Cora was sitting on her bed, her bare feet dangling above the speckled green-and-gold linoleum floor, and for once, Dora wasn’t with her.
“Oh, it’s my little relative,” she said, as soon as she saw me. Then she noticed Dashiell.
“Who woves her mommy?” she asked him. “Lady does.”
I gave Dashiell the hand signal for “find.” Venus had put a dog biscuit in the pockets of those she wanted me to visit, telling them Lady was coming this afternoon, never mind that this time around Lady wouldn’t be a little black bitch with dreadlocks, she’d be a big white pit bull with testicles, anatomically, rather than politically, correct.
You stick to the reality they have to get, Venus had said—meals are eaten in the dining room; you can’t leave the building without an escort; even when you get very angry, you must not hit; that sort of stuff. The rest, poof, you let it go. Because they will anyway.
Dashiell began to nuzzle the pocket with the biscuit. I watched Cora remember the biscuit, the biscuit becoming part of the trail of evidence that would connect her to what she’d been told twenty minutes earlier, help her hold onto the pieces of information she found difficult to grasp. I was interested to see that while she didn’t know one dog from another, she remembered the name of the other dog, giving it to this one, generalizing the way young kids do, designating every animal “doggie” until they learn otherwise.
Cora smiled.
“Is the baby hungry?”
She slid the biscuit out of her pocket.
Dashiell looked at it soulfully. Definitely a Patsy-winning performance.
“She is hungry, she is,” said Cora, letting him slip the biscuit gently from her bent fingers.
“My other daughter, Eileen,” she whispered, “now you don’t go telling on me I told you this, she’s taken all my things. I tried to get them back, but she has lawyers.” Cora’s eyes began to tear up.
“Oh, she was the smart one,” she said, nodding. “She told me she’d keep everything safe for me. But where? I don’t know where anything is. My own daughter. Not a good girl like you. She never visits me.”
I patted her dry old hand, the skin so thin you could almost see through it.
“I signed documents,” she whispered. “I trusted her.” Cora folded her arms across her chest. “From that day forward, I never saw another penny, not a bill, not a check, not a bank statement, not my jewelry.” She was working herself into a froth, the same story I’d heard a hundred times at the Village Nursing Home. “I don’t even have a watch,” she whined, tapping her wrist near the identification band all the residents wore. “I don’t know what time it is.”
“It’s pretty lucky you live at Harbor View, where you get taken care of no matter what time it is, and where Lady comes to visit you. How about a little trick today?” I asked, hoping to distract her from her worries.
“I don’t know any tricks,” she said indignantly.
“Maybe Lady knows one.”
“Lady doesn’t do tricks. She’s just here to love us.”
Dora wheeled herself in from the hallway, her freshly washed hair tight against her head like a cap.
“Oh, goody, Lady’s here,” she said, “in my—”
“Room,” Cora said. “Let’s take her—”
“Downstairs. Let’s take her out to the garden,” Dora said.
“But my daughter’s here.”
“Where?”
Then they both looked around the room.
“Do you know who she is?” Dora was frowning.
“Why, of course.”
“Who is she?”
“Don’t you know?” Cora said.
They both stared at me.
“Do you have children?” Dora finally asked me.
I shook my head.
“They never visit you.”
“Tell her to go away,” Cora said. She flapped her hands in my direction, shooing me out of her room.
“Would you like to see Lady wave good-bye before I go?”
Cora frowned. “She doesn’t—”
“Yes,” Dora said, “Oh, goody.”
“Goody two-shoes,” Cora said.
I signaled Dashiell to wave. Sitting in front of them, he lifted one paw high and patted the air with it. Cora wasn’t impressed. She turned her head away, hoping that, one way or the other, I would disappear.
By then, she wasn’t the only one who wanted me to move on. Someone’s diaper needed changing. Nu, my grandmother Sonya would have said, you think you’ll smell like Lily of the Valley when you’re old?
Cora and Dora shared a room on the second floor, facing east, over the garden. Dash and I took the stairs down to the main floor, turning left toward the garden door, straight back from the front entrance. Venus had given me a set of keys so that I could come and go as needed. I unlocked the garden door and stepped outside with Dashiell into the sultry heat of the August afternoon.
The garden was bricked in the center, no grass to mow, with a scattering of weathered teak tables with backless benches and plantings all around the perimeter in raised brick beds, a large tree in the center of it all for shade. I walked out and looked around, checking the gates to the side alleys, finding them high enough to keep both an agile dog and a tall human in, and locked up tight.
Dash began to sniff the places where Lady had left her scent, and I inspected the wall that surrounded the garden. That too was brick and solid; no holes to squeeze through, no way the puli could have gotten out this way.
There was a drawing pad on one of the tables, some colored pencils next to it. I walked over and leafed through the drawings, not knowing which of the residents had made them, since the kind of self-awareness that inspires artists to sign their work was not likely with this population.
Sitting on the bench where the pad had been left, I turned the pages back to the beginning and looked at the drawings, all meticulous renderings of exactly what the artist had seen: that one big tree across from the table. Each drawing was the same, except for one. Apparently a squirrel had scaled the wall a puli could not. But he hadn’t remained long enough for his portrait to be completed. The unfinished squirrel, washing his hands at the base of the tree, stood out in contrast to the tree, the trunk neatly colored in four shades of brown, the leaves, pale green where the sun reached them and dark green where they were in shade, each drawn perfectly, the pencils, points up, all neatly replaced in the box.
The glitches were fascinating to me and always had been, one of the many reasons I did pet therapy, for the chance to see what people who worked in homes such as this called tiny miracles, like the time a Down’s syndrome boy who was assumed to understand nothing handed Dashiell his plate of cookies when I told another child I had to leave because it was time for Dashiell to eat and he was very hungry, saying good-bye with something he could relate to.
Cora thought I was her daughter, and as she’d wisely told me, she didn’t know the time of day, but she’d remembered that Lady didn’t do tricks but came to love her.
I flipped back through the drawings once again, stopping at the incomplete squirrel. Only part of the story, like the one Venus was telling me.
I wondered what I’d hear next, the details carefully orchestrated, but for what purpose, I didn’t know.
Was she protecting someone?
And if so, who?
I held the door for Dashiell, then tried it to make sure it was locked and followed him down the hall. There were two more residents who had biscuits in their pockets, and though they probably didn’t know it, they were waiting for his visit.