The Speed of Mercy by Christy Conlin (good books for high schoolers txt) 📕

a future as an old lady with dementia. Stella felt she’d already lived most of her adult life as an old woman, but she was changing now. She had been an old lady in a young woman’s form, but more and more, her body was suiting her mind. It didn’t matter — young or old, she had spent years as an institutionalized woman with unpredictable memory problems. She worried now about disease taking the last of her good brain matter. Stella knew also that her medication had been cut back and that last week she hadn’t taken any at all. The new neurologist said the less medication, the better. She was only to take what was necessary, and that would be determined through trial and, perhaps, error.

When the consulting psychiatrist came from the city for her monthly round in July, she’d agreed with the neurologist about cutting back Stella’s medication. They could anticipate some confusion, memory loss but perhaps also memory gain, perhaps more sleep, perhaps less, maybe more appetite, or a diminishment. Stella had seen Nurse Calvin roll her eyes at the term, chronic treatment-resistant mental illness. As if it were a moral failing. Self-indulgence.

Grace, on the other hand, said Stella was just a variation of normal. Grace was a therapist at the centre who, in her other life, as Grace called it, was a poet. She had one son, at university. Grace had a picture of him on her desk in her office. Grace was a single parent.

Stella’s uncle Isaiah came every Sunday afternoon to see her. He was here last week. Or maybe it was yesterday? Stella thought he had been here yesterday. Stella wasn’t sure. It was August. They would have sat outside on a bench in the shade. (Did they?) Dianne may have been with them, talking to Isaiah about the migration of birds, a particular preoccupation of hers. Maybe he hadn’t been feeling well. He was old now. He didn’t drive in the night or heavy rain anymore because of his eyesight. She hadn’t seen him during the Covid. Stella couldn’t recall when the antique shop closed. At least a decade ago. Isaiah was eighty years old, four years younger than Dianne. Stella knew he had given her the alarm clock at the same time he had given her the antique bookshelf, when she first came to live at the Jericho Centre. When she started wandering off, like an old lady with Alzheimer’s disease, except she was twenty-five.

Stella couldn’t remember the moment she stopped talking. She could not vocalize much more than a grunt or a groan or a squeak. She had been mute long enough for the diagnosis to change from elective to selective mutism. But a diagnosis, Stella knew, didn’t assist recovery. Stella accepted that she didn’t talk in the same capacity most people accepted their inability to fly. She had occasionally tried to speak when alone in her room, opening her mouth wide in front of the mirror, but the language of sound and vibration was lost to her. Sometimes she would hear herself humming, but another self, and as soon as she listened — silence.

Her vocal cords had retired when she was thirteen, so even when she wanted to talk, she could not. But there had been very few times she had wanted to speak. Stella knew that sometimes she muttered in the night. They had sent her to a sleep lab. They had played a recording for her. It was unintelligible.

Stella looked at the groomed grounds from her window, a wall of thick blue firs jutting into the sky. Sweet silence filled the room. When Stella looked back at the doorway, it was empty.

Stella would wait for Dianne. It was Yoga Monday at the Jericho Centre. Today. Yoga followed lunch, as Stella called it. Dinner, as most residents and staff called it. There was a weekly cafeteria menu and activity schedule posted every Sunday night and copies of both given to residents with individual appointments and activities for the coming week. Stella pinned these to the corkboard beside her bookshelf. She needed her routine. The only variation she could easily abide was in nature, the capriciousness of the seasons, and yet even in that, the seasons were always predictable. Daylight savings time always threw her for at least a month.

Strolling on the extensive paths of the Jericho Care Centre property was Stella and Dianne’s main activity. Dianne and Stella had seen different programming come and go over the years. The Covid came and for a long time they weren’t allowed to walk alone. Just short walks, always with a worker. There was constant hand-washing. The activity room had become a temporary hospital ward. A storeroom at the far end of the building was converted into a morgue. It was a hard year at the Care Centre. Many of the residents had died. Stella’s anxiety medication and sedatives had been increased so much she was not able to do much more than sit in a chair.

Stella’s mind was jumbled with time. Her hands were sweaty and she wanted to chew her nails but she was not supposed to have her hands near her face. She remembered this. Also that Dianne had not come by for their Sunday bedtime walk last night. Stella had waited in the resident lounge at the other end of the hall, sketching a daisy in a white vase, lifting her eyes at every footstep until it was bedtime.

Dianne was eighty-four, Stella reminded herself. She could be napping. No. Nurse Calvin said she was outside talking to someone. Stella’s body knew when the time was for Dianne to appear and Dianne always appeared with her grey ponytail hanging down her back, her thin shrivelled lips turned down in a half moon through which she hurled wheezy belts of laughter. Dianne told Stella stories during their daily walking ritual, walking and talking, her observations about this person and that person, about what the sky was telling her, what