The sky is powdery with dusk by the time Varya leaves the lab. When she is halfway across the Golden Gate Bridge, the main cable lights prick to life. She arcs through Land’s End, past the Legion of Honor and the mansions of Seacliff, and pulls into visitor parking on Geary. Then she signs in at reception and walks the outdoor path to Gertie’s building.
Gertie has been a resident at Helping Hands for two years. In the months after Daniel’s death, she stayed in Kingston while Mira and Varya discussed options. But in May of 2007, Mira returned from work to find Gertie facedown in the backyard, having collapsed on her way from the garden. Gertie’s left cheek was pressed to the dirt, a glassy circle of drool beside her chin. There was blood on her right arm from where she’d scraped the chicken wire fence. Mira screamed, but she soon discovered Gertie could stand on her own and even walk. After a CT scan and a blood test, doctors labeled the incident a stroke.
Varya was furious. There was no other word for it; there was barely even sadness – just rage so blinding she felt dizzy as soon as she finally heard Gertie’s voice.
‘Why,’ Varya demanded, ‘didn’t you call Mira? You could stand. You could walk. So why didn’t you go inside and call Mira – and if not Mira, then me?’
She pressed her cell phone to her ear. She was dragging her suitcase through SFO, soon to board the plane that would take her to Kingston.
‘I thought I was dying,’ Gertie said.
‘You must have soon realized you weren’t.’
Silence stretched on, and in it Varya heard what she already knew to be true, the source of her rage in the first place. I hoped I was. I wanted to. Gertie didn’t have to say it. Varya knew. She also knew why – of course, she knew why – and yet it seemed unbearably cruel to think of Gertie leaving her now, of her own volition, when they were the only two left.
Within weeks, Gertie experienced complications. She became easily confused. Her left arm went numb, and her balance was worse. For six months, she lived in Varya’s condo, but a series of dangerous falls convinced Varya she needed round-the-clock care. They toured three different facilities before deciding on Helping Hands, which Gertie liked because the building – painted cream and robin’s egg blue, with yellow awnings over each balcony – reminded her of the beach house the Golds used to rent in New Jersey. Also, it has a library.
When Varya enters her mother’s room, Gertie stands from a faded armchair and wobbles to the door on her soft ankles. The staff at Helping Hands suggested she use a wheelchair at all times, but Gertie detests the contraption and finds any excuse to get rid of it, like a teenager leaving her parents behind in a crowd.
She clasps Varya’s upper arms. ‘You look different.’
Varya leans down to kiss her mother’s delicate, velvety cheek. For most of her life, Varya hid her nose by keeping her hair long. But now her hair has gone silver, and last week, she had it cropped close to her skull.
‘Why the black clothing?’ Gertie asks. ‘Why the hair like Rosie’s Baby?’
‘Rosemary’s Baby?’ Varya frowns. ‘She was blond.’
A light knock on the door, and a nurse enters to bring Gertie dinner: chopped salad; a chicken breast in a gelatinous yellow membrane; a small roll of bread with a pat of butter, the latter wrapped in gold foil.
Gertie climbs in bed to eat, activating a robotic arm that unfolds to become a small table. In the beginning, she hated the facility. She called it that – ‘the facility,’ instead of Varya’s preferred term, ‘the home’ – and weekly she tried to escape from it. Eighteen months ago – after she called Don Dorfman’s Auto Emporium and set in motion plans to purchase a Volvo S40, giving Don Dorfman the number of a long-defunct credit card once owned by Saul – Gertie was prescribed an antidepressant, and her circumstances improved. Now she attends continuing education classes on subjects like Battles of the Second World War and the popular Presidential Affairs (Not of State). She plays mah-jongg with a group of boisterous widows. She makes use of the library and even the pool, where she bobs atop an inflatable lounger like a celebrity on a parade float, calling to whomever is in shouting distance.
‘I don’t know why you won’t come to the dining hall,’ she tells Varya when the nurse leaves. ‘We could sit at the table and socialize. Maybe you’d even eat something.’
