The Escapement Mechanism, Part 2

Notes and Introduction

What happens if a secret is guarded too closely? I was interested in how a secret kept until it had nearly eroded away could be shared in a last ditch effort to communicate it. A secret has to be known to exist after all. A few versions of this rolled around the ink ribbon, but this draft is the way forward.

Gertrude Gorland Makes a Connection

The Southgate Assisted Living Towers were often mistaken for an apartment complex with an unfortunate view of the highway. Only the large billboard with smiling seniors corrected this assumption, advertising available spaces and dreamy respite to over-burdened family members acting as caretakers who ended up stuck looking at it during their rush-hour commute.

Wemly took the hard turn into the parking lot at full speed, cursing the lack of dedicated turning lane. Visiting hours were long over, but the head nurse was fine with her coming as long she arrived before shift change. She hadn’t quite made it.

In the lobby, Wemly signed the visitor sheet with frozen hands under the neglectful eye of Norris the security guard, who didn’t look up from his paperback. Her entry from the previous week was only a few lines up the page, even though the facility housed over 200 residents.

“Thanks Norris,” Wemly said to the slightest nod of acknowledgement. The hall to her grandma’s room in the middle of the dementia wing smelled of antiseptic and bodily excretions that seemed permanently embedded in the floral wall-paper.

A collection of nurses stood outside the room, and one caught Wemly by the arm just before she entered. “She’s having a good day. The best I’ve seen actually.” She turned briefly to address the group. “The best any of us have seen.” The nurse looked down at her chart. “Normally, lucidity isn’t cause for concern, but—she’s not behaving like herself.”

The nurse gave Wemly a sympathetic look. It won’t last, it said. Yes, there are peaks, but the trend is downwards. The same look that all sympathy wore. Her siblings. Even her fucking grandfather before he passed. Why even bother going? It’s not like she will remember.

Wemly entered the room. Trudy Gorland sat reclined on her bed, propped up with pillows. A tin of candies, open and resting on its lid, welcomed consumption by visitors. It was full. Even the nurses hadn’t taken any. The maple candies could be an acquired taste, but Wemly unwrapped one and popped it into her mouth.

It was a time machine every time. She closed her eyes and was back at her grandparents’ farm in Canada, the Eastern Townships of Quebec. She had only been as a child, and only a few times, but it had always been at Christmas, so her grandparents lived permanently in a world frosted by snow. Deep, but light enough to run through, to cushion as you rolled around with your siblings, wrapped in snowsuits and scarves and the woodsmoke of Christmas evenings.

The same snow that melted on contact as hot syrup was poured into molds—carefully by grandpa—and then just as suddenly hard enough to hold. Still warm, but solid, and sugary, and the taste of childhood.

What Wemly sucked on in the nursing home was nothing like the candy of her childhood—worse than a facsimile of the recipe passed through the same childhood’s game of telephone—but she would have been disappointed if they hadn’t been there. She wasn’t sure if it was her parents who sent the candies every Christmas, or if it was in some kind of living will agreement with the home, but they always appeared at this time of year.

“Gramma?” Wemly said lightly. The old woman opened her eyes and craned her neck, the weight of years lolling her head. The eyes flickered briefly, like a TV station turning on—the TV of her grandma’s childhood—or a radio being dialed in. But now the eyes were Trudy’s. Focused. Dialed in. Aware. Appraising her like a cat might a warm lap.

Most times, if Trudy responded to her own name, Wemly took it as a comfort. Now Wemly felt a pit of worry cracking open in her stomach, like she had forgotten to study for a test. Her grandma’s gaze was not flitting about, it had landed upon her and was demanding, but of what Wemly knew not, and though she couldn’t remember the last time her grandma had been able to even ask her a question, she now dreaded what her answer might be.

Trudy pursed her lips and for a minute Wemly was back in the past, sure of the question that was coming, as it had been when Wemly was little and staying over. “Are you hungry?” was what Wemly half expected to hear, followed by the sound of the refrigerator before she would have time to formulate an answer.

Trudy’s fierce eyes never left Wemly’s own. The hooks of the gaze set firm, holding fast through sheer will against the tangled fibers of memory that clung and attempted to pull her back into herself. Trudy did not blink.

Wemly understood how precarious their connection was—how temporary. Trudy Gorland reached behind her neck and fumbled with the clasp on the locket she always wore. No matter how lucid and calm the pool Trudy currently found herself in, the swift current of dementia pulled at it, sent eddies that spun her, that confounded her hands and fingers despite their willingness. Wemly knew what the nurses were getting at though. Something was burning, and fiercely behind the veil.