The Tides (4 page)

The open space was vast when you considered that it was in the middle of a dense urban area, and it surprised her that Dan or his predecessors hadn't sold it or found some other way to turn it to a profit. Probably close to an acre, it sloped gently from the back of the facility for fifty yards or so, then dipped steeply. The weeds and trash were thick, but there were no trees, nothing to break its sinking profile, and the lights of the surrounding buildings could seem very distant if you stood at the back door of the dining room, say, and looked out across it at night.

Rebecca was thinking, again, that there was potential in that space, if she could just come up with the right thing to do with it. A garden, maybe; she'd like to have fresh produce for the kitchen, and surely there were residents who'd have both the physical energy and the knowledge to grow vegetables. Or maybe they could raise animals of some kind, like chickensnot that she knew anything about chickens. Or goats. Could you have goats in the city? Something glinted wet in the middle distance of the
vacant space as she came closer to it; something streaked and shimmered, the suggestion of blue and violet and silvery gray. She cursed. There'd been no significant precipitation for weeks; why should there be water?

As she crossed Ahern Street and came up on the west edge of The Tides property, it looked as if the bottom foot or so of the wide depression was under water. The closer she got, the more water there seemed to be; at one point, the back wall of the building rippled, vaguely distorted as though the lake that had not been there for decades were rising up it now.

It was her facility, and her responsibility to investigate. What could be risky, anyway, about trying to find out where this seepage was coming from? But she was afraid.

She moved her right foot off the sidewalk and onto rough ground, which slanted downward away from her. Swiveling to the right, she brought her left foot around, and nearly lost her balance as the ground seemed to shift and the angle of it to steepen. Gravity and momentum, or some other force, drew her rapidly downhill, though for some reason she did her best to resist, and in scant seconds she was at the bottom of the bowl, where she'd never been before, out of breath and tingling as if she'd fallen, grasping in vain for something tall and sturdy enough to break her descent.

Her tactile sense told her that it was perfectly dry down here; there was no hint of moisture against exposed flesh or trickling through shoes or fabric. But things looked wet. The outlines of grasses and low thorny bushes were smeared. Crumpled newspapers and plastic grocery bags looked to have been melted, dissolved at the edges, in some cases even run together to form some strange amalgam. A brown beer bottle here and there, a green
plastic two-liter soda bottle, a fat clear bottle with a smudged red label that had once held wine all glistened, sparkled, rendered pretty by the wavery refractions of what looked like but was not water.

Disoriented, chilled, and frightened, Rebecca thought to clamber out of the depression, which was deeper and wider, steeper-sided, than she'd have imagined, and hurry into her facility by one of the back doors; she hoped she had her key and that it would work in the new lock. Instead, she slid farther down, so that the line of The Tides was barely visible above the lake-bed rim.

Her feet seemed wider, rounder under her, her shoes soft-sided and unable to hold their shape. She couldn't quite make out separate fingers on the hand she held up before her face, and the veins and dancing tendons in the back of her hand colored haloes across the skin. The sounds in her head were gauzy. There was the smell of roses, unlikely on a September evening, but inescapable, and when she pivoted to look for the source of the fragrance, which it seemed imperative to locate, she slipped and fell into her own shadow, which shouldn't have been there at all in the half-light but which accepted and then absorbed her impression.

Sitting up, struggling to her knees and then to her feet, not wet but feeling smudged and hazy, Rebecca suddenly had a flash of a memory she'd never had before. A rainbow drawn across her cheek. A rainbow ribbon slid across her cheek and then tied into her hair. The smell of roses, which only now, with a shock, did she recognize as roses. The elongated, smeary shock of somebody important leaving and never coming back. Water closing over her face, rainbow water, and then sliding away.

Somebody called her without quite using her name.

Chapter 3

'Faye!'

Rebecca jumped and looked up from the staffing report. A cloud must have passed rapidly over the sun, for the square of indirect light from the window beside her father's bed was almost lavender for a moment, and the even less direct light inside the room, under the glare of the fluorescents, took on a decidedly purple cast before it returned to normal. Usually, outside light, temperature, weather were of so little relevance inside the facility that Rebecca could go for hours without noticing, and it would be a bit of a shock to emerge after work and find snow in the air, or a sunset.

The long, perforated sheets of the staffing report tumbled over the edge of her father's bedside table, which she should have known wouldn't be a big enough work surface. Heavy and slick, they threatened to slide off onto the floor. If she lost her place it would take forever to find it again among all the rows of numbers, columns of names, charts of symbols. This was the dozenth weekly staffing report she'd done, and it still took her most of a day, partly because of the complexity and tedium of the task itself, partly because she resented having to do it at all, and largely because it was so hard
to
keep her mind on it among all the interruptions, most of them welcome.

