Little Girls(43)

The waitress brought over Teresa’s coffee. Laurie could smell the alcohol in it.

“How bad was my father when you started working the night shift at the house?” Laurie asked after the waitress had left.

“Like, how . . . gone . . . was he?” She pointed to her temple to illustrate that she meant gone mentally. “To be honest, he was fine at first. He went to bed early and by the time he woke up in the morning, Dora was already coming in for her shift. I was really there in case something happened—an emergency or something, you know? It was really a no-brainer for the first few weeks. I mean, I read books, listened to my headphones, stuff like that. The only bummer was that there were no TVs in the house, but I got a lot of reading done those first few weeks.”

“So what happened after the first few weeks?”

Teresa’s hands wound around her coffee. She hadn’t tasted it yet, but looked like she wanted to—like she needed to.

“Well, see, before I got there, Dora had the locks changed. They used to be regular old crank deads on the doors—”

“‘Crank deads’?” Laurie asked.

“Sorry. Dead bolts—you know, the kinds with the knob on the inside that you turn instead of having to use a key, which Mr. Brashear could unlock easily enough. Dora had them changed so that you needed a key to unlock them. She said this was because he had tried on a few occasions to sneak out of the house. Folks with dementia sometimes do that.”

“Sure,” said Laurie, nodding.

“I was worried about what might happen if he tried to get out. Like, what if he became violent, you know, and I couldn’t stop him from leaving? Your dad, he was a pretty big guy.”

Laurie remembered him being huge, but of course she had been a much younger and smaller person at the time.

“Did he ever get violent with you?” Laurie asked.

Teresa’s eyes narrowed and grew distant. Laurie couldn’t tell if she was trying to remember a specific event or if she were just trying to figure out the best way to relay it.

“No,” she said eventually, though she stretched the word out which raised more questions than it answered—noooo. “Sometimes with himself, but never with me.”

“Good. I’m glad to hear it.”

Teresa sipped at her alcohol-infused coffee, sucked at her lips, then continued. “He never tried to get out of the house while I was there. By then, he was more concerned with people getting in.”

“Dora said the same thing to me. I asked her to explain what she meant, but she brushed it off as a symptom of my father’s dementia. It bothers me that I don’t know what he was afraid of.”

Teresa took another drink, then asked if Laurie had ever spent any time with someone suffering from dementia.

“No, I haven’t. I hadn’t even seen my father in . . . well, in many, many years.”

“They’re sort of like children trapped in the bodies of grownups,” Teresa said. “They sometimes say and do things a spoiled child might do.” She lowered her voice. “But sometimes, you know, there’s . . . something else there in their eyes, behind their eyes. It’s like they’re actually prisoners inside themselves, peering out windows, and watching helplessly as their body and mind betray them. That part scares me to death.”

“Scares you how?”

“Like, what if that’s me someday? You know what I mean?”

“Yes.”

“Your father was like that sometimes. Not always, but sometimes. He would come in and out of it. It was like there were two people inside him—this evil devil and this helpless old man. I felt pity for him.”

Laurie brought her own coffee to her mouth. All of a sudden it tasted bitter and she quickly set it aside.

“You asked about the locks on the doors,” Teresa went on. “I had a copy of the key, of course, just as Dora did. After I’d been there a few weeks, your father would wake up in the middle of the night and insist I go around and relock the doors. He insisted on watching me do it, too. Some nights, I had to do it three or four times.”

“Did he ever say why he thought people were trying to get into the house?”

“He didn’t know why. But he was certain of it. Terrified of it, really. And do you want to hear something ridiculous?” The young woman laughed nervously. “After a while, he started to convince me of it. And I started to think, shit, what if he’s right? He seems so certain, what if he’s right? Soon, I started waking myself up just to go around the house and make sure the doors were all locked. And, see, that freaked me out even more because, you know, just like I said—what if his dementia was contagious? What if it had somehow seeped into me?”

Laurie offered the young woman a pained smile. Inside, however, her stomach felt like it was beginning to boil. She couldn’t help but recall her own recent obsession with checking the locks in the house, fearful that someone could get in . . . or possibly already had. To think that she shared this identical psychosis with her demented and suicidal father alarmed her.

“Yeah, I know, it sounds crazy,” Teresa said quickly, no doubt discomfited by the look of distress on Laurie’s face. “I’d think I was crazy if I was in your place.”

“I don’t think you’re crazy at all.”

“I mean, I know it isn’t possible—I’m not a dummy—but when you’re there alone in a strange house with nothing but time on your hands to think of all these ridiculous things . . .”