The Sweetness of Forgetting (5 page)

“Gavin,” I say, and he starts, pushes back from the sink, and stands up. His eyes dart back and forth between Matt and me, and he scratches his head as Matt moves past him to put my food in the refrigerator.

“Hey,” Gavin says. He glances at Matt again and then back at me. “I came right over when Annie called. I got your water turned off for now. Looks like the pipe that burst is in the wall, behind the dishwasher. I’ll come over and fix it for you the day after tomorrow, if you don’t mind waiting.”

“You don’t have to do that,” I say softly. I make eye contact with him, hoping that he knows what I’m trying to say: that I still can’t pay him.

But he just smiles and goes on as if he hasn’t heard me. “Tomorrow’s packed, but the next day, I’m wide open,” he says. “I just have a small job over at the Foley place in the morning. Besides, this shouldn’t take too long to fix. It’s just a pipe repair, and you should be good as new.” His eyes dart to Matt again and then back to me. “Listen, I’ve got a wet-vac in the Jeep. Let me go grab it, and I’ll help you get some of this water up. We can see if it did any damage once the floors are dry.”

I glance at Annie, who’s still standing there with a huge pile of towels in her hand. “We can clean all this up ourselves,” I tell Gavin. “You don’t have to stay. Right?” I add, looking at Annie and then at Matt.

“I guess,” Annie says with a shrug.

Matt looks away. “Actually, Hope, I’ve got an early morning tomorrow. I’m going to have to head home.”

Gavin snorts and walks outside without saying another word. I ignore him. “Oh,” I say to Matt. “Of course. Thanks for dinner.”

By the time I walk Matt to the door, Gavin’s reentering with his wet-vac.

“I said you didn’t have to do that,” I mumble.

“I know what you said,” Gavin says, without slowing down to look at me. A moment later, as I watch Matt’s shiny Lexus pull away from the curb, I hear Gavin’s vacuum turn on in the kitchen. I close my eyes for a minute, and then I turn and begin walking back toward the one mess in my life that can actually be fixed.

The next evening, Annie’s at Rob’s house again, and as I mop up the remainder of the mess in the kitchen after work, I find myself thinking of Mamie, who always used to know how to fix disasters. It’s been two weeks since I last visited her, I realize.
I should
be a better granddaughter,
I think with a swell of guilt.
I should be a better person.
Yet one more area in which I seem to be eternally falling short.

With a lump in my throat, I finish mopping, put some lipstick on in the hall mirror, and grab my keys. Annie’s right; I need to go see my grandmother. Visiting Mamie always makes me want to cry, because although the home she’s in is cheerful and friendly, it’s terrible to see her slipping away. It’s like standing on the deck of a boat, watching the waves suck someone under, and knowing that there’s no life preserver to throw in.

Fifteen minutes later, I’m walking through the doors of Mamie’s assisted living facility, a huge home that’s painted buttercream yellow and filled with pictures of flowers and woodland creatures. The top floor is the memory care unit, where visitors are required to enter a pass code on a digital pad at the door.

I walk down the hallway toward Mamie’s room, which sits at the far end of the west wing. The residents’ rooms are all private and apartment-style, although they eat all their meals in the dining room, and staff members all have master keys so that they can check on residents and give them their daily medications. Mamie’s on an antidepressant, two heart medications, and an experimental drug for Alzheimer’s that doesn’t seem to be helping; I meet with the staff doctor once a month to get a status report. He said at our last meeting that her mental faculties have been going sharply downhill in the last few months.

“The worst part is,” he’d said, looking over his glasses at me, “she’s lucid enough to know it. This is one of the hardest stages to watch; she knows her memory will be all but gone soon, which is very unsettling and sad for patients in this state.”

I swallow back a lump as I ring the doorbell beside her name:
Rose McKenna
. I can hear her shuffling around inside, probably getting up from her recliner with some effort, moving toward the door with the cane she’s been using since she fell and broke her hip two years ago.

The door opens, and I resist the urge to throw myself into her arms for a hug, the way I used to do when I was a little girl. Up until this moment, I’d thought I’d come here for her, but now I realize it’s for me. I need this. I need to see someone who loves me, even if it’s an imperfect love.

“Hello,” Mamie says, smiling at me. Her hair looks whiter than the last time I saw her, the lines in her face deeper. But as always, she’s wearing her burgundy lipstick, and her eyes are rimmed in kohl and mascara. “What a surprise, dear.”

Her words are tinged with the hint of a French accent that has all but disappeared. She’s been in the United States since the early 1940s, but the traces of her long-ago past still shroud her words like one of the feather-light French scarves she almost always has wrapped around her neck.

I reach forward to hug her. When I was younger, she was solid and strong. Now, as she leans into the embrace, I can feel the bones of her spine, the sharpness of her shoulders.

“Hi, Mamie,” I say softly, blinking back tears as I pull away.

She stares at me through gray eyes that are clouded over. “You will have to forgive me,” she says. “I get a little forgetful sometimes. Which one are you, dear? I know I should remember.”

I swallow hard. “I’m Hope, Mamie. Your granddaughter.”

“Of course.” She smiles at me, but her gray eyes are foggy. “I knew that. I just need a reminder sometimes. Please, come in.”

I follow her inside her dimly lit apartment, where she leads me to the living room window.

“I was just watching the sunset, my dear,” she says. “In a moment, we’ll be able to see the evening star.”

Chapter
Three

Rose

Rose gazed out the window, searching, as she always did, for the first star on the horizon. She knew it would appear, as twinkling and brilliant as an eternal flame, just after the setting sun painted the sky in ribbons of fire and light. When she was a girl, they’d called this twilight
l’heure bleue,
the blue hour, the time when the earth was neither completely light nor completely dark. Rose had always found comfort in this middle ground.

The evening star, which appeared each night during the deep velvet twilight, had always been her favorite, although it wasn’t a star at all; it was the planet Venus, the planet named after the goddess of
love. She had learned that long ago, but it hadn’t changed anything, not really; here on earth, it was hard to tell what was a star and what wasn’t. For years, she had counted all the stars she could see in the night sky. She was always searching for something, but she hadn’t found it yet. She didn’t deserve to, she knew, and that made her sad. A lot of things made her sad these days. But sometimes, from one day to the next, she couldn’t remember what she was crying for.

Alzheimer’s.
She knew she had it. She heard the whispers in the halls. She had watched her neighbors in the home come and go, their memories slipping further with each passing day. She knew that the same thing was happening to her, and it scared her for reasons no one would understand. She dared not speak them aloud. It was too late.

Rose knew that the girl with the glistening brown hair, the familiar features, and the beautifully sad eyes had just told her who she was, but she had already forgotten. A familiar panic rose in her throat. She wished she could grab the memories like lifelines and hold on before she went under. But she found them slippery, impossible to grasp. So she cleared her throat, forced a smile, and hazarded her best guess.

“Josephine, dear, look for the star on the horizon,” she said. She pointed to the empty space where she knew the evening star would make its appearance, any second now. She hoped she had guessed right. She hadn’t seen Josephine in a long time. Or maybe she had. It was impossible to know.