Dust of Eden (6 page)

Denny disarmed the thing, but he couldn't disarm the world that threatened his father.

How could he protect him without abetting the irony of being alive but not really living? He had to do something for this man who had fathered him, who had gone to work each day to provide for him and sacrificed without limit for his family's well-being. He had to care for him. No question about that. Only how could he do it when he himself had to go to work each day? How could he stand guard through the nights when his father, having slept most of the day, suddenly got up? So he did something a Bryce male never did. He reached out to others. He reached out to everyone. The parade included a volunteer elder aide, Meals on Wheels, then Medicare, an agency and a visiting nurse, who assigned a visiting caregiver. But it was all stopgap, and then one day after school had ended for the semester and the counselors had finished their year-end record keeping, Denny Bryce found himself driving around to the assisted-living complexes and nursing homes whose mailings he had steadfastly thrown away over the past decade. Enlightenment was ghastly.

Most of the homes maintained common areas suitable to the mobile and the sentient, but go beyond that and you were in the corridors of the damned. Here were urine smells and feeble calls for help and waxy flesh straining to coat skeletons and an infantry of nurses maneuvering two-wheeled personnel carriers. You talked above hoary heads and studied antiseptically clean linoleum or looked at light caught in the sheers of windows that never seemed to brighten the interior. You pretended these were not warehouses for the dying.
Welcome aboard the Titanic!
In the end, Denny could not consign his father to such a place. He just couldn't do it.

And then he came upon New Eden.

KNEAL the small hand-painted placard below the rural mailbox read. If he hadn't stopped at the turnoff while trying to find his way back from Mankato, he wouldn't have noticed. He had gone to Mankato hoping that Golden Years Senior Living was the answer, and he had left in despair, grasping at straws, praying for deliverance, ready to trade in the Yellow Pages list of facilities he had been using for cues and omens. And suddenly here was this unimposing sign with that phrase again, that shibboleth that promised there wasn't a contradiction between freedom and confinement: "Assisted Living." Kenyon New Eden Assisted Living. KNEAL. Out here in the middle of nowhere.

It looked like a wood-frame farmhouse, but there was a long wing built of bricks, and it was pastoral and refreshingly distinct from the urban compounds and contrived fa
ç
ades of green over gray that clamored for the abandoned and the dying. Still you couldn't take the place seriously with that tiny sign, an afterthought, as if it needed to fulfill some regulatory declaration but didn't really want to be discovered. Maybe they were hiding a good thing. Maybe God had finally stepped in with a few misleading road signs to facilitate an answer for him. KNEAL. He was too frustrated and desperate not to pay attention.

The driveway was an archipelago of surviving chunks of asphalt that eventually led to a barn, but there was no parking area—no cars, in fact. And then he saw the last vestiges of a curb that ran parallel to the red brick addition.
Goosegrass
and dandelions were growing on the compacted area, and there were no tire tracks. What was going on here? A permanent bed and breakfast for enfeebled octogenarians? Some informal home-care facility qualifying for funds by listing itself as assisted living? It just couldn't be legit. Probably be out of business next week. But all he really knew was that it wasn't what he had already seen at a dozen geriatric prisons across the state.

He parked his
Tercel
under the umbrella of a willow and strolled up to the porch. Nothing stirred in the windows and the house was strangely mute, as if caught in its afternoon nap. Maybe everyone inside had died a decade ago, he thought; maybe he was walking into a mausoleum. He almost felt he should knock, but you didn't knock when you went into a business, so he turned the flecked metal handle and stepped across the threshold . . .

And it was like coming home.

In fact, he still wasn't certain he wasn't trespassing on someone's living room. But that wasn't all bad. Because the white-glove cleaning patrol, and the smell of disinfectant, and the receptionist with the lily who probably did double duty as an instant mourner, and the rattle of trays on gurneys, and the snail line of wheelchairs at the elevators, and the donated
National
Geographics
and
Reader's Digest
books, and the
WanderGuard
detectors behind plastic plants, and the flashing call lights screaming silently on a switchboard or unanswered above a grim portal where the grim reaper leaned on the doorframe—
all these were missing!
True, you could just call this place ill equipped, but he liked the homey informality. Did it actually run? It came down to the people, didn't it? And that was when he realized that he was looking at two of them.

They sat on an ottoman as still as lamps. Two white faces—a man's, a woman's—trained on his, but with radiance awakening in their eyes. The woman especially seemed to glow at his presence, her eyes huge behind Hollywood glasses with glitter on the frames. She was a
tiny woman in shrieking colors, and her red lipstick had rubbed onto a prominent eyetooth.

"Got a cigarette?" she asked hopefully.

The man—burly, leathery, in a shirt buttoned to the neck—leaned forward also intent on Denny's answer.

"Sorry," Denny answered.

"She won't let us smoke in here anyway," the woman murmured dryly.

She.

And suddenly there was another woman in the archway, a good deal younger than the other two, fiftyish, though nothing else about her suggested the formality of staff, except that her calves and forearms were plump and muscular, as if she were a twist balloon put together in segments. She had a shoe button nose, liquid brown eyes, jet-black hair with two white streaks like meteors in the night, and her voice held a hint of challenge: "May I help you?"

"I saw your sign," Denny said. "I'm inquiring."

"About . . . ?"

"Residency for my father."

"Does he smoke?" piped the woman on the ottoman, and the man next to her grinned.

"Now, you know we don't have any openings, Beverly," said the plump woman by way of informing Denny.

