She slipped back into her chair and said something into Aubrey’s ear. She tapped her fingers across the back of his hand.
Grant went in search of Kristy and met her in the hall. She was pushing a cart on which there were pitchers of apple juice and grape juice.
“Just one sec,” she said to him, as she stuck her head through a doorway. “Apple juice in here? Grape juice? Cookies?”
He waited while she filled two plastic glasses and took them into the room. Then she came back and put two arrowroot cookies on paper plates.
“Well?” she said. “Aren’t you glad to see her participating and everything?”
Grant said, “Does she even know who I am?”
He could not decide. She could have been playing a joke. It would not be unlike her. She had given herself away by that little pretense at the end, talking to him as if she thought perhaps he was a new resident.
If that was what she was pretending. If it was a pretense.
But would she not have run after him and laughed at him then, once the joke was over? She would not have just gone back to the game, surely, and pretended to forget about him. That would have been too cruel.
Kristy said, “You just caught her at sort of a bad moment. Involved in the game.”
“She’s not even playing,” he said.
“Well, but her friend’s playing. Aubrey.”
“So who is Aubrey?”
“That’s who he is. Aubrey. Her friend. Would you like a juice?”
Grant shook his head.
“Oh, look,” said Kristy. “They get these attachments. That takes over for a while. Best buddy sort of thing. It’s kind of a phase.”
“You mean she really might not know who I am?”
“She might not. Not today. Then tomorrow—you never know, do you? Things change back and forth all the time and there’s nothing you can do about it. You’ll see the way it is once you’ve been coming here for a while. You’ll learn not to take it all so serious. Learn to take it day by day.”
Day by day. But things really didn’t change back and forth, and he didn’t get used to the way they were. Fiona was the one who seemed to get used to him, but only as some persistent visitor who took a special interest in her. Or perhaps even as a nuisance who must be prevented, according to her old rules of courtesy, from realizing that he was one. She treated him with a distracted, social sort of kindness that was successful in holding him back from the most obvious, the most necessary question. He could not demand of her whether she did or did not remember him as her husband of nearly fifty years. He got the impression that she would be embarrassed by such a question—embarrassed not for herself but for him. She would have laughed in a fluttery way and mortified him with her politeness and bewilderment, and somehow she would have ended up not saying either yes or no. Or she would have said either one in a way that gave not the least satisfaction.
Kristy was the only nurse he could talk to. Some of the others treated the whole thing as a joke. One tough old stick laughed in his face. “That Aubrey and that Fiona? They’ve really got it bad, haven’t they?”
Kristy told him that Aubrey had been the local representative of a company that sold weed killer—“and all that kind of stuff ”—to farmers.
“He was a fine person,” she said, and Grant did not know whether this meant that Aubrey was honest and openhanded and kind to people, or that he was well spoken and well dressed and drove a good car. Probably both.
And then when he was not very old or even retired—she said—he had suffered some unusual kind of damage.
“His wife is the one takes care of him usually. She takes care of him at home. She just put him in here on temporary care so she could get a break. Her sister wanted her to go to Florida. See, she’s had a hard time, you wouldn’t ever have expected a man like him—They just went on a holiday somewhere and he got something, like some bug, that gave him a terrible high fever? And it put him in a coma and left him like he is now.”
He asked her about these affections between residents. Did they ever go too far? He was able now to take a tone of indulgence that he hoped would save him from any lectures.
“Depends what you mean,” she said. She kept writing in her record book while deciding how to answer him. When she finished what she was writing she looked up at him with a frank smile.
“The trouble we have in here, it’s funny, it’s often with some of the ones that haven’t been friendly with each other at all. They maybe won’t even know each other, beyond knowing, like, is it a man or a woman? You’d think it’d be the old guys trying to crawl in bed with the old women, but you know half the time it’s the other way round. Old women going after the old men. Could be they’re not so wore out, I guess.”
Then she stopped smiling, as if she was afraid she had said too much, or spoken callously.
“Don’t take me wrong,” she said. “I don’t mean Fiona. Fiona is a lady.”
Well, what about Aubrey? Grant felt like saying. But he remembered that Aubrey was in a wheelchair.
“She’s a real lady,” Kristy said, in a tone so decisive and reassuring that Grant was not reassured. He had in his mind a picture of Fiona, in one of her long eyelet-trimmed blue-ribboned night-gowns, teasingly lifting the covers of an old man’s bed.
“Well, I sometimes wonder—” he said.
Kristy said sharply, “You wonder what?”
“I wonder whether she isn’t putting on some kind of a charade.”
“A what?” said Kristy.
Most afternoons the pair could be found at the card table. Aubrey had large, thick-fingered hands. It was difficult for him to manage his cards. Fiona shuffled and dealt for him and sometimes moved quickly to straighten a card that seemed to be slipping from his grasp. Grant would watch from across the room her darting move and quick, laughing apology. He could see Aubrey’s husbandly frown as a wisp of her hair touched his cheek. Aubrey preferred to ignore her as long as she stayed close.
But let her smile her greeting at Grant, let her push back her chair and get up to offer him tea—showing that she had accepted his right to be there and possibly felt a slight responsibility for him—and Aubrey’s face took on its look of somber consternation. He would let the cards slide from his fingers and fall on the floor, to spoil the game.
So that Fiona had to get busy and put things right.
If they weren’t at the bridge table they might be walking along the halls, Aubrey hanging on to the railing with one hand and clutching Fiona’s arm or shoulder with the other. The nurses thought that it was a marvel, the way she had got him out of his wheelchair. Though for longer trips—to the conservatory at one end of the building or the television room at the other—the wheelchair was called for.
The television seemed to be always turned to the sports channel and Aubrey would watch any sport, but his favorite appeared to be golf. Grant didn’t mind watching that with them. He sat down a few chairs away. On the large screen a small group of spectators and commentators followed the players around the peaceful green, and at appropriate moments broke into a formal sort of applause. But there was silence everywhere as the player made his swing and the ball took its lonely, appointed journey across the sky. Aubrey and Fiona and Grant and possibly others sat and held their breaths, and then Aubrey’s breath broke out first, expressing satisfaction or disappointment. Fiona’s chimed in on the same note a moment later.
In the conservatory there was no such silence. The pair found themselves a seat among the most lush and thick and tropical-looking plants—a bower, if you like—which Grant had just enough self-control to keep from penetrating. Mixed in with the rustle of the leaves and the sound of splashing water was Fiona’s soft talk and her laughter.
Then some sort of chortle. Which of them could it be?
Perhaps neither—perhaps it came from one of the impudent flashy-looking birds who inhabited the corner cages.
Aubrey could talk, though his voice probably didn’t sound the way it used to. He seemed to say something