Even when she came in in the middle of the night to do it, there were myriad things more interesting than staffing reports to claim her attention. Of primary concern to her at the moment was the persistent problem of staff sleeping on the job. She seemed to be the only one who objected to this; more than a few people had informed her, defensively or indignantly or indulgently or with a shrug, that the night shift at every facility napped. But it infuriated her, and she derived a certain short-lived perverse pleasure at three o'clock in the morning from sneaking into the staff lounge, where on some nights there'd be aides and even the nurse dozing in practically every chair, and shouting, 'Staff meeting!'

Now, righting the stack of slippery papers with her fist, she regarded her father. He was still staring at nothing. Thinking of her experience the other night in the twilit empty lake bed behind the facility, she repeated to herself sternly that it was nothing he was staring at, just as it had been nothing that had so shaken and disoriented her then. The only strong emotion his face registered was curiosity, not fear or rage or anything else explosive that required her intervention, professional or filial.

Such intense curiosity on her father's face, though, was a curiosity in itself. He'd always taken pains to hold himself aloof. His interest in the world
,
in her
,
had always been of a removed, intellectual sort, without much passion.

Until, Rebecca had lately come to realize, the dementia had started; passion of many sorts
,
brief unsustained bursts, often free-floating
,
had in fact been one of the early symptoms, unrecognized at first but cumulative. Shedidn't know what to make of her father's emotional lability. Geriatric theory would have her write it off as symptomatic of chemical and physical alterations in his brain, signifying nothing but the advancing dementia. But, somehow, that explanation didn't seem to her quite sufficient.

Clearly he wasn't at the moment aware of her. Like finding no reflection in a mirror, this set off an unpleasant shiver, and she had the childish impulse to do something outrageous to claim his attention
—
jump up and down and make faces; shatter some object or break some rule. Say, 'I love you, Daddy.'

No matter what she did, his obliviousness to her was likely to be replaced without warning by equally discomfiting scrutiny. This had always been true; she squirmed remembering the sudden searchlight-glare of his attention when she'd been a child and, worse, a teenager
—
as if, all of a sudden, he hadn't exactly known who she was, or had known too well.

While he was ignoring her, though, she had the opportunity to observe this man who was her father and was, always had been, such a stranger. There'd been periods in her life when she'd watched and listened to him intently, and periods when she'd gone out of her way to avoid being with him at all and especially alone, for fear of what she might find out and of what she might not. There'd been long stretches
—
junior year abroad in Spain, grad school on the East Coast
—
when thoughts of her father and mother had hardly entered her mind at all. Now professional and personal obligation made it virtually impossible to stay away.

She hadn't thought it was a good idea for him to be placed at the nursing home she administered, but she
hadn't been able to articulate why. 'I'm just starting a new jobs,' she'd tried to argue with her mother. 'A whole career. This is my first facility. I've been waiting a long time for this. I don't want to have to think about my father, too.'

Her mother's face had gone stony. 'I know he's a lot of trouble, but he's your father. And he'll be less of a bother if he's right nearby. If he's in your nursing home, you can make sure they take good care of him.'

'I'm not sure I know how' Rebecca had started to protest.

'It's not as if we're moving
in
with you. You'll still have your personal life.' Unspoken:
Such as it is
. She'd added
slyly, which wasn't like her, 'You and Kurt,' and Rebecca had been surprised that her mother even remembered his name.

'Mom, this isn't a good idea,' she'd said helplessly, her doomed last shot.

'All right, Rebecca. All right. I'll find someplace else for him.' Her mother had turned her back, and Rebecca, as always, had panicked and acquiesced.

Now her father was staring straight at her, the whiskered corners of his mouth twitching in an uncertain smile. Rebecca had the impression that he didn't know exactly who she was, which wouldn't be the first time. Still expecting to be hurt or offended by that, she was surprised to find herself smiling back at him with the same kind of diffuse affection she imagined him to be feeling.

Both her parents had kept themselves from her. Her mother still did. Rebecca couldn't have said how she knew that; she hadn't in any sense been neglected, and she had no doubt that they loved her. But there'd always been
—
distance between them and her, the sense of a secret, of something profoundly hidden. Or maybe not; maybe that was nothing but a romantic construct to soften the reality that they just had never been very close.

Not that she'd always minded. Not that she even entirely minded now. Sometimes, in fact, she'd wished for even greater distance. A certain lightness resulted from being disconnected from one's parents without ever actually having been estranged.

There was, in fact, a certain gratifying lightness in not being very connected to anybody. She and Kurt had been together for over a year, and, while she'd have said
—
did say
—
they loved, each other, she wouldn't have said they were close. He'd moved in with her because his lease had expired, she owned a house, and it was a convenient and practical arrangement for them both. They divided household chores and expenses. They shared a bed. They decidedly did not share a life.

