On Sunday evening I took my usual walk, a two-mile loop around the Pines of Rome. I waved to Dick Gunderson, out polishing his Acura in the driveway of his cottage. I stopped to talk to a couple of the nurses standing under the awning of the Assisted Living wing. Made them laugh, as usual, when I told them it would be a long time before they got me into one of their beds — meaning their Assisted Living beds, but with a little double entendre, if they wanted to take it that way.
Out back behind the kitchen, Miguel was smoking a cigarette. I asked about his granddaughter and he showed me a new picture on his phone. Cute kid. Then down the long avenue of maple trees. There were no pines at Pines of Rome, and it’s not near anyplace called Rome. There were big white columns holding up the front portico but it looked more Southern Plantation than Roman, and that was just one way the Pines hadn’t lived up to the promise.
I came out from under the shade of the maples and crossed the parking lot toward Independent Living, if you want to call it “living.” I’d moved in after my wife Patty died, thinking it would be good to be around other active old folks. But they weren’t active at all. People stayed in their rooms, sucked the marrow of their memories. Half my neighbors used walkers to get around. A lot of them had in-home care: Anything to put off the vast expense that came with being shunted off into the Assisted Living wing.
For 83, I was still reasonably active. I wound up my walk barely winded. I even took the stairs up to my second-floor apartment, making my big outing of the day last a little longer. I’d already eaten in the dining room, dreary poached fish and dull conversation. Maybe some TV next, if there was anything worth watching.
As I opened the door to 2B, I got a surprise.
“Come on in, dad,” my daughter Eileen ushered me into my own apartment. I saw her idiot husband Glenn messing around with my coffee maker. In the living room, Bob Corbett sat on the sofa looking awkward. Bob was my one friend on the outside, still living in his home. Sometimes he sprung me on a Saturday morning to go fishing at the lake. Next to Bob, Alicia Welles, the resident director at Pines of Rome.
“What’s all this?”
No one wanted to go first and then Glenn yelled from the kitchen, asking how to work the coffee maker. I made my break and elbowed him out of the narrow galley. He’d got the water and the grounds alright, but he hadn’t plugged it in. I unplug things when I leave the apartment, for safety.
Finally they got me seated in the place of honor, the beat-up leather La-Z-Boy that I’d refused to surrender when I moved to the Pines.
“It’s an intervention,” Eileen said, perching herself on the edge of a dining room chair. (Dining room? The table where I ate was in the living room, right beside the sofa, but the chairs had come from old dining room, so. . .) The only other room, beside the narrow galley kitchen, was the one where I slept. And of course the bathroom, with the shower you could step right into and the water that never got above lukewarm, so us residents wouldn’t accidentally scald ourselves. They’d thought of everything, at the Pines.
Do I sound like I’m complaining? Well, this wasn’t exactly how I figured on ending up. For one thing, I never imagined being without Patty. Thought for sure I would go first! As for life at the Pines, I suppose I had pictured us relics taking laps in the pool, the men playing cards together at night, outings to baseball games. No one played cards, or used the pool (except for a few women who did standing stretches in the shallow end, waving their arms and calling it water aerobics). There were weekly outings, but mostly for the ladies: Flower gardens, and concerts with cheesy singers parroting music I’d never much liked fifty years ago.
Maybe I was just bored at the Pines? I’d been an active man in my youth, served a stint in the Army and then had a full career in corporate accounting. I didn’t think of myself as “old,” whatever that meant. I still had energy, wanted to go places, do new things. I wanted another adventure.
But the world had moved on without me. Now I had my big outings twice a week, driving myself to Walmart. And my evening walks to keep up the circulation, keep the muscles strong.
I nodded around the room, looking at each of them. My friend Bob was picking at his nails, avoiding my eyes. Alicia Welles was smiling and relaxed, like she always is. She nodded encouragingly. Eileen seemed on edge, as if she’d been working up the nerve for whatever this was and now she wanted to get to it. I noticed her tapping her index fingers on the edge of the table, like she used to do when she was little. Her nitwit husband Glenn was reading the spines on my books, mostly espionage thrillers. Le Carré, Deighton, Graham Greene, even some Ian Fleming. Adventure by proxy?
