Chapter 6. Lenore #2
A laugh sputters out of him and he shakes his head. “I don’t think I’m her type.”
I roll my eyes. “Please.” There’s no way he doesn’t know how attractive he is. The good-looking ones always know.
“I’m her cousin,” he says flatly.
Oh.
Callan considers me over the rim of his beer glass. After a moment, he gets to his feet, coming around to my end of the booth. “Scoot over.”
I make enough room for him to slide onto the bench beside me. Awareness flushes beneath my skin, embarrassment over my faux pas melding with the heat of him, our knees pressed together beneath the table.
“What are you doing here, Lenore?”
I reel sideways a few inches to look at him. “You invited me.”
“You know what I mean,” he says. “Here. Home.”
We’re sitting so close, far closer than necessary. Dark blue eyes flit over my face, like he’s trying to see all of me at once. Maybe it’s the drinks, but I feel unbalanced, tipping toward him without meaning to. I straighten in my seat and tear my eyes from his, fixing them on my drink.
I could lie, but without my full wits to back it up, he’d see right through it.
“Do you remember what happened at Damien’s wedding?” I ask instead.
It’s not quite an honest question. I want to gauge what he remembers from that night—what he thinks I’m talking about.
“I remember,” he says. “Damien and Katie had to postpone their honeymoon to search for a long-term care facility afterward.”
It’s exactly what I would expect him to remember, the first domino in the series of events that led me back here, so there’s no reason for the disappointment that sours my gut. A part of me had hoped he’d let slip the reason he’d acted the way he had that night, before the worst of it.
“I think—” I hesitate over my words. “I know that Gran wasn’t herself that night, but there was this moment of lucidity when we took her up to her room.
It was—” Emotion strangles out the end of that sentence, but drinking has loosened my tongue on more topics than one.
“I know that she knew exactly who I was, in that moment. And the things she said … Maybe it was the dementia talking, but she only got worse after that, so I never had the chance to ask her whether that was how she truly felt.”
Her short-term memory was the first to go—little things, like accidentally getting locked out of the house or forgetting her doctors’ appointments.
It’s hard to know for certain when it started, but around the time she got her diagnosis seven years ago, her symptoms were still mild enough that she insisted on continuing to live alone.
I was two years and several student loans deep into a prestigious fine arts program in New York, and Damien had found steady work in Connecticut and had met Katie there.
Gran never called to let us know that her world had shifted on its axis. She never asked us for help.
We didn’t know it at the time, but she started dipping into the life insurance payout from the death of her husband thirty years earlier to pay for a nurse to come to the house for eight hours every day.
In the evenings, after the nurse had left, Callan’s father would stop in to check on her after he finished his work around the property.
Sometimes, he even ran her errands and cooked her dinner.
Callan’s father was the only person she told. I’ve never quite been able to come to terms with that.
Damien’s wedding was when the truth finally came to light, because her dementia had progressed to the point that she couldn’t hide it any longer.
We could no longer chalk it up to everyday forgetfulness.
For a moment, she’d forgotten us. It was like a switch flipped, and suddenly, she was sitting in the middle of a wedding, surrounded by utter strangers.
It terrified us, so I can only imagine what it was like for her.
It was a struggle to help her up to her room. For someone who stood shy of five feet tall in her old age, she was alarmingly strong, and she spit all sorts of venom as we fought to help her.
Damien went back outside to let the guests know that the reception was being cut short. I stayed in the room to keep an eye on her.
“Who are you?” she’d asked, again and again.
“I’m your granddaughter, Lenore,” I’d said—tearful, utterly lost. I didn’t understand why this was happening, why she couldn’t remember.
Gran shook her head. “I don’t have a granddaughter.”
It was the same conversation on repeat, like rehearsing for a play. Until, at last, she remembered.
“Lenore,” she said with certainty.
“Yes!” I cried in relief. Until she went on.
“You left me,” she said. “I took care of you, and you left me here alone.” There were no tears welling in her eyes. Only fierce anger at the injustice of it all. It twisted her into someone unrecognizable. “Everyone abandoned me. You only ever worry about yourselves.”
I shook my head, my throat cinched tight. “No.” I took her hand in mine, paper skin over brittle bones, but she flinched away. “I’m only gone for a little while,” I promised. “I’ll come back soon.”
“It’s too late for that,” she muttered, without looking at me. “Far too late.”
I wasn’t sure what she had meant, but the words made my stomach bottom out.
Afterward, Callan’s dad, Thomas, sat us down and explained everything. I felt like I was in a trance, like turning the page of a book only to realize your eyes were moving but you couldn’t quite make sense of the words.
Your grandmother has Alzheimer’s disease. It’s progressed. You need to put her in a home.
A bitter taste had coated my mouth. A home, but not her home. I was ready to drop out of school then and there, to move back in so that she could live out the rest of her days here on French Hill Farm, even if there came a time when she forgot where “home” was.
It was Thomas who talked me out of it—explaining, in gentle terms, that it was too much for me to manage on my own.
Gabrielle had put her wishes into writing, and they were clear: When the time came that she could no longer live alone, there were funds set aside to pay for the very best facilities.
No one, she wrote, should put their life on hold on account of her.
I detested it, but I listened. At least the wording in those instructions belonged to the grandmother I’d always known, and not the stranger I’d spoken to in the bedroom. Damien found a nursing home near where he and Katie were living in Connecticut, which made it easier for all of us to visit.
I tried to keep on living. Except, when she passed six months ago, it didn’t feel like I’d lived well enough. I was a failed artist, near friendless in a city of eight million people, with her horrible words from that night echoing back at me across time and space.
“Your grandmother adored you,” Cal tells me here, in the present. “I never heard a bad word out of her mouth about anyone, let alone you.”
“You don’t understand.” It is suddenly, desperately important that I make him understand.
I need someone to understand. “It wasn’t that she was talking nonsense.
The things she was saying, they made sense, even if she would never have said them before.
It was like the dementia took away her filter, but the thoughts were always there. ”
Something softens around his eyes, an emotion I don’t know how to name. Faint crow’s feet are baked into the corners, the result of years spent squinting against the sun. “I’m not sure that’s how it works,” he says, as gentle with his words as his father had been that night.
I shake my head, frustrated tears smudging the edge of my vision.
“You don’t understand,” I say again, but all the fight has seeped out of me.
“I thought maybe coming back here would … I don’t know, give me a way to connect with her one last time, to ask her whether she meant those things she said.
Not that I believe in ghosts, exactly,” I rush to add.
If they existed, I like to think that I would’ve already met a couple, living in a centuries-old house.
“But it would be nice to believe that there’s some connection between us and the afterlife, even if it’s not supernatural.
” Even if it’s words in a journal, and the things we leave behind.
Callan shifts in his seat. “What about your art?”
I look at him all puffy eyed and askance. “What about it?”
“You don’t think that’s a connection?”
I sniffle and look at the cider can, sitting on a soggy coaster. “I think I need another drink.”
“Come on,” Cal huffs. “You don’t belong serving cranky people coffee all day, Nore. You have real talent. You should do something with it.”
I blink at him, too embarrassed to admit that I’ve let that skill atrophy. People always call drawing a talent, but even those who are born with some natural inclination still have to work for it. It takes years of practice to get good at anything, and even more practice to stay good at it.
The bar explodes into raucous cheers. I flinch, breaking eye contact to stare up at a television screen. The Red Sox have hit a home run.
Callan casts me another unreadable look, then flags down our server to order another round of drinks.