Brandon Johnson found Baiba Lielkaja in the corridor that connected the east and west suites. “Can I go in Lucy’s room, Baiba, just for a second? I want to say good-bye.”
Baiba frowned. “Didn’t you already see her?”
Brandon shook his head. “I drew the short straw—again. I’ve been sitting and walking with Mr. Lane for three hours. Please. This could be my only chance.”
He touched the sleeve of Baiba’s burgundy Park Manor blazer and stared into her blue eyes. She was wearing no makeup this morning, he observed, and her long blond hair was pulled back into a tight ponytail. She had rushed to work without taking her usual time in front of a mirror. Still, she looked perfect, he thought. She had always looked perfect to him, ever since the afternoon two years ago when she had interviewed him for the Park Manor job. He remembered staring across the desk at her. He had imagined how soft her pale, high cheekbones must be. He had felt mesmerized by the sound of her ever so slight Latvian accent.
“Please, Baiba,” he repeated, and he sensed that she would grant his request—for the same reason she had pressed an envelope into his hand last week. Baiba’s caregiving instincts didn’t shut off after hours, and when he had told her his story—more of it than he’d ever told anyone other than his therapist Judith Greenwald—she had wanted to become a part of his happy ending. “I admire your strength and courage so much,” she had told him as she’d reached across the diner table, covered his hand with her warm palm, and insisted he take her envelope containing three thousand dollars.
Now she glanced over her shoulder down the quiet east corridor. Six resident suites were situated on this side of the “Nostalgia Neighborhood,” as Park Manor called its memory care unit. Lucy occupied the suite in the far corner overlooking Madison Avenue. Brandon could see her rooms clearly in his mind. He had tucked Lucy Merchant into her bed six nights a week for the past eighteen months, and now he found it impossible to accept that she was really gone. He had to see for himself. He had to bring her death to life.
Baiba fished in her blazer pocket. She was his manager and she was eight years his senior—he had organized the Park Manor party last month for her thirty-first birthday—but age and titles didn’t matter. They were friends, and she would do this for him. “Come with me—quickly,” she said as she pulled out her keys. He followed her down the carpeted corridor lined with photographs of turn-of-the-century New York City. As she unlocked Lucy’s door, he stared at a photo of Fifth Avenue mansions on “Millionaire’s Row.” Some of those mansions still stood just blocks from Park Manor. “One minute, Brandon,” she told him. “That’s it. No more.”
And then he was alone in Lucy’s rooms. He took a deep breath. Despite the meticulous care provided by Park Manor’s staff, some Nostalgia residents’ suites had the faint odor of old age and incontinence, but Lucy’s apartment always smelled like jasmine body lotion and the bouquets of fresh-cut flowers her family had delivered every four days. Her still-drawn curtains blocked the bright morning light. Lucy lay in the middle of the bed exactly where he had left her last night at ten thirty. She was on her back, and someone—Maybelle, he supposed—had arranged her hands neatly over her stomach. Maybelle would do something like that out of respect for the dead.
He kneeled next to Lucy’s quiescent body. In death, as in life, she was an arrestingly attractive woman. Her brows arched symmetrically. Her skin was spotless. She had one of those rare, perfect noses that even the most sought-after Upper East Side cosmetic surgeons could never artificially sculpt. And unlike the other Nostalgia residents, she still looked youthful. Just last week, Park Manor’s stylist had come to her room and given her a pixie cut. Only when Lucy smiled did you realize that something was wrong with her. Then you saw her straight but yellow stained teeth with hardened plaque and food particles at the gum lines. Even Brandon—who could coax Lucy to do almost anything—could rarely get her electric toothbrush into her mouth anymore.
He stroked her short hair. It was soft. It did not feel like the hair of a dead person. But then, wasn’t the hair on your head already dead? Perhaps hair didn’t change when you died. He touched Lucy’s arm. Were the cells in her skin dead yet? He had once read that the body does not die all at once, that the cells give up their lives one by one. Were there any living cells in Lucy that still sensed his presence? “Good-bye, Lucy,” he whispered to those invisible cells. “I’ll miss you.”
Baiba was tapping on the door. Brandon quickly kissed Lucy’s cool forehead, rose from the carpet, and rejoined the Nostalgia Neighborhood care coordinator in the corridor. “Thank you, Baiba.”
Baiba relocked the door. “I didn’t just do that.” She wagged her pale index finger at him and winked. “I’ll have to deny it if you say I did.”
“But I won’t. You know I won’t.”
He returned to the kitchen where Maybelle and Josie were setting the dining room tables for the residents’ breakfast. He slumped into a chair and Maybelle patted his shoulder. “At least she now with God,” she consoled him in her booming Bajan patois. Maybelle was a tall, big-boned black woman who carried herself proudly through the Nostalgia Neighborhood of privileged white inhabitants. She was Brandon’s favorite coworker because she was optimistic and kind to the residents. She always adjusted herself to the idiosyncrasies of their dementias instead of trying to force them to relinquish their delusions. When Mr. Morrow wandered the halls and repeatedly asked what time it was, she patiently answered, “Don’t you worry yourself, Mr. Morrow, I not gonna let you miss that train to Scarsdale again!” And when Dr. Evelyn Bruce, a once prominent surgeon at Sloan Kettering, tried to follow Cheryl O’Brien into the dispensary while she prepared medications, Maybelle told her, “Let your nurse do her job, Doctor. Let her be. Now go read your new medical journal.”
Maybelle told Brandon, “You just say a nice prayer for her. She gonna be fine where she gone to.”
“What you crying about it?” Josie called out from the other side of the dining room where she was taking a sponge to a sticky spot someone must have missed during last night’s dinner cleanup. Josie had only worked at Park Manor for two weeks, but she had taken an immediate dislike to Brandon and attacked him whenever she could. “Why you care?” she demanded. “They just a bunch of rich folk. It’s not like they your family.”
Brandon did not agree. How could you not become attached to someone you fed, changed, bathed, and rubbed with body lotion every night? In the past few months, Lucy had rarely uttered more than two or three words at a time, yet he had always known when she was hungry, thirsty, or upset. He had made her laugh. He could coax her to eat, play catch with an inflated beach ball, and swallow her medicine. And he had meant something to her, too. Why else had her face lit up whenever she saw him? She exuded no judgment, only gratitude for what he did for her.
Josie moved closer, shaking her head in disgust. “You call yourself a man, crying like that?”
Brandon let the comment go unanswered, but Maybelle snapped, “You stop that right now, Josie. When my mama pass, my brother cry like a baby in my arms—and he were a big six-foot-four-inch man. You let Brandon alone. Let him be. He got a right to espress his feeling.”
“Well, he espress them like a girl.” Josie returned to her work with a new hostile vigor.
Maybelle sat down and leaned in confidentially. “Don’t you pay her no mind, Brandon. Josie from Jamaica, and the Jamaicans is different from the Bajans. We don’t hate on nobody just because they different.”
The irony of Maybelle’s remark was not lost on Brandon. Everybody had his or her own brand of prejudice. At least Maybelle’s wasn’t directed at him. In fact, she had defended him in front of more than one caregiver who objected to working with “someone like him.” Brandon knew he had done nothing overt to provoke Josie’s outsized anger. Either he deeply offended her fixed and narrow definition of normal, he had concluded, or she felt personally insulted by his decision to abandon her gender for another.
“Thanks, Maybelle.” He forced himself up and into the kitchen. He might as well stay busy, he thought, until Ms. Hodges debriefed them.