I stared at him.
“Who?” I said.
He looked at the monitor.
“My wife,” he said.
He turned the monitor so I could see it.
The fourth box. The camera view I couldn’t see before.
Ezoic
It showed a small room. Grainy, black and white. Shelves along one wall stacked with towels and toilet paper and cleaning supplies. A mop bucket. A vacuum cleaner.
And in the middle of the floor, sitting on the edge of an old bare mattress, an old woman.
White hair. Long. Loose around her shoulders. A long white nightgown. Bare feet.
Ezoic
She was holding a stack of towels in her lap. Folding them. Unfolding them. Folding them again.
And she was rocking back and forth. Slowly.
Her lips were moving.
“That’s Jean,” the clerk said quietly. “My wife. Fifty-three years.”
I didn’t say anything.
“She has Alzheimer’s,” he said. “Six years now. It’s bad. She doesn’t know me most days. She doesn’t know where she is. What year it is.” He swallowed. “But she always knows where Room 18 is.”
