“Did Dr. Carr leave?” Alice asked, as René returned to the nurse’s station.
“Yes.”
“Oh, well. A fax just came in for him.”
Just then one of the aides called her to help with a patient. “Here, hon, slip this in Dr. Carr’s mailbox for me like a good kid, okay?” And she handed René the sheets and scurried away to the aide. Even Alice was beginning to perceive René as Jordan’s girl.
René walked over to the mailboxes and happened to glance at the sheet. It was from Massachusetts General Hospital Emergency Department, Archives. It was a blood assay made back in August.
She glanced at all the chemical analyses, but what caught her eye was the name of the patient. It struck her as odd since he was not one of Jordan Carr’s patients. In fact, when she had mentioned her visit a few weeks earlier, Jordan had said that he was unfamiliar with the case of Jack Koryan. Never heard of him.
31
RENÉ FOUND MARY CURLEY IN ONE of the activity rooms. Three other women were at the main table doing cut-and-pastes with an aide. But Mary sat alone in a corner with puzzle pieces piled in front of her.
As she approached her, René became aware of Mary’s outfit—a ruffled white blouse under a pink and white jumper. Some residents needed help getting dressed. Others could dress themselves. According to the charts, Mary was in the latter category because of her improved functionality. But what startled René was that Mary looked like a geriatric Little Bo Peep. “Hi, Mary. Remember me? My name is René.”
Mary looked at her. “I remember you.”
René didn’t really believe her since several weeks had passed. “The last time we met, you were doing a puzzle of a kitten.”
“That was Daisy. She’s over there.” And she pointed to a shelf of puzzle boxes.
René was shocked at her recall. But Alice’s words shot through her head: This is what it’s all about.
“That’s right!” But as soon as the words were out, René’s eyes fell to the picture puzzle—a little girl with a dog. And the little girl was dressed in a pink and white jumper. “Mary, that’s a very pretty dress. Where did you get it?”
Without missing a beat, Mary said, “My daddy.” She clicked another piece into the puzzle. “He’s going to take me to the museum today.” And she checked her naked wrist as if reading a watch.
“He is? Isn’t that nice? Which museum?”
“The Museum of Fine Arts in Boston,” and she enunciated the words with slow deliberation.
But what sent a jag through René was the woman’s voice. As if somebody had flicked a switch, Mary sounded like a little girl. Even her deportment seemed to shift as she rocked her head with each syllable, the pink tip of her tongue wetting her lips.
“He’s going to take me to see the mummies. You like mummies?”
“Yes. I like mummies,” René said, feeling as if the room temperature had dropped ten degrees.
“No, you don’t. That’s not what you said yesterday. You said you didn’t like mummies. You said they were all dry and scary-looking, and you didn’t want to go the museum.”
“But I didn’t see you yesterday.”
“You did so.”
“Mary, what’s my name? Do you remember?”
Mary looked up at her with a slightly quizzical expression. “Barbara Chin, silly.”
“My name isn’t Barbara Chin. It’s René.”
Mary snapped another piece into the puzzle. “I’m not afraid of mummies. And you shouldn’t be either. They’re dead.”
As Mary continued her weird monologue, René noticed how she kept licking her upper lip like a child and how she fidgeted with the folds of her dress and twisted strands of her hair as she studied the scattered puzzle pieces, or put a twist of them in her mouth, sucking the ends as she searched for connections.
But what unnerved René was not just the full-faced innocent hazel eyes entreating her to explain her fear of mummies. It was that voice: It had none of the resonance and timbre of an elderly woman but the thin violin sharpness of a little girl’s.
“I remember you have a dog also,” René said, as Mary completed the spaniel’s head in the picture.
Mary licked her lips and her face lit up. “His name is Jello.”
“Yes, Jello. I like the name. What kind of dog is he?”
“He’s a golden retrieber.”
“Retriever.”
“That’s what I said, retrieber.”
René kept feeding her questions not just in fascination at Mary’s recall, but the weird sense of double exposure. Half the visual cues told her that René was having a conversation with a seventy-eight-year-old woman. But the dress and gestures and voice were those of a child. Every so often Mary would look up full-faced at René, her watery eyes staring at her full of little-girl innocence but through a face of crinkled, doughy flesh and liver spots. These were not the eyes of a dementia patient who looked out in fear and confusion at a meaningless kaleidoscope of colors and shapes. Nor were these the eyes of a woman who was being stripped away inside. These were the eyes of a child pressed into the face of an old woman.
“Mary, can I ask you a question?”
Mary looked up at her blankly, her eyes perfectly round orbs of milky blue innocence.
“Where are you?”
For a hushed moment, Mary just looked at her with that broad soft open face. “Henry C. Dwight Elementary.”
“And how old are you?”
“Seven.”
“No,” René began. But she was cut off as Mary grabbed her hand, and for a second René thought she wanted to be helped up. But she pulled it to her mouth and in the instant before she took a bite out of it, René snapped it away.
Mary hissed at her. “I don’t like you.” Then she pushed her chair back and stood up. She inspected her wrist again and started moving away.
“Mary, where you going?”
Then in that little-girl voice again, she said, “Jello needs to go out.” And she got up and shuffled out of the room.
32
“IT WAS CREEPY. SHE WAS IN a time zone of seventy years ago.”
“That’s not unusual with these patients,” Nick said.
“But this was different. She was coherent, not scattered or fragmented. Neither was her delusion. She was back in her childhood and apparently enjoying it, except when she tried to take a bite out of me.”
They were jogging along the river again. The day was cool and overcast, and because it was October only a few sailboats were on the water.
“Then that’s something we’ll be looking into,” Nick said. “Which brings me to why I called. Feel like moonlighting? I’m going to need help tabulating data for the trials. We’re getting lots of positive results, but I’m concerned over these flashback events.”
She was relieved to hear him say that. She was beginning to wonder if she was the only one who saw this as a potential problem.
“That’s something we have to deal with. And that’s going to mean cross-referencing these events with population demographics, genetic profiles, et cetera.”
“What exactly would my job be?”
“Your title would be behavioral data analyst.”
“Why do I have the feeling that you just made that up?”
“Because I did, but who’d be better than a consulting pharmacist?”
“I’m flattered, but won’t that be a conflict of interest?”
“Au contraire, and didn’t I see that coming? You’re an employee of CommnityCare pharmacy, which makes you an outsider to both the homes and GEM Tech. And since you’ll be in my employ, that puts you out of range of GEM.”
She thought that over for a moment, feeling a slight uneasiness.