Back when we’d just started dating, the first member of her family my wife introduced me to was her grandfather.
This was a deliberate decision on her part.
Her grandfather was a career military man. Even into his old age, he still carried the broad shoulders, barrel chest and tree trunk arms that had made him so formidable during his decades in the armed forces. He’d seen combat twice — first in World War II, then Korea, the latter of which had left him with a stiff hip and limping walk from a hit of shrapnel to the leg, which somehow only elevated his rugged steadiness to the world.
From his manner of speaking down to his style of dress — crisp white shirts, khaki pants, polished shoes — her grandfather fully looked the part of a military man. My wife told me that once a week he would take clippers to his head and shear his hair down to a stern buzzcut. He wore no watches or jewelry. He was frugal to a fault. When his old Ford sedan broke down, he went out and bought an identical car in the same color, so that no neighbors would think him flashy for the gratuitous act of purchasing a new car once a decade. He attended Catholic mass twice a week. He did not suffer fools, vegetarians or “artistic” types. He often said Ronald Reagan was the greatest president in American history.
All of this is to say that if you had to vote for which family member would be the most open-minded when it came to introducing your lesbian girlfriend, he probably wouldn’t be your first choice.
“But he won’t care anymore,” said Samantha, my girlfriend at the time, now my wife. “I honestly doubt if he even knows who I am now.”
We were in the car, Samantha driving, me sitting in the passenger seat, looking out the open window as I tried to think of the proper thing to say in response. We were on our way to her grandfather’s memory care facility so I could meet him for the first time.
The whole thing felt so surreal. I had never known anyone with Alzheimer’s, and it was hard to know how to behave in the face of it. As Samantha was explaining her grandfather’s situation to me — how he’d been diagnosed a year earlier, and how he’d since suffered a rapid decline and had been moved to a memory care facility across town — her tone of voice had remained detached, as if she were discussing someone she’d barely known, rather than the man who had read bedtime stories to her as a child.
And then there was another ingredient to the recipe of emotions in which we’d been marinading during that car ride, which was: for us, there was a positive aspect to his disease, in that we could tell him we were together – as in, romantically – without fear that he would go on to tell anyone else. Without fear that he would even remember. If things went poorly, we might even come back a day later and try again with him, using a different set of phrases or tones of voice, until we’d gotten it down as smoothly as possible, before telling the rest of Samantha’s family.
So this meeting with her demented grandfather, cruel as it now sounds, was nothing more than a practice run.
“Is there anything I should know before we get there?” I asked Samantha.
“I mean… not really?” she said, touching the steering wheel barely with just her fingertips as we followed the curved roads through a stretch of evergreen trees. “Honestly, Cara, it won’t matter, because he’s changed so much in the last few months. He’s like a totally different person now.”
I looked out the window, watching the unfamiliar wilderness pass us by.
I should mention here, this was the mid ‘90s. Bill Clinton had signed Don’t Ask Don’t Tell into law the year prior. The first legal lesbian marriage in America, which still wasn’t recognized by the federal government, wouldn’t happen for nearly another decade.
So I felt nervous.
And I suppose my nervousness was only heightened by the fact that, at that time, Samantha remained a shadow to me, someone I was drawn to in ways I could not quite explain, yet someone whom I also did not fully understand. We were so different on paper. She was born here in this rural Ohio town, while I’d grown up in a big city five states away. Her style was lipstick and sundresses, mine baggy jeans and hoodies. The fact that she’d chosen to date me, out of all the other girls at our small folksy college, was a source of constant bafflement to me. She was my first real girlfriend, and I wanted nothing more than to crawl inside her and live there forever. If she would’ve told me to get on my knees and bark like a dog, I probably would’ve done it. I was young and didn’t even know who I was, let alone what it meant to tether yourself to another.
So I just sat there and looked out the passenger side window, trying to spot the patterns of this new environment that would hopefully become familiar to me one day.
And just as quickly as the scenery passed us by, so did the years.
That car ride occurred more than two decades ago now. Yet I can’t stop thinking about that day: the day when I met her grandfather for the first, and only, time.
