Zee had always believed that one day Maureen would tell her what her real middle name was, but now of course it was too late. When Maureen died, everything was frozen in place, from Zee’s middle initial to the childhood room her mother had spent so much time decorating for what she clearly hoped would be the most perfect of little girls, her little princess.
That Zee was neither perfect nor a princess was evident elsewhere in the room. There were whole segments of wall where she had taken her Crayolas and colored in the ballerinas-head to toe to tutu. She’d had the measles at the time and therefore couldn’t be punished for her crime. Maureen, who didn’t believe in inoculation, had insisted that Zee stay in a dimly lit room for days with nothing to do. To entertain herself Zee moved systematically around the perimeter of her little world, decorating only as high as she could reach and choosing the colors she most preferred-Electric Lime and Fuzzy Wuzzy.
The colorful ballerinas were creative enough but fatally flawed, Maureen always said, though when Zee asked what she meant, her mother could never articulate a response. Instead Maureen had waist-high wainscoting put up around the room covering the flawed dancers. She painted it white and had rosebuds stenciled along the chair rail to match the bed. Just a trace of Zee’s artwork remained now, the occasional wild scribble looping upward past the wainscoting, then disappearing back down again.
There were other signs as well, through the years that followed, that Zee was not the princess type. Scuba gear dangled off the ballet bar, from a job she’d gotten untangling mooring and lobster lines from the propellers of the tourists’ boats that so often became caught in them. Those jobs paid forty dollars a pop, better than she could make waitressing, for a task that usually took less than twenty minutes. If she wore her bikini, she often got paid even more, but usually the men hung around and tried to help, which just made things take longer.
Regarding the room now, Zee thought that it did seem she was sleeping in a strange place, or rather the place of a stranger. The room had so little connection to her now that she found herself imagining what the girl who lived here might have been like. What did she want? What were her dreams? In some faraway part of herself, Zee seemed to know. But she couldn’t get to the answer.
ZEE HAD FINISHED TWO-THIRDS OF the bottle of wine before she crawled into bed. She was so tired that she didn’t even bother to change her clothes, just removed her jeans and slept in the T-shirt she’d been wearing. She had a lot on her mind: Finch, Lilly, Michael. She wasn’t angry at Michael anymore; she was simply exhausted, both emotionally and physically. She fell asleep in less than five minutes.
SHE AWAKENED FROM A DEEP sleep to feel another presence in the room. She was not alone. She sat up quickly, her heart pounding.
He was standing over her now, and the scent of him was familiar. And then a voice, one she recognized, barely above a whisper.
“Please help me,” Finch said.
As her eyes focused, Zee recognized her father. He stood still as marble, frozen in place, unable to break free.
11
FINCH HAD TWO MORE freezing episodes the following morning. It was Jessina, and not the neurologist, who finally taught them “Up and Over.”
Jessina and her son, Danny, lived in the Point, an area of Salem just off Lafayette Street that had a large Dominican population. She’d been a nurse back in the Dominican Republic and was taking night classes at Salem State, trying to complete her RN certification. Days she worked part-time in a nursing home and part-time as a private home health aide, initially for a woman who had died from complications of Parkinson’s six months before and now for Finch.
Jessina was addicted to the Lifetime Channel and to Swedish Fish candies, both facts that for some reason Finch seemed to find hilariously funny. For such a tiny woman, she had a huge presence. Zee marveled at the way she took over a house simply by entering it, speaking to Finch in a poetic stream of consciousness that included her native Spanish, Dorchester English, and an affectionate baby talk that she had developed to soothe her patients.
If Finch had minded the way the neurologist talked down to him, he didn’t seem to mind the baby talk from Jessina. It was clear that he genuinely liked her. They had developed a routine in the last few months. Breakfast cereal hand-fed, then a shower, then television-something that Finch had seldom, if ever, enjoyed.
“If you step up and over, you can break the freeze.” Jessina demonstrated the exaggerated step the next time Finch froze in place.
He looked at her strangely.
“Come on, you know this!” she encouraged. She turned to Zee. “It’s a different part of the brain that is used to climb.”
She helped Finch to lift his leg in an exaggerated fashion, Zee reached out to steady him. And it worked. The step freed him, and Finch continued his shuffle toward the bathroom.
“Thank you,” Zee said to Jessina.
She shrugged. “I taught him that trick a while back. He just forgot. Can you pick up some Depends while you’re out?” Jessina asked her.
Zee was shocked. “He wears Depends?”
“If you want to get the store brand without the elastic, it will save you money. I can just put them on inside his underpants.”
Finch grimaced. He didn’t mind the baby talk, but he clearly didn’t like this discussion.
“I’m sorry, Papi,” Jessina said, and squeezed his hand.
Zee could hear her singing a song to Finch through the closed bathroom door:
Los pollitos dicen pío, pío, pío
Cuando tienen hambre, cuando tienen frío.
La gallina busca el maíz y el trigo.
Les da la comida y les presta abrigo.
Bajo sus dos alas acurrucaditos
Hasta el otro día duermen los pollitos.
She wondered how Jessina would have reacted-did react, perhaps-when she heard Finch as Hawthorne. The thought of the Hawthorne monologues being answered in this lilting baby talk seemed surreal. Perhaps Jessina hadn’t even noticed the difference in Finch’s speech pattern. Perhaps she thought he’d simply been more talkative than usual.
ZEE COULDN’T FIND A SUITCASE, just a canvas bag from L.L. Bean that was on Melville’s boat. She went through the things she had rescued from the cent shop, packing the items she thought would be most important to Melville: two pairs of jeans, several dress shirts, a collection of ship’s bells. It was odd being on the boat again, and even odder that it hadn’t been in the water for so many years. When she was a teenager, Melville had allowed her to use this boat as a refuge when thoughts of Maureen had come back to her, and she couldn’t sleep. Melville’s mooring was directly off the Gables, and many nights she had walked down in her nightshirt and bare feet and rowed out in the skiff, sleeping on the deck and looking up at the stars, the movement of water the only thing that could lull her into a dreamless sleep.
Melville had always loved the boat even more than she did, and she wondered that he hadn’t put it in the water for so long. But Finch hated boats, and caring for Finch had taken so much time that she thought Melville probably had to let it go.
MELVILLE WAS LIVING OVER NEAR Federal Street in a condo he’d been taking care of for someone at the Athenaeum, the historic membership library where he’d been working for the last several years. His official job title was sexton, though Zee had for years called him “the sextant,” not in an attempt to be clever and name him after a navigational instrument but because she kept getting the words mixed up. Still, the job description had little to do with either sexton or sextant. A sexton was a caretaker, a position for which there had been budget approval at the time Melville was hired. What Melville actually did these days at the Athenaeum was more archivist than caretaker. Day to day he researched and documented the donated and acquired collections that included such historically significant items as the original Massachusetts Bay Charter.