“I’m sorry,” she answered. “I know how much you hate this.”
She tried to explain what the VNA nurses who came once a week had told her: “It’s important to keep him clean. It’s important that he get dressed every day.” She understood the first but wasn’t altogether certain she agreed with the last. It was just too difficult sometimes, she thought. He didn’t want to do it. He would have preferred to remain in his robe and pajamas, which would have seemed fine to Zee.
But every morning Jessina happily picked outfits for him, dressing him like a little doll, in vibrant color combinations Finch would never have chosen for himself. Jessina seemed to have a genuine affection for him.
Zee rarely left Finch alone, not unless she prearranged it with Jessina, who was glad to oblige when she could. But Jessina was the single mother of a teenage boy, and she didn’t feel good about leaving her son alone for too long. She could almost see her house from Turner Street, but the neighborhoods were vastly different, and there was all sorts of trouble Danny could get into if left unsupervised.
And so most of the time it was just Finch and Zee. He didn’t want to go out anymore, didn’t even want to go for rides in the car. As bad as his reaction to his meds had been, Zee sometimes thought she preferred his Hawthorne hallucinations to the quiet depression he seemed to be experiencing now.
For her own mental health, Zee had to get out of the house every day and used the two sessions when Jessina was with Finch to escape. Salem was a great walking city. Sometimes she walked down to the harbor or over to the Willows for a game of skee ball at the arcade, a game she had loved as a child. Sometimes she met Melville for coffee or walked over to the gardens at the Ropes Mansion. This was her city more than Boston had ever been. Its diversity of person and place suited every mood she was having that summer. There was part of her that simply felt better here.
On the occasions when she could hire Jessina for more than a few hours, she would escape for longer periods, usually to the beach or to Winter Island, often coming back to find Jessina and Finch sitting in the den watching the Lifetime Channel. It was out of character for her father to watch television at all, let alone such estrogen-based dramas. Still, they seemed to be among the only things that captured his interest, and he sat, eyes glued to the set, his reactions intense and perfectly timed to the story, as if the whole drama were unfolding not on a small screen at all but right here in his den.
ZEE HAD BEGUN TO SLEEP in Maureen’s room even before she started seeing Hawk. Finch’s sundowning was getting worse, he’d begun to have the hallucinations so common to Alzheimer’s patients that was a sign of the crossover the doctor had been telling her to watch out for. After the sun went down, Finch grew more and more agitated and confused. He often wandered, waking her, and she could never get back to sleep.
It didn’t happen when she stayed upstairs. Finch couldn’t climb the stairs anymore, and he wouldn’t try, but still she would worry about him waking up, so she checked on him every few hours. As a result she was still often exhausted and grouchy from lack of sleep. For a while she raised the side rails on the hospital bed the OT had ordered, but then the VNA nurse talked her out of it.
“The problem is, they try to get out anyway,” the nurse said. “I’ve seen more hospitalizations because one of my dementia patients tried to climb over the bedside and got himself tangled and ended up breaking a bone.”
It was Jessina who suggested the alarm. “They use them at the nursing home,” she said.
The next time Jessina came in, she brought one of the alarms with her. It clipped to Finch’s bedclothes and to the bed. When the connection broke, the alarm went off. Finch clearly hated it, but it served its purpose. Zee began to sleep through the night, waking only when she heard the buzzing.
ZEE OFTEN TALKED TO MELVILLE either in person or on the phone about what was happening to Finch. And she consulted with several doctors who basically told her what she already knew, that there was nothing much that could be done.
Mattei left messages on her cell. She returned the calls when she could bear to do so, which was less and less often as time went on. She didn’t want to talk about Finch or about Michael and how the whole situation made her feel. She remembered something one of her patients had replied when she asked him how he felt about the illness of a parent: How do you think I feel about it? I feel fucking awful. By the end of each day, Zee could feel an inescapable heaviness descending on her. It was about Finch, of course, but it was about Lilly, too, and about Michael and her career and basically about all the choices she’d made in her life so far that were either not well enough thought out or just altogether wrong.
Now, for the first time she could remember, there were no choices to be made. Instead of trying to fix things or plan her life, she only needed to be present for her father, something she found easier than she might have expected. She couldn’t remember ever spending this much time with Finch.
And so every night when Jessina put Finch to bed, Zee would give him his first sleeping pill and take her evening walk. When she got home again, she would give him the second pill, telling him what was new in town, talking about what she’d seen. She would kiss him good night, lingering for a minute with her hand upon his shoulder. Then, after Jessina had gone for the night, Zee would go upstairs to her other life, drawing herself a long bath and waiting for Hawk. Though a simple set of stairs connected the two worlds, they could not have been more different.
EVER SINCE EARLY JUNE, WHEN she’d told Hawk who she was, Zee had been having dreams about Lilly: Lilly on the bridge. Lilly being chased by Adam. So when she started having her recurring dream about Maureen’s story again, she was almost relieved. The night she started up with Hawk had been several weeks ago, back on June 10, the first really warm night of the season.
Zee had been too tired to sleep. She was so exhausted, and it was far too hot upstairs. Every time she settled down, her legs would jump her awake again. Desperate, she’d taken one of the sleeping pills Mattei had prescribed.
And then she’d had a dream about the Friendship, a dream she’d had off and on for years. Zee dreamed about the lower level of the ship, as Maureen had once imagined and described it, with very specific details: the hold, the bunks, a lantern that hung from a chain.
When she woke up, Zee became obsessed by the idea of seeing the Friendship for herself and finding out how accurate Maureen’s description had been. The fact that she didn’t want to wait until morning, when she could pay her admission and go aboard the historic vessel, should have been her first clue that the obsession was a reaction to the sleeping pill. Everyone had heard stories of people who’d done odd or unusual things while under the influence. But the drug was still in Zee’s system, and so her compulsion to immediately see the Friendship seemed logical.
Her mother had never set eyes on the Friendship, or rather on the replica of the 1797 merchant ship that the City of Salem re-created in the 1990s. Maureen had died back in the 1980s, long before the plans for building the ship were even drawn up, though money was beginning to be raised for the project. Tonight, for some reason, Zee was obsessed with discovering how accurate her mother’s detailed description had been.
And so she quickly dressed and snuck out of the house, tiptoeing down the stairs, stretching over the squeaky one near the bottom, and letting herself out through the kitchen door, careful to close the outside screen door slowly so that the spring didn’t slam it shut and wake Finch. Once outside, she cut across the backyards and alleys until she reached Derby Wharf, where the Friendship was tied up. The night was clear, the stars seemed bright and close.