Rose may be in her eighties and suffering from dementia, but she’s not done with life just yet. Alternately sharp as a tack and spectacularly forgetful, she spends her days roaming the corridors of her assisted living facility, musing on the staff and residents, and enduring visits form her emotionally distant children and granddaughters. But when her friend is found dead after an apparent fall from a window, Rose embarks on an eccentric and determined investigation to discover the truth and uncover all manner of secrets…even some from her own past.
Rose may be in her eighties and suffering from dementia, but she’s not done with life just yet. Alternately sharp as a tack and spectacularly forgetful, she spends her days roaming the corridors of her assisted living facility, musing on the staff and residents, and enduring visits form her emotionally distant children and granddaughters. But when her friend is found dead after an apparent fall from a window, Rose embarks on an eccentric and determined investigation to discover the truth and uncover all manner of secrets…even some from her own past.
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Overview
Rose may be in her eighties and suffering from dementia, but she’s not done with life just yet. Alternately sharp as a tack and spectacularly forgetful, she spends her days roaming the corridors of her assisted living facility, musing on the staff and residents, and enduring visits form her emotionally distant children and granddaughters. But when her friend is found dead after an apparent fall from a window, Rose embarks on an eccentric and determined investigation to discover the truth and uncover all manner of secrets…even some from her own past.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781668053621 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Atria Books |
| Publication date: | 07/01/2025 |
| Sold by: | SIMON & SCHUSTER |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 240 |
| File size: | 3 MB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Chapter 1 <figure>
In the beginning is the whatsitsname. The woman in the parking lot. She wears a nightgown and lies on her back, looking up at the sky. The nightgown is white and embroidered at the neck with blue... what do you call them? Forget-me-nots. A small crowd is gathered around her. All in their unicorns. Uniforms. All younger than the woman, much younger. They look at each other. They look up at the sky. They look down at the woman. They whisper.
I see them as I come out of the thing—the elevator. I push my walker across the foyer to the big sliding entrance doors and look at them through the glass. From here I can see the woman’s neckline with its blue forget-me-nots. There is nothing wrong with my eyesight.
I can see that they are whispering through the glass. I can see, through the glass, that they are whispering. In this place, they always whisper. Or else they shout, so you’ll understand them. There is the Doctor, or whatever he is, the Angry Nurse, the Filipino girl and several others, as well as the nice boy who mops the floors. And the woman in the nightgown. She isn’t whispering. She is intent on the sky. Intent upon the sky. Upon. Not a word you hear much. The woman is my age, and her nightgown is much like my own, except for the whatsitsnames around the neck. And I wouldn’t be wearing a nightgown in the parking lot. I get dressed whenever I leave my room. A proper dress or pantsuit, a decent blouse. I make the effort.
They look at her as if she is a delivery that has arrived unexpectedly. Will they accept the delivery? Every day there are deliveries. Every day trucks arrive in the parking lot and through the big sliding entrance doors come fellows wheeling upright trolley things stacked with boxes. And once, if I recall correctly, a famous cannibal, although that seems unlikely. But whether they are boxes or Hannibals, they always come with papers that need signing by the Angry Nurse. Is that what they’re waiting for? The paperwork? Is the woman in the nightgown a delivery that has arrived without paperwork?
No. She must be a new president. Resident. Of course. They’re just waiting for an available bed. Usually, the new ones arrive in wheelchairs. Usually, they don’t lie out there on their backs in the parking lot, looking at the sky. I imagine that she won’t be there for long nevertheless. When there’s a bed available in this place, it’s never for long. Never the less.
I go back up in the revelator, elevator, to my own floor. I push my walker along the corridor. My son has tied a piece of silk to the door handle of my room. Or my daughter. So that I know it is my room. My son. My daughter. My room.
But before I get to my own room, I go to my friend’s room. I know her door because it doesn’t have a piece of silk tied to it. Her door is open, so I look inside, but my friend isn’t there. What is strange is that her wheelchair is there, and my friend isn’t. It stands there, sits there, by the window that looks out over the parking lot. My friend doesn’t go anywhere except in that wheelchair.