Her father roused himself and commanded, 'Get out of here. Leave me alone.' He didn't seem to be talking to her, although he might be. She chose to assume he was not, and to stay.

He'd been a bulky man, and he still was much taller and larger-framed than she was, as was her mother; Rebecca remembered waiting for her growth spurt, and she'd been well away from home before she'd decided she was always going to be a smaller person than either of her parents. There'd been times when she'd chafed at the physical difference, imbued it with a power differential that made her alternately rebellious and overly eager to please. There'd been times when she'd welcomed it because it set her apart from them, gave physical form to the separateness she already felt. By now, she scarcely
thought about it, except as a genetic oddity.

Just in the last few months, her father's bulk had noticeably diminished, so that he seemed smaller, not frail yet, though that would likely come, but somehow occupying less defined space, less volume. His body seemed, like his mind, to be slipping out of reach, even nudging the basic boundaries of what was normal and predictable for a human being. When she looked at him, listened to him, there was no longer, for instance, the expectation of symmetry; no part of him could precisely be termed deformed, but nothing really matched anything else, either, and there was the generalized impression of something being awry. Sometimes he walked and sat and stood a trifle clumsily, as though the layers of the physical world and his body in it were not exactly familiar to him anymore, no longer quite aligned.

Rebecca had seen that in other people at the beginning stages of dementia. She'd been taught, in fact, to regard all such changes, subtle at first and then picking up speed
—
physical awkwardness, emotional lability, inattentiveness and forgetfulness and mental blankness that came and went
—
as symptoms that, taken together, were diagnostic in that they comprised a syndrome that could be defined and named. Not treated, though. Not reversed or interrupted or even slowed.

She'd also been taught that reorientation was the treatment approach of choice. In long-term care facilities and other institutions, the environment tended to be featureless and self-referential, contributing to the confusion of minds that already wandered. So in more enlightened facilities, activity directors and social workers gave painstaking instruction in Reality Orientation. Rebecca had led many an awkwardly chipper discussion constructed
around the date, the day of the week, what was on the menu for lunch, what the weather was like outside, who the President of the United States was. Signs were posted: '
Today is
. . .' Nursing home wings were color-coded. Staff was cued to slip references to time, place, and person into their routine conversations with patients.

All this reality orientation had never seemed to have much long-term effect. Nobody emerged clear-headed from dementia or was able to reorganize drifting thoughts. But for a few minutes, a few hours after each class, a few people did seem to be more aware of their own identities. She guessed that was a benefit.

Assuming that 'identity' was a constant and 'reality' a concept with truth beyond the convenience of common agreement. When she'd started working in gerontology, Rebecca wouldn't have entertained any notion to the contrary; what was real and the basic outlines of person, place, and time
the composite factor labelled on medical charts 'orientation × 3'had been static and clear. Now, increasingly and unwillingly, she wondered.

Her father had subsided again. His bald head glistened under the fluorescent lights Rebecca wished she could afford to replace throughout the facility with incandescent bulbs. The literature reported that the flickering and harshness of fluorescent lights seemed to contribute to the disorientation of patients with dementia, as well as to the hyperactivity of schoolchildren, but nursing-care facilities used them for the same budgetary reasons schools did.

Now her father seemed to be struggling to get up from his chair, at the same time apparently struggling to push himself deeper into it, staring wide-eyed at thin air and croaking something incomprehensible. Probably it was an
actual word that meant something to him; it might even have meant something to her if she'd had a context for it, but a single syllable and out of the blue, it was nothing more then a nonsensical bray. Several of the residents did that, and Rebecca was put in mind of the speech of a baby just before its native language emerges in recognizable form
more directed and organized than babbling, but not quite words. From her own father, it both irritated and chilled her.

'Faye!' Dad was flailing now, though in a peculiarly languid way, his hands undulating as if caressing shapes in the air, his thin forearms and sharp elbows fluttering. Rebecca found herself looking for the haloes she'd noticed around her own hands the other night, but saw nothing like that. The expression on his face might have been fear, or might have been just confusion; Rebecca had been trying to read the expressions on her father's face all her life, off and on, and the more senile he became the closer she seemed to get to being able to do so. That bothered her, to be gaining something from his affliction. Right now she would swear he was, among other things, leering.

He was determined to get up. He was awfully unsteady. Sooner or later he would probably have to be restrained. She hated the thought of it. Her mother was already complaining that the staff
—
in other words, Rebecca
—
wasn't doing enough to keep him safe. He could fall. He could wander off and be hit by a car, or fall down that hill in back and break a hip. He could have eaten the paint. 'If he could take care of himself he wouldn't be in such a place,' she kept saying. 'If I could take care of him at home, I would. You know I would.'

His eyes were bulging now, and he was drooling.

