“Who signed it as you?” Marcus asked again, and he held the quitclaim deed up to the light. In the corner of the page, a purple notary stamp, faint and smudged, and under it a scribbled signature. William Hatch, Notary Public, State of New Hampshire. “Mrs. Parsons, do you know this man?” I did. Bill Hatch ran the bar at the Elks club on Pleasant Street, and had been the drinking friend of Walter for thirty years. He sold insurance on the side, and in retirement he had taken a notary course, because, as he said, you never knew when you would need one. I swallowed. “Marcus,” I said, “on Friday I was at the library. I was never in the same room with Bill Hatch.”
Marcus did not argue. He pressed the call button a second time and told the nurse who answered that he needed the charge nurse and security, now. Then he took out his phone and photographed the deed, both sides, with the careful steadiness of a man who has dealt with accidents before. “My mother was a notary,” he said, without looking up. “A notary must see the person, check the ID, and write the details in a journal. If Mr. Hatch did not see you on Friday, the stamp is a crime.” Down the corridor, I heard hurried footsteps. A voice on a radio. The pain in my hip was like a hot wire, and I closed my eyes.
The detective who arrived within the hour was a tall woman with graying hair and a notebook. Sheila Moreau of the Concord police. She sat at the foot of my bed and listened to me for forty minutes without interrupting. I told her about the stairs, and the gap in my memory, and the strange pressure on my back that I remembered only now, a flat warm hand between my shoulder blades. I told her about Walter, who had slept in the guest room for two years, and Carla, whom I had never seen before. “We have the hospital camera,” she said at last. “We have the corridor outside this room. I would like to watch it with you.”
A smudged purple notary stamp and a hospital corridor camera exposed who had forged the deed to a woman house.
We watched it on a small tablet, the two of us, with the sound off. Walter standing in my doorway. Carla beside him. The brief, ugly struggle at the foot of my bed, as he seized the walker and flung it across the room, and then the shove. It was less than a minute. It looked like a scene from a film with the volume turned down. At the end, Detective Moreau paused the picture and glanced at me. “Mrs. Parsons,” she said, “I have been doing this twenty two years. This is not ambiguous.” I realized that I was crying, but quietly, with my chin up, the way I had taught myself to cry in front of Walter.
They arrested Walter at the nurses station, with his coat over his arm and an expression of wounded innocence. Carla was found in the parking lot, sitting in her car with the engine running. It turned out she was not a romantic partner at all. She was a realtor from Manchester, and Walter had agreed to pay her a finder fee if she could help him sell the house of my father to a developer, with me conveniently in a nursing home. The deed had been signed by a friend of Carla, a woman my size in my coat and a gray wig, who stood in front of Bill Hatch for ninety seconds on a Friday afternoon.
Bill Hatch cooperated almost at once. He turned over his notary journal, in which the entry for that Friday was written in a different pen. He pleaded to forgery and lost his commission. The woman in the wig was never found. Walter was charged with assault, attempted fraud, and, because of the fall, with attempted murder. When the judge in Merrimack County read the charges aloud, he looked down at Walter over his glasses with an expression that I have never forgotten. It was the look of a man who has seen a rotten board and been asked to call it sound.
I did not go to a nursing home. I went to a rehabilitation center for five weeks, and then home. My daughter flew in from Seattle and my sister drove up from Boston. They had a stair lift installed, and a ramp on the porch, and an extra railing on the staircase, painted white. My book club met in my living room on my first Thursday back, twelve women with casseroles and a chair they had saved for me, an old wicker armchair with a cushion in blue gingham. When I sat down in it, the whole room applauded, and I could not finish a sentence.
Walter pleaded guilty in the spring and was sentenced to seven years. The house, which had belonged to my father and now belonged to me entirely, was cleared of every trace of him in a single weekend. My daughter and I carried his recliner out to the curb, and his golf trophies, and the framed photograph of him with a trout. I kept one thing, a small wooden box he had made in 1981. Inside it was a ring, and a card he had written me on our first anniversary. I read the card once. Then I put the box in the stove.
I climb the stairs now, one at a time. Marcus visited me in June, in his scrubs, with a bag of peaches. He examined the railings and the treads, tested the ramp, and said in his serious way that I had the best kept house on the street. He asked how my hip was. I told him that it ached when it rained, and that I had stopped being afraid of the stairs. “Mrs. Parsons,” he said, “you were the bravest patient I ever had.” I told him it had nothing to do with bravery. I had simply been tired of keeping quiet.
On Thursday evenings the book club still meets in my living room. This season we are reading a long novel about a family in Maine. We eat cake and argue about the ending, and I sit in my wicker chair by the window with the lamp on, in the house where I grew up, and I listen to the voices of eleven women. Some nights I hear the stairs creak, the old settling creak of the house at rest, and I think of my father, and I smile. I am home. I walked in on my own two feet.