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‘We like to integrate our resident population,’ Elaine said. ‘Staff are always out there to keep an eye on them, just in case, but we keep it as unobtrusive as possible, very low key.’

‘Aren’t you afraid your residents will wander away?’

She smiled. ‘We used to, until we got the special shoes. There’s a GPS tracking device imbedded in the heel. If patients assigned to the memory unit wander outside the specified area, an alarm goes off. Using the GPS, security can quickly track them down. Unless they take their shoes, off, of course, but that rarely happens. It’s usually hard for dementia patients to manage the laces.’

A resident marched crisply down the hall, a stopwatch in his hand. At the end he stopped, clicked the watch and shouted, ‘Ninety-two seconds! A new world record!’ He paused for a moment, as if to acknowledge silent applause, then headed back in our direction, his eyes glued to the stopwatch like the White Rabbit in Alice in Wonderland.

‘Good morning,’ I said as he breezed past.

‘Can’t stop now,’ he said without looking up, ‘or I’ll be late for the train.’

‘Pete worked for Norfolk Southern.’ Elaine grinned at the man’s departing back then turned to me, her light brown hair swinging just clear of her shoulders. ‘Here we are. This is Lillian Blake’s room. It’s such a nice day, you might want to sit out in the garden.’ She lowered her voice. ‘Lillian’s practically blind, I’m afraid, and she isn’t able to feed herself very well, so she spends almost all her time here in the unit. Getting a little sun will be good for her.’

Lillian’s room was the size of your average college dorm room. A double bed stood against the long wall, covered with a handmade quilt; in the center lay a life-sized plush cat surrounded by more than a dozen other stuffed animals. The headboard, bedside table and dresser were made of matching honey-colored oak. Placed at an angle to the picture window was a loveseat upholstered in green and gold-striped silk; two lipstick-red pillows were plumped up and resting against the armrests. An afghan, neatly folded, was draped over the back.

Lillian waited for me on the loveseat, smiling, her hands folded primly in her lap. She was a sunny, apple dumpling of a woman dressed in a 1950s-style cotton housedress imprinted with white roses on a black background. Her feet were clad in bright red socks and laced up in sensible black oxfords.

Displayed on a coffee table in front of her were several large picture books: Cameron’s Above Washington, a National Geographic encyclopedia of animals, and Star Wars: A Galactic Pop-Up Adventure. I had to laugh, but, hey, you’d have to be dead not to be a Star Wars fan.

‘Lillian likes poetry,’ Elaine said. From a bookshelf next to the dresser she extracted a book and handed it to me: Robert Lewis Stevenson’s A Child’s Garden of Verses with the classic illustrations by Mary Hallock. The cover was worn, and the spine mended with two kinds of plastic tape.

With Lillian clinging loosely to my arm we shuffled down the long hallway, out of the door and into a glorious secret garden. Paved paths wide enough to accommodate a wheelchair meandered among beautifully maintained beds of marigolds and hibiscus. Rows of perennials stood tall along the fence – I recognized rhododendron, yarrow and spiderwort – while ground ivy elsewhere provided a blanket of green. Several wrens and a fat robin were busy at a birdfeeder shaped like a pagoda that was under-planted with ferns and hosta. Somewhere a wind chime tinkled.

After Lillian and I got settled side by side on an old-fashioned glider swing, I opened the book and began to read. ‘“In winter I get up at night, And dress by yellow candle-light. In summer, quite the other way, I have to go to bed by day. I have to go to bed and see…”’

Lillian grabbed my wrist and squeezed, hard, harder than I believed possible for anyone so frail. ‘They can’t make me go to bed before dark,’ she said, her pale blue eyes fixed so intensely on me that I imagined my cheek starting to burn. ‘I’m a grown-up, you know.’ After a pause, she said, ‘I thought you were going to read.’

So I finished the poem. ‘Should I read another one?’ I asked, turning the page.

She nodded and began to hum tunelessly.

‘“How do you like to go up in a swing? Up in the air so blue”’ I read before the humming stopped and her hand tightened around my wrist again.

‘They make us go to bed early. But, sometimes I go visiting after dark.’ She smiled mysteriously.

I lay the book of poetry, still open to the poem I’d been reading, in my lap.

‘Where do you go, Lillian?’

‘Oh, out and about. Out and about.’

I doubted if memory unit residents were allowed the same freedom to roam about the premises at night, when staffing was at reduced levels, as they did during the day. ‘What is there to do at night?’ I asked her, not really expecting an answer.

She pressed an index finger against her lips then poked me with it. ‘I look after my babies.’

‘Your babies?’

‘I have lots of babies,’ she told me. ‘Lots of babies!’ She began humming again, rocking from side to side to a rhythm only she could perceive. ‘Do you have babies?’

‘I used to,’ I told her. ‘One, but she’s all grown up now.’

Lillian nodded sagely. ‘One, that’s good. So much easier. If you have too many babies they squabble all the time.’ She paused and looked directly toward a tree whose magnificent branches overhung the wall at the far end of the enclosed garden. ‘I hear them, making noises.’ She stared at it for a good few seconds then leaned in closer to me and started rocking again. ‘Or they’re whispering behind your back, cooking up mischief.’

Perhaps because we’d been reading classic children’s verses I had to smile, picturing Lillian as the old woman who lived in a shoe, the one who had so many children she didn’t know what to do. ‘My daughter is named Emily,’ I said. ‘What did you name your babies?’

Lillian stopped rocking and frowned, as if giving my question serious consideration. ‘There’s Princess,’ she said, touching the tip of one index finger to the other. ‘And Spot. And Freckles.’ She scowled, her index finger hovering. ‘I forget the rest.’

Dogs? Lillian’s ‘babies’ were dogs?

‘I don’t see very well,’ she confided after a bit, ‘but I can tell your trousers are red. I like red.’

‘I like red, too, Lillian.’

In a seat under an arbor up which tendrils of wisteria had already started to climb, a woman in an orange sweater with an untidy mass of white hair sat in a wheelchair, smoking a cigarette. She inhaled and held the smoke in her lungs for so long that I was having flashbacks to 1967 and the Summer of Love. Then she exhaled slowly with obvious pleasure.

On the opposite side of the garden, under a plexiglass kiosk that looked for all the world like a bus stop, an even older man sat, his bald head encrusted with scabs, legs stretched straight out in front of him, his head thrown back and his mouth open. I worried for a moment that he had died, but then he snorted, started, looked around in confusion, checked his watch, shrugged, and then carried on with his nap. After puzzling over it for a moment I realized the kiosk was a bus stop, advertising posters and all. I smiled. All the comforts of home without going anywhere.

Next to me, the humming abruptly ceased. Lillian reached for the book in my lap, quickly flicked forward through the pages, then back, then forward again. She stopped, squinted and tapped the new page. ‘Read this one,’ she instructed.