Secret Brother by Andrews V.C

Author:Andrews, V.C. [Andrews, V.C.]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: Pocket Books
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

11

At dinner, Grandpa Arnold didn’t ask me anything about my conversation with Dr. Patrick, nor did he mention anything she had told him about our tense little discussion. Perhaps she had told him that the best way to handle me was to ignore me. I knew that was what everyone was doing now, handling me. They had been doing that since the day Willie died. I had resented it until now. Handle me, I thought. Cater to my every whim and need. I could be as selfish as anyone else, if I had to be.

As if to underscore what I was thinking, my grandfather and Mrs. Camden talked about everything else but me and the boy in Willie’s room. I didn’t know if he was putting on a show for me to demonstrate that he could be just as aloof about it all as I was, but Grandpa Arnold was even more interested in Mrs. Camden, her early life, her education, some of her nursing experiences, and how she had come to live in Prescott. It was almost as if I wasn’t there, but I was interested in her answers.

Shortly after her husband had died, Mrs. Camden said, she had taken a private-duty nurse position at the home of one of the founding families of the community, the Brocktons. The matriarch of the family had been a vigorous woman in her early eighties, but she had rapidly fallen into what Mrs. Camden called dementia. It had gotten so she didn’t even recognize her own children and certainly not her grandchildren.

Of course, I wondered how you could forget your own family. I almost unintentionally turned the conversation to the boy when I asked, “Isn’t that just amnesia?”

“Amnesia,” she said, “is the loss of facts, personal experiences. Dementia is the loss of mental functions like cognition, the ability to reason, to understand what’s being said or done. There’s loss of memory and even language skills, but it’s a far more severe situation. Amnesia victims can and do eventually remember things,” she explained.

I looked at Grandpa while she spoke. He was staring at her with such admiration. It really surprised me, because I knew it wasn’t easy to impress him. I think he realized that I was looking more at him than at her while she spoke. He cleared his throat and turned back to his food.

“Well, I’m with the Eskimos when it comes to that condition,” he said. “Time to put you on a shelf of ice and set you sailing off into the sunset.”

“Oh, you don’t really believe that, William,” Mrs. Camden told him. I saw how she reached over to put her left hand over his for a moment. He didn’t pull his away. She lifted hers, and they got started on a new topic.

Well, they’re happy peas in a pod. Good for them, I thought. I finished my dinner and excused myself to go up and complete my homework. I was so proud of the way I could walk past Willie’s room and not have the slightest temptation to look into it.

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