Trust No One (5 page)

“Jerry,” Nurse Hamilton says, and she’s smiling and shaking her head just a little, in a
Well, we’ve all been very amused at your antics
way. “We’ve missed you all day.” She puts an arm around his shoulders and starts walking him to the door. “How you keep sneaking out is a mystery.”

“Can I have a word with you?” Eva asks the nurse once they get inside, and the nurse nods and Jerry imagines it will be more than one word, and that those words are going to be about him finding his way into town, and that none of those words are going to be friendly. He’s left standing in a foyer near a reception desk with another nurse behind it while Eva and Nurse Hamilton disappear. The nurse from behind the desk smiles at him and starts chatting, asking him if he enjoyed his time at the beach. He tells her he did, which is no doubt what she was expecting to hear. When Nurse Hamilton and Eva come back, Eva tells him to be well, and he tells her he’ll do his best. When he goes to hug her, she pulls back a little at first, but then puts her arms around him. He doesn’t want to let her go when she pulls away a few seconds later, but more than that he doesn’t want to cause the kind of scene that proves Eva and Sandra made the right decision to put him in this place. He watches her go, then stands in the doorway and watches her car disappear through the trees.

“Come on, Jerry,” Nurse Hamilton says, and she puts her arm around him again. It’s warm and heavy and comforting. He can smell coffee and cinnamon. He wants to smile back at her, but finds he can’t. “Let’s get you some dinner. You must be hungry.”

She leads him down to the dining room. They walk past people and Jerry looks at them, these people with other problems, and the way they’ve all been left here by their families makes him think of them as the rejected and the unwanted, and then he thinks of himself as their king, then he thinks he’s being too harsh in thinking that, that everybody here has a story and he doesn’t know what it is, but then he thinks that maybe he does know those stories but has forgotten them. He sits at a table by himself and puts his appetite to good use. Jerry is the youngest person in here except for one other guy whose skull is caved in on one side. A nurse is feeding him.

When dinner is over he heads back to his room. It’s the same size as the bedroom he shared with Sandra. There’s a single bed with a striped duvet cover, alternating blacks and whites, the same goes for the pillow, and he finds it a bit of an eyesore. There’s a small flat-screen TV on the wall, a small stereo, and a small fridge that he’s hoping contains alcohol, but when he opens it he sees only bottles of water and cans of diet soda. On one wall is a small bookcase stacked with copies of his books, probably to remind him of who he is. The whole room is miniaturized, a reflection on just how scaled back his life has become. There’s a small private bathroom off to the side, and there’s the window that looks out over the garden that is now getting the last of the sun, the flowers closing up for the day. There are framed photos of Eva and Sandra, one of the three of them taken in London, the bright lights of the city behind them, a double-decker bus coming into view, a telephone box on the side of the street—all very quintessentially British. Eva is only a teenager in the picture. He picks it up, and suddenly he can remember that trip, can remember the flight there, the turbulence twenty minutes short of Heathrow that made Sandra throw up. He can remember the taxi ride into the city, but he can’t remember what book he was promoting, where they went after London, how long they were away. He still has the photograph Eva gave him earlier. He places it on the dresser next to the London photo.

He moves to the bed where there’s a copy of
A Christmas Murder
on the pillow. He must have been reading it last night, and that’s where his confusion started. He remembers the way he looked at his daughter in the police station, the way he pictured her naked, and the feeling of disgust sends him rushing to the bathroom where he throws up into the toilet. He feels like a creepy old man who drills holes into school fences so he can add kids to his mental spank bank. What kind of man looks at his own daughter that way?

The answer, of course, is obvious. A sick one. One who doesn’t know who his daughter is, one who even forgets who he is. He can feel them coming now, the dark thoughts, an army of them marching in his direction and, like always, he wonders how he got here. What he did in life to deserve this.

