted to her, “Mary, stop.”

But Mary did not stop, nor did she hear Jenny or her friend with the cell phone or the people in their vehicles or the last ca-ching of the money falling into the collection machine or the train’s doors closing behind the last passengers. Mary had dropped to her knees so she could look into the doghouse.

“No, Mary! Noooo!”

Jenny and her friend were scrambling over the hoods of the stopped cars screaming at Mary to stop.

But Mary was down now and crawling under the massive coupling that connected the two Green Line cars. “There’s my good boy.”

52

An elderly woman from Brookline killed herself yesterday by crawling under the wheels of an MBTA train in Boston …But authorities are still baffled how the seventy-eight-year-old woman suffering dementia had managed to find her way to Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts three miles from her home.According to her daughter, Mary Curley had been furloughed from Broadview Nursing Home in Cobbsville. Somehow she had managed to slip out of her Brookline home and found her way to the museum.According to witnesses at the scene, Mrs. Curley appeared to be delusional and did not realize she had crawled under the Green Line train … .

IT WAS THE FOURTH FLASHBACK-RELATED DEATH. This had to stop, Nick thought and clicked off the radio.

He pulled into the parking lot of Broadview Nursing Home, thinking that maybe Peter Habib was right—that this was a flawed drug that should be tabled.

He parked and made his way inside, where he stood in the lobby waiting for his party to arrive. Also burning like an ember in the forepart of his brain was the report about Jack Koryan. It was as if he had been raised from the dead, and with impossible recall—with an incandescent hippocampus that might harbor stuff that could turn things topsy-turvy.

My God!

Nick shook the dark possibilities from his mind as he watched the GEM group march up the front walk from the parking lot for the two P.M. meeting. This was not going to be good.

Gavin Moy was in the lead, his bulldog face preceding him like the grille of a Mack truck. He was dressed in an olive green sport coat, and with the dark glasses he looked like a military commander striding his way toward the front. Flanking him was Jordan Carr, moving in steady cadence like Moy’s shadow in the afternoon sun, and behind them marched Mark Thompson, the GEM Tech medical director, and Mort Coleman, chief legal officer for the company.

Nick met them at the door, then led them across the lobby, a spacious and well-lit area newly furnished with padded chairs and sofas upholstered in bright floral patterns and clustered around coffee tables and large floor plants discretely arranged for attraction and privacy, giving the room the feel of an upscale country inn. And, like the rest of the wing, all provided by the generous grant money of GEM Tech, according to a plaque hanging in the entranceway.

They took the elevator to the second floor and passed through the security doors leading into the Alzheimer’s unit. Although Jordan Carr had worked on the ward in the early days of the trials, he had been back only a few times since Nick had taken over the site. And he was here because Gavin, with his penchant for corporate