He said nothing and turned back to staring into space. I thought about Rosie again, and the way she’d talked to me, and the buried pain in this boy’s face. I spoke again. “Are you okay?”
He looked at me with a new expression—not an emotion but a calculation, as if he were trying to figure out who this intrusive stranger was and why said stranger thought it was okay to ask such probing questions out of nowhere. It occurred to me how dangerous my question was, not physically but socially, for the most likely response was almost guaranteed to be an attack: he’d ask what my problem was, or tell me to stop bothering him, or simply get up and leave. I waited, trying to form some kind of defense or explanation, but he simply watched me, saying nothing. After a moment he glanced over my shoulder, nodding at the restroom.
“Who’s your friend?”
“Just some guy,” I said, surprised by the question. “I met him about twenty years ago, right before the Alzheimer’s. It’s not really Alzheimer’s, actually, but it’s close enough. He was a good man, and I liked him.”
“And now you still visit him.”
“It’s the least I can do.”
The young man’s eyebrow went up, just slightly—the first hint of emotion he’d displayed. “I’m sure you could do a lot less if you put your mind to it.”
It was a joke, of sorts, and I chuckled, but more at the joke’s sudden appearance than at its meaning. It made me feel suddenly dark, like a chill wind had blown through the foyer. “You’d be surprised how little of my mind there is,” I said, shaking my head. “Another few years and I’ll end up like Merrill, more than likely, just a . . . hollow man. An organic machine, going through the motions.”
“So is it worth it?”
For the second time in our short conversation, his question stopped me cold. I looked at the boy in surprise. “Is what worth it?”
“Coming here,” he said. “Caring about a man who doesn’t care about you—who couldn’t care about you if he tried. Making connections with people who are only going to disappear.”
I wondered what had happened to this boy to jade him so thoroughly, but then I shook my head. We were sitting in a rest home, surrounded by the last brittle gasps of a hundred dying lives. If he knew one of them, if he’d watched them fade from a vibrant human being to a distant, shuffling figure—if he’d listened as an old, familiar voice forgot his name—that was all the answer I needed. He was broken, because life had broken him. I recognized this boy, because I recognized that broken expression every time I looked in a mirror.
I looked down at my belt, at my keys clipped securely to my lanyard, and I saw myself in Merrill’s room. In Merrill’s life. Who would visit me when I finally lost it all? Who would help me pick up all the pieces of my shattered mind and console me when it snowed and I remembered some distant, unshoveled sidewalk? Who would knock on my door and call himself my friend?
Rosie had spoken to me in the grocery store. She saw me once, for half a second, and she remembered and she looked for me and she found me again, weeks later, and she offered to help.
The restroom opened, and Merrill came out, and I knew that I was already gone from his memory. I could walk out the door right in front of him and he wouldn’t even know he’d been left. I looked at the boy, but he was already looking away, staring at the wall. I stood and turned toward Merrill.
“All set?”
“Well, look who’s here,” he said brightly, his standard phrase when he reacted to someone who obviously knew him, to hide the fact that he didn’t know them back.
I held out his coat. “You still want to go for a walk?”
“I can’t go for a walk. Have you seen the snow outside?”
“There’s certainly a lot of it.”
He stared out the front door, deeply concerned about something. “Who do you think shovels all that stuff?”
“They have a man they pay to do it,” I said, taking him by the elbow. I have touched so few people in my life, almost none of them living. I pulled my hand away with a sudden rush of guilt.
“Do I live here?” he asked softly.
“You do. Would you like to go back to your room?”
“Do you know the way there?”
“I do.” I gestured toward the elevator, and we started walking.
It was the least I could do.
Part Eight