“I’m at gas station in Connecticut.”
“Why?”
“Sandra, I want you to listen to me.” There was a burst of static. Grace waited for it to pass. She finished filling the tank and grabbed her receipt. “You’re the last person to talk to my husband before he disappeared. You lied to me about it. You still won’t tell me what he said to you. Why should I tell you anything?”
“Fair point, Grace. Now you listen to me. I’m going to leave you with one last thought before I hang up: Go home and take care of your children.”
The line went dead. Grace was back in the car now. She hit redial and asked to be connected to Sandra’s office. Nobody answered. She tried again. Same thing. So now what? Try to show up in person again?
She pulled out of the gas station. Two miles later Grace saw a sign that said STARSHINE ASSISTED LIVING CENTER. Grace was not sure what she’d been expecting. The nursing home of her youth, she guessed, those one-level edifices of plain brick, the purest form of substance-over-style that, in a perverse way, reminded her of elementary schools. Life, alas, was cyclical. You start in one of those plain brick buildings, you end there. Turn, turn, turn.
But the Starshine Assisted Living Center was a three-story faux Victorian hotel. It had the turrets and the porches and the bright yellow of the painted ladies of old, all set against a ghastly aluminum siding. The grounds were manicured to the point where everything looked a tad too done, almost plastic. The place was aiming for cheery but it was trying too hard. The whole effect reminded Grace of Epcot Center at Disney World-a fun reproduction but you’d never mistake it for the real thing.
An old woman sat on a rocking chair on the front porch. She was reading the paper. She wished Grace a good morning and Grace did likewise. The lobby too tried to force up memories of a hotel from a bygone era. There were oil paintings in gaudy frames that looked like the kind of thing you’d buy at one of those Holiday Inn sales where everything was $19.99. It was obvious that they were reproductions of classics, even if you had never seen Renoir’s
The lobby was surprisingly busy. There were elderly people, of course, lots of them, in various states of degeneration. Some walked with no assistance, some shuffled, some had canes, some had walkers, some had wheelchairs. Many seemed spry; others slept.
The lobby was clean and bright but still had that-Grace hated herself for thinking like this-old-people smell, the odor of a sofa turning moldy. They tried to cover it up with something cherry, something that reminded Grace of those dangling tree fresheners in gypsy cabs, but there are some smells that you can never mask.
The singular young person in the room-a woman in her mid-twenties-sat behind a desk that was again aiming for the era but looked like something just bought at the Bombay Company. She smiled up at Grace.
“Good morning. I’m Lindsey Barclay.”
Grace recognized the voice from the phone. “I’m here to see Mr. Dodd.”
“Bobby’s in his room. Second floor, room 211. I’ll take you.”
She rose. Lindsey was pretty in a way that only the young are, with that enthusiasm and smile that belong exclusively to the innocent or the cult recruiter.
“Do you mind taking the stairs?” she asked.
“Not at all.”
Many of the residents stopped and said hello. Lindsey had time for every one of them, cheerfully returning each greeting, though Grace the cynic couldn’t help but wonder if this was a bit of a show for the visitor. Still Lindsey knew all the names. She always had something to say, something personal, and the residents seemed to appreciate that.
“Seems like mostly women,” Grace noted.
“When I was in school, they told us the national ratio in assisted living is five women for every one man.”
“Wow.”
“Yes. Bobby jokes that he’s waited his whole life for that kind of odds.”
Grace smiled.
She waved a hand. “Oh, but he’s all talk. His wife-he calls her ‘his Maudie’-died almost thirty years ago. I don’t think he’s looked at a woman since.”
That silenced them. The corridor was done up in forest green and pink, the walls lined with the familiar-Rockwell prints, dogs playing poker, black-and-whites from old movies like
“We have different neighborhoods at Starlight,” Lindsey explained. “That’s what we call the corridors like this. Neighborhoods. Each has a different theme. The one we’re in now is called Nostalgia. We think the residents find it comforting.”
They stopped at a door. A nameplate on the right said “B. Dodd.” She knocked on the door. “Bobby?”
No reply. She opened the door anyway. They stepped into a small but comfortable room. There was a tiny kitchenette on the right. On the coffee table, ideally angled so that you could see it from both the door and the bed, was a large black-and-white photograph of a stunning woman who looked a bit like Lena Horne. The woman in the picture was maybe forty but you could tell that the picture was old.
“That’s his Maudie.”
Grace nodded, lost for a moment in this image in the silver frame. She thought again about “her Jack.” For the first time she allowed herself to consider the unthinkable: Jack might never come home. It was something she’d been avoiding from the moment she’d heard the minivan start up. She might never see Jack again. She might never hold him. She might never laugh at one of his corny jokes. She might never-and this was apropos to think here-grow old with him.
“Are you okay?”
“Fine.”
“Bobby must be up with Ira on Reminiscence. They play cards.”
They began to back out of the room. “Is Reminiscence another, uh, neighborhood?”
“No. Reminiscence is what we call our third floor. It’s for our residents with Alzheimer’s.”
“Oh.”
“Ira doesn’t recognize his own children, but he still plays a mean game of poker pinochle.”
They were back in the hall. Grace noticed a cluster of images next to Bobby Dodd’s door. She took a closer look. It was one of those box frames people use to display trinkets. There were army medals. There was an old baseball, brown with age. There were photographs from every era of the man’s life. One photograph was of his murdered son, Bob Dodd, the same one she’d seen on the computer last night.
Lindsey said, “Memory box.”
“Nice,” Grace said, because she didn’t know what else to say.
“Every patient has one by their door. It’s a way to let everyone know about you.”
Grace nodded. Summing up a life in a twelve-by-eight box frame. Like everything else about this place, it managed to be both appropriate and creepy at the exact same time.
To get to the Reminiscence floor you had to use an elevator that worked by a coded numeric keypad. “So the residents don’t wander,” Lindsey explained, which again fit into the “making sense yet giving the willies” style of this place.
The Reminiscence floor was comfortable, well appointed, well staffed, and terrifying. Some residents were functional, but most wilted in wheelchairs like dying flowers. Some stood and shuffled. Several muttered to themselves. All had that glazed, hundred-yard stare.
A woman deep into her eighties jangled her keys and started for the elevator.
Lindsey asked, “Where are you going, Cecile?”
The old woman turned toward her. “I have to pick up Danny from school. He’ll be waiting for me.”
“It’s okay,” Lindsey said. “School won’t be out for another two hours.”
“Are you sure?”
“Of course. Look, let’s have some lunch and then you can pick up Danny, okay?”
“He has piano lessons today.”
“I know.”
A staff member came over and steered Cecile away. Lindsey watched her go. “We use validation therapy,” she said, “with our advanced Alzheimer’s patients.”
“Validation therapy?”
“We don’t argue with them or try to make them see the truth. I don’t, for example, tell her that Danny is now a sixty-two-year-old banker with three grandchildren. We just try to redirect them.”
They walked down a corridor-no, “neighborhood”-filled with life-size dolls of babies. There was a changing table and teddy bears.
“Nursery neighborhood,” she said.
“They play with dolls?”
“Those that are more high functioning. It helps them prepare for visits from great-grandchildren.”
“And the others?”
Lindsey kept walking. “Some think they’re young mothers. It helps soothe them.”
Subconsciously, or maybe not, they picked up the pace. A few seconds later, Lindsey said, “Bobby?”
Bobby Dodd rose from the card table. The first word that came to mind: Dapper. He looked sprightly and fresh. He had dark black skin, thick wrinkles like something you might see on an alligator. He was a snappy dresser in a tweed jacket, two-tone loafers, red ascot with matching hanky. His gray hair was