But Gertie’s new friends make Varya uncomfortable. They gossip constantly about whose son is due to visit, whose granddaughter has just given birth. They responded with shock, then pity, after learning that Varya is both childless and unmarried. And they showed little interest in her longevity research, which aims, after all, to help people like them.
‘But no children?’ they persisted, as if Varya might have lied the first time. ‘No one to share your life with? What a shame.’
Now Varya pauses at Gertie’s bedside, standing. ‘I come here to see you. I don’t need to socialize with anyone else. And I’ve told you, Ma, that I never eat this early. Not before –’
‘– seven thirty. I know.’
Gertie’s face is both defiant and doleful. She knows Varya better than anyone else, knows her deepest secret and has probably guessed plenty of others, and lately Varya’s visits have provoked these power struggles – times when Gertie pushes against Varya’s carefully assembled exterior and Varya pushes the wooden thing back, insisting on its legitimacy.
‘I brought you something,’ Varya says.
She walks to a small, square table by the window and begins to unload a care package from a brown paper bag. There is a book of poems by Elizabeth Bishop, which she found at a library sale; a jar of Milwaukee’s dill pickles, in honor of Saul; and lilacs, which she brings into Gertie’s small bathroom. She cuts the stems over a trash can, fills a tall glass with tap water, and carries them back to the table by the window.
‘If you’d stop walking back and forth like that,’ Gertie says.
‘I brought you flowers.’
‘So stop and look at them.’
Varya does. The glass is too short. One flower keels dumbly over the side. They won’t be alive much longer.
‘Very pretty,’ says Gertie. ‘Thank you.’
And when Varya takes in the bland plastic table and the window felted with dust, the hospital-like bed across which Gertie has laid a faded afghan Saul’s mother crocheted, she can see why Gertie thinks so. In these surroundings, the flowers stand out, so colorful they almost look neon.
Varya pulls a metal folding chair from the card table at the window to Gertie’s bedside. The armchair is closer to the bed, but its fabric is nubby and stained and Varya has no way of knowing who’s sat on it.
Gertie peels back the foil around the butter and digs inside with a plastic knife. ‘Did you bring me a photo?’
Varya has, though every week she hopes Gertie will forget to ask. Ten years ago, she made the mistake of photographing Frida with the camera on her new cell phone. Frida had just arrived at the Drake after a three-day journey from a primate lab in Georgia. She was two weeks old: her pink face wrinkled and pear shaped, her thumbs in her mouth. That year, Gertie was still living alone, and the thought of her isolation compelled Varya to send a photo by e-mail. Immediately she realized her error. She had joined the Drake one month before, at which point she signed an uncompromising confidentiality policy. But Gertie responded to the photo with such glee that Varya soon found herself sending another – this one of Frida wrapped in a teal blanket while being fed by bottle.
Why didn’t she stop? For two reasons: because the photos were a way to share her research with Gertie, who had never fully understood it – previously, Varya had worked with yeast and drosophila, organisms so small and uncharismatic that Gertie could not fathom how Varya might discover anything of use to human beings – and because they brought Gertie delight; because Varya brought Gertie delight.
‘Better,’ says Varya now. ‘A video.’
Gertie’s face is a mask of anticipation. Her hands, thickened and gnarled by arthritis, reach for the cell phone, as if Varya has brought news of a grandchild. Varya helps Gertie hold the phone and press Play. In the video, Frida is grooming herself while looking into the mirror that hangs outside of her cage. The mirror is a source of enrichment, like the puzzle feeders and the classical music played in the vivarium each afternoon. By reaching their fingers through the bars, the monkeys can manipulate the mirrors, using them to look at themselves as well as the rest of the cages.
‘Oh!’ said Gertie, holding the screen close to her face. ‘Look at that.’
The video is two years old. Varya has taken to recycling old material during these visits, for Frida looks very different now. She smiles, remembering Frida at this age, but Gertie’s face is darkening. In the three years since her stroke, these moments have become more frequent. Varya knows what will happen before the transformation has finished: a vacancy in the eyes, a slackness of the mouth, as Gertie’s new disorientation asserts itself.
Now she looks from the phone to Varya with accusation. ‘But why do you keep her in a cage?’