The day when I saw the most horrifying expression of fear I’d ever seen in another human.
The day when I watched a man begin to die.
It doesn’t help that, for years, Samantha has told the story of this day at dinner parties and get-togethers with our friends and acquaintances in the city. The story works for this particular crowd: the so-called bohemian groups in which we’ve found ourselves most at home. These are our people, the ones who harbor their own stories of growing up in a place that wanted nothing to do with them. The stories are always played for laughs, no matter how bleak. It’s a skill we’ve come to master. Usually, during these dinner party reconciliations with our pasts, Samantha will wait for some of the others to tell their own personal version of it – a mother who responded to the news by kicking them out of the house, for example, or a sibling who still won’t speak to them all these years later.
That’s when Samantha, cradling a glass of wine in her hand, will sit up and laugh.
“Oh, that’s nothing,” she’ll say. “Did I ever tell you the story of how Cara killed my grandfather?”
—
Her grandfather’s memory care facility was a plain one-story brick building with squat trees planted around the parking lot. When we arrived, we pulled into a spot in the back and sat still for a minute or so.
“You ready?” Samantha finally asked.
I nodded, even though I could feel my heart beating through my fingertips.
We got out of the car and walked across the parking lot. At the entrance of the facility, we were met by two old women sitting on a bench, a dog curled up on a mat at their feet.
“Hi there,” I said to them, holding up a hand.
The women didn’t seem to notice us at all. The dog, meanwhile, kept looking at me as I passed through the sliding glass doors at the entrance, its teeth just barely visible beyond the slop of its lips.
The automatic doors slid closed behind us after we stepped inside. We found ourselves in a waiting room area, where a woman with red hair sat behind a front desk. The woman knew Samantha from her prior visits and asked how she was doing, before pressing a buzzer to unlock the door beside her.
Through this door we entered an identical room, where another woman with red hair sat waiting behind an identical desk.
For a moment, my mind suffered a hiccup of sorts, an immediate déjà vu from one second to the next, as if we were repeating the exact same moment from which we’d just emerged. But I realized this must’ve just been how the building had been arranged for security reasons, the two rooms serving as a double layer of protection for a group of confused men and women prone to wandering off.
That the second woman looked the same as the first was simply a coincidence.
The second woman smiled at us, her eyelashes glossy and curled. Then she buzzed us through, and we entered the facility proper.
“It’s this way,” Samantha said.
But I knew that already, because there was only one way to go.
I thought we’d been transported inside a hotel as we stepped through the doorway. Even the air smelled different. Old vacuum cleaner fumes, carpet stain remover and disinfectant. But fancy, somehow. Paintings on the walls of oceans and cliffs.
The first room we entered was a lobby area – much like a hotel lobby. Soft, old-timey music floated from a radio in the corner, and old bodies had been arranged in armchairs and rocking chairs around the room. These were some of the residents, elderly men and women. Some showed their conditions plainly, with mouths agape and heads slumped forward. Others looked around the room randomly, as if following the flight patterns of angels. A few seemed perfectly normal, sitting calmly with blankets draped over their legs or shoulders, others wearing woolen caps over their heads.
The only person standing was a much younger man, who had positioned himself at the front of the room. I guessed he was in his early 30s. He wore the same grey scrubs that I’d seen some of the other facility staff members wearing, and when we walked in, he was reading loudly from a sheet of paper he held in his hands. At first, I assumed this was a game of trivia or bingo of some sort, because the younger man was reading aloud questions to the group.
“What the name of the thing you peel off an apple?” he said in a loud, steady voice, as we walked by the group.
But I realized there were no score boards for the residents, nor did there seem to be rounds or prizes. The younger man, it appeared, was simply asking questions – basic, easy questions, fit for a toddler. To win the game, evidently, was to come up with the answer to just one of them, a task that none of the wrinkled, sunken individuals seated around the room seemed capable of achieving.
