The nurse hesitated. “So you had a visit from your granddaughter today?”
Rose struggled to remember. “Why yes, I did,” she said quickly, because the nurse seemed so sure of it, and of course she didn’t want anyone to know that she was losing her memory.
The nurse seemed encouraged by Rose’s reply, and Rose, for a moment, felt a little guilty for deceiving her.
“How nice,” the nurse said. “She’s been coming more often lately. That’s wonderful.”
“Yes, of course,” Rose said, wondering when her granddaughter had been there. She supposed the nurse would have no reason to lie to her, and she felt a sudden, instant pang of regret that she could not bring to mind the visits. She would have loved to remember a visit with Hope.
The nurse patted Rose on the shoulder and continued in the same gentle voice. “It sounds like she has an exciting trip planned,” the nurse said.
“A trip?” Mamie asked.
“Oh yes, didn’t she tell you?” the nurse said, brightening. “She’s going to Paris.”
And suddenly, Rose remembered. Hope coming to see her. Annie’s confusion when Rose handed Hope the list of names earlier in the week. The concern etched in Hope’s face just this afternoon. She closed her eyes for a moment, the revelations washing over her, until she heard the nurse’s voice, far away, calling her back.
“Rose? Mrs. McKenna? Are you all right?”
Rose forced her eyes open and feigned a smile. She had become skilled at faking happiness over the years. It was, she thought, a terrible talent to have.
“I am sorry,” Rose said. “I was just thinking about my granddaughter and her trip.”
The nurse looked relieved. Rose knew that the real explanation—that her mind was suddenly back in 1942—would frighten the woman, whose kind eyes gave away the fact that she’d never had to endure the kind of loss that shatters one’s soul forever. Rose recognized that kind of loss in other people because she saw it in her own eyes every time she gazed at her reflection.
The nurse left to go prepare a dinner tray, and Rose closed the door behind her and drifted to the window. She stared into the eastern sky, dotted with a sprinkling of twilight’s first stars, but the sky looked different to her now than it had before. Beyond the darkness at the horizon, across the vast ocean, somewhere to the east, lay Paris, the city where it all began, the city where it would all end. Rose would never return there, but for the past to be completed, she knew that Hope had to go.
The end was coming, Rose knew. She felt it in her bones, just like she’d felt it that summer of 1942, before they came. When she’d arrived on American shores late that year, gliding into New York past the Statue of Liberty, she’d made herself a promise to put the past behind her forever. But the Alzheimer’s nibbling at her brain, twisting her timeline, had brought it raging back, uninvited.
Now, when Rose awoke each morning, she had trouble holding on to the present. Some days, she woke up in 1936, or 1940, or 1942 again. Things were as clear to her as if they’d just happened, and for scant, frozen moments in time, her life lay ahead of her, rather than behind. She imagined tucking them away in the beautiful jewelry box her own mamie had given her for her thirteenth birthday, turning the lock, and throwing the key into the endless depths of the Seine.
But now that the present was blurred and uneven, it seemed that that beautiful box of memories, closed now for nearly seventy years, contained the only moments of clarity Rose could find in this life. She sometimes wondered whether the willful forgetting had, in fact, caused the recollections to survive entirely intact, the way that storing a document in an airtight, darkened container for years could keep it from disintegrating.
To her surprise, Rose realized that she found comfort in the moments she’d hidden from for so many years. Slipping into the past was like watching a slow-motion picture show of the life she knew she would soon leave behind. And because of the gaps in her recollection, there were days when she could bask in the past without immediately feeling the crushing blow of its inevitable outcome.
She loved seeing her mother, her father, her sisters, and her brothers in those brief journeys into the past. She loved feeling her mamie’s hand wrapped around hers; she loved hearing her baby sister’s tinkling laughter; she loved breathing in the sweet, yeasty scent of her parents’ bakery. Now she lived for the days when she could slip back in time and see the ones she had vowed never to speak of again. For that’s where her heart remained; she had left it behind, on those foreign shores, so long ago.