There Was an Old Woman

Chapter Thirty-five


The parking lot at Pelham Manor was nearly full. Even the handicap spot where Mina always used to park whenever she visited Annabelle was taken. Mina had to zigzag back a few rows to find a spot. Brian came around and made a show of offering her his arm, but she ignored him. She started toward the building, trying to ignore the persistent drizzle and Brian’s inane remarks about the weather.

In the circular drive by the entrance, a van was parked, its side door open and a hydraulic lift raising an old man in a wheelchair. Annabelle had taken a few van trips to the mall when she’d first moved to Pelham Manor, but on one outing she’d wandered into the basement and gotten lost. It had taken security hours to find her, and after that the staff at Pelham Manor had put a stop to her trips.

Mina got to the front entrance first and rang the bell. As she waited, Brian caught up to her. There was a buzz and a click, and he pulled the door open for her to go inside. Then he went to the front desk and talked to the receptionist.

Mina looked around the familiar space. Plastic forsythia bloomed in a vase on the table by the elevator. Last time she’d been here, there’d been sprays of autumn leaves and bittersweet. Fortunately the bittersweet had been fake, too—she remembered reading somewhere that the real thing was poisonous, and more than a few of the patients on Annabelle’s floor were as likely to eat floral arrangements as look at them.

Mina heard a discreet throat-clearing and turned to find a woman in a light blue suit with a staff badge hanging around her neck standing beside her. Smiling, tall, and elegantly silver-haired, she reminded Mina of Mrs. Weber, her fourth-grade teacher, who told her students she’d once been a fashion model.

“Good morning, Mrs. Yetner,” the woman said. She gave Mina’s hand the gentle squeeze of someone who knew better than to put pressure on arthritic fingers. Brian came over to join them. “And Mr. Granville. It’s good to see you both again. Celeste Hall.”

Mina squinted at the badge the woman wore. It was easier for her to remember names if she saw them in print. But the print side of the badge was twisted around, facing the woman’s chest.

The woman turned back to Mina. “It was good to get your call.”

“My what?”

“Here.” She gave Mina a large envelope. A sticker on the front said THE MATERIAL YOU REQUESTED, which she most certainly had not. But it was the name written on the front, Wilhelmina, that gave her a start. The last person who’d called her that was Annabelle, and only when she was annoyed.

“I’m happy to show you around our independent living tier,” the woman went on, leading the way to the elevator. As Mina trailed behind in her wake, she smelled tangerine and ginger. Now Mina remembered. This was the woman who’d been there when Mina had checked Annabelle in on that hot summer day, efficient, calm, and frequently glancing at the large man’s watch she wore on her wrist then as she did now.

The woman pressed the elevator call button and turned back. With a sympathetic smile on her face, she said, “Independent living is quite different from assisted living, and of course Memory Care where your sister stayed with us is something else entirely. We have three hundred and fifty . . .”

Mercifully, the elevator doors had opened. The annoyingly cheerful woman, whose name Mina had already forgotten, rattled on with her canned speech as they rode the elevator up one floor, so slowly that it felt as if they were barely moving at all.

Instead of a locked door with a nurses’ station beyond, as there’d been on Annabelle’s floor, the elevator doors opened onto a spacious, brightly lit room littered with sofas and wing chairs that looked as if they’d lost their way en route to a furniture showroom.

When Mina and Annabelle had first visited, Annabelle had said, “But everyone is so old.” Mina had laughed, but now she was thinking the exact same thing as a woman shuffled past, pushing a walker tethered to an oxygen tank. An old man sat nodding off in a chair.

But it wasn’t all shuffle and nap. A woman who sat reading a USA Today lowered her paper and gave Mina a sharp appraising look as the energetic guide led them down a hall to a library where all five computer stations were in use. Maybe Mina would finally get around to learning how to use one. Past that was a room set up like a den with a big TV and card tables. Four women there were playing mah-jongg. Another foursome, men and women, were playing poker, betting with nickels.

“Are you a card player?” their cheerful guide asked with a treacly smile. Lipstick was smeared on her front tooth.

Mina said she wasn’t, but she wondered if anyone still knew how to play whist. She’d passed many a pleasant evening playing that with her grandmother.

Past the card room was an exercise room where women and a few men sat in two rows of chairs. According to Mina’s guide, they were “enjoying a session of chair yoga.” As Mina watched them look up at the ceiling, down into their laps, curl and stretch, she realized that she’d probably enjoy it, too.

All in all, it wasn’t so bad, really. It didn’t smell terrible. No one was muttering, or marching along like a zombie, or disrobing in the hallway. Mina had witnessed all three on the floor where Annabelle had been installed.

Continuing on, they passed a hall table, its top strewn with flower petals surrounding a carefully calligraphed card that read Dearly Departed. Beside the card was a framed photograph of a woman smiling and looking directly at the camera, her hand to her cheek. Perched on her head was a party hat in the shape of a tiara—just the kind of goofy thing Mina would never be caught dead wearing. But from the woman’s lively expression, it looked as if she was in on the joke.

Below the picture was a name and a room number and the date, May 17. Three days ago.

Farther down a corridor and beyond double doors were the rooms. The woman walked ahead with Brian at her side. They were chatting. Brian turned and motioned for Mina to hurry up. But just then a young woman came out into the corridor from one of the rooms. She turned back, holding the door open, talking and nodding.

Inside, Mina could see a cozy room with ruffled white curtains, a well-worn leather lounge chair, and a bed neatly made with a finely crocheted spread like one tucked away in Mina’s linen closet that she didn’t dare use for fear Ivory would have at it. Which reminded her, would they let her bring Ivory? It gave her a stomachache imagining Ivory being dumped at an animal shelter.

A woman in a wheelchair sat facing the door, so stooped she was bent near double, her thin white hair tucked into a bun at the nape of her neck. Beside her was a piecrust-top table crowded with framed photographs and porcelain figurines. The young woman at the open door said something to her, and the old woman craned her neck in order to look up. Her face reminded Mina of a shriveled apple. Eyes sharp. She was starting to say something when the young woman let go of the door and walked off down the hall.

It seemed to Mina as if the door closed in slow motion with the old woman sitting there, talking to no one, until finally she was shut in that room, utterly alone with only a television, pictures of loved ones, and a window overlooking a parking lot. In a few weeks or months, a picture of her smiling gamely at the camera would be sitting on the Dearly Departed table. And the cozy room she was in would be filled with someone else’s memories.

It was the thing no one wanted to talk about. People came to places like this to die. Even after they’d finished their tour and were riding down in the elevator Mina was still shaken, thinking about the woman in the wheelchair.

Assisted living? Pfff. If she came here, it would be to die, tidily and off camera, as inexorably as the elevator she was in was going down.