“I appreciate the concern,” I said. “What are we talking about?”
“Mostly space aliens!” Glenn barked a laugh and when Eileen glared at him, he scampered off to the kitchen to get the coffee.
“Forget about it,” I said quickly. “It’s a gag. Don’t take a thing I say seriously.”
Well, dammit, I thought first. Then: Who listens to a cranky old man telling stories? I suppose I had made some remarks, but I told myself — defensively I guess — that I’d only said those things about Bill and Carol Miller in order to have something to talk about. Nothing ever happened at the Pines, and a little foolish gossip never hurt anyone.
Still, I ought to have known better.
“I’ll go first,” Eileen said, while Glenn handed around mugs of coffee that no one wanted. Then he was back, making a fuss with the milk, sugar, spoons. He’s a lawyer, but I wouldn’t trust him to empty the wastebasket. Eileen waited until he’d gotten everyone organized, all the time looking at me with a mix of guilt and pity. I felt sorry for her.
“First,” she said, “no one is saying you’re senile. No one thinks you have dementia.”
“Well, that’s good.” I nodded encouragingly. Eileen’s smart. She’d been champion of the high school chess team, played tennis like a demon, and now she was a successful woman, the communications lead for a big software company. Strong willed. But she’d always been shy around me. Now that she was the adult and I was the one who needed to be cared for, she gave me respect, tried not to crowd me or tell me what to do. So I knew this was hard for her.
“But, well, you know the Millers aren’t visitors from another planet. Right, dad?” She wanted me to nod some more, so I did, feeling — I don’t know what. Mortified? Outraged? Probably both. I’d lost a lot of dignity already with my move to the Pines, been embarrassed and infuriated often enough. All the little indignities. I told myself what I always told myself: It’s just part of aging, nothing personal in it. I’ll admit that didn’t help much. I was miffed, but tried not to let Eileen see it. I knew she meant well.
Bob jumped in. “Listen, Jim, I guess I understand. You’ve told me often enough what it’s like around here.” He glanced at Alicia Welles. “No offense? But it’s pretty sleepy. And heck, I watched all those movies too, when I was a kid. Spacemen and monsters. That’s what we grew up on. So you tell stories. You’re keeping your mind active. That’s great. But listen. Eileen has heard about the aliens a few too many times. I guess we all have. It seems like you’re a little stuck on that. So we got concerned. I’m sorry we have to bring it up like this. We all are.” He looked around the room, everyone nodding back at him.
I ought to have kept my mouth shut, played along. They’d have said their piece and left me alone. But then Glenn had to add his two cents. “It’s just goofy, pop!” he barked his nitwit laugh again. Alicia Welles glared at him, and Alicia as a rule doesn’t glare at family.
Pop? Glenn needed the back of my hand across his mouth. Maybe that’s what did it. “Now hang on,” I said. “Just hang on, all of you. Let’s consider the facts.”
Bob was shaking his head, warning me to shut it. Eileen looked a little pale around the gills, and Glenn made a show of throwing his hands in the air. “Here we go,” he said under his breath.
So I went. “First, no one knows where the Millers come from. Ask them, and you get a different story every time. And what did Bill Miller do for a living? A flyer, he says, but what kind? Military, commercial? Just flying he tells me. Well, alright, maybe it’s a private thing, maybe he doesn’t like to share.”
They all just stared at me, Bob and Eileen looking sad, Alicia Welles kind of neutral, Glenn with his idiot grin.
“They go out to the gazebo almost every night. But they don’t sit in the gazebo. They stand on the lawn, Bill with his smartphone in his hand, or whatever it is. The two of them staring up at the sky, always to the northwest. And late at night,” I said, “I hear voices.”
