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I move through the adjoining door back into Lenora’s room, knowing it’s not a good idea for someone else to see me and Carter conferring in mine. I still remember the way Jessie sounded last night. Full of innuendo. Like she was suspicious—or jealous. Who knows how Archie or, God forbid, Mrs. Baker would react if they saw us together like this.
“Let me know if she does.” Carter heads to the hall, pausing in the doorway to take one more look at Lenora, checking for a resemblance that isn’t there. “And be careful. Right now, I don’t trust anyone but you.”
By the time he’s gone, it’s fifteen minutes past dinnertime. Which will make us equally as late for Lenora’s evening exercises, bath, and bedtime. I go back to my room and the lockbox under the bed, shaking out the proper amount of pills I need to mix with her dinner. The pages Lenora and I have typed remain under the rolling bottles. I wonder if more will eventually be added to the stack—and if that would make things better or worse.
Back with Lenora, I start to get ready for dinner. She’s exactly as I left her. Wheelchair. Window. Headphones over her ears. The only thing that’s changed is the Walkman.
The cassette inside no longer turns.
When I lift the headphones from Lenora’s ears, no words come out.
“It turned off?” I ask Lenora.
She taps her left hand twice against the wheelchair armrest, where it’s been since before I turned the Walkman on. The Walkman, meanwhile, sits exactly where I left it between her right hand and the sideof the wheelchair. Even if Lenora had moved her left hand at some point, there’s no way she could have reached across her lap and turned off the Walkman without disturbing its position.
“How did it stop?”
Lenora gives me a blank look that’s her substitute for a shrug.
I pick up the Walkman and examine it. My initial thought is that it automatically shut off when the first side of the cassette ran out of tape. Thinking the cassette needs to be flipped, I eject it from the Walkman. There’s plenty of tape around both reels, suggesting only half of it has been played.
Since the only other thing that could have caused it to stop working is a dead battery, I slide the cassette back into the Walkman and press the play button. Jessie’s voice, muffled but unmistakable, pops from the headphones in my hands.
I hit the stop button, my mind turning faster than the reels inside the Walkman a mere moment earlier. Since the cassette didn’t run out of tape, the batteries still work, and Lenora didn’t use her left hand, I can think of only one other way for the Walkman to have stopped playing.
Lenora turned it off herself.
With a hand she can’t use.
TWENTY-SIX
It’s ten p.m., Lenora’s in bed, and I’m in my room next door staring at a Walkman she may or may not have turned off using a hand she may or may not be able to use. After an hour of obsessing over it, I’m still not sure.
One thing I’m certain of is that it’s nearly impossible for the Walkman to have accidentally shut off without Lenora using her right hand. I know because I’ve tried. Jostling it. Smacking it. I even knocked it against the side of a chair multiple times, testing to see if it was enough to bump the stop button. It wasn’t. Nothing Lenora could have done with her left hand would have somehow made the Walkman turn off if it bumped her right one.
Now I watch the reels inside the Walkman spin, waiting to see if they stop on their own for any reason other than the one I’m thinking of. A warp of the cassette tape. Faulty wiring in the Walkman itself. Just random occurrence that has never happened before and never will again. But everything works exactly the way it should, even as I keep pressing buttons.
Stop, rewind, play, stop, rewind, play.
My thoughts do a similar herky-jerky dance.
Stop.
Lenora turned off the Walkman. I’m convinced of that now. But how?
Rewind.
Because it’s possible she’s capable of more than she’s letting on. I’ve thought this before, when I realized the page in the typewriter had been moved.
Play.
If that’s true, then it means Lenora has been pretending all this time.
Stop.
But I can’t think of a single reason why she’d do that. Lenora’s day is filled with indignities. Having someone feed her, bathe her, remove her soiled adult diaper, and wipe her clean before putting on a fresh one. No one would willingly subject themselves to that.
Rewind.