Scott Turow - Identical

Evon had talked to Tim for a while to convince him to do this. Whatever the Gianises’ motives, she said, they had hidden the truth, from the Kronons, and from Tim and the other investigators. There was nothing disrespectful or cheap about getting answers to questions that should have received more forthright responses a long time ago. It was a good sales pitch, but the idea of trying to take advantage of an addled old lady still didn’t sit well with him.

“Came to visit Lidia Gianis,” he announced at the reception desk.

The young woman, a college volunteer by the look of her, had a spray of turquoise in the front of her short hairdo. With the phone to her ear for another conversation, she asked, “You are?”

“Tim Brodie. Old friend from church.”

She gave him the room number and pointed the way. Tim limped down the corridor wondering how soon his moment would come for a place like this, with the sprightly odors of disinfectant and air freshener not quite hiding the more unsettling smells of defecation and death. But it was a fine-looking place, decorated Colonial, with wooden pilaster strips in the corners of the hall and heart-backed chairs and comfy sofas in the reception area, all the furniture done in tasteful small prints, Martha Stewart on a tight budget. He passed by the chapel, fairly good-size, with white pews and a lovely dark walnut altarpiece. Three icons, elongated medieval figures on gold fields, were set on each side of the opening to the altar table, the crucifix and the stained glass window.

Clomping further down the hall, he heard live music and couldn’t resist following the sound to the door of the dayroom. The old faces, mostly women’s of course, were raised to the strains of a cello as if it were a sweet breeze. The young Asian woman with the instrument between her knees was quite talented, judging from her tone and bowing. Her music, Brahms, was offered as a gift, a reminder of the eternal and evenhanded power of beauty, a thought that stirred him deeply. He actually found himself wiping one eye as he moved on.

Once he reached Lidia’s door, he asked for help from one of the staff members circulating in their bright smocks. She summoned Lidia’s attendant. A stout black lady with short straightened hair, she approached, smiling broadly. She had a bad hip and rolled her body around it as she moved. He introduced himself and she shook with both hands, a kindly soul.

“I’m Eloise,” she said. “Take care of Lidia most of the time.”

“She decent for a visitor?”

“Oh yeah, we pretty her up every day and she just love it.” Eloise waved him behind her, but stopped with her hand on the silver doorknob. “If she get nasty, don’t mind her. Them dements are like that, you know.” She put her good hip to the door.

Lidia’s private room had the ambience of a decent chain hotel. The decorating scheme was all pastels, with plush carpeting and sheer curtains under the opened drapes, and a flowered print spread on the twin bed. Lidia sat in a beige recliner. A broad window behind her admitted a comforting rush of daylight, but her face was raised to the gray glow of a TV, from which Tim recognized the voices of Law and Order . A blanket rested on her lap. Lidia looked, for lack of any other term, hollowed out. She was far thinner than the woman he recalled, and beneath the makeup, her cheeks were now bunkers in her face. The black eyes were worst, clouded and shifting. Her entire head seemed compressed by whatever damage was occurring in her brain. It made his heart sore to see it, but it was what happened, what was happening to him. Rise and fall. The circle turns. His granddaughter, Stefanie, had called yesterday to say she was pregnant and Tim was still aloft on that news.

“Hey now, Lidia,” said Eloise, “Mr. Tim here come to see you. And you look so nice today. Don’t she look nice, Mr. Tim?”

Tim could only nod, still shy of paying compliments to a woman who was not his wife.

“See,” said Eloise, “you wearing that bracelet your sons brought you on Valentine’s Day. She always looking at the jewelry she got on.”

Lidia’s vague eyes turned to her wrist, which she studied as if she were surprised to find she had one. When she glanced back, she cast a cold look at Tim.

“Is he my husband?” Lidia asked Eloise.

“Oh no, honey. He just a friend.” Eloise propped Lidia up in the leatherette recliner. “You all go head and visit. I’m just outside, case you need me.”

Tim sat down in a wooden-armed chair a few feet from Lidia.

“Do I know you?” she asked Tim.

“Tim Brodie, Lidia. We met a million years ago at St. D’s.”

“I don’t know you,” she said. “I had a stroke and my memory is not so good.”

“Yeah, well, my memory isn’t what it once was either.”

In thirty years on the Force, and twenty-five-plus as a PI, he’d done lots of interviews under daunting circumstances, questioning children and the mentally handicapped, and naturally enough, the desperately bereaved. But this would be a new chapter and he had no idea how to start.

On Lidia’s bedside table were photographs of her two daughters and the twins and a passel of kids.

“Now who are all these folks?” he asked her.

“I don’t know. The girl just put them there. But they’re all nice people.”

Tim picked up one photograph, a group shot of her grandchildren, Paul’s two boys and her daughters’ daughters.

“Now these grandkids of yours, they’re a good-looking bunch.” Tim meant it. The Gianises were always a handsome family.

Lidia was frowning. “Is that who they are?” she asked.

“Beautiful,” Tim said. “All of them.”

“My daughter is a movie star.”

“I know.” She was referring to Helen, who was still maybe the most gorgeous woman Tim had ever met face-to-face. She was said to be a handful, personally, and never got further than a brief role in one of the soaps. According to the local gossip, she was on husband four or five by now, a strumpet by the straitened standards of St. D’s.

“Yes, I think they’re all nice people. I have a son, did you know that?”

“Two, I believe.” He tapped the picture of the twins, a recent one, Paul with his lumpy nose and Cass beside him, just a tad bigger.

“Identical twins,” she said. “No one can tell them apart.”

He agreed.

“My sons come here all the time. One of them is a big deal, too. Is he an actor?” she asked Tim. “People just love him. They tell me so all the time. Everyone here knows who he is.”

Tim said he knew Paul, too, then asked about Cass, hoping for any information. Cass seemed to be some kind of shapeshifter, materializing, then disappearing.

“Oh yes. They are such good boys, both of them.”

“I thought the other one, Cass, didn’t he have some trouble?”

Lidia pondered a second and shook her head. “I had a stroke and my memory’s not so good.” She raised her hand again and stared at the bracelet, which, by whatever logic was left to her, once more brought her attention to Tim. “Who are you? Do I know you?”

“Tim Brodie, sweetheart. I thought maybe we could play a little game, you and me. See here?”

He reached into the pocket of his overcoat and removed an inkless fingerprint pad and several pieces of eight and a half-by-eleven copier paper. He showed her how it worked, putting her whole hand on the pad and the way the impressions magically appeared on the page. She was childishly amused by the process, and they continued for several minutes. Lidia offered no objection when he bore down on her fingers to roll the print onto the sheet.

Being with Lidia couldn’t help putting him in mind of Maria’s last days, when she was mostly gone and couldn’t speak. All in all, his wife was the kindest person he had ever known-love seldom left her and she had filled their house with love like light. But in dying she became ornery and sharp-tongued, and frequently raised her voice to him, telling him that whatever he did was not right. It was a grief impossible to bear at the time, the raw unfairness that she had to die and leave as final memories ones of her being somebody else.