Hastily Rebecca folded up the report and slipped it into her briefcase. It obviously wasn't going to be feasible for her to get any work done while she kept her father company; she'd have to talk to her mother about it, a prospect which made her stomach ache with dread.

She went to him, took his hands. 'Dad, what's wrong?' He couldn't tell her. He was looking over her head. He used her hands as leverage to stand up and then sit down again. She sat beside him and put on a classical tape. The piano and violin music agitated her, but it wasn't long before her father was sitting calmly, not asleep but not fully conscious, either. The innumerable things she had to attend to scrolled through her head, and she could hardly sit still. After a few minutes she kissed his cheek, which seemed a terribly impertinent thing to do, and told him, 'I have to go back to work, Dad. I'll leave your door open and somebody will be in to check on you. Here's your call light in case you need anything.' With an obvious effort he brought his gaze to her face, but it slipped away again, and she knew the concept of a call light was beyond him, so she was, in effect, proposing to leave him unattended and alone.

Impatient though she was, it was hard to tear herself away from him. She sat beside him for longer than she should have and watched him. Then she wasn't watching him anymore but she still sat there, lethargic, hands in her lap, her thoughts and gaze on nothing in particular, oddly reluctant to get back to work. Her father sat relaxed in his chair with a small smile on his lips, and neither of them had anything to say for a while
—
a unit of time that was, for Rebecca, calibrated into minutes whose passage she could virtually hear; for Marshall, they didn't pass at all but blended into one long smear.

Her mind was racing. His was, too, but more as though underwater than on hard ground. In and out of his mind and back in again flowed images from his own past and present: being tied in a chair; being immersed in the layered sensation of being lost in a place he had been for a long time; being hurt. Images came to him, too, with no personal attachment, as if his were not the life that contained them, even as if they hadn't been lived at all but stored, set aside, imbued with a different sort of reality than being lived would have given them.

Rebecca worried at the endless list of things she had to do, many of them things she hadn't gotten done yesterday though she'd been here till after ten at night; she wouldn't get them done today either. The worry, though, softened into some other kind of mental process, swirling with her father's. Not memory, exactly. Before memory.

A car in a deep woods, overgrown, vines through the windows although all the glass was intact. Multicolored vines, soft and flowing, like scarves. Himself stumbling toward it; herself at the same time skirting around. The bulk of it brown as sunlight on treetrunks, golden as delicately tanned flesh.

Not a car. A body. Not a person. Something else.

Being summoned.

Answering, approaching, and discovering it was nothing, a hillock covered with vines that weren't multicolored at all, not a pink or lavender among them, only green and gold. A curious torpor, disappointment and sweet relief.

As soon as Rebecca forced herself to stir, energy and anxiety returned. As soon as she was on her feet and moving toward the door, had her hand on the knob
,
which
should be a lever so people with limited hand motion could use it (she took time to fish the spiral notebook and pen out of her pocket and add a note about doorknobs to the list)as soon as she was out in the hall, the feeling of being tugged on was strong, the threat of engulfment acute, and also the anticipation that here at The Tides, maybe, she would discover who she was without even having time or inclination to think about it. She was the person who had this never-ending list of things to do. She was the one in charge.

She could have started her rounds right here. Instead, needing to get away from her father, she hurried along the corridor to the lounge in the middle, where the restored mural - not quite the same as the first one, but exuberant and expressive in its own right - caught the morning light and lifted her spirits just as it was supposed to. There was a pink spot on it that hadn't been there before, a small sunburst pattern near the floor. Rebecca liked the idea that somebody had been inspired.

As she went outside, it occurred to her that the door ought to be re-hung so that it opened inward, to make it harder for wanderers like her father to get out. On the other hand, maybe this knob also ought to be replaced with a lever or a bar for conflicting safety reasons: so that, in the event of a fire, residents with limited mobility could get out. She'd have to check the regs. It would be easier if she could just call the Health Department and ask for advice, but Dan had warned her not to do that for fear of triggering a visit or a full-fledged survey, and The Tides wasn't ready for that.

'The Health Department is not your friend, babe,' Dan had told her, laughing a little, all but patting her head. 'Trust me.' Rebecca wasn't entirely sure she believed that;

Dan had had a running battle with the Health Department for years, which made him something less than objective on the subject. Theoretically, they were all on the side of good patient care. But she wouldn't call about doorknobs.

She went out the back door, thinking to check the condition of the grounds behind the facility first. A scraggly privet hedge later in the spring she'd get somebody to come look at itmarked off a haphazard boundary that served no purpose, since the nursing-home property extended through the empty and partially filled-in lake bed to a street considerably more than a block away. Surprised and displeased by her own unwillingness to venture out that farit was, after all, broad daylight now, and nothing sinister had happened to her there anyway; she'd just slipped, and dusk had made things look and sound odd
—
she pushed through the hedge, noting dot a few of its scratchy branches were dangerously at eye level.