I am the mobile one. I have my walker and go anywhere I want to in this place, whether I’m supposed to or not. It’s why I take the trouble to get properly dressed every day, despite the difficulties with buttons and hooks and zips and everything. I keep myself presentable. Unlike my friend, who turns up to lunch in her wheelchair wearing the same old nightgown that she wears when she lies propped up in her bed. It’s white, more or less, if you look past the food stains down the front that the Vietnamese girl takes a sponge to from time to time. At the collar there’s this faded line of embroidered blue flowers. What do you call them? Forget-me-nots.
My room is better than my friend’s. There are trees in my window. Or bits of trees, at least. Leaves, branches, that kind of thing. On the floor below the window are potted plants that my daughter waters whenever she comes. There is a TV, hanging high up on the wall in one corner. And I have a whatsitsname, with pictures on it. Photos. There is also a big diary, open at today. My son writes in this diary whenever something is going to happen. I’m supposed to look at it every day, so that I know.
The pictures are of younger people mostly—children and boys and girls and so on—as well as one picture of an older fellow toward the back. Apart from the older fellow, they are all smiling, which is nice. The people on the TV are smiling too, which is annoying. They sit behind a desk with coffee cups in front of them and they talk and laugh and agree about everything, but they never look at each other. They look at me, or at the wall above my head. They seem happy, but that can change. Sometimes there are murders or politicians or people driving too fast in ridiculously large cars or serious fellows pointing at numbers. Sometimes people sing, or eat hamburgers, or sing while they are eating hamburgers, although I never have the sound on. Sometimes people play cricket for surprisingly long periods. At other times the TV stops moving altogether, and there are pictures of this place, with information along the bottom about what time lunch is on or bingo or a bus trip—the same sorts of things I am supposed to check for in the big diary that’s always open there on the whatsitsname.
Whenever my son comes, the first thing he does, after pushing the picture of the older fellow toward the front of the whatsitsname, is to look at the diary, at the page it’s open at. At the page at which it’s open. At.
“Hello, dear,” I say to him. I try not to sound surprised.
“You sound surprised,” he says. “You have checked the diary, haven’t you, Mom? It says that I’ll be here today.”
“Then I look forward to seeing you,” I tell him.
He looks around the room, like he always does when he’s not sure what I’m talking about.
But today my son also does something different. He looks at me with an expression I can only describe as sad. Rather than worried, impatient, constipated.
“Mom,” he says, “are you okay?”
It is not possible to know what he means.
“There was a delivery today,” I tell him. Was it today? I wonder.
“I could take you out for morning tea,” he says, “if you’d like.”
“Somewhere nice?” I ask.
“Of course. Somewhere nice.”
“No thanks,” I tell him, and he looks around the room.
Still, it’s lovely of him to offer. He hates taking me out. Having to fold up my walker and put it into the what do you call it... the trunk, of his car. Having to fold me up too, to get me into the passenger seat, being careful with my head, then having to fiddle with the seat belt to make sure I’m safe, because my fingers can never manage the buckle thing. Having to find somewhere nice, having to explain the menu to me, having to worry about whether I’m enjoying myself. The poor dear, he is such a good son.
I tell him not to bother, we’ll just ask the Laotian girl to bring us a cup of tea and a biscuit.
“My friend might join us,” I say. “We could play Scrabble.”
I don’t know why I say this. My friend never comes into my room, and I never invite her. But he looks interested when I mention her, and I know he likes me to have whatsitsnames... interactions.
“She cheats, you know,” I add.
Lunch in the dining room is meatballs, which means it is a special day. I don’t ask. Maybe it’s Melbourne Cup, although nobody has hats on. Nobody has a hat on. Or it’s the end of the war again, or Christmas. The Angry Nurse is there in the kitchen, checking that the meatballs are gray enough. She is being angry at the Swedish girl.
