“Do you have a preference? Eckhart Tolle? The Secret?”
“You can read her a banana sticker, it doesn’t really matter,” murmured Ana, opening the closet, stepping around Finn, who stayed close to her.
“Oh, I like that one,” said her mother.
James settled into the lounge chair. The print was enormous. “ ‘The world can only change from within,’ ” read James.
Ana didn’t bother to stifle a laugh. Finn had found Lise’s purple hairbrush and was brushing his hair slowly, in the center of the room.
Lana walked by the open door, quickly, as if hoping not to be caught.
“Excuse me,” said Ana, rushing toward the door. “Is it possible that my mother is missing some clothing? I bought her a very nice camisole and I can’t find it.”
Lana stood opposite Ana, eye to eye. “We do ask our clients’ families to label everything very carefully,” she said loudly. “But I can check. What color is it?”
“Black, and her name is sewn inside, just like you said.” As Lana walked away, Ana shouted after her: “It’s an Elle Macpherson!”
She turned to James. “Was that hostile? Am I imagining things?”
“Definitely hostile,” said James, turning back to the book: “ ‘When you are present in this moment, you break the continuity of your story, of past and future.’ ”
“James, are you even hearing what you’re saying?” Ana interrupted. “Really, do you think someone with dementia needs to be reminded to live in the present? The present isn’t the problem.”
Ana spread a throw over her mother’s upper half, and in return, Lise smiled a new, grotesque parody of a smile that she’d been trying out lately.
Ana leaned in to straighten her mother’s cardigan and saw, poking out of the back, the Elle Macpherson tag.
“Mom, you’re wearing the camisole,” said Ana, snapping the blanket in place.
“Ana, you can’t get mad at her,” said James.
Finn had dumped Ana’s purse into the middle of the room—keys, Kleenex, her phone, beeping with texts. He raised his arm in the air, a tube of lipstick northward, its red tip poking through the black casing.
Ana moved toward the lipstick. “Finn, no!” she snapped.
“Ana—don’t yell—” said James as Finn opened his mouth and smeared red over his lips.
“Jesus, Finn, that’s mine!” said Ana, grabbing the lipstick from his hands, trying to corral her objects of vanity, grasping for a rolling bottle of foundation.
“Oh,” said Ana’s mother. “What a pretty little girl!”
“Am I interrupting?” Charlie stood at the door, one hand on either side of the frame leaning in, as if stretching after a basketball game. James always thought of basketball when he saw Charlie. He always made sure not to stand too close to him.
“You’ve got a suit on today, huh?” said James, putting down the book.
Charlie pulled his tie up sideways, sticking his tongue out and bugging his eyes. Then he blushed a little. Ana was always surprised by his boyishness—the shaggy, rock star hair, the West Coast drawl. She had always thought of the church as a kind of elaborate hiding place, tunnels and spaces dug underground, with priests like little black ants moving and scheming far below the real world.
“How are you today, Lise?” he asked, moving into the room, standing near her, without raising his voice.
“Oh, I’m wonderful. My family’s here. My camisole is here!” she laughed.
“This is Finn. He’s staying with us for a while,” said James. Finn hid behind Ana’s legs.
“Ah. He has great taste in lipstick, I see. Nice to meet you, Finn.” Charlie turned: “Ana, I wonder if I could have a word with you in my office before you leave? Do you have time? Is that cool?”
“Go, go,” said James. Charlie’s use of the word “cool” irritated James. If some guy under thirty was saying “cool,” then clearly James shouldn’t be. “We’ll meet you in the lobby.”
Ana leaned over and kissed her mother on the cheek while the men looked away. Finn returned to Lise’s drawers, pulling out pantyhose and twisting them up around his arms.
As they walked down the hall together, Ana noticed the top of a small notebook jutting from Charlie’s back pocket.
“Sit down. But don’t look around too closely,” he said. The room was small and windowless, a desk and a bookshelf filled with stacks of science and philosophy, some spines in Hebrew. A guitar case leaned against the shelf. The desk was a puddle of papers ringed by a pair of mugs and a stack of cardboard coffee cuffs.
Charlie saw her looking at the cuffs and said: “I know. I keep thinking I’ll reuse them, but I never have. Not once.” He suddenly picked up the entire stack, opened a drawer, and with a dramatic flourish, dropped them in. Ana smiled.
“I can’t throw them out,” said Charlie. He shut the drawer.
“Is everything okay with my mom?” asked Ana.
“Oh, yeah, yeah. She’s doing fine.” He riffled through papers, searching. “The reason I wanted to talk to you—I’ve been writing these songs, and I’m actually going to be performing.”
“Oh, I didn’t know you did that,” said Ana, surprised. “I know you sometimes sing with the patients.…”
“I used to be in a band, a long time ago. This is just an open mic night, it’s not a big deal.”
Ana remembered all the songs that James had played for her over the years, the ecstasy in him, her own feeble efforts to match it. “I wish I were more musical. My mother was. She was always singing under her breath.”
“She still does,” said Charlie.
“Really?” Ana said, surprised. “I never hear that.” She looked at Charlie. “It’s primal, isn’t it? Some need to express oneself, to be heard.”
“Researchers have actually found that listening to music activates empathy in the brain. It gets you out of yourself,” said Charlie. “It’s almost the only way of communicating with some of the people here.” Ana knew those women, the advanced cases, who had lost language entirely. It had begun that way with her mother, searching for a word, an image, a name.
“It must be difficult to work here,” said Ana.
Charlie shook his head. “No, it’s not,” he said. “The managers can be assholes, but the people who live here—that part of it is easy.”
Finally, he found the paper he’d been seeking and handed it to Ana. A flyer for his show. “Anyway, I have these songs. I think they’re pretty good, some of them. Trying to spread the word.”
Ana attempted to imagine Charlie’s songs. She pictured holy rollers and heard hymns. “Are they—Christian songs?”
Charlie laughed. “Not in any way that’s creepy.”
“No, no,” said Ana. “When you say ‘songs,’ I think of love songs, and it’s interesting to me, you know, a priest—”
“I’m not a Catholic priest. I’m a chaplain.” He leaned in faux-conspiratorially: “I have girlfriends. I don’t right now, but you know, I hope to again. At some point.” The tops of his cheeks grew pink, reminding Ana of a time when handsome men became unstuck in her presence.
She glanced at the flyer. “I’ll try to make it. Thanks, Charlie.”
“Tell James, too,” he said. Ana stood to leave, and Charlie did the same. “I wondered …” he said. “Have you thought about what we were talking about last time I saw you?”
Ana cast around in her memory.
“Wait—what was it?”
“About your mother, about coming to terms with death.”
Now Ana remembered. The conversation had taken place in the lounge, during teatime. Lise had fallen asleep suddenly, and Ana was leaving when she ran into Charlie in the hall. They had sat for an hour or so among the old women in their wheelchairs, against the hot glass windows in the last days of summer. They talked as the kitchen staff cleared plates until only one woman was left, playing solitaire on her tray.