“One more time,” the young staff member said. I had paused by the wall to hear him. “What is the name of the thing you peel off an apple? Anyone?” When no one responded, he looked down at the sheet, as if needing to confirm the answer. “The skin, yes… the skin. Okay gang, next question,” he said, looking up at the group with a big smile. “What are the fluffy white things that float in the sky? Fluffy white things? They can look like different shapes, and they give shade?” When, again, the question was met with silence, he said, “Yes, the answer is clouds… clouds. Okay one more – what is the kind of word you say to enter a secret place — “
“Hey, Cara?” Samantha was a few steps ahead of me now, looking back over her shoulder.
“Oh, sorry,” I said, and I turned away from the group of elderly residents and followed her down the hallway.
A long corridor stretched out before us, with rooms on either side – again, much like a hotel hallway. But the doors to each of these rooms were unique in that they were split horizontally at their centers, similar to the swivel doors you would see in a cowboy saloon. The top half of the door could swing open independently, while the bottom half, I realized, were all locked from the inside, so that many of the upper halves of rooms were easy to look in — scenes of old men and women sitting on couches, watching TV, dozing in bed — without allowing the residents to stumble out on their own.
“I know it’s small, but he really seems to like it here,” Samantha said as we passed the rooms, which felt more like enclosures to me, pens for old zoo animals. “Just try not to be weirded out if my grandfather acts strange around you.”
“Strange how?”
“Oh, just… you know, strange in general. I don’t really know how to describe it.”
We stopped at the end of the hall and turned left, which happened to be the only way to turn, and headed toward where his room was located near the back.
I knew this corridor was only one half of the memory care facility. Samantha had already told me the building was split in two. This side, where her grandfather lived, was the better side, the one reserved for the residents who were calm and did not fight or scream at the staff. This allowed for more freedoms, like access to hobby materials, more open movement and less constant oversight. But there was a separate entrance for the other side of the facility. The other side, which I never saw, was structured more like a prison, Samantha had said, full of lunatics raging at their ghosts, their delusions and fractured memories.
The second side, she’d added, was soundproofed.
When we got to her grandfather’s room, Samantha slipped off her personality and put on a new one.
“Hi Granddad,” she cooed gently as we stopped at her grandfather’s room, her lacquered fingertips tapping out a soft knock on the bottom half of his door. She turned the knob and let herself in, saying, “It’s your favorite granddaughter Samantha here, stopping by to say hi… and look, I’ve brought a friend!”
If I had to describe my feelings in that moment, it would be true to say I did not know what to expect before meeting her grandfather. But it would also be true to say I did have a vague approximation in my mind. The grandfather I’d envisioned had been thin and frail. He would be lying in bed, propped up perhaps, his mouth hung open like a fish gasping at air. Wrinkled and deformed, his limbs too fragile to touch, he would behold us with a pale face and blank, distant eyes.
That was not the man I found when I entered the room.
“Well, look who’s here,” said the man seated on a stool in the center of the room.
His voice, it filled the space around us. He was not wearing a thin hospital gown, as I’d expected, nor the stiff khaki pants and starched button-up shirt of the military man Samantha had described to me on the car ride here. Instead, he wore jeans and a casual white T shirt. In his right hand he held a paintbrush, his body facing an easel on which a canvas rested. The man’s posture was perfectly straight; his shoulders appeared broad and muscular; his hair was gray but thick and long, falling nearly down to his shoulders, gleaming with the radiance of an aged movie star. Gently, he set down the paint brush on an artist’s pallet beside him and turned his body to face us.
Only then did I notice he was wearing sandals.
“Granddad?” said Samantha. “I’d – um, I’d like to introduce you to someone. This is my very close friend, Cara.”
Her grandfather brushed his hands on his jeans before reaching out to introduce himself. “I am Robert Stevens. It is a pleasure and delight to meet you, Cara.”
I took his hand, feeling his soft grip as he made eye contact with me. And he had kind eyes, I thought. And I also thought: These are eyes that are seeing me right now. At this point in my life, I’d met a handful of very elderly people, some of whom seemed to have been squinting through a cloud of hazy decades as they looked at me, but not this man. If our era is defined by how easily we fit into a particular moment, then this was a thoroughly modern man. He could’ve been in magazines. Had you told me this was a person deep in the dim, murky throes of memory loss, I would not have believed you.
