Okay, he didn’t say that, that’s just you reading between the lines. You spent half an hour talking about the future with him. Soon a stranger is going to be living inside your body. You, Future Jerry, may even be that stranger. Bad days are coming, days when you will wander from the house and get lost at the mall, days where you will forget what your parents looked like, days where you’ll no longer be able to drive. Other than the journal, your writing days are over. And that’s only the beginning. The days will get so dark that in the end you won’t know who Sandra is, or that you have a daughter. You may not even know your own name. There will be things you can’t remember, and there will be things you can remember that never actually happened. There will be simple things that no longer make any sense. The day is coming when your world will be without logic, without any kind of sense, without any awareness. You won’t be able to hold Sandra’s hand and watch her smile. You won’t be able to chase Eva and pretend you’re a grizzly bear. That day . . . Doctor Goodstory couldn’t tell you when it would be. Not tomorrow. That’s the good news here. All you have to do is make sure that day will never be tomorrow.
The nursing home is fifteen miles north of the city. It’s set on five acres of land, gardens flowing out into the neighboring woods, a view of the mountains to the west, no power lines to interrupt the view, far enough off the main road to avoid the sound of passing trucks. It’s secluded. Peaceful. Though Jerry doesn’t see it that way. He sees the nursing home as being out of the way so people can shovel their parents and sick relatives into them then slip into the out of sight out of mind phase of their life.
Eva has the car radio on as they drive there. The five o’clock news comes on just as they hit the driveway leading up to the home. The driveway is close to a hundred yards long, the trees lining it mostly skeletal looking, a handful of them with tiny buds starting to grow. A report comes on the radio of a homicide. A woman’s body was found an hour ago, and like always when Jerry hears these type of reports it makes him sad to be a human being. Ashamed to be a man. It means while he was walking along the beach with Eva enjoying the breeze, this poor woman was living the last few seconds of her life. It’s news like this, Jerry remembers, that has always put his own problems into perspective.
Eva brings the car to a stop. The nursing home is forty years old, fifty at the most, two stories of gray brick stretching fifty yards from left to right, and another fifty yards from front to back, a black roof, some wooden windowsills stained dark brown, not a lot of color other than the gardens where spring is working its magic, bulbs planted in the past now coming back to life. There’s a large door at the front of the nursing home made of oak that reminds Jerry of a church door. It all looks familiar to him, but doesn’t feel familiar, as if he hasn’t lived here but saw it once in a movie. He can’t even remember what the name of this place is. This life that is now his isn’t his at all, but belongs to a man from the same movie this nursing home is from, a man who confesses to murders of women who never existed, a man whose wife hates him, this man becoming less and less of the Jerry he used to be.
“Don’t make me go in there.”
“Please, Jerry, you have to,” Eva says, taking off her seat belt. When he doesn’t move, she reaches across and takes his off too. “I’ll come and visit you again tomorrow, okay?”
He wants to tell her no, that tomorrow isn’t good enough, that he’s her father, that she wouldn’t exist if it weren’t for him, that when she was a baby he once tweaked his back while bathing her and could barely walk for a week, that he once dropped a jar of baby food and cut his finger picking up the pieces, that he once thought about calling an exorcist after undoing her diaper and seeing the mess she had made. He wants to tell her he put Band-Aids on her knees and tweezed out splinters and bee stings, that he brought back teddy bears from faraway countries and then, when she was older, brought back fashion from those same places. These things he can remember. He can’t remember his parents. He can’t remember his books. He can’t remember this morning. The least Eva can do, he wants to tell her, is not make him go in there. And the very least she can do is come in with him. But he says none of this. It’s the way of the world, the natural cycle, and he’s thirty years ahead of schedule, but that’s not her fault, it’s his, and he can’t punish her for that. He takes her hand and he smiles, and he says, “You promise?”
The big front door of the home opens. Nurse . . . Hamilton, her name comes to him as she walks towards them, stops halfway between the big oak door and the car and smiles at them. She’s a big woman who looks like she could bear-hug a bear. Her hair is a fifty-fifty mix of black and gray, and looks like it was last styled in the sixties. In her late fifties or early sixties, she has the exact kind of smile you want to see on a nurse, the kind of smile your grandmother would have. She’s wearing a nurse’s uniform with a gray cardigan over top that has a name badge pinned to it.
“Do you promise?” he asks again.
“I’ll do my best,” Eva says, looking down for a moment, and that doesn’t sound like a promise at all. He keeps smiling as she carries on. “You have to do your best to stay put, Jerry. How you made it into the city from here I don’t know,” she says, and nobody knows, least of all him. It’s a fifteen-mile walk to the edge of the town, but it’s another five on top of that to where he was found. He also can’t think why he went to the library. Maybe to see his books, maybe to see other books, maybe to fall asleep and get kind of arrested. They get out of the car just as Nurse Hamilton reaches it.
“Jerry,” Nurse Hamilton says, and she’s smiling and shaking her head just a little, in a Well, we’ve all been very amused at your antics way. “We’ve missed you all day.” She puts an arm around his shoulders and starts walking him to the door. “How you keep sneaking out is a mystery.”
“Can I have a word with you?” Eva asks the nurse once they get inside, and the nurse nods and Jerry imagines it will be more than one word, and that those words are going to be about him finding his way into town, and that none of those words are going to be friendly. He’s left standing in a foyer near a reception desk with another nurse behind it while Eva and Nurse Hamilton disappear. The nurse from behind the desk smiles at him and starts chatting, asking him if he enjoyed his time at the beach. He tells her he did, which is no doubt what she was expecting to hear. When Nurse Hamilton and Eva come back, Eva tells him to be well, and he tells her he’ll do his best. When he goes to hug her, she pulls back a little at first, but then puts her arms around him. He doesn’t want to let her go when she pulls away a few seconds later, but more than that he doesn’t want to cause the kind of scene that proves Eva and Sandra made the right decision to put him in this place. He watches her go, then stands in the doorway and watches her car disappear through the trees.
“Come on, Jerry,” Nurse Hamilton says, and she puts her arm around him again. It’s warm and heavy and comforting. He can smell coffee and cinnamon. He wants to smile back at her, but finds he can’t. “Let’s get you some dinner. You must be hungry.”
She leads him down to the dining room. They walk past people and Jerry looks at them, these people with other problems, and the way they’ve all been left here by their families makes him think of them as the rejected and the unwanted, and then he thinks of himself as their king, then he thinks he’s being too harsh in thinking that, that everybody here has a story and he doesn’t know what it is, but then he thinks that maybe he does know those stories but has forgotten them. He sits at a table by himself and puts his appetite to good use. Jerry is the youngest person in here except for one other guy whose skull is caved in on one side. A nurse is feeding him.