the Third Twin (1996)

Walking around, he would select his main victim. She would be a pretty girl with a vulnerable look. He would take her arm, saying: “This way, please, I’m with security.” He would lead her into the corridor then turn the wrong way, to the pool machine room. There, just when she thought she was on the way to safety, he would smack her face and punch her in the gut and throw her on the dirty concrete floor. He would watch her roll and turn and sit upright, gasping and sobbing and looking at him with terror in her eyes.

Then he would smile and unbuckle his belt.

2

MRS. FERRAMI SAID: “I WANT TO GO HOME.”

Her daughter Jeannie said: “Don’t you worry, Mom, we’re going to get you out of here sooner than you think.”

Jeannie’s younger sister, Patty, shot Jeannie a look that said “How the hell do you think we’re going to do that?”

The Bella Vista Sunset Home was all Mom’s health insurance would pay for, and it was tawdry. The room contained two high hospital beds, two closets, a couch, and a TV. The walls were painted mushroom brown and the flooring was a plastic tile, cream streaked with orange. The window had bars but no curtains, and it looked out onto a gas station. There was a washbasin in the corner and a toilet down the hall.

“I want to go home,” Mom repeated.

Patty said: “But Mom, you keep forgetting things, you can’t take care of yourself anymore.”

“Of course I can, don’t you dare speak to me that way.”

Jeannie bit her lip. Looking at the wreck that used to be her mother, she wanted to cry. Mom had strong features: black eyebrows, dark eyes, a straight nose, a wide mouth, and a strong chin. The same pattern was repeated in both Jeannie and Patty, although Mom was small and they were both tall like Daddy. All three of them were as strong-minded as their looks suggested: “formidable” was the word usually used to describe the Ferrami women. But Mom would never be formidable again. She had Alzheimer’s.

She was not yet sixty. Jeannie, who was twenty-nine, and Patty, twenty-six, had hoped she could take care of herself for a few more years, but that hope had been shattered this morning at five A.M.., when a Washington cop had called to say he had found Mom walking along 18th Street in a grubby nightgown, crying and saying she could not remember where she lived.

Jeannie had got in her car and driven to Washington, an hour from Baltimore on a quiet Sunday morning. She had picked Mom up from the precinct house, taken her home, gotten her washed and dressed, then called Patty. Together the two sisters had made arrangements for Mom to check into Bella Vista. It was in the town of Columbia, between Washington and Baltimore. Their aunt Rosa had spent her declining years here. Aunt Rosa had had the same insurance policy as Mom.

“I don’t like this place,” Mom said.

Jeannie said: “We don’t either, but right now it’s all we can afford.” She intended to sound matter-of-fact and reasonable, but it came out harsh.

Patty shot her a reproving look and said: “Come on, Mom, we’ve lived in worse places.”

It was true. After their father went to jail the second time, the two girls and Mom had lived in one room with a hotplate on the dresser and a water tap in the corridor. Those were the welfare years. But Mom had been a lioness in adversity. As soon as both Jeannie and Patty were in school she found a trustworthy older woman to mind the girls when they came home, she got a job—she had been a hairdresser, and she was still good, if old-fashioned—and she moved them to a small apartment with two bedrooms in Adams-Morgan, which was then a respectable working-class neighborhood.

She would fix French toast for breakfast and send Jeannie and Patty to school in clean dresses, then do her hair and make up her face—you had to look smart, working in a salon—and always leave a spotless kitchen with a plate of cookies on the table for the girls when they came back. On Sundays the three of them cleaned the apartment and did the laundry together. Mom had always been so capable, so reliable, so tireless, it was heartbreaking to see the forgetful, complaining woman on the bed.

Now she frowned, as if puzzled, and said: “Jeannie, why have you got a ring in your nose?”

Jeannie touched the delicate silver band and gave a wan smile. “Mom, I had my nostril pierced when I was a kid. Don’t you remember how mad you got about it? I thought you were going to throw me out on the street.”

“I forget things,” Mom said.

“I sure remember,” said Patty. “I thought it was the greatest thing ever. But I was eleven and you were fourteen, and to me everything you did was bold and stylish and clever.”

“Maybe it was,” Jeannie said with mock vanity.

Patty giggled. “The orange jacket sure wasn’t.”

“Oh, God, that jacket. Mom finally burned it after I slept in it in an abandoned building and got fleas.”

“I remember that,” Mom said. “Fleas! A child of mine!” She was still indignant about it, fifteen years later.