“My, you are quite beautiful, young lady,” he said. “I hope you don’t mind me saying so.”
I’ll admit it — when his hand slid out from mine, I blushed.
“No, that’s… very nice of you to say,” I mumbled.
“Truly a sight for sore eyes, especially here in this den of geezers like me!” and he laughed, standing up effortlessly from his stool with the agility of a man half his age. “Well, come in, come in… rest your weary legs, you two. And for what do I owe the privilege of this visitation?” he asked, lowering his body stylishly into the armchair in the corner.
Samantha took a seat on a small couch by the wall, and when I did the same, stepping around the easel and stool, I saw what her grandfather had been painting. On the canvas was a cresting wave of calligraphy, the words “WE WERE BURIED THEREFORE WITH HIM” painted in beautiful strokes of black ink. The words were elegantly scripted, as perfect as any typography I’d ever seen.
All over the walls of his room, I only then noticed, were other canvases with similarly graceful brushstrokes. I had ignored them as merely decoration when we’d first entered the room, but now I realized they were all from his hand. Some of the calligraphy I recognized as Bible verses. Others were names. Bethany. Luke. Melinda. Sebastian. Each name written in such a way that it appeared more portrait than word, although I’m aware how little sense this makes, yet believe me when I say this is how I saw it. Then, one of the canvases showed only a minimalistic drawing of a bird, its wings opening, soaring with an invisible wind.
The rest of the space was basic, from what I remember now. Off in the corner was a desk and a chair. A small TV on a stand. A dresser and a mirror. Then two doorways, one leading into a bedroom, the other leading into a bathroom. (A comb was resting beside the sink in that bathroom, a detail that stands out in my memory, though I can’t think of any reason why it should.)
The whole arrangement was so small, so lonely, I would later think, for a man who would loom so large in my memory all these years later.
“Can I get you two anything to drink? Coffee, water?” Samantha’s grandfather asked, draping one leg over the other as he settled back in the armchair. He sat like a kind professor, or, I would think, like a relaxed talk show host. “I apologize that I’m fresh out of Dom Perignon champagne, but I hear the tap water here is a fair substitute.”
Samantha said, “No, we’re fine, Granddad.” Then she placed her hand over mine. “Actually, the reason I stopped by is, I wanted to introduce you to Cara here.”
“Well, I’m glad you did. She seems swell as a summer afternoon spent on the porch during a rainstorm.”
“She is, Granddad. Really swell. In fact, she’s my girlfriend.”
He nodded, his face calm. The words moved through him like air. “A friend is always good to have,” he said. “If either of them falls down, one can help the other. But pity anyone who falls and has no one to help them up.”
“Well, yes, but Granddad?” Now Samantha took her other hand and placed it over mine, squeezing in a way that felt, even then, practiced or learned somehow, as if she’d seen it in a movie. Or perhaps it was the particular angle of her posture, the strangely adult tone to her voice. Or the way she leaned forward and pulled me toward her on the couch, just enough to make me shift my body to face a direction I wasn’t facing. “I mean she’s my girlfriend girlfriend… romantically,” Samantha said. “We’re dating, Granddad, and we love each other.”
I watched her grandfather’s face, feeling my throat tighten. We’d never said we loved each other before. Of course, if she would have said it, I would have said it back, and I thought I did feel a flood of warmth in that moment. It was only later I realized how disorienting it was to hear those words for the first time spoken in front of me, but not to me.
“We love each other, Granddad,” she repeated. “We love each other very much.”
—
Often, when she tells this story at a dinner party or other social function all these years later, this is where Samantha pauses. She’ll take great care to describe the ensuing scene in her grandfather’s room.
“You should’ve seen the look on my grandfather’s face,” she’ll say. “Imagine a 75-year-old devout Catholic Republican hearing that. It was like telling him I was a salamander or a raccoon. His brain, God bless him, just could not compute.”
People laugh, we all drink our wine, and then we sigh over the collective sadness in our pasts.
