Read Online Portland Noir by Kevin Sampsell - Free Book Online Page A

Marie Claire on my nightstand and I think: You’ll still feed me, won’t you?

ALZHEIMER’S NOIR
    BY F LOYD S KLOOT
Oaks Bottom
    I t was about 10 at night when I saw her walk out the door. Now they’re telling me, No, that’s not what happened, she wasn’t even there.
    I I don’t buy it. The room was dark, the night was darker, but Dorothy was there. We were in bed and her curved back was against my chest. She wore the pale yellow nightgown I love, with its thin straps loose against the skin of her shoulders. My arm was around her, my hand cupped her breast, we were breathing to the same rhythm. Then she slipped from my grasp and I felt a chill where she’d left the sheets folded back. She drifted like a ghost over the floor, down the hall, and out the front door that’s always supposed to be locked. I saw her fade into the foggy night.
    They tell me I’m confused. What else is new? I’m also tired. And I have a nasty cough from forty-six years of Chesterfields, even after two decades without them. And I don’t sleep worth a damn. That’s how I know what I saw in the night. Confused, maybe, but the fact is that Dorothy is gone.
    For three, four years now, Dorothy is the one who’s been confused. That’s what we’re doing in this place, this “home.” She has Alzheimer’s. We had to move out of the place where we’d lived together around sixty years.
    “Jimmy,” she’d say to me, “you look so much like Charles.”
    Well, I am Charles. Jimmy’s our son, gone now forty-two years since he went missing over Cambodia, where he wasn’t even supposed to be.
    It broke my heart. Filled me with despair, all of it: Jimmy gone too soon, then Dorothy slowing leaving me, now Jimmy somehow back because of her confusion so I have to lose them both again, night after night.
    I miss her. Where is my Dorothy? I saw her walk out the door that’s supposed to be locked. Because Alzheimer’s people wander. They try to get out of the prison they’re in, who can blame them? I feel the same way, myself.
    But at eighty-two I still have all my marbles. Thank God for that. Memory? Bush Jr., Clinton, Bush Sr., Reagan, Carter, then what’s-his-name, then Nixon, Jackson, no, Johnson, Kennedy, and I can go all the way back to Coolidge but I don’t want to show off. Or I could do 100, 93, 86, 79, 72, 65, and so on.
    I saw her fade into the foggy night. The staff here can’t remember to lock the front door, and I’m supposed to believe them when they say what I saw with my own eyes didn’t happen? It’s a crime, what they did. What they’re doing. Negligence. It’s like they’re accomplices to a kidnapping. Anything happens to Dorothy, I hold them accountable.
    Truth is, I’m not sure how long she’s been gone. I thought it was only a few hours, but then I look outside and see the day’s getting away from me. Dark, light, dark again. Makes me weary.
    “Let me use the phone,” I say to Milly, the big one, works day shift.
    “Sorry, Mr. Wade. I’m not authorized to do that.”
    Always the same thing. “Look, Dorothy wandered away! No one here’s doing it, so I need to call the police and file a missing-persons report.”
    “What you need is a rest.”
    “What I need is a detective.”
    Milly shakes her head. “We’ve been through this ten times today.” The phone is in a locked closet. She tests the door on her way to the kitchen.
    I saw Dorothy fade into the foggy night. They tell me that’s not what happened, she wasn’t there, but I don’t buy it. Her curved back against my chest, the chill, her long white hair fading as she drifted like a ghost over the floor, down the hall, and out.
    Well, okay then, it’s up to me. I’ll have to find her myself. Be the detective myself.
    Why not? I’m used to hunting around, discovering lost old things. Forgotten old things. For fifty-plus years, I had my own antiques business here in Southeast Portland, just a short walk from Oaks Bottom. Sellwood, the