“A long time ago.”
“How long did it take? I mean, all that had to take a crazy load of time. What is this one? Wait, wait—are these your own designs? My Spanish teacher has a biggie,” she forms a circle with both hands, “but it’s on her shoulder, and she usually covers it up, and hers is nowhere near as gorgeous as yours. So,didyou design these yourself?” She reaches out, almost touching him but not quite. Her eyes rise to his. “Did ithurt?”
Bill looks overwhelmed. Anne is suppressing a grin.
I come forward. “Know what we need, Joy? Flowers.” Grateful that the clippers are still in the same old tool drawer, I hand them over. “Cut lots for the lots of vases in the dining room.”
“We’re eating in the dining room?” Joy asks, eyes as wide at that thought as at the tattoos, and I feel a pang. We eat in Chrissie’s dining room, but rarely our own. Joy equates dining room with family, which is different in her mind from just us two.
“Uh,” I look quickly at Anne, who gestures,Sure.
“O-kay,” Joy agrees and heads out, but not before telling Bill, “We aren’t done with this conversation.”
He waits until the screen door slaps before squinting at me. “Where did she come from?”
I simply raise a hand to say,Don’t ask,and return to the corn.
Having slept through much of the afternoon, my father is in better shape than I’ve yet seen him. Maybe it’s having dinner in the dining room on a large mahogany table done up with linen napkins and the family silver. Maybe it’s having lobster. Maybe it’s seeing all those vases filled with flowers—and I do mean filled. Joy went overboard, and while her experience is limited to the tiny garden behind Chrissie’s brownstone or bunches of flowers from Whole Foods, she has a knack. One vase holds red phlox, another orange and yellow gerbera daisies. The two largest vases sprout fans of purple-blue Russian sage, the three smallest offer nosegays of violets and buttercups.
My mother’s arrangements were more refined. But Dad appreciates Joy’s. He moves from one to the next in patent admiration. Nothing on his face suggests worry, as it would if he had left a gun in the one vase I might have skimmed too quickly, or, for that matter, anywhere else in this room. His good mood may be that he feels safe here.
It may also be having people around this table, and, for a split second, I wish Margo were here to feel the nostalgia I do. If she could open her mind to the memories in this room, she might soften. She might agree with me that family is worth saving. She might commit to finding a path forward with Anne.
She might even get an understanding of what Dad’s life is like—might even feel a drop of compassion for the man. His world has shrunk, his family is dispersed. I’m not sure whether Anne actually eats dinner with him each night, or whether she just sees that he’sfed before she leaves. Whatever, I’m guessing that five for dinner is more than usual.
Of course, that could have the opposite effect, which is why it’s probably better that Margo is at her pre-theater dinner in Manhattan. Typically, Alzheimer’s patients are stressed by new or challenging things. Seeing Margo might freak him out.
That said, he greets Bill with a handshake and calls him by name, suggesting he’s been here before. And I’m glad. Bill is a surprise. He seems to calm Anne. For that alone, I like him. Moreover, the guy here today is a huge improvement over the one I remember when we were growing up. I won’t say he’s charming, since I can’t call a discussion of inmates at a medium security prison in Cranston charming. He supervises the carpentry shop there, and while I ask a question or two, they go nowhere fun. And there’s still the matter of the tattoos, at which Joy continues to slide surreptitious glances. He does, though, tell my father about the legal battle an inmate is waging against a conviction that was based on the testimony of a single eyewitness.
“Tricky thing, eyewitness testimony,” Dad says. He is studying his lobster, not sure where to begin, then jiggling one of the feelers in uncertainty. But he does remember the law. “If the initial identity is made from a police sketch, a witness is more apt to confirm the accused in person, whether he believes it or not. He may not want to be wrong. He may be swayed by a prosecutor who promises lenience or even immunity on a charge of, say, aiding-and-abetting. Let’s face it, eyewitnesses aren’t always good people, especially if they’re hanging around places where crimes take place.”
“What if they are good people?” Joy asks. I try to catch her eye to keep her from breaking Dad’s momentum, but she’s on a riff. “What if there’s just one person who survives an awful crime, like a school shooting, and she has to identify the suspect?”
“Oh sweetie,” Anne says as I would have if she hadn’t beat me to it.
Seeming unaware how tragic it is that a thirteen-year-old knowsto ask this, my father lifts his lobster fork and, dispassionately, says, “That scenario introduces other questions, like the effect of trauma. Terror can color eyewitness testimony. And if the witness is injured during the event and loses consciousness, his recollection may be spotty.”
“Emotion,” I say without meaning to, but if Joy thinks of school shootings, I think of that night, right here, twenty years ago. In the aftermath, we were all highly emotional.
My father either doesn’t hear or can’t compute. “Then you have the matter of time between the crime and the trial. And memory. It isn’t stored in the brain intact. It has to be reconstructed. The mind retrieves pieces and puts them together. There’s room for error.”
What he says makes so much sense that I wonder if he and I are wrong and Anne right. He may not have Alzheimer’s at all. Right now, he is perfectly lucid.
But then, setting the fork aside, he frowns and looks around the table. Anne is sucking sweet scraps of meat from the feelers, while Bill has forcefully bent the tail backward and is tugging chunks of meat out with a regular fork. Joy is holding her corn in both hands and eating it row by careful row. I twist off a claw.
Watching me, Dad twists off a claw.
“I never thought of memory that way,” I say, working at the meat. When no one speaks, I realize that either I take the bait, or the opportunity is lost. “Is that what you do, Dad—fit pieces together?”
He removes a piece of meat, dunks it in butter, and eats it. Almost absently, he says, “It is.”
“Do you do it when you think back on that night out on the boat?” I dare ask. I’m aware that Anne has paused to listen.
“Of course, I do,” he says. “I’m the only eyewitness to what happened to Eleanor.”
“Elizabeth,” I whisper.
“Elizabeth,” he whispers back—and how pathetic it is that despite his mistake, I’m pleased that he and I connect.
