“Linda died three years later,” Elmer said. “Breast cancer. She was forty-eight. Jean doesn’t remember her at all now. Doesn’t remember she ever had a daughter.” He looked at me. “But she remembers Marisol. She remembers the girl in Room 18. She remembers a baby she delivered in a bathtub thirty-two years ago.”
He shook his head slowly.
“I used to think that was the cruelest thing,” he said. “That she’d forget her own child and remember a stranger’s. I used to be so angry about it.”
“And now?”
He was quiet for a long time.
“Now I think,” he said, “the disease takes everything. Every room in the house. One by one. It closes the doors. It turns off the lights.” He looked out the window. Toward the east hallway. “But Room 18 is the one it can’t get into. That night, she was the bravest she ever was. She was exactly who she was supposed to be. And something in her won’t let go of it.”
