Even Maureen had to admit that there’d been little real evidence about Zylphia Browne’s escape. There was some documentation by an eyewitness who had seen someone rowing the stolen dory in the direction of the Miseries. The witness knew it to be Zylphia, he said, only by the red hair that escaped from under the brim of a boy’s cap. The dory was later discovered on the Miseries, oarlocks worn down to bare wood. But no sign of the young lovers was ever found.
Maureen never questioned the idea that the lovers escaped. Her belief in The Great Love would allow for no other possibility. But try as she might, she could never find the happily-ever-after ending that she so needed to complete the story. Though most of her stories were fictional, and though her original intention was to create the happily-ever-after, she found herself obsessed by her search for the truth. In the writing of the story, she had developed a strong bond with Zylphia Browne. She knew the woman well, she said. She told Zee that it almost felt as if she were walking around in Zylphia’s skin.
Zee had known for a while that her mother had begun to believe that the story was her own. And so when Maureen announced one day that she was certain she’d been Zylphia Browne in a prior lifetime, Zee wasn’t as alarmed as she should have been.
Looking back on a tragedy, there is often a moment one can point to when everything changes and begins to move more quickly toward its inevitable climax. As Zee looked back, she realized that the moment for Maureen had been the day she began to talk about reincarnation. For while she had initially believed that Maureen was talking about who she had convinced herself she’d been in her last life, Zee realized only later that she was also talking about who she was most certain to become in her next.
“People reincarnate in groups,” she told Zee in those last days. “So do not despair, for we will most certainly see each other again in another place and time.”
16
ON TUESDAY MORNING THE occupational therapist showed up. Jessina was there, hand-feeding Finch. Oatmeal spilled down the front of his shirt.
“Can’t he feed himself?” the OT asked.
“He can,” Jessina said.
“Then he should be doing it.”
“He likes it when I feed him this way, don’t you, Papi?”
Finch managed a weak smile.
The OT addressed Finch directly. “It’s important that you do this yourself. You have to keep up your skills.”
She walked through the house taking notes, more like a Realtor than a medical professional. She pointed out two more spots in the bathroom that needed grab bars, one more in the shower next to the one that Melville had put in earlier and another one next to the toilet. “You should raise the seat in here,” she said. “Try Hutchinson’s on Highland Ave.” She also suggested a hospital bed. “They can be rented,” she said. “His insurance will probably cover it.” Zee followed her back to the hall. “You’ll need a railing in this hallway,” she said. She looked at the tilt of the floor, the slope of old pine.
“Do you know of anybody who can install one?” Zee asked.
She shook her head. “I don’t. But a local carpenter can probably do it for you.
“And get rid of these newspapers,” she said. “Falls are inevitable with Parkinson’s, but this is an accident waiting to happen.”
The OT wrote out her report, leaving a copy for Zee. She said good-bye to Finch, who ignored her. Zee walked her down the long hallway to the front door.
“He really should be in a nursing home,” the OT said.
It shocked Zee to hear it. “I was thinking maybe assisted living of some sort.” There was a nice place in Back Bay not far at all from where she lived. But even that was only in case of emergency, meaning if Melville didn’t come back and she couldn’t figure out anything else.
“He wouldn’t qualify for assisted living,” the OT said matter-of-factly. “He’s incontinent, and he needs to have his meds administered. A few years ago, maybe, but not now.”
Zee barely heard the rest of the instructions. All she wanted was for the OT to leave.
“Make sure he showers every day. And gets dressed. I forgot to ask you about skin breakdown.”
“I haven’t noticed any,” Zee said.
“Pay attention to his skin,” she said. “There’s always a danger of skin breakdown with incontinence. And skin breakdown can kill them. That and falls.” She gestured toward the newspapers again.
“I’ll take care of those,” Zee said.
SHE WORKED ALL AFTERNOON ON the piles of papers. When Jessina was making dinner, Zee decided to walk down to the wharf to pick up some more recycling bags.
“Can you stay a little longer tonight?”
“Sure,” Jessina answered. “What else do I have to do?”
“I can’t tell if you’re serious or if you’re being sarcastic,” Zee said.
“I am never sarcastic,” Jessina said.
“Again,” Zee said, “I can’t tell.”
Jessina laughed. “Go. Take your time. I can give him his pills and get him to bed if you like.”
Technically, Jessina wasn’t supposed to give Finch his pills. But with her nurse’s training, she was certainly capable. Zee left the seven-o’clock dose on the table.
“Thanks,” she said, then added, “don’t let him have milk with them.”
ZEE WALKED DOWN DERBY STREET toward the wharf. This was a street of American firsts: first candy shop, first brick house. The street was named after America’s first millionaire, Elias Hasket Derby, a man known locally as “King Derby,” who had been made famous by the lucrative shipping trade that came into this port. Zee remembered her Uncle Mickey telling her something about the first elephant in America as well. It had come in on one of the Salem ships. For some reason she thought the elephant had a drinking problem and laughed to herself, dismissing the thought as a trick of memory. But then she remembered the story. Running low on water, the crew had fed porter to the elephant. By the time the ship arrived in Salem, the elephant had developed a strong taste for the stuff. That much of the story was true. Uncle Mickey’s embellished version included 1800s AA meetings and elephant detox.
She thought about Mickey and decided to stop by. There was no love lost between Mickey and Finch, not since Maureen had died and Melville had come into Finch’s life. But Zee hadn’t yet said hello to her uncle. She knew she should tell him what was going on, and she figured he might know someone who could install the rails and grab bars Finch needed. If anyone was connected in the city of Salem, it was Mickey Doherty.
Zee ducked into Ye Olde Pepper Companie to buy Finch some Gibralters. The Salem confection was the first commercial candy in America and might have been responsible for some of the success of the Salem ships, which stocked the candy as ballast on their outbound voyages. They were hard candies with a shelf life longer than the life span of any human, and it is said that the captains bribed the customs officials in the far ports with Gibralters to get more favorable trading rights. “The original strangers with candy,” is what Finch called the Salem ships.
Finch loved Gibralters, and he loved Black Jacks as well, so she bought both for him. She helped herself to one of the Black Jacks, smelling the sweet molasses as she opened the bag.
She walked past the Custom House with its gold roof, where Nathaniel Hawthorne had worked his day job before his writing made him famous. Then she crossed the street to Derby and Pickering wharves.
There were only a few wharves left in Salem now. In the shipping days, there had been almost a hundred, along with all the businesses that went along with the shipping trade: coopers, boatwrights, stables with wagons for transportation, and shipyards.
In those days there were many rivers that emptied into the sea here. New Derby Street, where it connected to Lafayette and Salem’s Route 114, would have been mostly underwater, with the North River running down the other side of town. It was possible back then to get around Salem almost completely by boat. Even the Point, where Jessina and many of the Dominican and Haitian population lived now, had once been bordered on three sides by water. The street noise from the wharves and the resulting trade eventually became loud enough to send the shipping millionaires uptown, either to the Common or to Chestnut Street, depending on their politics.