From there, Samantha usually speeds through the rest of the story. She’ll explain how her grandfather broke down and screamed at me, how the staff had to restrain him and pull him back into an intervention room. All of that — factually speaking, at least — is accurate. He was transferred that week to the other side of the memory care facility, the dangerous side, and it wasn’t long before he stopped accepting food or water.
He died three weeks after meeting me.
At this point in the story, Samantha will make sure to point out that of course she doesn’t truly believe I “killed her grandfather” as she’d originally joked. We all know the real reason was due to his illness. A sudden deterioration like that or drastic change in personality is usually a sign that an infection has led to delirium, according to the doctors. Unfortunately, the illness is only measured by the observable behavioral symptoms of the afflicted. One cannot scan the brain or carve open the skull to see its progress. Most likely, that moment had been building up within his brain for weeks, for months, for years even, a rising tide of neural plaque that had finally reached a chemical threshold — and spilled forth.
That it happened the moment Samantha told him the truth of our relationship is just another example of life’s affinity for peculiar sadness.
But I don’t blame Samantha for telling the story as a comedy. Some of our friends joke about their spouses who died of AIDS back during the Reagan, Bush and Clinton years. Or they riff about their family members or job opportunities that have shunned them. Because what else can you do? It’s best to learn to laugh at the absurdity of it all. Outsiders might think Samantha cruel for the way she told that story, as if she were making fun of her grandfather’s death, but everyone in our group understood she was coping with a difficult love in the only way she could.
The only part that bothers me is how easily she tells it.
As if she enjoys it.
“I didn’t ask to be born in Ohio,” she always says at the end of the story, laughing.
Lately, I’ve been feeling uncomfortable in the spaces I occupy. The cylinders I pass through in the city’s concrete public infrastructure feel too biological, too instinctively burrowed. The cars and individuals on the streets look like bloated worms. Scaffolding on the sides of buildings are mangled spiderwebs, insects trapped within their architecture. Our business and commercial districts, ant colonies. When I look out our apartment window, I see a corpse being devoured in a million increments, while somehow building itself anew with fungus and parasites, even as what it was decomposes, over and over. Forgetting itself each time. Forgetting where it came from, what it was. Forgetting where it’s going.
I realize now that I knew from the start it wasn’t right. I’d just always assumed I had nowhere else to go. That no one would want me. And then, decades gone by. Where would I go now?
These days, whenever we have friends over, it’s usually later in the evening, when I’ve stopped moving enough to remember how I feel. We’re all wearing designer clothes while projecting our opinions at one another over wooden slabs overflowing with shaved meats, cheeses and pickled vegetables. The windows of our 12th-floor apartment overlook the blurry lights of the nighttime city rippling in all its currents and bisecting arteries. It’s funny, because I remember how anxious and shaky Samantha was when we’d first moved to the city together in our early 20s. “It’s so loud,” she kept saying on our first night. “I can’t think. I miss trees and silence.” Now she sits by the framed window in her armchair so effortlessly, swirling her glass of 20-year-old red wine so calmly, wearing her past like a fashionable outfit, light as silk.
“But that’s all behind us,” she says. “Anywho, shall we tempt fate and open another bottle of Cabernet?”
I can’t explain to her how heavy I feel all the time.
So whenever she tells that story about the day I met her grandfather, I don’t say anything.
I sit there, like a stone at the bottom of a pond.
All these years, I’ve never once corrected her.
I’ve never said, “That’s not how it happened, Samantha. You didn’t see him. You left the room. I was alone with him. You didn’t see what happened at all.”
—
What I remember now, most of all, were the old man’s eyes, how they held over my face for a moment as Samantha’s words lingered in the air.
“We love each other, Granddad,” she’d said. “We love each other very much.”
For now, her grandfather’s mouth opened and closed. He began to nod, although by the way he glanced from my face to Samantha’s, I couldn’t tell if he understood what she’d said. He looked back at me again, as if for confirmation, and it was his eyes, dark brown and reflecting the light of the room, that I remember now. That I can’t forget.
“Love is a beautiful thing,” he mumbled. “Let love and faithfulness never leave you. Bind them around your neck. Write them on the tablet of your heart. Then you will win favor and a good name in the sight of God.”
