that, if this were ten, twenty years ago, she might have had.
Janie Ferris knew this was a fool’s errand. She had known it before she left her house early that morning, before she had made the three-hour drive to Muth County, West Virginia, before she parked in the lot attached to Thornapple Terrace, before she paused at the sign in front of the facility, the cheerful white wooden one with the bright green letters assuring her that the place offered MEMORY CARE—tricky euphemism, that. She had the same thought each time she came here, the same grudging respect for words that obscured grim realities.
She had known it before she opened the front door and checked in at the circular reception desk, asking to see Bill Ferris.
“Bill Ferris,” the woman at the desk had repeated back to her, making sure she had it exactly right.
“Yes,” Janie said. “That’s it.”
“Yes,” the woman said.
This repeating thing—was it, Janie wondered, some kind of tic? Some sort of aphasia? Or maybe it just automatically happened to you when you worked at a reception desk in a place like this, a place with no hope, a place where time had essentially stopped. Why bother coming up with an original reply? You probably got used to echoing whatever people said to you. They said, “Good morning” and you said, “Good morning” back. No more, no less. They said something, and you repeated it.
Janie had lost touch with her father for many years. The need to find him and talk to him had come upon her suddenly about six months ago; it was like a mysterious ache that just shows up one morning. You start to Google symptoms, book a specialist, and then you think: No, I’ll take care of this myself, with vitamins and exercise.
The receptionist turned away. She had to stretch to her right, to the far corner of the desk, poking out a stubby arm to fetch the clipboard on which the residents were listed in alphabetical order. Bill Ferris had been here two years now. The regular receptionist, a woman named Dorothy, never had to check. This woman was new, or maybe she was just a substitute, which is why she had to look at the list.
Had Dorothy been on duty, Janie would never have been alone with her father in the visitors lounge today. Dorothy would have called someone from security or from the nursing staff to sit with them.
That was the rule. Everyone had signed off on it—the executive director, Bonita Layman; the head of security and maintenance, Mike Ford; the sheriff’s deputy who had responded to the call that other afternoon, Clifford Wilkins; and Janie.
Because of what had happened two months ago, because of “the incident,” as they insisted on referring to it still, Janie was not supposed to be alone with him when she visited. She had signed an agreement to that effect. If she had not signed it, they were going to press assault charges against her.
But today’s receptionist, a hefty woman whose name tag said HELLO! I’M SHERRY, didn’t know Janie. She didn’t blink or frown when Janie gave her the name of the person she was here to see.
HELLO! I’M SHERRY simply repeated the name, and then reached for the clipboard on the far side of the desk.
When she leaned that way, the fabric under the arm of her pink smock pulled and bunched unbecomingly. Janie noticed things like that. The smock looked as if it had once fit but now did not—owing, no doubt, to the steady expansion of the woman’s body, a thing, Janie knew, that happened in middle age to everyone. Except her. She had been very thin as a child, alarmingly thin, and even thinner as a teenager, when a cardboard cradle of fries and a can of Mountain Dew—bought for her by her boyfriend, Kenny Huffman—often constituted her entire food intake for three or four days at a stretch. She had been thin throughout her twenties and her thirties and forties and now into her fifties. Her body was not like other women’s bodies. People thought she was lucky, but they were wrong. Her body never quite seemed to get the knack of absorbing nutrients. It was as if the very idea of sustenance—the taking in of nourishment to prolong life—was strange and hateful. Sometimes she wondered why she was even still here at all. She had never really reconciled herself to the idea of existing.
She blamed him for that.
She blamed him