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16 Guardian฀Home฀for฀the฀Elderly,฀Alzheimer’s฀Wing for Karla Lil pets the milk-eyed lapdog, believes he is the child she lost at first snowfall, 1939, storm dragging in across the Great Lakes. Most days she cradles one naked doll in each arm. That ghost light in the corridor; her open mouth, like the hole a man, in rage, once punched in the plaster. This photograph now in Marguerite’s hands (was it in her pocket a moment ago?), a girl with carnations, the brick walk of a model home. Whose face and when? It was, Molly recalls, the rummage store on McClintock, how her mother fainted into a bin of furs: the aunts fussing and clucking and laughing too hard to breathe. The women lay cards on the table, no particular game, no memory of the meal that wedges between their teeth. Clarity, when it comes, is the voice that says you are like that last piece of apple, molared, always a little closer to the throat. In another life, Rose says, I taught piano. The Nurses murmur, cross the halls like sailboats. Doris in 12B went quietly last night. Today her children divide valuables at her house in the suburbs, dress each room up for sale. A cactus blooms in the garden. The kitchen’s all white tile, and the four-poster arranged like a bed from a catalog, pillows full and smooth as if no one had ever slept there. ...

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