Dream Girl(33)

He put his pillow over his head and, somehow, went back to sleep. When he woke to the cold house—their old oil burner was no match for temperatures in the teens—his mother was already up and dressed, her bed made.

She was in the kitchen. Alone, thank God. It was a dream. It had to be a dream. What a strange, awful dream to have about one’s mother.

“Look at you, slugabed. I guess you want to get right to the presents before breakfast. Just let me get my coffee.”

When there had been three of them, they had each taken a turn opening a gift. This year, the first with just two, Gerry started by giving his mother his present for her, a boxed set of perfume and moisturizer from Hutzler’s.

“Now you pick.”

He knew which of the two big boxes he wanted to open first and was about to grab it when he noticed a third box, even bigger than the other two.

“Where did this come from?”

“Read the card,” his mother said.

To Gerry, from Dad.

“When did this get here?”

“Oh, your father had it sent weeks ago.”

“When, though? I get home from school before you come home from work. I’m the one who signs for packages.”

His mother paused and he saw, in the pause, that she was deciding which lie to tell.

“He sent it to Dr. Papadakis’s office, knowing what a nosy parker you are. It’s been hidden in the basement for weeks. I put it out last night,” she said. “After you went to bed. Your old mother still has a few tricks up her sleeve.”

Oh, don’t you just. Could it have been someone else in his mother’s bed? Another man, not his father? Maybe another woman, too. There had been two strangers in his mother’s bed while she was readying the house for the morning. That made more sense than what he thought he had seen.

His father’s gift to him was a tool kit, but a babyish one, insulting. Gerry was already using real tools, the tools his father had left behind, learning to make small repairs as the house needed them. Sitting there with this toy in his lap, knowing he was long past toys, Gerry decided his next project would be going to the hardware store in Towson and buying a chain lock for the front door, which would keep him and his mother safe at night, while making it impossible for anyone to come and go.





March 8




AND SO, at the age of sixty-one, Gerry enjoys—no, that’s the wrong verb—Gerry receives his first actual house call from a doctor. It has not been easy to arrange. In order to find a specialist who is willing to see him in his home, he first had to join a so-called concierge medical practice, talk to the doctor, and then ask for that doctor’s help in procuring a neurogerontologist, one who is willing to travel to him. The head of the practice asks him a lot of questions about his pain medications, seems far more interested in those than his mother’s Alzheimer’s. But, ultimately, she finds him a specialist.

The specialist has a name, Andre Bevington, that could be lifted from the pages of a romance novel—and a face to match. He is beautiful, there is no other word for it. Devastatingly beautiful, there is no other adverb for it. Gerry has never been attracted to men, was never comfortable with the way Luke joked about corrupting him. Complimented, but not comfortable. But this man is like a work of art. No—in portrait form, his beauty would be crass, not unlike that portrait of Donald Trump that Trump bought for his own country club, using his foundation’s fund. In art, this kind of perfection is tacky. But as a work of nature, it is something at which one can only marvel. Gerry finds himself thinking, Of course you work with geriatric neurological issues. If you worked with age peers, everyone would fall in love with you. Good lord, if you had been a gynecologist, women would be begging to climb into those stirrups three times a year. A connoisseur of beautiful women—isn’t every straight man?—Gerry has never really spent much time thinking about beautiful men. But this! What’s it like to walk around inside such a body? Does the doctor know? How could he not? Is he grateful? He’d better be.

“Andre,” he says, holding out his hand. “Pleased to meet you.”

They talk through Gerry’s history—the fall. Had he been experiencing any tremors or instability before the fall? No? Excellent. His pain meds. The doctor is curious to pinpoint the time of day of what he calls the “instances.”

“You’re very thorough,” Gerry says at one point. “Patient.” A thought strikes him. “Why are we called patients? Do you know the etymology?”

“It’s the same Latin root for the noun and the adjective. It comes from pati, the word for ‘suffering.’ I like how your mind works, Gerry. And your mind seems to work well. But we have, by my count”—he looks at the small notebook in which he has been jotting—“six instances, and they seem to be escalating. A letter, three phone calls, a tweet, a visit. If we put aside the tweet, which was seen by your assistant before it was taken down, I do detect a pattern. These things happen when you’re close to sleep. In fact, they happen when you are asleep. And they’re remarkably consistent. They all center on a person, a woman, claiming to be the model for a character in your novel, but you say there is no such person.”

“The letter doesn’t fit, though. I saw that during the day.”

“True. And it was before the accident. But there’s an Occam’s razor explanation for the letter—you probably did get something with a familiar address, but it was the mass mailer you initially took it for. That’s why you didn’t open it right away. I think you would have recognized the precise address used in your novel. You strike me as quite sharp, detail-oriented. But it was junk mail and it got tossed. One of those extended car warranties or something like that. That’s all there is to it.”