Crush. Candy. Corpse. Read Free Page A

She keyed in four numbers to open the door. “The code is 7686, but if you forget, it’s written at the bottom of the box underneath this lid.” I peeked in and, sure enough, saw the numbers on a white paper. As Gillian pushed the door shut behind us, the cozy feeling left. The door itself was camouflaged with a mural of a bookshelf. “Be careful comin’ in so you don’t let any of the old folks out,” Gillian told me.
    “They want to escape?” She didn’t have to answer. The walls were beige and blank; the floor was speckled linoleum. Windows opened to a nursing station to the right. It was an airless atmosphere. Who wouldn’t want to get out?
    A sweet old couple strolled hand in hand towards us.
    “Hello, Fred. Hi, Marlene,” Gillian called in a jolly voice. “Almost time to eat. Don’t walk too far!”
    Fred shuffled along with one grey sweatpant leg tucked into a sock. So goofy looking — I wanted to run and pull it out. Why didn’t one of the aides do that?
    “I don’t understand it,” he grumbled as he tried the hidden door. “They must have changed something.”
    Marlene kept her head down, murmuring back at him. I could only see her forehead. On it was a lump the size of a dinosaur egg. “Should we stop in and pick up some bread?” she asked Fred.
    He murmured back, “Can’t stop now.”
    “Do they understand each other?” I asked Gillian.
    She shrugged her shoulders and then grabbed Fred’s arm. “This way,” she said, as she gently turned the couple around.
    We followed behind them. Dressed in pastel polyester — baby blue pants covered by a pink floral scoop top — Marlene’s colours actually worked for her. Still, her hair was an iron grey, and there’s so much a good colour rinse can do for that. “Nice that they can stay together anyway,” I told Gillian, getting more depressed by the minute.
    “Oh, they’re not married to each other. The Alzheimer’s makes them want to pace. So one day they just started strolling together, holding hands. I have to stop them sometimes. Fred once collapsed from all the walking.”
    “Really. What happened to Marlene’s head?”
    “The old folks lose their sense of balance as they get on. She fell out of bed.”
    “Ouch!” But it wasn’t the big lump that made me squirm, it was the way her neck jutted out, like a turkey stretching to get a worm, head down. I pulled back my shoulders and rubbed at the top of my spine. Would my neck look like that someday?
    “Here we are, the dining room.”
    I could see it through windows in the hall — blue walls with murals of ’50s-type teens, blue cloths draped over wooden tables, a cafeteria-style counter where trays of food were lined up, ready to go. Prettied-up institutional. Imagine eating every meal of your life in there.
    Outside the door six wheelchairs circled the area, the residents in them paused in semi-doze mode.
    “Hello, Gorgeous. What a lovely dress you have on!”
    I turned to see a smiling, silver-haired lady with lively dark eyes and bright red lips. Lipstick? How civilized. She was sitting in a chair behind a walker. Was she talking to me? I was wearing a skirt, not a dress.
    “Jeannette, this is Sunny, our new volunteer.” Gillian winked at me.
    Jeannette continued to look at me, so I assumed it had been my clothing that she complimented. “Thank you,” I answered and smiled back at her. Perhaps there was one person not so far gone here. I mean, she mixed up her words but she still had taste.
    Jeannette grinned, teeth showing now and just a touch of that red lipstick on her incisor. “You’re welcome.” Her head turned slightly, attention somewhere else. Suddenly her lips pulled down into a vicious dog snarl.
    “If you touch my walker again, I will kill you.”
    Whoa! I stepped back. Did she have a hidden weapon? Who was she even mad at? The lady she seemed to be threatening slumped in her chair, mouth open as she lightly snored. Could she have moved in her