He cleans himself up. He goes back into the room. He puts
A Christmas Murder
back into the bookcase. He starts to undress. When he slips his hands into his pockets to empty them, his finger presses against something buried near the bottom. He pulls it out. It’s a gold chain with a gold four-leaf clover hanging from it. He turns it over and studies it from different angles, but no amount of studying makes it familiar or suggests who it might belong to. Then he thinks that he wouldn’t be much of a crime writer if he weren’t able to connect the dots—he’s stolen it from either one of the staff, or from one of the other residents. Great, so now he’s going to be labeled not just the crazy man, but the crazy thief too. Just one more thing to add to the growing list of bad things he’s done in his life but can’t remember. Tomorrow he’ll drop it somewhere on the grounds for somebody else to find, but for tonight he needs to put it somewhere safe. And hidden. Last thing he needs is a nurse to walk in and see it on his bedside table.

He opens the sock drawer and reaches into the back to hide it, but there’s something already back there—an envelope the size of a greeting card. It’s thin near the ends and a little bulky in the middle. There’s nothing written on it. He doesn’t recognize it. He sits on the bed and opens it.

Inside is a necklace. And a pair of earrings. And a locket.

You know what that is, don’t you?

The words aren’t his, but those of Henry Cutter, and Henry is the real deal. Jerry might be able to connect the dots, but Henry’s the guy who makes the puzzles.

“No,” he says.

Yes you do.

Jerry shakes his head.

They’re mementos,
Henry says.

“I’ve been stealing from people?”

That’s not all you’ve been doing.

“Then what?”

But Henry has gone and Jerry is left sitting on the edge of the bed alone, confused, frightened, sitting with an envelope full of memories he can’t remember.

“My name is Jerry Grey and it’s been five days since I was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s.”

“Hi, Jerry.”

“And it’s been two days since I last forgot something.”

“Well done, Jerry.”

That’s how Henry would write about the support group that Sandra wants you to go to, if he were writing this journal. You still need updating on Henry, and on support groups, and that will happen soon. Support groups are for other people, the same way car accidents are for other people. Sandra thinks it will be good for you. You fought about it, actually—though
fought
is probably too strong a word—but before you read all about the fight, or about Henry, here’s what you need to know about Sandra. You love Sandra. Of course you do. Everybody does. She is the absolute best thing that has ever happened to you. She’s beautiful, smart, caring, she always knows the right thing to say. When things are going badly, she is there to talk some sense into you. When the reviews are bad, she’s there to tell you the reviewers don’t know what they’re talking about; when the reviews are good, she’s there to tell you that reviewer is the smartest guy in the world. You bounce ideas off her, sometimes you go to the gym with her, you run with her, you used to hike when you were younger, you’d go camping and skiing and once you went skydiving together because you wanted to be able to write what you know. Your wife can’t walk past a cat without wanting to give it a cuddle, she can’t walk past a dog without a
Howzzit going
boy,
can’t watch a chick flick without crying at the end, can’t walk into a mall without buying a pair of shoes, and she can’t imagine what you’re going through even though she gets you, and you can’t imagine a life without her.

You’ve been married for twenty-four years and, if you do the math, you’ll see that Eva is twenty-five years old. You dated for five years before the wedding, which included three years of living together. You met back in university. You were getting yourself one of those fandangled English degrees that were popular back in the day, and you were doing a psych class too—psych 101. And why were you doing these things? Because you wanted to be a writer. Ever since you were a kid, telling stories is what you wanted to do. An English degree would help you tell those stories, and a psych degree would help you understand the characters. That’s where you met Sandra—in a room of people all wanting to learn what makes the mind tick. Your opening line to her was
We need crazy people to make a living doing this.
She laughed, it was a warm wonderful laugh that made you feel warm and wonderful inside, it was a smile that made the world melt away except for her. You can even remember what she was wearing—tight blue jeans with in-fashion holes in the legs and hems that looked like hedgehogs had fooled around on them, a sleeveless red top that matched the shade of her lipstick, and her blond hair was flowing down to her shoulders the way you’ve always liked it. But for the last ten years or so it’s always been in a ponytail, even at the dinner party where you said
This is my wife—
please fill in the blank. You went to the cinema that Friday night. Seeing a film may be a cliché for a first date, but it’s a good cliché. You went to see a Star Trek movie. She was a fan, and you told her you were a closet Trekkie, and she asked what else you were keeping in the closet. You told her your last girlfriend.

