“I’m sorry,” she said. “I thought this was Gladys Lynch’s condo.”
“Was that her name?” the younger old woman said, her bandy wrinkled arms braced at the wrists, her hands holding tiny dumbbells she pumped in sequence, left, then right, then left again, as if she was keeping her heart going manually.
“Was?” Pandora said, her own heart nearly stopping. “What happened?”
“Oh no,” the usurper said. “They’ve only moved her.”
“Where?”
“Haven’t a clue,” the heart pumper said. “Oh, wait. When you find her, can you give her something?”
“Sure,” Pandora said, imagining some old-people’s tradition of giving gifts for occasions like being moved closer to death’s door—a cake, perhaps. Instead: “Here,” the other one said, handing the girl a tight, rubber-banded tube of junk mail that hadn’t been forwarded to wherever they’d installed the grandmother Pandora was getting to know, for real, for the first time.
A series of nurture-free nurses, recalcitrant rehabbers, and a-hole attendants later, Pandora finally found her way to “the other side,” where her grandmother had been moved. She knocked on the frame of the open door before entering to find Gladys, looking out the window, watching her breath freeze against the glass, the ice crystals feathering out geometrically, biology turned into math.
“I wished I’d smoked when I had the chance,” Gladys said, as if she was talking to herself but didn’t mind if her granddaughter listened in.
“Why, for heaven’s sake?”
“For heaven’s sake,” Gladys echoed before pausing—to think, perhaps. “I wish I smoked because of heaven. That’s why.”
“How . . . ?”
“Because maybe I’d be dead already,” Gladys said. “Maybe I’d be looking down from heaven now.”
“That’s silly,” Pandora said. To the best of her knowledge, her grandparents had both become agnostic after the war. Roger and his daughter had taken it a step further, as atheists.
“What’s silly is everybody trying to live longer,” Gladys said. “They think they’re adding years to their lives. What they don’t realize is that all those years get added on the shit end.”
Pandora wanted to quibble with Gladys’s conclusion but, looking at her grandmother’s new accommodations, found she was fresh out of sunshine and pep talks. “What happened?” she asked.
“I messed my bed,” Gladys said.
Pandora tried keeping the “yuck” off her face—couldn’t—and so went for brutal pragmatism. “Switch to Depends,” she said. “I’ve seen them on TV. All the active seniors are wearing them.”
“I’ve been wearing them,” Gladys said, her voice an angry hiss, though who that anger was aimed at wasn’t clear. “I forgot to change, goddamn it.”
“How long . . .”
“All day,” Gladys said. “I went to bed that way. They . . . exploded.”
Pandora’s “yuck” face doubled down, her mouth an oval of forlorn darkness.
“It was in my hair, Dorie,” Gladys said, tears standing in her eyes.
“Oh, Gram,” the younger girl said, wrapping her arm around the older girl’s shoulder.
After a moment: “I want you to promise me something,” Gladys said.
“Anything, Gram.”
“I want you to start smoking. Camels. Unfiltered. Die some other way.”
“Okay, Gram,” she said. “For you,” she added, already looking forward to her forgetting they’d ever had this conversation.
25
Pandora had done it the same day she decided to start working on the phone for Gladys. She’d begun wondering, idly at first but then frantically as she watched Gladys change before her eyes: Did she have more in common with her grandmother than just a hyperexpressive face? Until then, the younger woman had consoled herself with a factoid she’d heard somewhere about how Alzheimer’s was linked to the use of aluminum cookware. But when she tried to remember the source of that factoid: nothing. Crickets. Which made her wonder if—from here on out—every recall lapse or random brain fart would make her feel like she’d stepped down a step and missed, finding nothing under her feet but air and the panicked caught breath of a fall as it happened.
Whether that was to be her fate seemed like a knowable unknown. And so she bought a DNA kit from the Safeway pharmacy. The company she picked donated part of their profits to CARE or UNICEF, placing them one holier-than above competitors like 23andMe, which also cost more. The test was originally marketed as the Healing Helix, a nod to the goal of ending intolerance by showing how genetically interconnected everybody was. Someone in the company must have had second thoughts about the alliteration, however, and so the name was changed to Six Degrees, which was displayed on the box and in their ads as the numeral followed by the symbol for degree in superscript. By avoiding words altogether, the logo was considered internationally recognizable shorthand for the whole “six degrees of separation” thing. The company further reinforced this message by running ads that featured happy multicultis tracking their ancestry around the globe, dropping pins next to happy dancing villagers, next to happy nodding monks, next to happy chanting protesters, their faces streaming tears of apparent joy while the gas canister fumes filled the screen to provide a backdrop for the tagline: “One Big Happy.”
Locking herself behind the one actual interior door that actually locked, Pandora ripped open the box like her life depended on it. A shatterproof plastic test tube fell out, along with its screw-on cap and a Q-tip in cellophane followed by a folded wad of tissue-thin paper with the instruction to swab her cheek, drop the Q-tip in the test tube, and mail it back in the prepaid mailer to an address somewhere in North Carolina with the words research and park as part of the city’s name. The same instructions (presumably) followed in Spanish, French, German, Russian, Arabic, Chinese, and a dozen or so more languages. Pandora checked inside the box, hoping for more lab tech—a petri dish, say, or a bottle of reagent—some evidence that she didn’t have to wait for this process to go back and forth through the US postal system.
No such luck.
Pandora swore. Didn’t they know how many brain cells could die waiting for USPS to complete its appointed rounds? She swore again. And then she swabbed her cheek, packed up the tube, borrowed the truck, and sped off for the nearest FedEx drop-off location. She’d handle the part of the timeline she could, hoping that the recipients on the other end of the delivery would take the “Please hurry” she scrawled across the prepaid mailer in earnest and reciprocate by sending the results back with equal urgency. And if passive-aggressiveness wasn’t their thing, maybe the fact of the package coming from Fairbanks would catch somebody’s attention and move her to the front of the line. She’d played the last-frontier card before, getting live people instead of robots, because the place she called home happened to overlap with their dream vacation or retirement plans. That was the nice thing about living in a state routinely featured on the Discovery Channel: you could pimp it out for favors in a pinch.