I park my walker against the wall, under the big picture of the smiling sharks, and sit in my usual place. The sharks are in a swimming pool balancing beach balls on their whatsits. Snouts.
The fellow who doesn’t live here is in the chair beside me, as usual. I say hello and ask him, as usual, whether his room is on this floor or on the floor below or on the one above, like mine. He looks admonished. Astonished.
“Oh,” he says, “I don’t live here.”
“Oh, really?” I say. “Is that right?”
“I’m just visiting,” he says.
“Of course you are,” I say, and wait.
He looks around at everyone in their places at the dining tables, at the walkers and wheelchairs lined up against the wall. At the smiling sharks.
“I have a beautiful home,” he says. “With a white fence and a two-car garage.”
We eat our meatballs. The fellow who doesn’t live here wants to tell me something. But I have offended him. He is always offended when you don’t remember that he doesn’t live here.
After a while he can’t stand it anymore.
“Have you heard?” he asks me. He always knows things. For a fellow who doesn’t live here, he knows a lot about this place.
I don’t answer him right away. I look at the others around us in the dining room. None of them look like they know all that much. About this place or about anything else. I should be nice. The way they look at their plates, it seems that they are very keen to know everything there is to know about their meatballs.
“Heard what?” I say.
“The news.”
“Sometimes. Not so much anymore. I don’t like all the smiling.”
“No. Have you heard what happened? Here, in this place?”
“There was a delivery,” I tell him. He isn’t the only one who knows things.
“Someone died,” he says.
Then he tells me. Somebody fell out a window. One of the upper-floor rooms. Dead in the parking lot. He doesn’t know all that much, but what he does know he knows with great pride. He whispers loudly. His eyes are bright. I think his hands are shaking.
“You must be very happy,” I say.
He looks astonished again—offended again. What I have said is not what do you call it... applicable. Appropriate.
I go to my friend’s room. Her door is open, so I look inside, but my friend isn’t there.
“Hello, dear,” she says.
I say the same thing to her. It’s something my friend and I often do, even when we remember each other’s names. I do it to my daughter too, and my son.
She lies propped up on the bed, facing her window. It’s a different window from mine. Mine’s better. Hers looks out over the parking lot; mine, of course, has the trees. There’s one chair in the room: the same chair as in my room. It’s right beside the bed. I sit on it, parking my walker alongside.
“Scrabble?” my friend says, as she always does.
Sometimes I ignore her, but today I don’t.
“Why not?” I say.
“Why not, indeed?” she says, and reaches for it on the whatsitsname, knocking a photograph of someone or other onto the floor, as she always does.
“Fuck!” says my friend.
I tell her not to worry about it. The Malaysian girl will pick it up later, when she comes in to do the medication. My friend puts the Scrabble thing, the board, flat on the bed between us.
“What color would you like?” she asks.
“Black,” I tell her.
“I think I’ll have black too,” she says, and gives me a handful of the whatsits with letters on them.
My friend and I play Scrabble for a while. We don’t do it properly, and we don’t care. She has her parts of the board, and I have mine. We don’t build on each other’s words, never share each other’s letters, but we do praise each other’s efforts.
“What word is that?” she might ask.
“Zbtosmty,” I tell her.
“Most impressive,” she says.
If one of us doesn’t like a word, we grab the letters and throw them on the floor for the Peruvian girl to pick up later.
After a while, my friend decides that the game is over.
“I win,” she says. “But don’t be downcast, Rose, you put up a great fight.”
“I know,” I tell her. She always calls me by my name when she feels like showing off.
“See you at lunch?” she asks. “I think it’s something special today.”
We both laugh.
But I know my friend isn’t here. I know that right now I am the only person in her room. I know that perfectly well.
My daughter carries the potted plants, one by one, from the carpet in front of my window into the bathroom, where she puts them in the bathtub. Each one makes her sigh as she moves them. As she moves it. Each potted plant is one more thing in her life.
