Missing Pieces (33 page)

My mother stared anxiously out the car window, her fingers twisting the fabric of her dress. “What’s happening
to me?” she asked, her voice high, birdlike. “What’s happening to me?”

I swallowed, not sure what to say. Dr. Caffery had discussed the various possibilities with her, including Alzheimer’s disease, a conversation my mother had seemingly forgotten. Was there really any point in going over it again?

“We’re not sure, Mom,” I told her. “That’s why you’re going for all these tests. It could be something physical, some blockage somewhere, maybe a tumor of some kind that they can remove, or maybe you’re just starting to forget things. It happens when people get older. It doesn’t necessarily mean it’s Alzheimer’s,” I qualified, more for my benefit than for hers. “I know how frustrating it must be for you, but we’ll get to the bottom of all this soon, and hopefully there will be something we can do about it. You know medical science. It moves so quickly, they could find a cure before they even know what you have.”

My mother smiled and I patted her hand reassuringly. She closed her eyes, drifted off to sleep, and I drove the rest of the way with only my thoughts for company. My mother would be all right, I told myself. This was just a temporary problem, not a permanent condition, and certainly not irreversible. Before long, one of these X-rays would turn up something, and it would be small and entirely treatable, and my mother would be her old self again, all the pieces neatly back in place.

I pulled into the parking lot of the Palm Beach Lakes Retirement Home, turned off the ignition, gently nudged my mother awake. She opened her eyes, smiled lovingly. “Jo Lynn called last night,” she said. “She’s getting married next week.”

“Relax,” Larry was saying, as I paced back and forth behind the kitchen counter.

“Please don’t tell me to relax.”

“I’m sure Mrs. Winchell will reconsider.”

“I’m sure she won’t.”

“Kate, stop pacing. Let’s sit down, talk this out.”

“What’s there to talk about?” I plopped down on the family-room sofa, jumping immediately back up again, resuming my pacing, this time in front of the TV. “You didn’t see her. You didn’t hear her. She was very adamant. She said that she has a responsibility to the other residents, that the whole building could have burned to the ground.”

“She’s exaggerating.”

“She doesn’t think so. She says that if old Mr. Emerson hadn’t smelled something burning in my mother’s apartment, then they wouldn’t have discovered the pot she left on the burner, and the whole building would have gone up in flames.”

“Everyone forgets to turn a burner off now and then,” Larry argued, the same words I’d used earlier in the afternoon with Mrs. Winchell.

“Palm Beach Lakes Retirement Home is an assisted living community,” I said, repeating Mrs. Winchell’s words verbatim. “It is not a nursing home. It is not equipped to deal with Alzheimer sufferers.”

“Grandma has Alzheimer’s?” Sara asked, bringing a stack of old papers into the kitchen, dropping them into the garbage can under the sink.

“We don’t know that yet,” Larry told her.

“What are you doing?” I asked.

“Cleaning my room,” Sara said.

“You’re cleaning your room?”

“It’s a mess. There was nowhere to study.”

“You’re studying?”

“We have a big test in a few weeks.”

“You’re studying for a test?”

“I thought I’d give it a try,” Sara said, and smiled. “Will Grandma be all right?”

“I hope so,” I told her. “Meanwhile, I have to find her a new place to live.”

To my shock, Sara walked to my side and drew me into a warm, comforting embrace. “It’ll be all right, Mom,” she reassured me, as I had reassured my mother earlier. I hugged her tightly to me, relishing the feel of her skin against mine, burying my face into the elegant bend of her neck. How long had it been since she’d allowed me to hold her this way? I wondered, realizing how much I’d missed it.

“I love you,” I whispered.

“I love you too,” she said.

For a few minutes, it seemed that everything would be all right.

W
ednesday morning found me lingering over my second cup of coffee and looking forward to a day of total self-indulgence: a much-needed, long-anticipated massage at ten, a facial at eleven-thirty, followed by a hairdresser’s appointment, a manicure and a pedicure. I thought of my mother, putting lipstick on her nails, then pushed her out of my mind. Wednesday was
my
day, my oasis in the desert, my day to unwind and regroup. It seemed I hadn’t had such a day in an eternity.

The phone rang.

I debated answering it, almost didn’t, gave in after the third ring. “Hello.” I crossed my fingers, praying it wasn’t the masseuse calling to cancel our appointment.

