But things were changing, and they were changing fast, with a look, an offhand remark, or a sarcastic tone of voice that he’d never heard Finch use before.
The night he kicked Melville out, Finch threw the volume of Yeats at him, hitting him in the head, leaving a bruise. Melville hadn’t seen the book for so many years-he and Finch had put it away after Maureen’s suicide, in a place where Zee would never find it.
“Get out!” Finch had screamed. “And don’t come back!”
Melville called a doctor he knew in Boston, a neurologist friend of a friend, and someone he’d had coffee with a few years back.
“Dementia is funny,” the doctor said. “Sometimes it’s worse when it starts. There’s so much anger involved. The patient is trying to hide his symptoms yet is clearly terrified. But then there’s a second stage, when things start to settle down. And usually that gets better for everyone for a while. I call it the honeymoon period. Of course there will also be a time when he may not even know you at all,” the doctor said. “But, hopefully, that won’t happen for a long time.”
THE PLAN THAT MELVILLE AND Zee had come up with today had been logical enough. He would drop by, ostensibly to pick up some of his belongings. Then they would see how things went. If Finch’s anger had been a product of the drugs, maybe he would have forgotten it by now. Melville would move back in and take care of Finch until the end. And if it were something else, some new progression of the disease, then they’d figure out what to do next.
It felt odd to knock on the door. He didn’t think he’d ever done that before. When he had first become involved with Finch, when Maureen was in the hospital, he’d almost never come into this house. He and Finch had always met elsewhere, usually somewhere in town. And later, after he’d moved his boat up here, when he thought Maureen wasn’t coming home, Finch had started leaving the door unlatched for him and he’d slipped into the house as quietly as possible late at night, so as not to wake Zee. In those first years, they had been very careful.
ZEE ANSWERED THE DOOR. “HE’S asleep in his chair,” she said. Melville checked his watch. “Three-fifteen.” Finch’s pill was due at four. He should have timed this better.
She was bundling papers in the hallway, her hands blackened, an old bandanna from Finch’s pirate days around her head.
“I’d been meaning to do that,” he said, remembering how Finch had talked him out of it every time Melville started to clear the newspapers. Finch had claimed he was going to read them all, though he couldn’t read anymore, hadn’t been able to for quite some time.
Finch was a bit of a hoarder by nature. Such was his respect for the written word that he could never bear to part with any printed material. Even the ad circulars from the weekend papers had to be kept for at least a month, with Melville sometimes sneaking them out of the house and down the street to throw them away, so that Finch, finding them missing, wouldn’t raid the trash and bring them back inside.
“Does your father know you’re doing that?” Melville asked Zee.
“He knows,” she said. “He doesn’t like it, but he knows.”
Melville helped her get the recycling bags to the curb. They were lucky-tomorrow was trash day, and in his current state Finch was unlikely to try to reclaim them.
They sat in the kitchen making small talk, waiting for Finch to wake up. She didn’t mention the Yeats book, and neither did he, though he wanted to. Part of him wanted her to have it. But years ago he’d made a promise to Finch, and Melville always kept his promises.
Zee checked her watch. It was almost four. “It’s nearly time for his next pill,” she said. “He should be waking up soon.”
As if on cue, she heard the sound of Finch’s walker.
“You got him to use his walker?”
“Yup,” she said.
“I’m very impressed.”
Neither of them spoke as they waited while Finch negotiated the long hallway.
Melville willed his heart to slow down. He couldn’t stay seated.
“I hired a carpenter to put some railings in the hall,” she said, sensing his nervousness, trying to calm him.
“Good idea.”
He took a breath and held it. He stared at the floor. When the walker paused at the kitchen threshold, Melville looked up at Finch.
Their eyes locked.
“Hello, Finch,” Melville said.
Finch stood still and stiff, his expression masked and unreadable.
“I brought you some sirloin,” Melville said. “I put it in the fridge.”
Finch lowered himself into his chair. Falling the last few inches, he winced. When he finally spoke, it was not to Melville but to Zee.
“I want him out of here,” he said quietly. It was almost time for his next pill, so his voice was gone. The sound scratched as if tearing his throat. But his words were unmistakable.
18
ZEE TOOK THE PHONE into the den. She’d been talking to Melville for the last half hour, trying her best to calm him down. By the time she hung up, Jessina had put Finch to bed and had left Zee a note.
“Get some sleep,” she said to Melville after they’d talked in circles for the third time. “We’ll figure things out tomorrow.”
The television was still on, but muted. Zee sat on the couch, flipped the remote, finding Turner Classics: Jane Eyre with Joan Fontaine and Orson Welles. She didn’t turn up the sound but just sat staring at the screen. “Who is Grace Poole?” she said to the television set. It was a game they had invented, she and Melville and Finch, a kind of Jeopardy! for the literary set. Something Finch had tried on his lit classes. Who is Grace Poole? was the answer. The question was one she had written herself: She takes care of Rochester’s crazy wife in the attic. No one had talked about the parallel to her mother when the question was asked. She thought now about the way her question should have been worded: She takes care of Rochester’s crazy wife. There was never any mention of an attic in Brontë’s book, and, in the film, it was more like a tower room than an attic. She had always gotten it wrong. It was Maureen and not Mr. Rochester’s crazy wife who lived in the attic. And though both Finch and Melville had challenged wrong answers all the time and must certainly have noticed the error of her question, they had never challenged Zee on this one.
Zee fell asleep to the sound of foghorns. She dreamed of the stars and of the Friendship, not the reproduction that was at the wharves today but the old one that Maureen had tried to write about. Then she dreamed about Bernini’s sculpture of Neptune and Triton as it had once been described to her by Maureen. Or maybe it was Lilly… No, it was Maureen.
19
THE DAY MAUREEN KILLED herself, Zee had borrowed Mickey’s dory and gone to Baker’s Island to get the Yeats book in an effort to cheer her mother.
Maureen’s mood seemed better that day. Certainly she was kinder to Zee, whom she had been ignoring ever since the visit to Arcana’s psychic studio. The last few months had reminded Zee of the Snow White fairy tale, not just because of Arcana and an image she kept having of her holding out a poisoned apple, but because her mother, who had once loved Zee so much, had grown cold ever since the pronouncement of the psychic, as if the very existence of Zee were keeping her from her fairy-tale ending.
That was the way it was between them for the rest of the summer. Maureen stopped writing “The Once”-in fact, she stopped writing altogether. Mostly she just stared out at the water or sat upstairs in her room. She hardly ate and rarely if ever slept.
So on her way to the island to get the book, Zee was encouraged. Her mother’s mood seemed lighter, and though Zee hadn’t been able to talk her into coming along, Maureen had sounded almost interested when Zee told her what she was planning to do.