Glenn: “Now he’s hearing voices.”
Eileen: “Shut up, Glenn.”
Good girl.
“I hear it through my bedroom wall. He’s got some kind of radio thing, but they aren’t speaking English. They aren’t even . . . regular voices.”
“Human voices?” Alicia Welles asked quietly.
“Well, darn it, fine. I know what a human voice sounds like, don’t I? These are gargly, they’re like a gargly grunt, wet sounding. They’re definitely speaking, the sounds have speech patterns. But they, well, they aren’t human sounds.” I looked around at them. “They just aren’t.”
I knew I was sounding pretty crazy. All of us at the Pines of Rome worried about it, worried we’d been caught out in a memory slip, some nonsense behavior. I always put on a clean dress shirt to go down to the dining hall, letting everyone know: Jim’s OK, he’s got it together.
Maybe it’s the Pines that does it to us? They shove us in here, leave us to ourselves. Maybe I had gone a little crazy, waiting in the warehouse for death to come and claim me. Who wouldn’t go nuts?
The idiot Glenn pulled me out of that train of thought. “Too many spy novels,” he muttered, and I bet Eileen would have told him to go wait in the car, but just then Alicia Welles made a show of putting down the coffee mug that she hadn’t sipped from. She got to her feet, so everybody else stood up too.
“Well,” Alicia said, smiling her mild, unchanging smile. It took a lot to ruffle Alicia. She’d told me she had been at the Pines for fourteen years: she’d seen just about everything, I suspect. So she sounded like her usual cheerful, sensible self when she said, “I think this can be easily settled. Why don’t we go next door and ask the Millers?”
That sounded to me like an awful idea. First, because it seemed like a boundary violation of some sort, an imposition. And also, more honestly, because I’d be forever branded as the village loon. Alicia Welles had anticipated all this.
“It’s alright, Jim,” she said. “I’ve talked it over with them already. They’re expecting us.”
Well, it was all my own doing. In a place like the Pines, anything you say is bound to get around, and it’s bound to come back and bite you. So I started to see the sense in Alicia’s plan. We could put Eileen’s mind at ease about my mental state, and maybe we and the Millers could all share a laugh about it.
“Sure,” I said. “Let’s go ask the Millers if they’re space aliens.”
***
Out in the hall, with its stale antiseptic smell, Bob Corbett held me back. “I knew they’d do it whether or not I came along,” he said. “I figured you’d prefer to have a friend in your corner. Hell, Jim. You’re still sharp as a tack. I know that. It’s this place.” He looked around at the blank walls, the institutional gray carpet patterned with blue and yellow flecks.
“Thanks,” I said. “I mean it. Thanks for coming. I brought this on myself. Didn’t think anyone paid much attention to what I said anymore. I guess I’m pleased they’re still listening.”
“Eileen listens,” Bob gave a firm nod. “She’s a good girl. But I’ll bow out here. You can talk to the Millers without me on standby, right?”
“Sure, Bob. Thanks again.” I watched him turn the corner to the elevator, then I followed the others into the Millers’ apartment. Eileen was handing Glenn the car keys, telling him she’d call when she wanted to be picked up.
“See you later, pop,” he patted my shoulder on the way out. I ground my molars.
That left five of us in the Millers’ apartment, myself and Eileen and Alicia, Jim Miller in his blue track suit and his wife Carol in her flowered muumuu. It was a two-bedroom and roomier all around than mine. Carol Miller pulled in an extra chair from the living room, and we could all sit around the dining table, the white tablecloth embroidered with tiny pink roses. Carol had put out a fresh-baked blueberry cobbler and insisted on everyone having a piece.
At least, I thought wryly, I get fresh-baked cobbler out of all this.
I knew the Millers only slightly and felt bad about putting them in this position, but they seemed perfectly at ease. Bill said, around a mouthful of cobbler: “I flew in the Air Force, Jim. And we moved around a lot. Can’t say we’re really ‘from’ anywhere, can we Carol? Moved here from Connecticut, wanted to get away from the cold. That answers a couple of questions, right?”
