“What was the girl’s name?” Anna asked, on the edge of her seat. “Do you remember her name?”
Blanche struggled. “It’ll come to me, gimme a minute. I’m so tired right now.”
“Try to remember. Do you know who I am?”
Blanche smiled and her old face looked so soft and sweet. “Of course. You’re the best nurse here and you’re my nurse. I think I should lay down. I need a little help.”
“Sure,” Anna said, helping her mother stand and then pivot to sit down on her bed. When Blanche laid down, Anna lifted her legs onto the bed. Within seconds, Blanche was snoring and Anna knew all conversation was over for the day.
There were three stages of assisted living and three stages of rehab care, in most cases terminal care. For assisted living there were apartments with galley kitchens, mostly couples occupied them, then efficiency units that had sitting areas and bedrooms, then bedrooms that opened into a nursing round. Then rooms in the nursing home division where residents ate their meals together in a dining room. Then memory care for residents with dementia—that wing required more staff. Then the hospice unit. Those rooms were filled with sick and memory-challenged residents who would not be going home.
Blanche was still in an assisted living room with full-time nursing supervision and full meal service. Blanche was on a waiting list for memory care. Nothing much would change for Blanche except the geography. But these memory lapses were becoming more and more frequent.
Anna sought out the senior nurse, Rebecca, as she had many times before. She described their conversation. “I have heard Blanche speak of the boy. I assumed she was speaking of her grandson.”
“She specifically spoke of giving him away. And then ‘the girl’ came along and she kept her—that would be me. My mother always told me everything, but I’ve never heard of that. Could this be true? Could this be something she’s never talked about before?”
“It’s true our Alzheimer’s patients remember old memories better than recent memories, so if something that happened fifty years ago comes to mind they talk about it. But it’s also true they tell wild tales that no one can make any sense of. Is it possible your mother had a son before you were born and had him adopted and never mentioned it to you?”
“I’ve never heard mention of it before,” Anna said. “She was twenty-eight when I was born. She said the man she was involved with had been married, had no intention of leaving his wife or, even if he did, was not inclined to marry her. Without even thinking twice about it, she said she was going to have me, raise me, and we’d be fine one way or another. And we were. But she never mentioned another child. Never.”
“You can chalk it up to dementia,” the nurse said. “Or you can research it. You know where your mother lived before you were born. You can try one of these ancestry DNA services. I hear some are very good.”
I’m a judge, Anna thought. I know how to get information.
But the larger thought she had was how much vital family information was hanging out there, stuff she wasn’t sure of. Could she have a brother? Did Chad have any more children? How had he managed to give money to Amy and her mother without Anna ever knowing? How many branches were there on her family tree exactly?
Suddenly, her body felt very heavy, as if each step she took, emotionally and physically, took great energy.
SEVEN
It hit her when she got home. In fact, as Anna pulled into the garage, she felt the emotion welling up inside her like a pressure cooker and she broke down in the car. She pushed the garage door button, lowering the door, leaving her to sit in the car in the semidark. And she came apart like a cheap watch.
Chad had been dead for five months. In that time she’d learned that his long-ago affair had born fruit and the strain of trying to figure out how she was going to tell her kids had been wearing her down. She’d been trying to decide if she hated him for keeping such a thing secret or, more often these days, if she longed for their life back. She struggled with whether she owed it to the kids to tell them she had been the one to bring up the possibility of separation and divorce. Her idea, not Chad’s. Their marriage hadn’t been perfect, but by comparison to the lives of many of the women she had helped through the legal system, it was heaven. That was small comfort at the moment. Chad left a mess for her to clean up alone.
She realized, not for the first time, that she didn’t miss Chad so much as she missed marriage. It had worked for her. It had worked for Chad for that matter. It was convenient; there was always another person to share the weight with even when things in the relationship were stormy. There were times, she had come to realize, that having a close enemy or stranger can be slightly more helpful than having no one at all.