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Kristy said, “You just caught her at sort of a bad moment. Involved in the game.”
“She’s not even playing,” he said.
“Well, but her friend’s playing. Aubrey.”
“So who is Aubrey?”
“That’s who he is. Aubrey. Her friend. Would you like a juice?”
Grant shook his head.
“Oh, look,” said Kristy. “They get these attachments. That takes over for a while. Best buddy sort of thing. It’s kind of a phase.”
“You mean she really might not know who I am?”
“She might not. Not today. Then tomorrow-you never know, do you? Things change back and forth all the time and there’s nothing you can do about it. You’ll see the way it is once you’ve been coming here for a while. You’ll learn not to take it all so serious. Learn to take it day by day.”
Day by day. But things really didn’t change back and forth, and he didn’t get used to the way they were. Fiona was the one who seemed to get used to him, but only as some persistent visitor who took a special interest in her. Or perhaps even as a nuisance who must be prevented, according to her old rules of courtesy, from realizing that he was one. She treated him with a distracted, social sort of kindness that was successful in holding him back from the most obvious, the most necessary question. He could not demand of her whether she did or did not remember him as her husband of nearly fifty years. He got the impression that she would be embarrassed by such a question-embarrassed not for herself but for him. She would have laughed in a fluttery way and mortified him with her politeness and bewilderment, and somehow she would have ended up not saying either yes or no. Or she would have said either one in a way that gave not the least satisfaction.
Kristy was the only nurse he could talk to. Some of the others treated the whole thing as a joke. One tough old stick laughed in his face. “That Aubrey and that Fiona? They’ve really got it bad, haven’t they?”
Kristy told him that Aubrey had been the local representative of a company that sold weed killer-”and all that kind of stuff”-to farmers.
“He was a fine person,” she said, and Grant did not know whether this meant that Aubrey was honest and openhanded and kind to people, or that he was well spoken and well dressed and drove a good car. Probably both.
And then when he was not very old or even retired-she said-he had suffered some unusual kind of damage.
“His wife is the one takes care of him usually. She takes care of him at home. She just put him in here on temporary care so she could get a break. Her sister wanted her to go to Florida. See, she’s had a hard time, you wouldn’t ever have expected a man like him-They just went on a holiday somewhere and he got something, like some bug, that gave him a terrible high fever? And it put him in a coma and left him like he is now.”
He asked her about these affections between residents. Did they ever go too far? He was able now to take a tone of indulgence that he hoped would save him from any lectures.
“Depends what you mean,” she said. She kept writing in her record book while deciding how to answer him. When she finished what she was writing she looked up at him with a frank smile.
“The trouble we have in here, it’s fu
Then she stopped smiling, as if she was afraid she had said too much, or spoken callously.
“Don’t take me wrong,” she said. “I don’t mean Fiona. Fiona is a lady.”
Well, what about Aubrey? Grant felt like saying. But he remembered that Aubrey was in a wheelchair.
“She’s a real lady,” Kristy said, in a tone so decisive and reassuring that Grant was not reassured. He had in his mind a picture of Fiona, in one of her long eyelet-trimmed blue-ribboned nightgowns, teasingly lifting the covers of an old man’s bed.
“Well, I sometimes wonder-” he said.
Kristy said sharply, “You wonder what?”
“I wonder whether she isn’t putting on some kind of a charade.”
“A what?” said Kristy.
Most afternoons the pair could be found at the card table. Aubrey had large, thick-fingered hands. It was difficult for him to manage his cards. Fiona shuffled and dealt for him and sometimes moved quickly to straighten a card that seemed to be slipping from his grasp. Grant would watch from across the room her darting move and quick, laughing apology. He could see Aubrey’s husbandly frown as a wisp of her hair touched his cheek. Aubrey preferred to ignore her as long as she stayed close.
But let her smile her greeting at Grant, let her push back her chair and get up to offer him tea-showing that she had accepted his right to be there and possibly felt a slight responsibility for him-and Aubrey’s face took on its look of sombre consternation. He would let the cards slide from his fingers and fall on the floor, to spoil the game.
So that Fiona had to get busy and put things right.
If they weren’t at the bridge table they might be walking along the halls, Aubrey hanging on to the railing with one hand and clutching Fiona’s arm or shoulder with the other. The nurses thought that it was a marvel, the way she had got him out of his wheelchair. Though for longer trips-to the conservatory at one end of the building or the television room at the other-the wheelchair was called for.
The television seemed to be always turned to the sports cha
In the conservatory there was no such silence. The pair found themselves a seat among the most lush and thick and tropical-looking plants-a bower, if you like-which Grant had just enough self-control to keep from penetrating. Mixed in with the rustle of the leaves and the sound of splashing water was Fiona’s soft talk and her laughter.
Then some sort of chortle. Which of them could it be?
Perhaps neither-perhaps it came from one of the impudent flashy-looking birds who inhabited the corner cages.
Aubrey could talk, though his voice probably didn’t sound the way it used to. He seemed to say something now-a couple of thick syllables. Take care. He’s here. My love.
On the blue bottom of the fountain’s pool lay some wishing coins. Grant had never seen anybody actually throwing money in. He stared at these nickels and dimes and quarters, wondering if they had been glued to the tiles-another feature of the building’s encouraging decoration.
Teenagers at the baseball game, sitting at the top of the bleachers out of the way of the boy’s friends. A couple of inches of bare wood between them, darkness falling, quick chill of the evening late in the summer. The skittering of their hands, the shift of haunches, eyes never lifted from the field. He ‘11 take off his jacket, if he’s wearing one, to lay it around her narrow shoulders. Underneath it he can pull her closer to him, press his spread fingers into her soft arm.