Back then, of course, in your university days, you weren’t really a writer. You always suspected that the university education you were getting is what you would fall back on as your house filled up with rejection slips from the publishers. You wanted to be a writer from day one, but it was your mother who encouraged you to continue your education, her scoring point being what an English degree would do for your creativity. By the time you met Sandra, you had written a couple dozen short stories, but you didn’t dare show Sandra any of them until you’d been dating for a few months—and even then it was only after she assured you that she knew they were going to be just great, because you were just great. You were convinced if she read any of your stuff she would tell you it was good in a very vague
Oh yeah, it’s good, I mean, sure . . . I’m sure people will like this, and by the way I can’t see you Friday night as I have to wash my hair / pick up a cousin from the airport /
I’m getting a cold, don’t call me I’ll call you
kind of way. What she did tell you was that your stories needed work. She told you that every character had to be perfectly flawed. She was the one who over the years convinced you to write a novel.
THE
novel. And that’s what you did. You wrote
THE
novel, and
THE
novel was awful and Sandra was kind enough to tell you. So then you wrote
THE NEXT
novel, and that was awful too—but not as awful, she told you, and you tried again. And again. It would be years later you finally put that university degree to good use and got it right, but during those years of study Sandra was tiring of psychology and was thinking of switching to law when she found out she was pregnant.

Life changed then. A few days later you asked her to marry you, and at first she said no, that she didn’t want to marry you just because she was pregnant, but you convinced her that wasn’t why you were asking. Having her in your life was the most amazing thing, and any day without her would be full of heartache and despair. She said yes. You didn’t get married until after Eva was born—Eva was eighteen months old when you walked down the aisle. By then you were also no longer studying, but were renovating houses. Sandra was a stay-at-home mother until Eva started school, at which time she then went back to university and got her law degree, focusing on civil rights. By then you had written
A Christmas Murder,
which a year later would go on to become a bestseller and open up the world for you. Sandra got a job at a law firm, and then all these years later you got Alzheimer’s and had a big fight with her.

Sandra is concerned, of course, because you spent yesterday moping around in your office, but you told her you weren’t moping, but working on next year’s book that your editor has just sent the notes for. Of course there were no notes—but you did call your editor this morning and she made the mistake of saying
Nice to hear from you, Jerry. I trust you are well?
which was like trusting politicians to have your best interests at heart. So you laid it out for her. Not like the journal, mind you—just the CliffsNotes. Actually, Mandy, no, you weren’t all right—you were five days into becoming somebody else, and your current project was a madness journal. She was very upset when you told her, and you were upset too, and why not? It’s something worth being upset about.

That would explain all the mistakes in the manuscript,
Mandy said, and you pretended that didn’t hit a nerve.
I should’ve known. . . . I should have.

Instead you just thought I’d become a horrible writer,
you told her, and you laughed to let her know it was a joke, and she laughed too, but it wasn’t very funny.

Day five and Sandra is mad at you. The truth is if you were counting the days she had ever been mad at you, you’d be up somewhere around five thousand by now (that’s a joke, Jerry—I hope you’re laughing!). The truth is you never fight. Never, ever! Of course you
argue
a little, but what couple doesn’t?

So here’s the thing—you just can’t face a support group. Meeting all these folks who are going to forget you at the same rate you forget them—the rate of forgetting twice as fast in reality, like two trains speeding in opposite directions. You’re actually scared that any new fact is going to push out an old one to make room. What if you meet these people and forget your family? This is Blair—now who is Sandra again?