“Just wanted to tell you how nice it was seeing you the other day,” the male voice said.

“Who is this?” The muscles across my back contracted painfully. I already knew who it was.

“How was L-lake Osborne?” Colin Friendly asked.

I said nothing, my eyes shooting instinctively to the windows, to the sliding glass door.

“And how are my lovely nieces-to-be?”

I slammed down the receiver, my hands shaking. “Damn you!” I screamed. “Damn you to hell, Colin
Friendly! You leave my daughters out of your sick fantasies.” I began pacing, turning around in a series of increasingly small circles, until I felt my head spin and my knees grow weak. “Don’t let him get to you,” I said aloud, collapsing into a waiting chair, hating his newfound power over me. “There’s no way I’m going to let you torment me,” I said, reaching for the phone, about to call the prison officials in Starke, when the phone rang again.

I stared at it without moving. Slowly, I plucked it from its carriage, brought it gingerly to my ear, bracing myself for the familiar stutter, said nothing.

“Hello?” a woman asked. “Hello, is someone there?”

“Hello?” I asked in return. “Mrs. Winchell?”

“Mrs. Sinclair, is that you?”

For an instant, I considered telling her that I was the cleaning lady, that Mrs. Sinclair wasn’t home, and wouldn’t be back till the end of the day. “What can I do for you?” I asked instead.

“I was just wondering if you’d been able to find other accommodations for your mother,” she began without further preamble.

I informed her politely that I’d made inquiries into several upscale nursing homes in the area, but that there were no current vacancies. In a sympathetic, yet firm voice, Mrs. Winchell told me that I’d have to look farther afield, and recommended several nursing homes I hadn’t tried, one in Boca, another in Delray. Boca, I told her immediately, was out of the question. It was too far away. I might consider having a look at the one in Delray.

“Please do,” she said. She didn’t need to add “as soon as possible.” The tone of her voice said it all.

I poured myself another cup of coffee, took my time drinking it, refusing to think about either Mrs. Winchell or Colin Friendly, then made my bed, arranging, then rearranging, the fourteen decorative pillows that graced it,
trying out new groupings, ultimately returning the pillows to their original configuration. It was only then, when there was no more coffee to drink, no more pillows to disturb, and nothing left to straighten, that I phoned the nursing home in Delray, and, much to my chagrin, was able to get an immediate appointment.

There goes my day, I thought, reluctantly canceling my various appointments. Why did it always have to be me? I groused. Why couldn’t Jo Lynn assume at least some of the responsibility as far as our mother was concerned? Did she have anything better to do with her time? If she could spend between ten and twelve hours every weekend driving up to north-central Florida and back, surely she could spend thirty minutes driving to a nursing home in Delray. And she could damn well tell her psychotic boyfriend to leave me and my daughters alone. On a sudden impulse, I picked up the phone and called my sister, although I hadn’t spoken to her since our ill-fated excursion to the state pen.

“Your fiance called me this morning,” I said, instead of hello.

“Yes, I know.”

“You know?”

“He told me he was planning to apologize for any misunderstanding there might have been …”

“Misunderstanding?” I repeated incredulously.

“I told him it would be a waste of time.”

“If he ever calls me again, I’ll complain to the warden. They’ll cancel his phone privileges altogether,” I warned, discovering how easy it was to threaten the already vulnerable.

“Thanks for your call,” Jo Lynn said icily.

“I’m not finished.”

She waited. I could see her eyes rolling toward the ceiling with disgust.

“Mrs. Winchell says Mom can’t live at Palm Beach Lakes anymore.”

“So?”

“So we have to find her somewhere else to live.”

Silence.

“I’ve made an appointment with this nursing facility in Delray. It’s called the Atrium.”

“Fine.”

“It’s for eleven o’clock this morning. I thought you should be there.”

“Not a chance.”

“I just thought you might like to have a look at where Mom might have to go,” I persisted.

“She can go to hell as far as I’m concerned.”

“Jo Lynn!”

“So can you.” She hung up.

“Jo Lynn …” Once again, I slammed the receiver down, only to watch it bounce off its carriage and tumble toward the floor, where it jerked to a sudden stop mere inches from the carpet, hanging by its white cord, like some misguided bungee jumper. “What the hell is the matter with you?” I scooped up the receiver, dropped it into its carriage, plopped down on the side of my bed, and stared out the window at the curving coconut palm. “Why couldn’t I have a normal sister?” I shouted.