Without warning, he stood, walked over to his easel, and lowered himself down on the stool.
“Do tell me,” he said, glancing back to Samantha, and he picked up his paintbrush as he did so: “What is her middle name?”
Samantha let go of my hand. She didn’t seem to know what to do. Her body fluttered between action. “I’m sorry, but… Granddad, did you hear me? What I said?”
“Her middle name,” he repeated, now sliding the canvas off the easel and replacing it with a fresh one from a stack off the floor. “And yes, I can hear you fine, young lady. I’m not so old I’ve gone deaf — not yet, at least, ha ha!” He positioned the canvas carefully, then looked at both of us.
Samantha was staring at me now, raising her eyebrows. “Well, Granddad,” she said, turning her gaze toward him, “I was just trying to tell you something. About Cara and me, and I’m not sure if you quite — oh, shoot — just a second… crap — ”
Her words were interrupted by the alarm of her beeper, buzzing at her hip, which she unclipped from her belt and then glanced down at the screen.
“My mom,” she said to me, holding it up so I could the words glowing on the small screen. “It’s a ‘911 emergency’ so you mind holding the fort for a second while I find a payphone?”
“Everything okay?”
“She’s a drama queen so I’m sure it’s nothing.” Samantha was already standing, heading toward the door. “Just ask him about his paintings and stuff. I’ll be back in a second — ”
She left us alone in the room, the bottom half of her grandfather’s door slamming shut.
Then it was just the two of us now, our eyes looking into one another’s.
“You can tell me, you know,” he said.
“What?”
“It’s OK, my dear. I’m here to listen to you.”
I was sitting on the couch, the old man on the stool a few feet across the carpet from me.
“Sorry, I — I don’t know what you… want…”
He leaned close to me. Then whispered, “I’ll keep it a secret. I won’t tell a soul.” And now he angled his paintbrush over the blank canvas. “Your middle name,” he said. “You can trust me with it.”
“Oh — ” I sat back, my body relaxing. I could feel words spilling out of my mouth now. “Yeah, um, sure, yes, it’s — “
“Ah ah ah! Make sure you mean it first,” he said, waving his paintbrush over my face. “Don’t just throw it around, young lady.”
“Throw what around?” I said. “My middle name?”
“Exactly,” and now he tapped the end of his brush on his head, his long gray hair cascading around his smiling cheeks. “Consider, for a moment, how many people in the world know it: your middle name, that is. A handful? More? Less?”
I hadn’t thought about it. But when I tried to count how many, it couldn’t have been more than five, maybe ten people. Even my cousins and childhood friends didn’t know it.
“And what about her?” he asked. He nodded at the closed half-door, the almost imaginary barrier that separated him from the outside world, through which Samantha had just slipped. “That other girl you’re with. She doesn’t know, does she?”
“No, she doesn’t,” I said, and I knew it was true when I said it.
“Some love, huh?”
He stood up from his stool again. He walked two steps over to me and sat down on the floor beside my feet, so smoothly I thought he could’ve been my own age. What had happened to the wartime shrapnel in his hip Samantha had told me about, which had caused him to limp? It was as if he’d dissolved it with his mind, by simply ignoring that version of himself. Now he looked up at me the way I imagine a boy looks up at the girl he loves.
And he said, “Let’s trade, young lady. Our middle names. I’ll tell you mine, if you tell me yours.”
In the years that have gone by since this moment, I’ve spent many nights researching the characteristics of individuals suffering from dementia, Alzheimer’s or other related diseases, especially in men, and especially when it comes to the language and motor abilities of those afflicted.
Nowhere do any of the symptoms match the man I spoke with that day.
The clarity of his brown eyes, holding over mine, as he reached up to touch my hand.
“Only if you’re comfortable,” he whispered in my ear.
I breathed, in and out.
“Lily,” I said.
He breathed back at me, gentle as a touch. “That is lovely. May I paint it?”
“Yes,” I said. I would’ve told him anything.
(Why, though? I’ve thought about that for years, haven’t it?)
