Summer Melody

Chapter 2 - Bonnie

Bonnie inhaled deeply as she drove through the valley, listening to Carole King on the oldies’ radio station. Ironic that the only peace she had in any day was her forty-minute commute, three times a week, to visit her mother at Whispering Woods. Whispering Woods – what a name. There was Parkland Villas, Deer Hollow Run, Canterbury Hills: names designed to evoke a sense of opulence and ease, sanctuaries where one could while away the hours playing Whist with characters lifted out of The Great Gatsby. Or contemplate a life well led while staring at the deer grazing in a wooded glade. But what none of these homes could disguise, with their floral wallpaper borders and cozy walnut-stained wainscoting, was the antiseptic weariness. It clouded the air like fog.

Whispering Woods had been no better, no worse, than the others, but it had the advantage of being closest to home, and it overlooked an actual pine forest. Bonnie doubted whether Elizabeth ever looked at the scenery. The location, however, made it easier for Bonnie to bear the visits. That was something, at least.

Dusk was beginning to fall, so Bonnie flicked on her headlights. The air circling around her neck from the cracked window was unusually cool and crisp for an early June evening in Ohio. Bonnie was glad she'd remembered to tie her hair back: the last time she'd driven with the window down and her hair loose, she'd arrived looking like she'd been given a beehive – or a wasp's nest – by a crazed hairdresser. It had taken a full fifteen minutes in the lobby's bathroom to unsnarl her hair enough to make herself presentable to Mother.

As Bonnie started the long series of lazy S-curves that led out of the valley toward Parkington, she spied a mother deer and a fawn skirting the edge of the woods. She automatically slowed. Sure enough, one deer, spooked by the car's headlights, bolted out into the road, only twenty or so feet away. The second deer followed close behind. Once the mother and baby had cleared into the forest on the other side, Bonnie resumed her course and before long, had pulled into the u-shaped driveway of the nursing home. The heady smell of honeysuckle bushes lining the drive greeted her as she made her way toward the entrance.

Bonnie walked into the airy vestibule and waved to the nurses sitting behind a large central desk. They smiled and nodded as she passed. Stopping at an ornate gilt-framed mirror, Bonnie quickly checked her appearance. Hair was still neatly pulled back, lipstick fresh, and neither too pale nor too "tarted up," as her mother would put it. It should do. When she reached Elizabeth's room, she stopped at the slightly ajar door. She took a deep cleansing breath, steeled her shoulders, and knocked. There was no reply, as per usual. Bonnie entered.

"Hello, Mother," Bonnie said to a shadow in the corner of the room. "Why are you sitting in the dark?"

Elizabeth shushed Bonnie and raised one hand, pointer finger raised. "Listen," she whispered. The room was silent but for the occasional sound of footsteps echoing down the corridor.

Bonnie walked over to the corner where Elizabeth was sitting and switched on the table lamp. The light illuminated the space just around her, magnifying the shadows on the wall behind.

Elizabeth laughed, a sharp expulsion of air that could have been mistaken for a cough. "Yeah, run for the hills, you bastards," she said with satisfaction, staring at her dresser.

"Who's running for the hills, Mother?"

She looked at Bonnie as if explaining the obvious to a slightly dim child. "Why, the rats, of course. Place is teeming with them. Sneaky little rodents."

Oh. She was seeing the rats again. She seemed to go on jags with this particular hallucination, scaring the bejeezus out of Bonnie the first time she had mentioned it. It took two aides searching the room before Bonnie could be persuaded they were only in her mother's mind. Now, she just let the reference pass. Mother would forget she'd mentioned it in a minute.