10

SLEEPING IN A NEW place had always given Zee nightmares. Not that her childhood room was a new place. But it was certainly a strange place.

“The Museum of the Perfect Childhood” was how Finch referred to the room that Maureen Finch had created for her daughter.

Zee’s room was reminiscent of the fairy tales Maureen was so fond of writing: white canopy bed with pink roses hand-painted on the head-board, ballerinas in different poses on the wallpaper, a dressing table with mouth-blown perfume atomizer bottles, though Zee, who hated any kind of scent, had never filled them up. The silver brush-and-mirror set placed on the diagonal bore her initials in the classic signet H. F. T.

Zee had never actually found out her middle name. During her teenage years, Finch and Melville had joked that the T. stood for “trouble.” Trouble is her middle name, Finch was fond of saying. Sometimes, if he was in a particularly playful mood, he would sing her the song “Trouble” from the soundtrack of The Music Man, but then he would catch himself, saying that a dignified man of his age and persuasion should never be caught singing a show tune, that it was just too much of a cliché.

The fact was that even Finch had never had any idea what Zee’s middle name was. Hepzibah was the name he had chosen for his daughter, the derivation obvious to anyone who knew him as a Hawthorne scholar. Maureen was given the honor of choosing the middle name, and she had chosen T. Whenever anyone asked Maureen what the T. stood for, she always replied that it simply stood for the letter T. “It is what it is,” she was fond of saying.

Zee had always believed that one day Maureen would tell her what her real middle name was, but now of course it was too late. When Maureen died, everything was frozen in place, from Zee’s middle initial to the childhood room her mother had spent so much time decorating for what she clearly hoped would be the most perfect of little girls, her little princess.

That Zee was neither perfect nor a princess was evident elsewhere in the room. There were whole segments of wall where she had taken her Crayolas and colored in the ballerinas-head to toe to tutu. She’d had the measles at the time and therefore couldn’t be punished for her crime. Maureen, who didn’t believe in inoculation, had insisted that Zee stay in a dimly lit room for days with nothing to do. To entertain herself Zee moved systematically around the perimeter of her little world, decorating only as high as she could reach and choosing the colors she most preferred-Electric Lime and Fuzzy Wuzzy.

The colorful ballerinas were creative enough but fatally flawed, Maureen always said, though when Zee asked what she meant, her mother could never articulate a response. Instead Maureen had waist-high wainscoting put up around the room covering the flawed dancers. She painted it white and had rosebuds stenciled along the chair rail to match the bed. Just a trace of Zee’s artwork remained now, the occasional wild scribble looping upward past the wainscoting, then disappearing back down again.

There were other signs as well, through the years that followed, that Zee was not the princess type. Scuba gear dangled off the ballet bar, from a job she’d gotten untangling mooring and lobster lines from the propellers of the tourists’ boats that so often became caught in them. Those jobs paid forty dollars a pop, better than she could make waitressing, for a task that usually took less than twenty minutes. If she wore her bikini, she often got paid even more, but usually the men hung around and tried to help, which just made things take longer.

Regarding the room now, Zee thought that it did seem she was sleeping in a strange place, or rather the place of a stranger. The room had so little connection to her now that she found herself imagining what the girl who lived here might have been like. What did she want? What were her dreams? In some faraway part of herself, Zee seemed to know. But she couldn’t get to the answer.

ZEE HAD FINISHED TWO-THIRDS OF the bottle of wine before she crawled into bed. She was so tired that she didn’t even bother to change her clothes, just removed her jeans and slept in the T-shirt she’d been wearing. She had a lot on her mind: Finch, Lilly, Michael. She wasn’t angry at Michael anymore; she was simply exhausted, both emotionally and physically. She fell asleep in less than five minutes.

SHE AWAKENED FROM A DEEP sleep to feel another presence in the room. She was not alone. She sat up quickly, her heart pounding.

He was standing over her now, and the scent of him was familiar. And then a voice, one she recognized, barely above a whisper.

“Please help me,” Finch said.

As her eyes focused, Zee recognized her father. He stood still as marble, frozen in place, unable to break free.

11

FINCH HAD TWO MORE freezing episodes the following morning. It was Jessina, and not the neurologist, who finally taught them “Up and Over.”

Jessina and her son, Danny, lived in the Point, an area of Salem just off Lafayette Street that had a large Dominican population. She’d been a nurse back in the Dominican Republic and was taking night classes at Salem State, trying to complete her RN certification. Days she worked part-time in a nursing home and part-time as a private home health aide, initially for a woman who had died from complications of Parkinson’s six months before and now for Finch.

Jessina was addicted to the Lifetime Channel and to Swedish Fish candies, both facts that for some reason Finch seemed to find hilariously funny. For such a tiny woman, she had a huge presence. Zee marveled at the way she took over a house simply by entering it, speaking to Finch in a poetic stream of consciousness that included her native Spanish, Dorchester English, and an affectionate baby talk that she had developed to soothe her patients.

If Finch had minded the way the neurologist talked down to him, he didn’t seem to mind the baby talk from Jessina. It was clear that he genuinely liked her. They had developed a routine in the last few months. Breakfast cereal hand-fed, then a shower, then television-something that Finch had seldom, if ever, enjoyed.

“If you step up and over, you can break the freeze.” Jessina demonstrated the exaggerated step the next time Finch froze in place.

He looked at her strangely.

“Come on, you know this!” she encouraged. She turned to Zee. “It’s a different part of the brain that is used to climb.”

She helped Finch to lift his leg in an exaggerated fashion, Zee reached out to steady him. And it worked. The step freed him, and Finch continued his shuffle toward the bathroom.

“Thank you,” Zee said to Jessina.

She shrugged. “I taught him that trick a while back. He just forgot. Can you pick up some Depends while you’re out?” Jessina asked her.

Zee was shocked. “He wears Depends?”

“If you want to get the store brand without the elastic, it will save you money. I can just put them on inside his underpants.”

Finch grimaced. He didn’t mind the baby talk, but he clearly didn’t like this discussion.

“I’m sorry, Papi,” Jessina said, and squeezed his hand.

Zee could hear her singing a song to Finch through the closed bathroom door:

Los pollitos dicen pío, pío, pío

Cuando tienen hambre, cuando tienen frío.

La gallina busca el maíz y el trigo.

Les da la comida y les presta abrigo.

Bajo sus dos alas acurrucaditos

Hasta el otro día duermen los pollitos.

She wondered how Jessina would have reacted-did react, perhaps-when she heard Finch as Hawthorne. The thought of the Hawthorne monologues being answered in this lilting baby talk seemed surreal. Perhaps Jessina hadn’t even noticed the difference in Finch’s speech pattern. Perhaps she thought he’d simply been more talkative than usual.