“…have been declared incompetent by doctors my daughter selected,” Dr. Reyes whispered, finishing the sentence I had not let him finish. “Both within three months of the evaluation. Both of their accounts emptied within six.” His eyes flicked toward the front door, where my daughter Pamela could be heard on the porch, laughing into her phone. I kept my face blank, the way I do at the library when a patron tells me something untrue. “Mrs. Adams, I am not who she thinks I am. My name is real. My license is real. But three weeks ago, the county Adult Protective Services office called me, and I agreed to come here wearing a recorder.”
He reached into his coat and showed me the small black device clipped inside his notebook cover. A red light blinked steadily. I felt strangely calm. All those months of Pamela watching me, writing in her little spiral book, saying, “Mom, you told me that yesterday,” when I had not. I had begun to wonder if I really was slipping. There had been nights I lay awake counting backward from a hundred to make sure I could. “Everything she has said to you,” Dr. Reyes said, “everything you say in the next ten minutes, will be recorded. Please keep acting. The detective is parked down the street, and he needs her to say it herself.”
I am seventy two years old, and I have spent forty years persuading children to read. I know how to play a part. When Pamela came back in, flushed and bright, I was holding my reading glasses upside down, frowning at them. “Mom,” she said brightly, “did you have your breakfast?” I told her I thought I had, then that I was not sure, then asked the doctor whether he was the man about the gas meter. Pamela practically glowed. She took the chair beside the doctor and lowered her voice. “You see how it is, Doctor. It gets worse by the day. I need the papers by Friday, before the bank closes the account.”
A notebook, a quiet doctor, and a mother who played forgetful until her daughter said every word out loud.
“What papers would those be?” Dr. Reyes asked mildly, his pen over his notebook. Pamela hesitated, then smiled the same thin smile she had worn at age eleven, when she told her teacher the dog ate her report. “The competency determination. Guardianship. I have a lawyer ready to file. Once it is signed, I can sell the house, and we can put Mom somewhere comfortable. I will see that she is cared for.” I felt the old hurt turn over inside me. She was my only child. I had once held her through a fever of one hundred and four, singing hymns to her all night long, certain she would live.
“And the other two women, Mrs. Pelletier and Mrs. Whitcomb,” the doctor said, in the same mild tone. “You handled their guardianship through the same law office?” Pamela froze. It was only a second, but I saw it. Her mouth opened a little. “Where did you hear that?” she said. “Dr. Whitmore signed their papers,” Reyes replied. “I reviewed the files. He signed four hundred of them last year. Fifty seven of them list your firm as the petitioner. The detectives would like to know why, Pamela.” She stood up so fast the chair tipped. “I think we are finished here,” she said. Her voice had lost every ounce of syrup.
She made it to the front hall. I will remember that, her heels clicking across my wooden floor, her hand reaching for the doorknob like a woman reaching for the last lifeboat. Then the door opened from the outside, and a heavyset man in a gray overcoat stood in the frame, holding up a badge. Behind him were two uniformed deputies. Pamela made a small sound, almost a laugh. “Detective Hayes,” the man said. “Pamela Adams Cole, I am placing you under arrest on suspicion of financial exploitation of an elderly person.” She turned around and looked at me. For a long second I saw my little girl.
“Mom,” she said. “Mom, tell them. Tell them this is a mistake. You know I was only trying to help.” I stood up from my chair, slowly, carefully, and I walked to the hallway. I was not pretending now. My knees were stiff but my mind was crystal clear. I took her face in both my hands, the way I used to when she was small. “Pamela,” I said, “I do not have dementia. I know exactly what day it is, who is president, and the middle name of every one of your teachers. But I know something else too. I know that I raised you better than this. And I am so sorry I did not do it harder.”
They took her away without handcuffs, which I appreciated, in the back of an unmarked car. Mrs. Pelletier and Mrs. Whitcomb were found, in time, in two different memory care wings of a facility in Sandusky, both quite sound of mind and both quite furious. The state attorney recovered most of their accounts. I testified at the hearing, and I will tell you it was the hardest thing I have ever done. I read my statement while my daughter sat at the defense table in a gray cardigan, looking at her hands. At the end the judge asked if I had anything to add. I said, “Only that I still love her.”
Pamela pleaded guilty and received three years. I visit her on the first Saturday of every month. We play gin rummy through the glass, or rather we talk, which is nearly the same thing. She does not ask for anything and I do not offer. At our last visit she said, “Mom, I think you were right about me.” I said I hoped I was not, but I would take it. We both laughed, and a guard looked at us as if we had told a joke in church. It was the first honest laugh we had shared in twelve years.
I still volunteer at the library on Tuesdays and Thursdays. Last week a little boy brought me a book upside down, and I turned it right side up with a flourish and said, “Always check which way your book is facing, young man.” He giggled and ran off. Dr. Reyes came by with his wife a month after the hearing, and he returned my reading glasses, which I had indeed left in his car. We have lunch now and then. He says he only wishes he could give a certificate to every elderly person who had to prove they were still themselves.