“Now look, Bill. You don’t owe me any explanations! I’m honestly just embarrassed about this whole thing. And I don’t know,” I admitted, taking up Alicia Welles with my glance. “If a man lets his imagination run away with him, well, it might not be cognitive decline. But forgetting his manners, that’s another matter! I’ve got no excuse for that. I’m sorry for not minding my own business. Sorry to all of you. I’ve lived with neighbors long enough to know better.”
Carol reached across the table and patted my hand. “That was nicely said, Jim. And not all necessary. Bill and I can be a little eccentric. We know that! Small confession: We sometimes give folks cagey answers, just to make ourselves interesting. Isn’t that awful? So the fault lies with us, too.”
Bill gave his wife a look of warm affection, and Alicia Welles made a little speech about the joys of communal living. It made everyone laugh and then we were all comfortable, eating fresh cobbler and talking about how hot we expected the summer to be.
“But there’s one thing. And you’ll excuse me for asking. The voices? I hear them at night” — and I might have blushed a little — “through the wall.”
Bill led to me the second bedroom, the one that adjoined my apartment, but it wasn’t a bedroom at all. On one side he had a workbench where he carved wooden ducks: They were lined up on a shelf above the workbench, polished and gleaming and all nearly identical. I admired his skill and said so. On the other wall, the one that abutted mine, there was a bulky, old-fashioned radio setup.
“Amateur ham, Jim. I don’t sleep like I used to and at night I talk to people all over the world. Guessing you might have been hearing Russians, or maybe Koreans. Depends on the night, and who else is around.”
I looked over the equipment, with which I wasn’t familiar at all, and Bill explained how it worked. The transceiver for sending, the receiver, the antenna and various cables connecting it all. It looked complicated, but Bill assured me there wasn’t much to it.
I really hadn’t thought those voices were Russian — but through the wall, late at night? I didn’t want to admit senility, and I didn’t like Glenn’s crack about my spy novels. So I started to form phrases in my head like ‘overactive imagination,’ which sounded like a forgivable sin.
“I guess that answers everything,” I said, as we walked back into the living room.
“Except the stargazing,” Carol chirped, with a mischievous twinkle in her eye. “Did you forget about that?”
“Maybe we should,” I laughed, hoping she’d just leave it alone. I’d had enough for one night. But Carol kept on going.
“Bill’s got a smartphone with an app that tells us where to look for planets and constellations and things. It’s almost dark now. Why don’t you come out to the gazebo with us? We’re going to try to spot the International Space Station going over.”
I felt like I had imposed too much already. I’d have rather gone back to my apartment and licked my wounds. But when Carol insisted, and Alicia and Eileen said we should make it a party — well, I didn’t have much choice but to show a brave face. The fact was, they all seemed pretty excited, and I had to put on an act to gloss over my embarrassment at the whole thing. I supposed they must know how ashamed I felt, and were making a to-do in order to reassure me. They were trying hard to mollify my bruised ego, in other words, and I couldn’t in fairness deny them the opportunity. So I mustered a smile to match theirs, and down we all went in the elevator. Off to the gazebo!
We all stood together on the lawn and Bill took a gizmo from his pocket. I know I’m not current, but it didn’t look like any smartphone I’d ever seen. Before I could ask about it, he started tapping into it, and a minute later everybody was pointing to a group of lights visible through the trees.
“There they are,” Bill sighed with satisfaction. Carol took his hand and I saw Eileen and Alicia exchange a look.
“The space station?” I said, but somehow I doubted it.
“Not exactly,” Bill murmured, his face twitching: Eyebrows jumping as he bit his bottom lip. The lights might have been coming closer; it was hard to tell. They seemed to exchange positions with one another every few seconds, a strange sort of choreographed movement that looked like nothing I’d seen before. I chalked it up to distance, maybe heat haze.