“Are you sure you’re okay?” she asks me.
She and her brother must have been talking.
“My friend fell out the window,” I say.
“Try not to dwell on it, Mom,” my daughter advises me. She doesn’t need one more thing in her life.
I see her flying out the window. My friend, that is. The food-stained nightie with the forget-me-nots was not a very good parakeet, I imagine. Parachute.
My bathroom has everything you could want in a bathroom, as well as lots of things to keep you from falling down, breaking your neck and so on. Right now it looks like a jungle because of the plants in the bathtub. My daughter waters them with a plastic whatsit. It’s the kind of thing she does. She worries that the pots will leak on the carpet under my window if I water them there. It’s the kind of thing she worries about.
“You’ve had your medications?” she says.
“The Sicilian girl gave them to me. With a cup of tea and a biscuit.”
My daughter looks annoyed. She doesn’t like too much detail. She has a very busy life. There is already too much detail in it; there’s no room for any more.
“I don’t know if I can come tomorrow,” she tells me. “Charity has a school excursion.”
“Never mind, dear. How is she?”
“I told you before, Mom. She’s struggling with biology.”
“Poor darling. Education is so... important. How is... the other one?”
She looks at me, sighs. It upsets her when I don’t remember things.
“Felicity, Mom. She’s having some issues with work experience at the moment.”
“What a shame,” I tell her.
My window is a much better window than my friend’s.
All through the dark night I lie in my bed, facing up to things.
Well, it is dark, certainly. And I may be lying, obviously. And what I face up to, really, is the ceiling. Lying in bed, looking up, it’s what I see. So I look at it. It offers very little of interest, but nevertheless. It is white, so it is something to look at in the night when everything else in my room is deep, dark shadow. The TV high up in the corner is an even deeper, darker shadow, having been turned off after my final medication. The whatsitsname with the photos on it is dark too, so you can’t see all the smiling. The big diary is open, though you can’t read it in the dark, and anyway it wouldn’t be right to read about what it says is supposed to happen tomorrow until tomorrow.
In the window there is more darkness, unless there is a moon, but even if there is it is a long way away. Apart from the moon, there is one tiny light in the bathroom, so that you don’t break your neck if you get out of bed to go in there. But why would I get up in the middle of the night just to go to the bathroom to break my neck?
Anyway, it’s not the darkness. It’s the time.
Time, in this place, is most unusual.
That’s not true. In this place there is so much time, there’s nothing unusual about it whatsoever.
There is no shortage of time here at all.
At night, in this place, you live forever.
Well, the night goes on forever, and being, to the best of my knowledge, alive, I go on with it.
Nothing happens, and it keeps not happening, then doesn’t happen some more. It continues, and I continue with it.
Nevertheless. If you lie in bed in this place and listen, you can hear things beyond your own darkness. You can hear people breathing. Or not breathing, which is slightly more difficult. You can listen to them if you get sick of the ceiling. Sometimes you can hear them remembering, which sounds interesting but is even more boring than the breathing or the ceiling.
But what is strange about time, if not unusual, is that there are two different types of it.
There is the time that is endless. In this time, nothing happens. Nothing goes on, and it goes on forever. This is time that has insomalia. Insomnia. The only way to avoid it is to be asleep or dead, neither of which I appear to be.
Then there are the tiny bits of time that aren’t endless. They do end; in fact, they end very quickly. Suddenly they are present, and then they are not. Except that they aren’t present, whatever they are. What is present is the ceiling, obviously, and the insomnia.
I know what this second type of time is. Of course I do. These tiny bits of time are the past. They are from a long, long time ago. And yet.
It is the present that is long. It is the past that is sudden, and happens, and is present.
This is quite a pardalote. Paradox.
And here is another one. The endless dark present does finish, finally. The light comes, in the window. But you don’t see it. Or you do, but before you see it you hear it. The sound appears in the window.
It is noisy. And it is now. And it is present.
And it reminds me of something.