He rose, walked back to his easel, picked up his paintbrush. His eyes squinted as he dipped his brush in ink. Then the old man began touching it in swirls over the canvas without a thought seeming to pass through his head, as natural as a tree swaying in the breeze.
When he was finished, he showed me, and I laughed.
“What?” he said. “Too literal?”
“No, no,” and as I took the canvas in my hands, he winked at me, which was somehow charming for a man his age.
Holding the canvas, I looked at the black brushstrokes of the petals blooming over white, the stem stretching, the roots relaxing. I couldn’t have told someone then what differentiated a lily from other flowers, but I was sure this was right. This was perfect. He’d written “Lily” at the bottom of the flower, and I don’t know why I started crying.
“This is beautiful,” I told him, in between laughs and choked sobs.
“Thank you, my dear.”
“But what about you?”
“Beg your pardon?”
“You said we’d trade,” I said to him. “I tell you mine, you tell me yours.”
“Ah! That is so. Well, I am a man of my word.”
“So?”
“Francis,” he said.
I nodded at him, wiping the remnants of tears from my eyes. “Francis… OK, then.”
Then I said, “Could you paint that for me too?”
Samantha’s grandfather’s name was Robert. He’d told me when introducing himself when we’d first entered his room not more than a half hour earlier, and I would hear it later from the doctors who told Samantha’s family about his rapidly plummeting condition. During his Catholic funeral mass a few weeks later, which I attended with Samantha, he was eulogized as the late United States Marine Corp. Lt. Col. Robert Stevens.
But from this moment on, when we were alone in that room together, I only remember him as Francis.
“But Francis? That’s an ugly name,” he said, leaning back on his stool, grinning at me. “Not fitting for the company of a beautiful Lily.”
“I’d like to see it on the canvas,” I said. “I think it’s pretty.”
“Well, my lovely lady, if you insist.”
He switched out the canvas of the Lily flower from the easel, placing it carefully on a drying rack near the door, then put a new canvas on the easel, dipped his brush in ink, and he began to paint —
F
R
A
N
— and each letter was perfectly scripted, the brushstrokes smooth and delicate as he continued painting the last three letters of the name, until he was finished, and he sat back, smiling at the canvas.
But a second passed, and his smile disappeared.
“Well, now that’s… oh, no!… ha ha, no, that’s not right,” he said. “How foolish! Misspelling my own middle name! What an embarrassment for the old codger!”
Laughing as he switched out the canvas with a fresh one, he said:
“Francis, I meant to write. Francis — ha! At my age, sweetheart, you find your hand and your noggin can get a bit shaky. Perhaps one too many martinis in my youth, no?”
He settled the new canvas on the easel, his hands steady.
“Now then,” and his brush moved smoothly over the empty canvas, the letters appearing as if in air as he painted:
F
R
A
N
—until he’d finished the last three letters of the word with a smooth flourish of his brush.
“And there you have it, young lady. Francis! My very own — …no, but that’s… that’s not…”
He looked at the canvas. He sat there and looked at it.
It was the same word he’d written before, this time the strokes thicker and more elegant, even more beautiful, the most perfect and artfully painted word I’d ever seen from a human hand — but still, the same word. The same word.
“It’s okay,” I told him. “We don’t have to — ”
“No no no,” he said, wagging his finger at me. “I’ll get it right. I believe that’s what’s called a senior moment, is it not? Just a… just a… Well, ha ha, third time’s the charm!”
This time, he threw the spent canvas across the room with a shocking force until it crashed into the wall and landed on the floor face-down, the fresh ink staining the carpet. Then he thrust the fresh canvas in place before him so hard I thought the easel’s flimsy wooden legs would topple. He stretched out his own legs wide and exhaled deeply out his nose, grunting. He waited a moment, dipping his brush in ink, gazing at the blank white space as if considering his own distorted reflection. Only then did he begin to paint.
F
He was slow, the brush licking the white space with its black tongue.
R
His shoulders were shaking, but his hand steady.
A
His mouth hanging open. Sweat dripping down his face.
N
His breath heavy and gasping.
Choking.
Coughing.
