"I think that's a good idea. By the way, I think we're going to hear about that other book project today, but frankly I don't think you'll get it. You should have told them you had an emergency appendectomy or something." Ruth had failed to show up at an interview because her mother had called in a panic, thinking her alarm clock was the smoke detector going off.
At four, Agapi called to discuss final edits for Righting the Wronged Child. An hour later, they were still talking. Agapi was eager to start a new book, which she wanted to call either Past-Perfect Tension or The Embedded Self. Ruth kept staring at the clock. She was supposed to pick up her mother at six for dinner at Fountain Court. "Habit, neuromusculature, and the limbic system, that's the basis…" Agapi was saying. "From babyhood and our first sense of insecurity, we clench, grasp, flail. We embed the response but forget the cause, the past that was imperfect… Ruth, my dear, you seem to be somewhere else. Should you ring me later when you feel more refreshed?"
At five-fifteen, Ruth called her mother to remind her she was coming. No answer. She was probably in the bathroom. Ruth waited five minutes, then called again. Still no answer. Did she have constipation? Had she fallen asleep? Ruth tidied her desk, put the phone on speaker, and hit automatic redial. After fifteen minutes of unanswered ringing, she had run through all the possibilities, until they culminated in the inevitable worst possible thing. Flames leaping from a pot left on the stove. LuLing dousing the flames with oil. Her sleeve catching fire. As Ruth drove to her mother's, she braced herself to see a crackling blaze eating the roof, her mother lying twisted in a blackened heap.
Just as she feared, when Ruth arrived she saw lights flickering in the upper level, shadows dancing. She rushed in. The front door was unlocked. "Mom? Mommy! Where are you?" The television was on, blasting Amor sin Límite at high volume. LuLing had never figured out how to use the remote control, even though Ruth had taped over all but the Power, Channel Up, and Channel Down buttons. She turned off the TV, and the sudden silence frightened her.
She ran to the back rooms, flung open closets, looked out the windows. Her throat tightened. "Mommy, where are you?" she whimpered. "Answer me." She ran down the front steps and knocked on the tenant's door.
She tried to sound casual. "By any chance, have you seen my mother?"
Francine rolled her eyes and nodded knowingly. "She went charging down the sidewalk about two or three hours ago. I noticed because she was wearing slippers and pajamas, and I said to myself, 'Wow, she looks really flipped out.'… Like it's none of my business, but you should take her to the doctor and get her medicated or something. I mean that in the good sense."
Ruth raced back upstairs. With shaky fingers, she called a former client who was a captain in the police department. Minutes later, a Latino officer stood at the doorway. He was bulging with weapons and paraphernalia and his face was serious. Ruth's panic notched up. She stepped outside.
"She has Alzheimer's," Ruth jabbered. "She's seventy-seven but has the mind of a child."
"Description."
"Four-eleven, eighty-five pounds, black hair pulled into a bun, probably wearing pink or lilac pajamas and slippers…" Ruth was picturing LuLing as she said this: the puzzled look on her mother's face, her inert body lying in the street. Ruth's voice started to wobble. "Oh God, she's so tiny and helpless…"
"Does she look anything like that lady there?"
Ruth looked up to see LuLing standing stock still at the end of the walkway. She was wearing a sweater over her pajamas.
"Ai-ya! What happen?" LuLing cried. "Robber?"
Ruth ran toward her. "Where were you?" She appraised her mother for signs of damage.
The officer walked up to the two of them. "Happy ending," he said, then turned toward his patrol car.
"Stay there," Ruth ordered her mother. "I'll be right back." She went to the patrol car and the officer rolled down his window. "I'm sorry for all the trouble," she said. "She's never done this before." And then she considered that maybe she had, but she just didn't know it. Maybe she did this every day, every night. Maybe she roamed the neighborhood in her underwear!
"Hey, no problem," the policeman said. "My mother-in-law did the same thing. Sundowning. The sun went down, she went wandering. We had to put alarm triggers on all the doors. That was one tough year, until we put her in a nursing home. My wife couldn't do it anymore-keeping an eye on her day and night."
Day and night? And Ruth thought she was being diligent by having her mother over for dinner and trying to hire a part-time housekeeper. "Well, thanks anyway," she said.
When she returned to her mother, LuLing complained right away: "Grocery store 'round the corner? I walk 'round and 'round, gone! Turn into bank. You don't believe, go see youself!"
Ruth wound up staying the night at her mother's, sleeping in her old bedroom. The foghorns were louder in this section of the city. She remembered listening to them at night when she was a teenager. She would lie in bed, counting the blasts, matching them to the number of years it would be before she could move out. Five years, then four, then three. Now she was back.
In the morning, Ruth opened the cupboards to look for cereal. She found dirty paper napkins folded and stacked. Hundreds. She opened the fridge. It was packed with plastic bags of black and greenish mush, cartons of half-eaten food, orange peels, cantaloupe rinds, frozen goods long defrosted. In the freezer were a carton of eggs, a pair of shoes, the alarm clock, and what appeared to have been bean sprouts. Ruth felt sick. This had happened in just one week?
She called Art in Kauai. There was no answer. She pictured him lying serenely on the beach, oblivious to all problems in the world. But how could he be on the beach? It was six in the morning there. Where was he? Hula dancing in someone's bed? Another thing to worry about. She could call Wendy, but Wendy would simply commiserate by saying her own mother was doing far crazier things. How about Gideon? He was more concerned about clients and contracts. Ruth decided to call Auntie Gal.
"Worse? How can she be worse?" GaoLing said. "I gave her ginseng, and she said she was taking it every day."
"The doctor said none of those things will help-"
"Doctor!" GaoLing snorted. "I don't believe this diagnosis, Alzheimer's. Your uncle said the same thing, and he's a dentist. Everybody gets old, everybody forgets. When you're old, there's too much to remember. I ask you, Why didn't anyone have this disease twenty, thirty years ago? The problem is, today kids have no time anymore to see parents. Your mommy's lonely, that's all. She has no one to talk to in Chinese. Of course her mind is a little rusted. If you stop speaking, no oil for the squeaky wheel!"
"Well, that's why I need your help. Can she come visit you, maybe for the week? It's just that I have a lot of work this week and can't spend as much time-"
"No need to ask. I'm already offering. I'll come get her in one hour. I need to do some shopping there anyway."
Ruth wanted to weep with relief.
After Auntie Gal left with her mother, Ruth walked a few blocks to the beach, to Land's End. She needed to hear the pummeling waves, their constancy and loudness drowning out her own pounding heart.
SIX
As Ruth walked along the beach, the surf circled her ankles and tugged. Go seaward, it suggested, where it is vast and free.
When Ruth was a teenager, her mother had once run off in the middle of an argument, declaring she was going to drown herself in the ocean. She had waded in to her thighs before her daughter's screams and pleas had brought her back. And now Ruth wondered: If she had not begged her mother to return, would LuLing have let the ocean decide her fate?