The Impossible Knife of Memory(30)

“Do you want to go home?” I asked.

“Ha!” Gracie laughed, shaking her head. “Only if you have a time machine.” She bent over the sink and splashed water into her face. When she stood up, I handed her more paper towels. “It doesn’t matter where I go, I don’t want to be there. And then I get to the next place, and I don’t want to be there, either.” She reached in her purse and pulled out a small tin of mints. “Want one?”

She opened the tin and held it out to me. I started to reach in, but then saw what was inside: large oval pills the color of a robin’s egg. “Those aren’t mints.”

“Duh. Mints wouldn’t do much good right now, would they?” She set the box on the edge of the sink, swallowed a pill, then took a swig of water from the faucet. “It’s okay, they’re legal. One of my mom’s prescriptions. You should take one. It might make math fun for a change.”

I stared at the pills and then at her. She still looked like kindergarten Gracie around the eyes, but around the mouth, under the zits and the makeup that didn’t quite hide them, she looked like someone I didn’t know at all.

I closed the box. “No, thanks.”

She looked at me in the mirror. “Can I go to your house after school?”

“Can’t. I have to go to the nursing home for my service hours.” I closed the box and handed it to her. “Come with me.”





_*_ 37 _*_

The receptionist at St. Anthony’s Nursing Home and Care Center clamped a phone between her ear and shoulder and wrote down the arrival time on my form with a wellchewed pen. She pointed to the elevators and held up four fingers, then she told the person on the other end of the phone that she had to work a double shift and some days it felt like she’d never get out of this damn place.

Gracie followed me into the elevator. She hadn’t said a word on the bus. I suspected that was she was a little bit stoned, but she was with me and that counted for something.

The elevator doors closed. “How long do we have to stay?” she asked.

“Benedetti said I need four hours.”

“Four?” Gracie sighed dramatically. “I don’t like old people that much.”

“I bet they don’t like you, either,” I said. “At least an hour, okay? It’s better than going home.”

She frowned as the elevator doors opened. “Barely.”

A nurse sent us to an Activity Room. Whoever named it that had a sick sense of humor. Of the dozen residents there, only one seemed to have a pulse, a lady in a faded flowered dress pushing a walker so slowly it was hard to tell what direction she was moving in. Most of the others sat slumped and sleeping in wheelchairs lined up in front of a huge television screen, all tethered to oxygen tanks like withered balloons. The television was turned off. My nose wrinkled; the room smelled like cherry cough drops, used diapers, and bleach.

A skinny guy in a uniform with a long, black ponytail pushed a cart past us. “First time here?”

“The last,” Gracie muttered.

He pointed to a table in front of the window. “Doris likes to play cards. Mr. Vanderpoole, sitting across from her, is a jigsaw puzzle fan.”

Doris was the size of a garden gnome (minus the hat) with thick glasses that magnified her gray, watery eyes. She stared at Mr. Vanderpoole’s puzzle, a picture of an old-fashioned fair. Half of the Ferris wheel and a few pieces from a cattle pen were missing, but there were no extra pieces on the table. Mr. Vanderpoole, wearing a suit and tie, his face perfectly shaved, slept in his wheelchair silently, like a statue.

Gracie walked over to a low bookcase and examined the puzzle and game boxes stacked there. “Think they have a Ouija board?”

“Why?” I asked.

“More interesting than puzzles, for one thing,” she said. “Maybe the dead will tell me how to deal with my parents.”

“Come on, G,” I said. “The whole point of dragging you here was to get your mind off that.”

She flipped me the “whatever” hand.

I pulled out the chair next to Doris and sat down. “I’m Hayley Kincain, ma’am. Do you want to play cards?’

She blinked like an ancient owl and asked, “When is my sister coming?”

“Um . . .” I looked around desperately for a gnome-sized old lady who looked like Doris or, even better, a nurse.

“When is my sister coming?” Doris repeated. Her eyes puddled up.

“I’m not sure,” I said. “Does she live here?”

“Your sister will be here soon,” Gracie said over her shoulder. “Right now you’re supposed to play cards, Doris.”

“She’s right,” I said with more enthusiasm than I felt. “Bridge or Go Fish?”

Doris smiled and nodded. “I like Fish.”

Crisis over, I shuffled the cards. “How did you do that?” I asked Gracie.

“Do what?” Gracie carried a stack of dented boxes to the table. “Can you believe they have Candy Land?”

Someone down the hall moaned regularly, like a bored ghost. I silently cursed Ms. Benedetti, cut the cards, and cursed again. I dealt seven cards to Doris and looked at my own hand: five aces and two seven of hearts. I opened my mouth to say we needed a different deck but closed it again when I saw how carefully Doris was organizing her cards, and how calm she looked, as if she hadn’t just been on the verge of bursting into tears about her sister.