Sunland: A Novel

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• • 141 • • Thursdays and Fridays felt more or less like Tuesdays, not much unlike Wednesdays, each day the same, rewind and play, rewind and play. Repetition stapled the days together into an undistinguishable heap. I spent time on the casita, caulking the leak under the bathroom sink, installing blinds in the spare room, and checking the fuse box. The days were long and cauterizing, the air dusty and stirless. Each was difficult to move through and easy to forget. I visited the nursing home almost every day while I waited for things to move on the Mexican front. I sat with Nana, patting her arm, waiting for improvements in her speech, listening to her labored words. I missed our long talks and arguments. A criticism would have felt welcome, a cause for celebration. Too often I caught myself staring at the corners of her sloweddown mouth, searching for signals. The Activity Director—that hyper-caring woman—had given me a sheet with helpful instructions. I’d asked her if I could volunteer. I followed the instructions like a dutiful son. I smiled, and I tried to help, but there were days when all I saw was loose skin draped over skeletons . Transferring Ms. Silverstein from chair to bed felt like lifting a plastic bag full of wooden hangers. Ms. Montague had lost weight; her elbows in my side were scalpels. I enjoyed wheeling Ms. Collins to her clinic room appointments because she was a storyteller. I walked through the building and patted gaunt shoulders and touched cheeks blooming with eczema. I rescued shoes that had gone missing. I taped streamers across the hall that announced the monthly birthday party. It was okay to tell therapeutic fibs. But never contradict yourself. Hand-sanitizing dispensers were every twenty feet. Visitors on average were in their mid-fifties. Sons and daughters had eyes full of worry and loss. I found the building at the end to be not unlike preschool. There were the occasional pissy smells and unidentifiable wet globs in the activity rooms. There was singsong hour and reading hour. Some days I found the place wondrous. At any moment utter nonsense could come from any resident , which I enjoyed, which I’d come to appreciate, above all because the nonsense was often more edifying than the standard rote hits popping from doctors’ mouths. One hundred and ten women and ten men called the building at the end home. Thinking about the numbers made me shudder. There were only ten men—just ten. Each visit was a reminder that my male reptilian circuitry was already starting to fray. Each tug at my sleeve and each gapped 19 • • 142 • • smile reminded me where everyone was headed, with my gender leading the charge. pandemonium erupted one bright morning. I arrived to find the residents scattered in the sun, as though the building at the end had disgorged them. Orange highway cones were propping doors open, and from inside I heard alarms. The emergency had happened during breakfast, and each resident had a cloth bib around his or her neck. I witnessed one nursing assistant panic and lasso together four women with rope, which prevented them from rolling down the path toward the lake. I searched for my grandmother amid the chaos, surprised to find Mona at her side. My grandmother was wearing a straw hat. “Alarms blew twenty minutes ago,” Mona said to me. “So I grabbed your grandmother.” I watched her play with the hem of her skirt. Sunlight distilled through a cottonwood’s waxy leaves and speckled the pavement. “The zoo was fun,” she said, and into my mind came the zoo, her leg, the contortions , up in the air, just so. “We need to do that again,” I said. Mona smiled. Eventually the Nursing Director cupped her hands around her mouth, mimicking a bullhorn, and yelled, “There was a scorpion in the alarm system ! Nothing to worry about. False alarm. No fire.” I watched her move from group to group. Barbara Gordon, fat as a hornet, waved at me from across the wheelchair traffic jam. She grabbed the handles on her father’s chair and pushed him over. Mr. Gordon’s plastic gun sat snug inside its holster, and the old gunslinger was decked out in cowboy hat and ostrich-quill boots. “I assume you have something for me,” Barbara said. She ran her ringed fingers through the feathered hairstyle of a distant decade. I dug the woman’s blood pressure meds...