Carter Clay (24 page)

When West Central Land began developing the site for Palm Gate Village Retirement Living, the partners—young men out of Pittsburgh—were delighted by the utter flatness that makes Florida's west so well suited for the golf games and wheelchairs of retirees. The site needed only the slightest modifications after bulldozers bladed the native scrub and grasses that attracted local fauna but did nothing at all for humans in search of an expanse of lawn, bright blossoms, handsome shade trees.

It did not occur to the developers that the golf course site contained no trees because it could support no trees; that the sturdy saplings they plugged into the ground in 1987 would, seven years later, remain so puny that the four retirees who play the course this May morning have a well-established ritual of rotating turns beneath the trees' tiny umbrellas of shade.

The day is sunny, as are most May mornings at Palm Gate Village. The red-faced golfer now taking his turn in the shade of hole 8's little scholar tree has misplaced his sunglasses. Axel Barkely. Lately, more and more often, Axel misplaces things (sunglasses, keys, checkbook)—or so it seems to Axel. According to an article read by his wife, we
believe
we misplace things more often as we grow older simply because we are constantly on guard for signs of senility, dementia, Alzheimer's.

To avoid the sun's glare, Axel turns from the game entirely and watches the odd pair who now come down the asphalt path.

People at Palm Gate Village talk about this pair: the little girl in the wheelchair; the awkward, limping woman (Axel once saw
her break into loony laughter while watching a groundsman work with hedge trimmers). Mother and daughter, some say, and both are blond and fair and long-boned, but it is hard, catching sight of the two, not to imagine them wayfarers bound to one another by affliction rather than affection or family ties.

When the man in the baby blue golf clothes—baby blue shirt, pants, cap—turns her way, Jersey is sure he will be the one to speak to her, but it is another from his group who calls out: “May we help you?”

Tick, tick, tick. The wheels of her chair strike against the little rocks on the asphalt path, and the path passes close enough to the green that she can imagine the men hear the tick too. Tick, tick. An advance warning system. Like the alarm clock that ticked inside the crocodile in
Peter Pan.

People at Palm Gate Village often ask Jersey, “May I help you?” and some mean just that, and some mean, “Do you have any right to be here? May we help you leave?”

As there is no reason to suspect that she needs help, Jersey supposes the golfer is in the latter group, but she cannot be certain. There is something confusing about his face: the way the murky yellow tint of his eyeglasses gives one segment of his otherwise very rosy face a depressed and sickly look.

“It's okay,” she calls to him. In the hospital, she learned that “It's okay” was a good phrase for allaying people's fears. “It's okay. We're going to feed the ducks.” She lifts from her lap the two cellophane bags of popcorn that she purchased at Walgreen's the day before.

“Well, that's fine, sweetie,” the man says with a cheer as prickly as her own, “but during daylight savings time, nongolfers are prohibited from the course between 7
A.M
. and 6
P.M
.”

Jersey pretends not to hear this last remark, and she presses on, while Katherine—a few feet ahead—stops and turns and arranges her own face in what seems an imitation of the man's expression of amused dismay.

“Jersey”—Katherine bends to whisper when Jersey draws up alongside her—“do I rememer him?”

“Maybe,” Jersey whispers back. She is relieved that M.B. is not there to hear Katherine's question. This morning, when Katherine could not recall how one went about making water flow from the kitchen faucet, M.B. rolled her eyes. Angry, Jersey threw a sponge at M.B. But the truth of the matter is that Katherine sometimes frustrates Jersey, too.

Just the night before, Jersey tried to get M.B. and Katherine to take part in a game from one of her books for families of brain-injury patients. This game involved one person's holding an orange under the chin, and passing that orange along to another person, neither making use of their hands (“Improves cooperation, coordination, and intimacy skills,” said the book). While Jersey read the instructions aloud, Katherine hummed “She'll Be Coming ‘Round the Mountain,” and M.B. went right on laying out her game of solitaire, only looking up once in order to mutter,
“Ri-dic-u-lous!”
Jersey finally drew M.B. down to the master bedroom to discuss M.B.'s lack of cooperation, and by the time the pair returned to the living room, Katherine—her chin dripping juice—had finished off the last bite of the orange.

Another failure to arouse Katherine: the weekend before—over M.B.'s objections—Jersey borrowed a VCR from the public library so that she could show Katherine
Invasion of the Body Snatchers.

Movie under way, Jersey turned to Katherine to ask, “Do you remember any of this?” Katherine shrugged from her spot on the couch. Her own interest was focused upon the hard candies set out in the bowl on the coffee table before her: cinnamon balls, butterscotch disks. The candies' transparent wrappers—red and gold—lay scattered about her on the couch, and rustled each time she reached for a new sweet.