I was still screaming as I drove down to Delray. Screaming and speeding, for which I was duly pulled over by a waiting police officer and ticketed. “Any idea how fast you were going?” he asked. Not fast enough, I thought.

Mrs. Sullivan was a moon-faced, pleasant-voiced woman of around sixty. She had brown hair, brown eyes, and legs the size of toothpicks under an otherwise sturdy frame. She graciously showed me around the grounds, which were well manicured and attractively landscaped, then the building itself, a relatively new structure that was
low and white and Mediterranean in feel. It didn’t look like a nursing home, I tried to convince myself, refusing to allow the vaguely medicinal scent permeating the halls to penetrate my nostrils, ignoring the low wails I heard emanating from behind the closed doors of several of the spacious rooms, pretending not to notice the empty eyes and slack jaws of the residents lined up in wheelchairs against the walls. “Hello there, Mr. Perpich,” Mrs. Sullivan said gaily, receiving no response from the white-haired, toothless old man whose body was twisted and gnarled, like the trunk of a long-dead tree.

How could I abandon my mother to a place like this? I asked myself as I raced to my car. “Don’t be silly,” I said out loud, fumbling with my keys. “There’s nothing wrong with this place. It’s a perfectly acceptable place, nicer than the ones you looked at in Palm Beach.” What was I always telling clients in similar positions? You have to think about yourselves. Your mother will be happier there. She’ll have people to look after her. You won’t have to worry about her falling down the stairs or getting enough to eat. You can get on with your life.

Sure. Easy for you to say.

How could I get on with my life when the woman who gave me that life was losing her own? How could I abandon her to clean but sterile hallways, leave her sitting in a wheelchair for hours at a time, staring into space, into a past she could no longer connect with, into a future that held no hope. She could last for years this way, I reminded myself, her life effectively over, death a slow tease away. I couldn’t put my life on hold indefinitely. Yet she was my mother and I loved her, no matter how many pieces of her former self were missing. I wasn’t ready to let go.

Still, it was clear she could no longer stay where she was. If I wasn’t prepared to put her in a nursing home, that left only one other alternative. “I was wondering how
you’d feel about my mother moving in with us for a while,” I rehearsed into the rearview mirror, seeing my husband’s eyes widen in alarm. “It would only be temporary. A few weeks, maybe a few months. No longer than that, I promise.”

“But you’re gone all day. Who’s going to look after her while you’re at work?”

“We could hire someone to come in. Please, would you do it for me?”

I knew he would. No matter what his reservations, I knew that ultimately Larry would do whatever he thought would make me happy.

So, what was I going to do? I asked myself repeatedly as I drove aimlessly through the streets of Delray. The office building that housed radio station WKEY suddenly appeared before me like a mirage in the desert. Had I been heading here all along?

“This is a pleasant surprise,” Robert said as I stepped inside his office. I heard him close the door behind me.

I turned around and into his arms, his face a handsome blur as his lips fastened on mine, my body collapsing into his with an eagerness I hadn’t anticipated. “I can’t believe I’m doing this,” I heard myself say, but the words never made it past my mouth as I swayed, ever closer, against him.

He pulled back, just slightly, pulling me with him, like a magnet. “Why didn’t you tell me you were coming?”

“I didn’t know myself.”

“I have a lunch appointment in a few minutes.”

“I can’t stay.”

He kissed the side of my mouth, the tip of my nose. “I would have kept my schedule free.”

“Next time.”

“When?”

“What?”

“Next time—when will it be?”

He kissed my forehead, my cheek, the side of my neck. “When?” he repeated.

“I don’t know. My life is such a mess right now.”

“Messes become you. You look sexy as hell.”

“I look sexy or I look like hell?”

“You’re driving me crazy, you know that.”

And then he was kissing me again, this time full on the lips, our mouths open, his tongue circling mine, and suddenly I was seventeen years old, and he was pressing my body against the hard bricks of the high school we attended, his knee pushing my legs apart as his hand tried to sneak underneath my blouse. “No, I can’t,” I said, pulling back, hitting my head against the window of his twelfth-floor office, snapping rudely back into the present tense. “You have a lunch appointment,” I said quickly, trying to catch my breath, tucking my blouse back inside my skirt. “And I really should get going.”