Charlie rapped on the sliding window. Up popped a squat, middle-aged man, his doughy face flattened from sleeping against his desktop. His small eyes snapped to alertness, he smoothed the stripes of hair into place across his balding pate, straightened a clip-on tie bearing the Fairview’s mountain peak logo, and slid the glass open an inch.
“Good evening, sir,” he said. With a glance at his antique pocket watch, he added, “Technically, I should say, ‘Good morning.’”
According to the letters packed into the placard, this was NIGHT MANAGER A. BRODY. Although other managers shared this desk, Charlie had no doubt that the meticulously trimmed miniature Christmas tree on the sill was A. Brody’s work. Charlie usually felt a kinship to the A. Brodys of the world, miles below the station in life befitting their intellect. Now Charlie was far more interested in getting out of the cold.
“Hi, I’d like a room, please,” he said. To diminish the chance of his being identified, he stayed at the outermost limits of the office’s fluorescent haze.
Brody plucked a registration card from atop a neat stack, set it on his desk blotter, aligned it, and then tweaked it until it was exactly parallel to the edge of the desk.
“May I have your name, please, sir?” he asked finally.
“Ramirez,” Charlie said, and, as soon as he did, cursed himself. His friend Mickey’s last name, the first that had come to mind, was common enough around here. But even in the dark, with the bill of a Yankees cap pulled down to his eyes, Charlie was no Ramirez.
Indeed, Brody raised an brow. “And how many adults in your party, Mr. Ramirez?”
Charlie considered that the FBI bulletin might have reached the furthest outposts of civilization by now. “Just me.”
Brody’s brow stayed put, quieting Charlie’s anxiety. “That will be fifty-nine dollars and eighty cents, please, sir.”
Charlie paid with three twenties and received two dimes and a key card.
“Have a wonderful stay,” Brody said with, Charlie thought, inordinate cheer.
Room 105 smelled of bathroom cleanser in combination with the flowery spray used to mask worse smells. The walls trembled each time a truck passed. Although worn, the beds were clad in crisp, clean sheets that promised sleep. And Charlie was starved for sleep.
“But how can we go to bed?” he asked as he paced the frayed carpet, careful to stay away from the window. Drummond lay on the less concave of the two beds. “Any second they could burst through the door with guns drawn. Then what?”
Drummond sagged against his headboard. “That would be trouble?”
Charlie recognized that danger had preceded both of Drummond’s episodes of lucidity. Hopefully the threat alone would do the trick now. “How about this? Say a sharpshooter takes a crack at us from out there?” He waved at the window. The spotty vinyl shade filtered passing headlights so that they appeared on the inner wall of the room as giant, spidery shadows.
Drummond was captivated by the shadows.
“Dad, if you could just remember a name. Even a phone number could make a difference in whether or not we have a tomorrow.”
Drummond fluffed his pillow. “Maybe if we got some sleep?”
“I don’t suppose you’ve remembered who you work for?” Charlie asked, on the remote chance that his tactic had had some effect.
Drummond yawned. “Perriman Appliances.”
“And what’s your job?”
“Deputy district sales manager for the North Atlantic Division. I demonstrate the appliances in the showroom, then go on-site with building owners to-”
“So you said.” Charlie sighed.
He turned away from Drummond, continuing to pace in hope that the motion would stir up a new idea. Helen might have one. He yearned to call her-apart from his predicament. He had long accepted the horseplayer tenet that all of life is six-to-five against-until the moment she asked him out for a beer. The problem was that almost certainly he and Drummond had been followed after meeting her: In all likelihood, Drummond was right about the Department of Housing worker on the sidewalk outside the senior center. And if Lenore was under surveillance…
In any case, Helen already had told Charlie that there was no sure way to stimulate lucidity. Back at the senior center, she likened lucidity’s random occurrence to a basketball player of middling ability sinking four consecutive shots from three-point range. If there were an explanation, no one knew it. Sometimes, however, strong mental associations triggered latent memories. In this respect the Alzheimer’s sufferer was like the Vietnam veteran with post-traumatic stress disorder-show him a helicopter, he’s back in Saigon. Because the Alzheimer’s sufferer’s memory could be damaged, inoperative, or gone, however, finding such a precise mental association was a crapshoot, at best.
But a crapshoot was far superior to Charlie’s other idea-doing nothing. He resolved to reel off the names of every United States president in office since Drummond’s birth, the major events in history during that time, and anything else Drummond might associate with government work.
Charlie took a deep breath, spun back at Drummond, and exclaimed, “Franklin Delano Roosevelt.”
Drummond was fast asleep.
Frustration joined the exhaustion and angst already blackening Charlie’s mind. He wanted to fly at Drummond and shake his memory back into operation.
Rest at least had a track record, he reminded himself.
Drummond was curled into the fetal position. Charlie would have bet that the old man slept on his back in the classic coffin pose, arms crossed at right angles over his chest. Careful not to jostle him, he slid the comforter out from beneath him. Close proximity to his father had always given Charlie something of a full-body itch. But no longer, for some reason, or at least not now. Gently, Charlie covered him. He twisted the knob on the nightstand lamp in slow motion so the snap wouldn’t wake him, then he tiptoed to his own bed. The springs whined as he lowered himself onto it, but not so loud that Drummond could have heard.
Drummond sat bolt upright, eyes bulging with terror.
“What is it?” Charlie asked, catching the panic himself.
“Beauregard!” Drummond cried.
“You mean the dog?” After Charlie left home, Drummond took in two retired dog track greyhounds, John-Paul Jones, who lived two or three years, and Beauregard, who lasted about a year longer.
“We forgot to get someone to look after him while we’re away!”
“No, no, it’s fine. Beauregard is-” Charlie stopped short of saying, “dead,” seeking to soften it. He was clumsy with euphemisms. “Beauregard’s with Mom.”
Drummond’s face twisted in mystification. “Now how would Beauregard have gotten all the way down to Monroeville?”
It sounded awfully Alzheimer’s-y, but Charlie had a feeling it was a major clue. The envelope with the first of his mother’s Social Security checks had borne a forwarding label; originally the check had been mailed to Monroeville, Virginia.
He got up and paced some more, trying to make sense of it.
He’d been a month shy of four when she died. He remembered a woman with the grace of a princess, the grit of a tomboy, and a whimsy all her own. She liked rain. No matter how cold the water was at Brooklyn’s Brighton Beach, she let out a whoop and plunged in. The two of them never went on mere errands, they went out in search of adventure. And found it-at the time, Charlie believed riding in the shopping carts at FoodLand compared to the Paris-Dakar Rally.
He couldn’t recall her funeral-just Drummond sitting him at the kitchen table and soberly relaying the details of the accident. Charlie’s theory was either time had eroded the recollection or he’d blocked it out.
Tonight he developed a new theory: She never had a funeral.
“She’s still alive, isn’t she?” he asked Drummond.
“Who?”
“Mom.”
