The Arsonist (22 page)

Two cars awaited them, and they drove for what seemed like hours. The roads were so deeply pitted that their driver often had to turn the car almost sideways to avoid getting stuck. Sylvia’s back ached from their jolting progress.

The station was a series of mud buildings with thatched roofs, some whitewashed, some not. The refugees were mostly Somalis, those beautiful women and their children, their slender faces now grotesquely thin in many cases. A few were doing well, but many of the newly arrived children were lethargic, too weak or numbed even to cry, their eyes
sunken and old, world-weary in their skull-like faces, their bellies distended, their hair an odd reddish color. Two that Sylvia noticed seemed far gone. They lay motionless on pallets on the floor, their mothers lying next to them, cradling them—their arms and legs just sticks, bone and claw. They wouldn’t survive, Frankie said later. They’d come in too sick.

Frankie moved easily among the children and their mothers, speaking a language that Sylvia couldn’t guess the meaning of except for Frankie’s tone: concerned, full of sympathy, but always also pointed, cool, efficient. As she watched Frankie touch a mother’s shoulder, a child’s forehead or belly, Sylvia realized she had never noticed her daughter’s hands before now, how graceful, how white. How quick, while also seeming slow, infinitely careful.

There was an argument with the nurse before they left. She was impatient with Frankie about the arrival of supplies, equipment, food. Frankie was solicitous and accommodating, but firm. There were difficulties, but the NGO was trying to correct them. It would get better. She must be patient.

It was hard, Frankie told Sylvia later. Convoys carrying medications and food had been intercepted, robbed.

“But medications and food for
children
?” Sylvia had asked.

“Everyone needs food,” Frankie had said flatly.

They drove back over the potholed roads they’d come in on, Frankie silent now. And then they had the flight back to Nairobi. They took a taxi home, and from its windows as they drove, Sylvia saw skinny cattle grazing imperturbably in the scrubby grass on the median strips of the busy road while traffic whizzed by in either direction. They were herded by tall, unsmiling natives in bright robes. Drought, Frankie said when Sylvia asked about it. The Masai grasslands were brown, so they drove the cattle to any place where there might be forage.

As they approached and entered Nairobi itself, Sylvia took in anew the life of the place, the buses and
matatu
, the streets crowded with people walking—walking in suits, carrying briefcases; walking in cheerful patterned dresses, carrying enormous bundles on their heads. They passed shopping centers and the dusty central park. They passed all the entrepreneurial improvisations—juice stands, fruit stands, clothing stands,
their goods sometimes spread out all over the sidewalk, people milling around, looking, buying, bargaining. The smell of cooking fires, of disinfectant, hung in the air.

And then they were suddenly back at the peace and order of Frankie’s compound, driving through the squealing metal gates opened by the guard, the air around them scented with mimosa, with frangipani. Inside, Alice, the maid, had left dinner under dampened towels on the kitchen counter. The sun sank, and dark encircled them as Sylvia and Frankie sat eating outside on the patio overlooking the trimmed green lawn and the tropical garden, which teemed with colorful plants Sylvia had always thought of as annuals—lantana, impatiens, bougainvillea. Dinner was a cold spicy Swahili dish, a bit like curry, and they each had several glasses of a chilled South African wine. It all seemed criminally luxurious in contrast to where they’d been.

But when they brought their dishes in to clean up, there was no water at the taps. They went to bed without washing the dishes, without showering, without flushing the toilet. Before she dropped off, Sylvia heard Frankie shutting the rape gate, heard its clatter and then the sharp click of the padlock.

Sitting in a corner of Dr. Thibodeau’s office, watching the back of Alfie’s head as he bent over a task the doctor had assigned him, Sylvia was thinking how vulnerable he looked from this angle, as hunched and concentrated as a second grader, even his white hair tufted up awkwardly, like a child’s. Dr. Thibodeau was sitting next to him, leaning over to watch what he was drawing. She had asked him to perform a number of tasks—to count backward by sevens, to copy a design. Now he was supposed to be drawing a clock face, showing the time as ten past eleven. He had started off confidently enough, though he’d protested the nature of the task.

