There were far worse places in the world than Hillsboro Home, a fact Claire often had to remind herself of when she felt especially crushed by the weight of its collective despair. There was the clinic in Honduras where her in-laws extracted children’s teeth that had been rotted black by malnutrition. There were hospitals in war-torn countries where the elderly—yes, someone’s grandmother, yes, someone’s grandfather—slept on a hard floor for days waiting to see a doctor. The patients at the Hillsboro Home (they were supposed to be called residents, but by this point, honestly, they were patients) were well cared for. It was not an inexpensive facility, so either the patient himself or someone in the family had the necessary resources to provide. It was clean and well staffed and there were people in the kitchen with chef hats. There were daily events posted on a board in the front lobby: Humphrey Bogart Movie Night, Poker Tournament, Wii Bowling, Life Collage Workshop. And yet despite all this it was awful. Maybe it was made more awful because apparently this was the very best you could hope for after you got too ill or too feeble for non-assisted living. Clean. Well staffed. Cable TV. Dental care.
The mobile dentistry practice consisted primarily of routine cleanings. Almost all the residents of Hillsboro Home were wheelchair bound, and many entirely bedridden, and so only for a true emergency would a patient be put through the stress of an ambulance trip to a dentist’s office. Better, in the final months and years, to stave off infection, reduce as much pain as possible, focus on preventive dentistry so that there could be one less thing to worry about as multiple other systems began to break down. Patients were seen every six months, which meant that often Claire and Mark saw each person just once—by the time the next appointment rolled around, chances were fifty/fifty that the patient was dead. There was heavy turnover at Hillsboro Home. It was, Mark had once commented, like the trenches in Belgium, except that there was no floss in the trenches.
Ninety-four-year-old Mr. Mitchum had clearly not paid attention to the attrition statistics; Claire recalled seeing him at least twice before, although Mr. Mitchum certainly did not recall her and lay still in his bed staring up at the ceiling, his jaw dangling open like a broken marionette. Often it was utterly silent, this particular dentistry, more like the operating room Claire had once imagined than her regular office ever would be. She knew Mark talked to these people, some of whom did not, could not even, talk back, and some days she made an effort to do so as well. But today she could not bring herself to say these kinds of things: “It’s getting chilly out there!” “What wonderful holiday decorations!” “That’s a very handsome sweater!”
There was a new woman, Mrs. Ogles, who was chatty and smiley and referred several times to “when I move back in with my daughter.” There were three others, standard cleanings, then a filling at the end of the day. The fillings had to be done in a special exam room at the end of the hallway, a cold place that doubled as medical storage and had shelves lined with gauze and rubber gloves, patient gowns, sheets, towels. Mark hated “the closet,” as he called it, but today Claire preferred it to the patients’ rooms because at least inside the closet there were no reminders that the mouth she was inside belonged to an actual person, no mementos, no photos of happier days, no needlepoint pillows, no proof of life.
She inserted the novocaine needle into the gum.
“Where’s Thomas?” the mouth said.
“I’m the dentist,” Claire said. “I’m going to fill your tooth.”
“But where’s Thomas?” the mouth said.
“It will only take a couple minutes. I’ll have you right out.”
She filled the tooth and wheeled the wheelchair back into the hallway. It was almost lunchtime and the wheelchairs were lined up along the wall.
A hand reached out from the wheelchair and grabbed her lab coat.
“Thomas? Tommy?”
Claire removed the hand from her coat and walked down the corridor. This was where it ended for you, she thought, and you could pretend all you wanted, but the chairs that lined these halls waiting for lunch were where you were headed. Maybe you were lucky to be Lisa Bellow, struck down at your most ignorant, never to know the pain of lost parents and lost children and lost lives. But that wasn’t fair—even Lisa Bellow, at fourteen, knew what it was to lose a parent, or to never have one, which was in many ways the same thing. And yet there were so many agonies she would never encounter, never have to face, chief among them the realization that every day had the potential to be its own little individual agony because you never knew what the hell you were doing, or why you were doing it, or what was going to happen to you or the people you loved. Perhaps life itself was no great loss, depending on the life you led. Perhaps Colleen Bellow, having lost her only child, would be better off with no life at all than the one that awaited her.
Grief and hope were cruel bedfellows, incompatible. There was no chance that grief would ever run its course, Claire knew from experience, and thus in cases of the missing there should be a statute of limitation on hope. It was only fair, only just, that after one year or three years or five years you could wake up on the assigned date and know, with absolute certainty, that the waiting was over, that the window of possibility had closed, that there was no chance your lost girl would return. What horrible stories, those few miracles of women kicking through doors into the sunlit neighborhoods they’d only ever seen from nailed-shut windows. Better for those stories to be kept secret, for the tales of joyous homecomings to be censored. How cruel that such a statute did not exist, that fifty years from now Colleen Bellow could be sitting in a wheelchair in this stuffy hall waiting to have her tooth filled, could hear footsteps approaching and believe, if only for a moment, that the footsteps belonged not to the mobile dentist but to her beloved daughter. It was not right and it was not fair and Claire resented the system of inequalities that existed, dictating who would be waiting forever for the chosen footsteps and who would be rewarded on Sunday afternoons with their sound. Here was her darling Evan! Here was her clever Meredith! Better if no one’s children came. Better if all were equally lost. Better if you knew well in advance that the footsteps you heard would never be the footsteps you were waiting for.
?
“Can I please go to Becca’s for a sleepover?” Meredith asked.
They were eating Thanksgiving leftovers. There was talking. Evan said something. Mark said something. They were all talking at once. Meredith was scowling. As a baby she’d scowled all the time. Hoarded her best smiles for Evan, given them out sparingly, grudgingly, to everyone else. Of course she was just a baby, so it was absurd to assume she had done this consciously, with hostile intent, though maybe it was even worse if it hadn’t been deliberate but genuinely the way she’d felt.
The turkey on Claire’s plate was dry. Had it been dry yesterday and she just hadn’t noticed? Had she overcooked it? She had forgotten to be thankful, was the thing. She had broken the Thanksgiving rule and not taken a minute out of her day to be thankful, not for a single thing. And now it was the day after Thanksgiving and obviously too late for anything like thankfulness.
“Fine,” she said. “It’s fine.”
They were looking at her. Mark said something. Meredith said something, probably something snotty, but Claire couldn’t be sure because she had stopped listening.
“Go,” Claire said. “Please. Just go.”
Meredith got up from the table. The food on her plate was hardly touched.
“Mom,” Evan said. “Are you okay?”
It wasn’t a joke, the way he said it, her half-blind boy. She couldn’t think of how to respond. She couldn’t even imagine the words.
?
She woke Saturday morning to the phone ringing, the landline, which almost never rang anymore. She looked at the clock. It was 7:25. The bed was empty beside her. She picked up the phone and said hello.