The Things We Keep(13)

5

Anna

Fourteen months ago …

My room at Rosalind House isn’t an entirely unpleasant place to be, which is good, since I spend so much time in here. As much as I don’t want to admit that the dementia is getting the better of me, I find myself more worn out than I used to be. Once, not so long ago, I would do a twelve-hour shift in the ambulance and still have an entire night ahead of me to dance, drink, and socialize. These days, I leave my room for a meal and upon my return, I am ready for a nap.

Now I drop into my chair and lean back, closing my eyes.

“Good girl. You decided to wait for me today.”

I open my eyes, sit up straight. The skinny lady—Trish, according to her name badge—is standing in front of me.

“Excuse me?” I say.

“Would you like to undress in here or in the bathroom?”

I blame the exhaustion for the fact that I haven’t checked the laminated sheet for shower times. In truth, I’d actually forgotten the laminated sheet existed. Now it comes back to me like a fist in the gut. “I’m fine,” I say. “I don’t need a shower.”

She sighs. “Come on, Anna. Let’s not make this difficult.”

Beyond the skinny lady, the door to my room is wide open. Someone trundles past the door on a walker. Does she actually think I’m going to strip naked right here? Is that what she wants me to do?

Clearly it is, because she comes at me, yanking me to my feet. She reaches for the bottom edge of my T-shirt, and I realize in alarm that she’s going to undress me.

“Ahhh!” I yell. I know I sound crazy, but I’ll take crazy over the humiliation of being showered by this woman against my will. “Ahhh.”

I take a step back, but the wall is behind me, there’s nowhere to go. Skinny Lady smiles. (I’ll tell you something for nothing: The only thing worse than having someone undress you against your will is to have them do it smiling.)

I keep shouting, rhythmically and repeatedly. Skinny stands back. “You’ve got visitors this afternoon, Anna. Don’t you want to look nice for them?”

Another person passes my doorway, no walker this time. It’s the young guy.

Skinny reaches for my waistband. “How about we start by undoing your—?”

I open my mouth to start shouting again, but then I hear a noise—a smash.

Skinny’s arms retract back to her sides. “What on earth—?”

She darts out of the room. I drift after her as far as the doorway and see Young Guy, standing over broken glass.

“Oh, sweetie, what have you done?” Skinny is using a controlled, deliberate voice, but her irritation is only thinly veiled. “Just stand back, I’m going to get something to clean it up. All right, Luke? Stay back.”

Skinny marches off, presumably in search of a broom. The moment she’s disappeared around the corner, Young Guy—Luke—looks directly at me and realization dawns. It wasn’t an accident.

I want to say something—do something—but my mouth just hangs open, intermittently filling and emptying with air, like a grocery bag in the wind. “I’d … be quick if I were you,” he whispers. “Whatshername, she’s speedy … with that sweeper-thing.”

We stare at each other a moment and a strange, silent dialogue is transmitted between us. From some primal place inside, I feel a twinge.

There’s a rustle as the broom closet opens and Skinny, presumably, rifles through it. I slip out of the doorway and into the bathroom, where I start the shower. And even though my short-term memories are supposed to be the first to go, a few minutes later, as the water pounds against my shoulders and back, I am still thinking about him.

*

The good thing, I guess, is that I’ve known love. At least, I think it was love, but how do you really ever know? I was twenty-eight when I met Aiden. I was stuck at a set of traffic lights in my beat-up old Ford when he pulled up beside my car on a Harley-Davidson. I still remember the ease of him, the way he leaned back slightly, like he had nowhere he had to be. His helmet covered only his head and ears, so I could see his chin, his stubbly jaw, his lips.

I wound down my window. “I like your bike,” I said.

He regarded me curiously. “Thanks. You ride?”

“Not a Harley.”

“But you ride?”

He was cute, this biker guy. I found myself wondering if there were full sleeves underneath his leather jacket. And what else might be under there.

“I’ve got a Honda 900 cc in my garage,” I said, “just waiting for its momma to come home and take her for a spin.”

Now he leaned forward, assessing me. He seemed pleased with what he saw. “How ’bout you give me your number, and we can go for a spin sometime?”

I found an old ticket on the dash just as the light changed to green and I steeled myself for the honking and cursing. But no one did honk as I scribbled down my phone number. Perhaps it was because Aiden rode a Harley that they didn’t want to mess with him? Or perhaps it was because sometimes people were willing to wait for a glimpse of young romance?

I sped Aiden through the early relationship process, from first date to boyfriend without passing Go. We went camping at Yosemite. We hugged the curves of coastal roads on our bikes. We started our days with sex and, if Aiden hadn’t been smoking pot, ended them with it, too. But afterwards, when we fell asleep, we were always sprawled out and separate—together in our desire to be alone. It wasn’t the love from a romance movie, but it worked for us.