“I met them back in the ’60s, when I was doing high-altitude reconnaissance over the Soviets,” Bill said. “We, um, sort of ran into each other. Almost! That was some night.”
What was? I wondered. Carol seemed to know. She nodded with enthusiasm, her tight curls bobbing.
Bill went on. “We’ve kept in touch all this time, and now they’re coming to get us,” he said. “We’re going along with them, Jim. And Eileen thought maybe you’d want to join us.”
Darkness was falling quickly but I could still make out my daughter’s face well enough. She had the kind of grin she used to get when she’d win a chess tournament or beat a kid in tennis. She reached out and took my hand.
“You knew about this?” I looked back and forth between her and Alicia. They were nodding and grinning. I thought about it. “Then why bother with the intervention? What was the point of putting me through all that?”
“I’m sorry, dad. But we had to. You see, you were so mad afterwards, you drove your car into the lake. We never expected that!” Eileen looked into my eyes and shook her head with fake solemnity. “They never found the body.”
I told you she was bright, didn’t I?
“Bob doesn’t know?”
“We couldn’t tell him,” Eileen seemed put out by it. I knew Bob, though. He’d be alright. And he’d step in to keep an eye on Eileen, for as long as he could. Not that she needed tending. She was a strong woman. Maybe he’d take her fishing on a Saturday morning, and they’d remember me together.
“What about the Millers?”
“Terrible problems for me,” Alicia giggled. “They moved out with practically no notice. I’ve got all the papers in my office already. The fellows in the kitchen will make their furniture go away, without asking any questions.”
We stood watching the dancing lights, which definitely were coming closer. “So,” Bill broke the silence. “Do you want to come along?”
I turned to my daughter and she took both my hands in hers. We’ve always had a special bond. “I’ll miss you too, dad,” she said. “I wish I could come with you, but . . .”
We all turned out faces to the sky.
I cleared my throat, dropped Eileen’s hands and took a step back. “Yeah, I don’t think so. Thanks but no thanks.”
Eileen looked up sharply. “What?”
“I mean, better the devil you know, right? I really appreciate all the thought that went into this. All that planning! You never cease to amaze me, Eileen. All things being equal, though, I’m going to ride it out here. I’d like to see the maple leaves change. And still I’ve got some reading I want to do. But hey, safe travels, you two.”
Eileen was shaking her head, not really listening to me. “It’s not actually a question,” she sighed. “You’re going, dad.”
Now it was my turn to be surprised. That girl had a strong will, sure. But this? “What are you saying, Eileen?”
“It’s the money, dad. Glenn’s law practice is tanking. You know what he’s like, for god’s sake! Would you want him for an attorney? Nobody does. We’ve got bills to pay. And I’d like to have a kid someday, before it’s too late. I’ve thought it all through, believe me! You’ve got to go with them. It’s best for everyone.”
I looked at Alicia Welles and saw her shrug in the gathering dark. “I’ve got a waiting list, Jim. It’d help a lot if I could turn your apartment.”
Beautiful.
“Listen, Eileen. I could write you a check . . .”
She glared at me. “It wouldn’t be enough. The Pines will reimburse half your buy-in on the apartment. That’s a lot! With what’s left in your portfolio, I’d have enough to be really secure. We could have a kid.”
I didn’t a script for this, so I just stared at her.
“It’s not like I have been hoping for you to die, right?” Sounding not-very apologetic. “But look at you, with your evening walks. You might have another ten years left! Glenn’s a moron, dad, and I’m too old to go shopping for another husband now. So I need to make it work with him. And that’s going to be expensive. So do me a favor, okay, and get on the fucking spaceship?”
We all want to take care of our kids, right? This wasn’t what I had expected, but life so rarely is. I watched the approaching lights and thought I ought to bid some of kind of farewell to the Pines of Rome. But there was nothing there that I was going to miss.
The Piker Press moderates all comments.
Click here for the commenting policy.