The Impossible Knife of Memory(31)

One minute passed. Two. After a short eternity, Doris finally put one card facedown on the table and pulled another from the draw pile.

“Your turn,” she said.

I looked at my cards. “Do you have any sevens?”

She looked at me blankly. “Why?”

We were clearly playing by Doris Rules. I mimicked her; one card down, another taken from the pile. It was like playing with a three-year-old. (Was that disrespectful, thinking of her like that?)

Gracie lifted the lid off the Candy Land box and frowned. Then she took the lids off the Monopoly box and two jigsaw puzzles. “These are a mess. The pieces are all mixed together. How can they play anything?”

Mr. Vanderpoole snorted and shifted in his sleep.

Doris reached across the table and tapped my hand. “When is my sister coming?”

Fifty hands of Doris Rules Go Fish later, Gracie had spread out the contents of the boxes on an empty table, sorted the pieces into piles, and gone to the Activity Room at the other end of the floor in search of the missing pieces. Doris was in a happy world of her own, picking one card from the deck at a time, laying them down, and announcing “I win” every once in a while. She talked to herself quietly. Once she said “Annabelle.” Another time it sounded like she mumbled “cotton candy.”

I wasn’t sure why I had to do this in order to graduate, but the longer I sat, shuffling and dealing, shuffling and dealing, the less pissy I became. This room had no connection to the outside world. Did Doris know what year it was? Probably not. Did the old people in this room know who the president was, the price of gas, which war we were fighting now? How many of them could even remember their names?

I shuffled. Dealt another hand. I wound up with six aces (two hearts, two spades, a club and a diamond) and the jack of hearts. Doris hummed and put her cards in some kind of order that made sense to her.

If Gramma had lived, would she have wound up in here? I’d spent so many years trying not to think of her that I could barely remember what she looked like. I didn’t even know how old she was when she died. Did it happen in the grocery store? Was I at school? Did I find her? I’d remember that, right? The questions filled in the glacial pauses while Doris decided which card to lay down. A wristband poked out from the sleeve of her cardigan. It had her name printed on it, along with the name of the nursing home and a phone number. Did Doris really not know who she was or where she lived? Which was better: being alive (if that was the right word) but not remembering anything, or being dead?

That was a Finn question. He’d probably answer it with an obscure quote from The Tibetan Book of the Dead or gibberish about runic interpretations, but there was a chance he’d really think about it and then we might get somewhere.

Half an eternity later, a nurse wearing a top decorated with dog cartoons walked over, crouched down to next to Doris, and asked if she wanted to go to the accordion concert before dinner.

“Will my sister be there?” Doris asked.

“I hope so,” the nurse said kindly. She helped Doris stand and said to me, “Thanks for coming. Janine’s on the desk. She’ll sign your form.”

Nurse Janine wore a plain beige top, no dogs. When I walked up to her, she closed the binder she was writing in and said, “Let me guess. Belmont?”

“How did you know that?” I asked.

“I have a sense about these things. Do you want to be a nurse?” she asked. “Physical therapist? Pharmacist?”

I shrugged. “Never really thought about it.”

She rolled her eyes. “I told them to stop sending kids like you. We only want volunteers who care about this kind of work.”

“I’ll tell my guidance counselor.” I handed her my attendance sheet. “Does Doris’s sister live here, too?”

She scribbled on the paper. “Annabelle? She died more than seventy years ago.”

“That’s awful.”

“Not really. Doris loves her. She always thinks that Annabelle is going to walk through the door in just a few minutes. Imagine how awful it would be if she realized that she’d never see Annabelle again.” She handed the paper back to me. “Bus comes on the half hour. Tell your guidance counselor to send you to the Girl Scouts next month.”





_*_ 38 _*_

I found Gracie sitting on a wooden bench bolted to the patio in front of the nursing home. I sat next to her and waited, but she just stared, sniffing, at the river flowing at the bottom of the hill.

“Nurse Janine told me not to come back,” I said. “It’s not like they can afford to be picky,” she said. “She didn’t like my career goals.”

Gracie wiped her nose on her sleeve. “Do you have career goals?”

“Of course. I plan on lifting the zombie curse from our fellow students.” I pulled a wadded-up tissue out of my pocket and handed it to her. “Don’t tell Ms. Benedetti.”

She blew her nose. “Okay.”

“You gonna tell me what’s wrong?” I asked.

“They have three Candy Land games and no red pieces.” She kept her eyes on the river. “Everybody wants to be red, the whole world knows that.”

“You’re not crying about the red pieces.”

“No.” She tucked her hair behind her ear and sighed. “Mom blew up my phone ’cause I wasn’t on the bus. Left a million messages begging me not to go to the quarry.”