Really, Katherine seemed quite content just to roll candies about between her tongue and the roof of her mouth. Jersey, on the other hand, was depressed:
why did she not have a movie of her father?
Try as she might to imagine her father at any particular moment in his life, and what did she come up with? A reconstruction. Because in life, things happened only once.
Each moment passed. On the other hand—and this struck her as grossly unfair—as the watcher of
Invasion of the Body Snatchers
, she had witnessed, at least six times, the way the Chinese laundry owner's mouth turned down at the corners as he tried to explain that the woman who
appeared
to be his wife was
not
his wife.

“She wrong,” the laundry owner said of the woman lurking at the back of the laundry.
“That
not my wife.”

Also, Jersey knew precisely how the movie's heroine complimented the hero's cooking: “This is delicious. You're a great cook.” Something so particular, so charming in the way the charming heroine swallowed her delighted and delightful laugh, and emphasized
you're
, and slurred
delicious.
In fact, Jersey not only could
recognize
such moments, she could
recall
them. She could
anticipate
the moments that lay ahead because she could
recall
them: gestures, sets, smiles, lighting, dialogue; and she turned to her mother and demanded—her voice a small shriek—“Do you even
try
to think of Dad?”

An abrupt and accusing question that not only frightened Katherine but reminded her that she was not what she once had been; and when Katherine shrieked back, “I
do
!” Jersey felt more dreadful than ever.

Why did she not have a movie of Katherine?

All that she remembered of the beloved, pre-accident mom was slowly being effaced by this other Katherine. Trying to love this woman who sat amid candy wrappers and twiddled her bit of fuzz—Jersey knew this woman deserved her love, too, but sometimes, when summoning love for her, Jersey felt that she performed a discipline rather than acted from her heart. A strange and lonely sensation. She might have been one of Pastor Bitner's parishioners, taking up the cross for any suffering soul.

A pair of wood ducks, several buffleheads, a common goldeneye, and a number of lesser scaup—these are the ducks on the golf course's largest water hazard today, and while Jersey opens the
bags of Walgreen's popcorn, she makes the sort of polite conversation with the ducks that her mother would have made in the past, asks about their health, and tries to remember some of the duck facts that she read in the bird book back at the condo.

“So these are tippers rather than divers, right, Mom?”

Katherine stands by the bindweed-covered fence that runs between the edge of the golf course and the street. Katherine seems more interested in the passing cars than the ducks; still, she nods at Jersey's question. Perhaps some bit of old knowledge has entered her atmosphere once more, and now burns its bright path across her inner sky?

“I like bir-ds,” Katherine says.

Jersey nods. For a moment, her heart catches. One hand on the fence post, looking intent as she watches passing cars, Katherine appears, just then, very much the way she used to when, say, watching for Joe and Jersey to meet her outside a baseball game, a store, the symphony. A little intimidating, that watchful look, even if you knew that it was done on your behalf and would vanish straightaway once she clapped eyes on you, had you safely within her protective gaze.

“Jers-ey?”
Katherine says. The pair has spent part of the morning working on Katherine's enunciation—particularly the troublesome ends of words.

“M-hm?”

“You know Car-er?”

Jersey hesitates. “Carter Clay? From Fair Oaks?”

Katherine points toward the road. “He wa-s there.”

Absently, Jersey nods. “Spread out your popcorn, though, Mom. You've got it all in a heap.”

Katherine begins to flatten the noisy cellophane bag against her chest. “I like Car-
ter
. He walk-s me. He says I get better.”

Jersey glances at the golfers, now heading up the path. Soon they will pass by her and her mother, and she will be obliged to drum up another pleasantry. “Well, I think so, too, Mom,” she says.

“There! Car-er!” Katherine points across the street, where,
sure enough, Carter Clay is now climbing from his rusty van, waving, heading their way.

“Hey!” he calls. “How you doing, ladies? I thought—driving by—I thought that was you two!” He smiles at the ground as he makes his way through the knee-high grass on the other side of the fence. “Feeding the ducks, huh?”

“Done!” Katherine says, and holds up her empty bag for proof.

“Looks like fun!”

When he reaches them, Carter Clay asks Katherine if she is enjoying her weekend, and so on. Though he is kind, Jersey feels awkward in his presence; particularly as it seems to her that her mother is trying to
flirt
with the man—

Is that what the tilt of the head is all about? The giggle behind the hand? Flirting?

If so, it is lost on Carter Clay.

For the past five hours—ever since leaving the AA meeting—Carter Clay has been driving around Bradenton. He thought of calling Pastor Bitner, but what could he tell Pastor Bitner? “Pastor, it may be that the man who was with me when I killed Joe Alitz, and left his wife and daughter smashed up on the road, is also the man who knifed me two years ago when I was a homeless alcoholic/addict/bum”? What could Pastor Bitner do with that beyond telling Carter to turn himself in?

So Carter drove. And, eventually, he wound up in the neighborhood surrounding Palm Gate Village. He hoped he might see Jersey and Katherine out for a walk, or maybe running an errand at the shopping center, and here they are, out on the golf course. Pure luck.