"How about a waiting list?"

The pair on the ottoman laughed.

"We don't keep a waiting list either."

"Plenty of room, Molly," the burly man put in. "You ought to ask Ariel."

Denny gestured loosely. "I didn't see you listed in the phone book, but you've got that sign outside—"

"We're a private home."

"Just what I'm looking for. How do people apply? You must be regulated or you wouldn't have that sign."

The word "regulated" entered the room like a hornet looking for a place to land.

"Wait here," Molly said warily and squeaked back through the arch in her ripple-soled sneakers.

Beverly, the tiny woman with the Hollywood glasses, stroked her chin with an age-spotted hand. "She's gone to get Ariel," she said. "Haven't seen that before, eh,
Paavo
?"

Paavo
danced his feet on the floor—one step each—and nodded, his hands folded between his knees, his mirthful expression directed straight before him.

"Is Ariel the manager?"

"Oh yes. She manages us." Beverly nudged her glasses back up her petite nose. "You're almost a redhead," she assessed with the tactlessness of the very bored.

"Almost."

"I had red hair once.
Naturally
red hair. You wouldn't know it now, of course, but it was my best feature." She turned to her companion. "Apparently Ariel didn't like it."

The burly man restrained his amusement. He had square, pink fingernails and a strong face that was just starting to collapse with gravity. "Your hair's not all she may not like," he said to the woman.

"
Aaah
, to hell with it. I'll say what I like."

"Do I detect a Norwegian accent?" Denny addressed the man.

"
Paavo's
a Finn," said Beverly. "
Paavo
Seppanen
. His wife is
Ruta
. She was a
Lanoki
before she married this old galoot."

Denny nodded too many times. "How long have you lived here?"

"About a year."

"You came at the same time?"

Paavo's
smile seemed to freeze.

"Just about," Beverly said.

"So, do you like it here?"

"Hell, no. I'd like to be twenty-four years old and on the French Riviera, that's where I'd like to be. But it's better here than where I was."

"How's the food?"

"Food's good,"
Paavo
said.

"And the medical staff?"

Again the tandem exchange of faint smiles. "Infallible," said the woman. "No one gets sick here. Not for long anyhow."

And that was when they heard the cane thudding on the wooden floor, and Denny saw their eyes go down. Molly reappeared in the arch, followed by a somewhat regal figure—a woman, tall, thin, gray hair cut short, and wearing a dress that a dowager empress might have worn in another time. She had very white skin and her hawkish nose seemed aimed at Denny like the bowsprit of a ship.

"Bring him back," she crackled at Molly.

They took each other's measure for the first time not in an office but in a kitchen, Ariel on one side of an immense worn butcher's block, Denny on the other. The looks between them were guileless.

"We're not taking residents at this time," Ariel declared softly, and when he replied that he had been told they had plenty of room, she looked to the doorway as if Molly were still there. "It's a matter of choice," she said.

"But you haven't even met my father."

"—which should tell you there's nothing personal in it."

"But . . .” Denny tried to smile. “You can't be running a business that way."

"Do we look like a corporation, young man?"

Young man. When was the last time someone had called him that? He was fifty-one.

"No," he said. "But you have the sign out front. You must be regulated. Aren't you getting funds or tax breaks or something?"

"It's not a big sign, and we don't advertise."

However informal this place was, she was getting some kind of financial advantage from the system, he thought, otherwise why put up a sign at all?

The sun was on the other side of the house, and the light entering the kitchen was mugged of its color by the muzzy sheers. Ariel and Denny went back and forth in a black-and-white chess game where neither knew the rules and the moves were mostly pawns falling one by one.

"We're willing to pay the going rate," he said, "even a little more. More than the going rates for places with fuller programs than you have, I mean."

"If you value fuller programs, perhaps that's where you should look, Mr. Bryce."

"I don't. That's the point. I don't want what comes with them. All I meant was that you don't seem to have the overhead others do."

"We meet all requirements, you can rest assured of that," Ariel snapped.

Again he wondered if he had touched a nerve he could use to soften her resistance.

"So if I went to check out your credentials, you're a viable business? And you have a qualified medical staff."

"No one complains. You might say our doctor is a miracle worker."

"What kind of staff
do
you have?"

"For the record, there are only a dozen people in this house, Mr. Bryce. We all pitch in. That's why they call it assisted living. Things get done and we manage well. No one has ever had a serious illness or died."

He was not an intuitive person, but something in the informality of this house hinted more strongly than ever of the match Denny was looking for.

"My father isn't the ordinary beast," he said. "All those frantic social programs and interventions at the other places—he doesn't need that. He doesn't need stimulation—he needs a sanctuary. He's kind of a paradox. The less fussing, the better he likes it. Memory going bad—he's on Aricept—but other than that he just likes to be left alone. When I'm home, he's fine. If there are people around, he just hunkers down. But I have to work and when I'm not there he goes looking."

"We don't handle dementia patients."

"No? No senior moments allowed here? What
are
you certified for?” Immediately he was sorry. “Look, I don't give a rat's ass about how you run your business, but I've heard that term 'dementia' thrown around so many ways that I don't know what it means anymore. My father hasn't had a firm diagnosis, and anyway, no one has used that as an excuse to rule him out of a facility. Like I said, we'd pay you well."

For a moment Ariel seemed to consider the possibility. "Are you . . . like your father, Mr. Bryce?"

He tried to stare her down, but she was not easily flustered. "Does that matter?"