Doris Kristoff hunched in the chair, warming her numb fingers on the coffee mug.
She felt the bruises under her arms where the man had dragged her from the lake, and remembered opening her eyes to see him bent over her like a ghost.
If only the clouds cleared her mind and let her think. Dr. Perkins had told her, hadn’t he? Plaque, he said — plaques in the brain. She told herself Perkins was wrong.
The images began like a watercolor painting that never dried, the foggy shapes of color running down behind her eyes before molding into a solid form, and then she saw them clearly for a time.
She thought of it as a picture show behind her eyes. A scent or sound often choreographed them. Sometimes when she came back she didn’t know where she was.
Now, seeing the sheriff in front of her made them start again. What was he saying?
She smelled fragrant mums and Old Spice.
her mother’s delicate hands
a bloody nose (keep your head back Doris!) a washcloth over her face
sleep in her eyes she sits patiently until the bleeding stops
her father the scent of old spice
walking together the wind from pastures tousling hair
the green of the corn a bag of groceries slung over his shoulder
he hums words and after the first few lines sing the chorus Doris!
lost in endless giggles she stares at her shoes every step sends dry dust into wisps of corn husk
summer asphalt vaper after rain the mums bloom everywhere crooning bumble bees swarm
i’m tired, daddy
high above his head shoes dangling plops her on his shoulders
daddy! daddy! sing
the lunge with his steps her teeth chatter the boots swing forward bird’s eye view
she holds tight to his forehead covers his eyes and shrieks throwing her head back in rapture
zigzags down the dirt road songs fade into a gelatinous orange sun
“More coffee for you?” Sheriff Stanley crossed the room with the coffee pitcher in his hand. “Think I lost you for a moment. Are you warm enough? Should I have the deputy get another towel?”
She shook her head and widened her eyes, sending the pictures away and focusing on him. “Y‘all don’t fuss. Guess a little shaken from this afternoon. The heat.” She had changed into dry clothes but her hair was still wet, the gray strands darker and pasted to her forehead.
Stanley sat across from her at his desk and smiled. “Yeah, the heat. Colbert was rightly worried about you, the way you fainted and all. Could’a drowned. Now a proper hospital is quite a ways from here, so Dr. Norris here in town is on the way.” He waited and watched her face for any sign of agreement.
Her face remained taut, her eyes lost in a forest.
“You understand? He has to look you over. From there we decide what to do. Now, I know you had a long day, but why don’t you tell me how you came to be at Green Lake? We want to contact your family and tell them where you are.”
She stared at him and smiled bringing the warm coffee cup to her lips. “I don’t want you to do that.”
He folded his hands on the desk and sighed. “Now why is that, Mrs. Kristoff?”
She squinted at the pictures on his desk.
Stanley reached behind the desk and placed her purse on it. “You left this on the shore.”
She reached for her purse, found her bifocals, and studied the framed pictures on his desk. “You have beautiful children.”
“Yes, ‘reckin’ I do. You?”
“I have a daughter, stubborn from the day she was born. Finally divorced that husband of hers.”
He grinned. “I see. Are you running from her?”
She took her bifocals off and gently put them in her purse. “No. I have some things to sort out. I haven’t broken any laws, have I?”
He crossed his arms. “‘Course not.” The grin again, and a hesitation. “I can’t say many swim in that lake. Blood suckers as big as my hand.” He leveled his eyes on her. “Lot’s a death in that lake.”
She set the coffee cup on the desk and clasped her fingers on top of her purse. She was cold now but tried not to show it.
“I’m a bit puzzled about that myself.”
“I want to run your name through the Database. Before I do, you want to tell me anything?”
She puffed her lips and gave him a puzzled look.
“National Crime Information Center. Missing persons,” he said.
She ironed the pleats of her skirt with her hand. “I’ve done nothing wrong.”
He stood up from the desk and came around the front of it, sat on the edge. “Can I call you Doris? That Database just tells me if anyone’s hollerin’ for you.”
“I understand. Why don’t you hear me out first?”
“We got us a small town we got here. We have one grocery store, and one post office, and Dr. Norris is our hospital. When Cliff Colbert called and told me he found this grandmother wading out in the lake with her clothes on, well, you understand.” His gun twisted against the desk and the leather holster cracked as he shifted once to release it. “And Colbert’s Camp ain’t set up this time of year. Those trailers are rented out to folks on vacation, so he doesn’t normally take any pull-ups like your camper. Luckily he let you stay. You stuck out like a purple hen in that Airstream.”
“Yeah, imagine so.”
“You understand his business. You don’t strike me as someone on vacation. He seemed to think you were troubled about something, and I think you are.”
He stood up and walked to the window and looked out over the dirt parking lot of the small police station. He spoke with his back to her.