I told you, it was his eyes I remember. It was the way they squinted at first, then opened wide as his brush formed the next letter, the fifth letter. Then the sixth letter. And then, the seventh, final letter. Until he was done. The word was painted. There was nothing more to do. His eyes were fixed and unblinking, looking at the canvas before him, and I’ve spent years wondering what he must’ve seen on that blank white space around his brushstrokes. Why his mouth opened so wide. Why his entire body began shaking the way it did.
It was as if he were looking through a doorway, seeing something on the other side, something that had been waiting for him all along.
The paintbrush slipped from his hand.
It rolled off his thighs, staining his jeans, and landed on the carpet at his feet.
I watched as Francis leaned back on the edge of his stool. He did not make a sound. By now he’d gone more than a minute without blinking, and tears were pouring from his eyes. His pupils were massive, the whites of his eyes turned red and bloodshot from the sight of the single word he’d painted three times in a row now, the single word burning on the canvas before him:
f r a n t i c
Then he turned around, looked me in the eyes, and screamed.
—
Samantha’s parents picked us up from the memory care facility that afternoon.
“This is Cara,” Samantha said when introducing me to her mom and dad. “One of my friends from college.”
We’d decided, after her grandfather’s episode, that we should wait to tell them about us.
That night, her mother drove us home while her father drove Samantha’s car. That earlier beeper message Samantha had received — the beeper message which had sent her rushing out of her grandfather’s room, leaving me alone to watch him fall apart, before the facility staff had carried him off — that beeper message had been from her mother about what we’d wanted for dinner.
Spaghetti, it turned out.
We ate together at the family’s small kitchen table with the TV on, and they reassured us that the doctors had said it was only an episode and Granddad would be fine, they were positive.
In truth, he would be transferred to the other side of the memory care facility the next morning. Another three weeks, and he would be dead. Inexplicable, the doctors said. But that night we could still believe nothing had changed. Swirling spaghetti in our fork tines, slurping sauce.
“So tell me,” Samantha’s mother said, in between bites of pre-frozen meatballs, “have either of you met any cute boys at school?”
-
We slept in the basement on the pullout couch that night. I doubted her parents would’ve been OK with that had they known about us. The basement smelled like dust and old air freshener, air Samantha had breathed her whole life, but it felt heavy and thick around my body. I couldn’t sleep. As she slept beside me, I tried to lie still, the metal pullout mattress squeaking every time I moved. The stiff cushions and the arms of the couch held us on either side.
Sometime in the middle of the night, I must’ve fallen asleep, because I had a dream in which everything no longer fit together. It was a dream of shapes and gaps, volume and space, only all the angles were just barely out of reach to touch and form a whole — as if a word or gesture could snap them into place, a password I knew but had forgotten — and I tried and tried to shape my paralyzed mouth to form the right word; I tried to grunt out the air that would make the word into sound; I kept trying until I awoke, letting out a dumb shout as I sat up on the brittle metal spine of the pullout mattress, choking on the dusty air.
The basement was dark, only a soft beam of moonlight cutting through the tiny ground-level window at the ceiling. Distantly, I could hear crickets outside, a noise as strange as angels singing to me.
Samantha sighed in her sleep beside me, shifting her body under the thin summer sheet.
I looked down at her face. Her hair fell over her cheek, and I moved it aside, revealing her soft cheekbones.
“Do you really love me?” I whispered.
Her arms were curled up, her body pressed against me.
Then my heart was pounding in my chest from one second to the next, and I felt the sudden urge to wake her up, to not be alone down here.
“Samantha!” I shook her shoulders, not so hard but not gently either. “Samantha… wake up… please wake up…” My fingers pressed into her skin as I pulled her toward me.
All she did was mumble, “Hmm — wha — huh?” Her voice came from the bottom of her throat. Her eyes stayed closed as I lifted her head an inch off the pillow.
And I said to her, “What’s my middle name? Do you know? Do you know me? Do know who I am?”
But when I let go of her shoulders, she rolled over on the mattress, turning away from me, and she was already fully asleep again, breathing softly against the couch cushions.