Rachel Alexander 04 - Lady Vanishes

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