“Oh, I know, it does seem silly,” Dr. Thibodeau had agreed. “But just as another kind of doctor might want to test for something you’d likely have no sense of at all—something in your blood, let’s say—just like that, this exercise may show me things you wouldn’t take notice
of, or even care about. But to me it’ll be quite … 
useful
!” Her voice was always warm, deferential.
Silly me, to be interested in this foolish information
.

Now he was faltering. He stopped and turned to her. “Well, of course,” he said, “with Roman numerals, the two is like the eleven. So it’s hard to … separate them out.”

“That is so true. Maybe we should just stick to Arabic numbering.”

He seemed to freeze. “Arabic?” he asked, after a few seconds.

“Yes, you know, the figures we usually make for a one or a two or a three.”

He hunched over the table a little longer. Dr. Thibodeau was encouraging, though Sylvia could see that the pencil was moving only slightly, only occasionally. “Very good,” she said.

After another few minutes, he sat back. “That’s it,” he said. And after a long silence, contemptuously: “You know, digital clocks have made this … stupid.”

“I know,” she said. “Even my watch is digital now.” She held her wrist up for him to see. Then she said, as if only idly curious, “I wonder if you could tell me now the three words I asked you to memorize earlier.”

“I have no memory of that,” Alfie said. His voice was dismissive.

“Oh, yes,” Dr. Thibodeau said cheerfully. “There were three nouns I named, and you repeated them for me? I just want to go over them one more time.
If
you would be so kind.” She curtsied her head slightly, smiling warmly at him.

There was a pause, a long pause. Sylvia was aware of her own tension, of her wish that he do it, that he triumph, and of the quickly dawning, shamefully gratified knowledge that he couldn’t. That she was right: that it was real, his failure.

Alfie finally said softly, “No.”

“All right,” said Dr. Thibodeau. “Let’s move on. That part’s not so important anyway.”

He had a few more tasks to perform. And then Dr. Thibodeau thanked him, as warmly as ever, told him she thought he’d done fantastically, that she was so grateful to him for enduring these assignments, but that they were useful in her thinking about cognitive function. She stood, and he
did, too, more slowly. And took the hand she extended to him. “You’ve been so patient with all this,” she said.

“Oh, no,” he said. “It was fine. I won’t say the most
interesting
interview I’ve ever had, but I didn’t mind.”

Dr. Thibodeau laughed. Her hand moved to his back, and she was gently guiding him, moving with him, to the door. “I’m just going to chat with Sylvia a few minutes about the same tests, so if you can just wait in the aptly named waiting room. I think there’s a
Newsweek
there.
People
magazine, too, but I don’t imagine that’s quite your cup of tea.”

He exhaled, a quick, amused sound. No, he said. No.

The door was open now, and Dr. Thibodeau said to the nurse, “Dr. Rowley will wait here for his wife, Liddy. We’ll be a few minutes.”

Just as he turned to go, Alfie raised his finger and smiled triumphantly at her:
“Pencil!”
he announced.

She laughed. “That’s it! The word was
pencil
. Right you are.
Horse, rose, pencil
. Good for you!”

When the door shut, Dr. Thibodeau came and sat in the same chair she’d been in, next to Alfie’s. She swiveled in it to face Sylvia. “You can probably tell that we had pretty mixed results there.” Her face was sober.

“I’m not surprised,” Sylvia said. “But you know, I’m relieved. I’m ashamed to say that, but the thing is, I thought he might just breeze through all this, and I’d be left thinking I was just imagining things. Or exaggerating anyway.”

“No, there’s clearly some real loss. You’re right.” She tilted her head and smiled sadly at Sylvia. “And that feeling you have, of confirmation, really? That happens often. It’s a great relief to people to have some clarity finally. So don’t be ashamed. Not in the least.” Her tone was as warm, as reassuring, as it had been with Alfie, and Sylvia wondered for a fleeting moment whether she ever let go of this, whether she made ironic remarks, jokes, about a patient occasionally—maybe to Liddy. Or at home, to her husband, if she had one.

“So what comes next?”

“More tests, I’m afraid. But these will seem
medical
to him, and therefore probably be less distressing in some ways. Easier to deal with, to explain to yourself. Blood work, an MRI, some things like that. Liddy will set it all up for you at the hospital.”

“And then what?”

“Well, then comes the hard part. Because there just isn’t a lot we can do. We have a few drugs that can slow things down—slow the progress of the disease. So it’s good you brought him in now. The earlier the better. But as you probably know, the trajectory is set, and the prognosis is not good if it’s Alzheimer’s. It
is
a terminal disease, after all.”