“Not much happens around here, cats in trees, dogs waking up neighbors, kids trespassing on old man Bishop’s land.” He turned to her. “While we wait for Dr. Norris, why don’t you just tell me your story, and we won’t make any calls right now.”
Doris clutched her purse in her lap with both hands. She waited and heard footsteps on the wood floor outside the open door. The embarrassment! A sheriff calls Edward to come get her.
“Very well, Mr. Stanley. You seem forthright. May I have your word you won’t pick up that phone when you’ve heard me out?”
He sat on the desk again, the Boy Scout smile. “You have my word. But we‘re gonna have to make that call eventually.”
She turned her head toward the open door and waited.
He yelled to the big deputy she passed on the way in. “Willis? Tap on the door when Norris gets here.” He closed the door and clasped his hands together. “Tell me.”
She had left a note for Edward on the kitchen table in the fruit bowl, gently explained she had to leave, had to think, not to worry, don’t get the police involved, and can you please stop and get milk when you run into town?
She hitched the Airstream as competently as Edward — watched him plenty of times. She woke up alone the next morning for the first time in forty-six years. When sleep found her, she dreamt of men in white surgical suits and masks. They surrounded her as she lay on a frigid steel table.
That first morning alone on the lake she recalled her first visit with Smith.
“Doris. You are suffering from early dementia.” His voice was a monotone drawl, and she recalled him tapping his pen on the folder as he spoke, as though it were all rudimentary and something he had to explain so he could move on with his day. “Your brain has developed plaques, eh, like glue, among your brain cells.”
“Fine. This is between us. Ed does not need to know now,” she had said.
“You will need support. Memory care. The episodes you’ve been experiencing tell me it is well advanced.”
“Then why call it early?” She said it as though it would change the course of medicine.
That morning in the camper she looked in the mirror and smelled the medicine odor of the dream. She turned to face the emptiness of the 22 by 8-foot Airstream trailer.
She recalled when Edward first brought it home. “1967 Safari Classic!” he said. He had already backed it into the garage and stood in the doorway sideways as though it was a secret he didn’t want her to see yet.
“What do we do with it?” she had asked.
“Doris. Wally Byam! He invented the damn things!” He moved to the front of it where a window was broken, the screen hanging. He gently tucked the screen inside, whispering to himself like he did when he was planning a project. With his fingers tracing the frame of the broken window, he turned his head to her and grinned.
It could have been worse. Many men his age get foolhardy enough to buy a motorcycle or jump out of an airplane, but Edward had sublimated his yearning for a 1967 Wally Byam Safari Classic Airstream Trailer.
“Doris. The Wally Byam Airstream Club Rally is July twenty-fifth.” Edward had gone and joined the club, and she was a member whether she wanted to be or not. It said it right there on the wallet card that came in the mail for both of them.
The Rally that year was held in Las Vegas, with swarms of Airstream trailers and people of every age group. This had surprised her. She expected older folks like them. But no, silver bubbles on wheels stretched out across the desert in a glittering maze, refurbished in Elvis Presley-style amenities and in every decorative theme you could imagine by people of every age.
From there they would caravan to other states, in a group the Wilmington Register had erroneously called a “subculture breaking out of the rocking-chair stereotypes.” She read it herself right there in the Neighbor section. She had intended to call the paper after the Rally to inform them there were no rocking chairs.
It was during the Nevada Rally that the flashes of memory blackouts began. She mostly hid it from Edward, though he finally caught her when he handed her a spare trailer key.
“Ed? What is this for? I don’t know.”
He had insisted that she go for neurological tests when they returned to Wisconsin. Edward seemed to lose patience with her after that trip because he knew whatever was wrong with her he couldn’t fix.
That day in the lake she couldn’t tell how long the Colbert fellow had been standing at the waterline. She saw him as a vapor she was trembling so much.
She began to push to the shore, barely hearing his shouts. The ducks had worked their way to the shore, just feet from where she was in the water, so the sudden movement sent them into a cloud of whiteness and squawks and flaps of desperate wings.
What was he shouting? She used her hands to help push toward the shore, felt like she was moving through cement now.
I’m so tired. Before she reached the shore her body gave up. She felt the vacuum of water, felt her ears fill with blackness, then silence, and felt her hands claw the pillowed mud as she reached shallow water. Her face broke the surface once and she tried to stand and push the water out of her lungs in a scream, yet there was no air.
When she finished talking the sheriff held his wide face in his palm. He moved his hand and deep red indents appeared on the side of his cheek. He rubbed his heavy eyes.
“I understand. Colbert seemed to think you were planning on hurting yourself, Doris. After hearing your story I think that might be true.”
There was a tap on the door.
She stared through him, out the window to an expanse of recollections. “I just want to go home.”
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