They talked awhile about the way it usually went, about the timing of the various stages, about how long it would be before the test results would come. Sylvia was growing tense about the notion of Alfie, waiting outside, but she asked, “Why is it so much worse since we moved up here?”

“I’m sorry, I know you told me, but when did you move, again?”

“In May. When Alfie retired.”

“Well, sometimes the kind of changes he’s just gone through, both in his routine and then also in his physical surroundings, can be a trigger for a … 
lurch
forward, I guess you could call it.” She was frowning. Her face was earnest. “Any change, really, is challenging. So this one, well, it might have been a sort of double whammy, sad to say, with the actual move and then the retirement on top of that.”

“But it’s really marked. And he seems so much more … remote now. Very quickly. And he’s had what I guess I’ll have to call hallucinations.”

“Oh, really?”

“Yes.”

“Tell me about those.”

Sylvia did. The shadow he mistook for a dog. The idea he had—Sylvia thought it might be left over from a dream—that their daughter had been kidnapped by terrorists. “This, even though we’d had her over for dinner the night before.”

Dr. Thibodeau said all this raised some other possibilities. She herself had noticed a stiffness in his gait, and also that he still had a good command of language.

“Most of the time,” Sylvia said.

“Yes. And some of these symptoms are a bit different from Alzheimer’s. So it’s possible it’s a disease called Lewy body disease.”

“Is that better? Is it curable?”

“No. No, not really. It presents differently, but the course is similarly
downhill. It’s just, if it’s Lewy body, he’ll have days when he seems better suddenly. Or even quick switches in and out in a short period of time. But ultimately a slow decline, just like Alzheimer’s.”

They sat silently for a moment. “I’m so sorry,” Dr. Thibodeau said.

“Yes,” Sylvia said, getting up.

As she left the room, her eye fell on the drawing, Alfie’s drawing of the clock face. It was a rough circle, more an oval, actually, with an uneven, almost deckled edge. Only the top-right quarter of the oval was filled in, an X at 12 and a Roman numeral I about where the 3 would have been. There was a wavering arrow on the left-hand side, somewhere between where the 9 and the 10 might have been. It looked as though a three-year-old had drawn it. Her shock was almost physical.

In the car, Alfie seemed both relaxed and tired, suddenly, and Sylvia decided she wouldn’t go shopping at the supermarket, which was what she had planned. There was enough stuff in the house. She could just stop at Snell’s for what she’d need to tide them over for a day or two. She was mentally reviewing the contents of the pantry and the refrigerator for possible meals when Alfie spoke.

“That young woman,” he said. “What is it that she’s studying?”

“Something about memory.”

“I’m afraid I wasn’t of much help to her,” he said.

“Oh, I think you were, some.”

“I’m surprised you didn’t tell her that’s not my field.”

She ignored his tone. “I don’t think that mattered very much. She said she’d be able to make use of some of it, anyway.”

“Well.” He settled back again. “Good.”

By the time they got to Snell’s, he was asleep, his head dropped forward, his hands resting on his thighs, palms turned up. As she turned off the engine, she wondered what to do about him. She didn’t want to take him in with her, newly awakened, bewildered, and have him traipsing behind her in that state for all to see. But would he be confused if he woke out here on his own? Wonder where he was? Leave the car? After a moment she decided it was better to leave him and trust—hope—that if he woke, he’d recognize Snell’s and know that he should wait for her.

She got out of the car slowly—
sneakily
, she said to herself—and shut the door as quietly as she could behind her, latching it only partially. She mounted the broad, scuffed wooden steps and went inside, the bell attached to the door announcing her.

There were four or five people moving around inside the store. Adrian was working the cash register, and she felt the slight sense of unease she always had at the idea of an encounter with him. He was standing, arms folded across his chest, talking to Loren Spader. They both turned and nodded at her as she came in. She raised her hand in response, and they returned to their conversation. Spader’s loud voice could be heard again as she moved to the back of the store to get milk. He was expounding on his theories about arson, the unavoidable topic everywhere in town. “Just you wait,” he said. “He’ll do his own house eventually, that’s what this is all heading toward, and then who’s going to suspect anything? He’ll be just one of the crowd of victims collecting damages.”