And the Mountains Echoed

past the multipurpose room with its computers and bookshelves and domino sets, past the bulletin board and its array of tips and announcements—
Did you know that soy can reduce your bad cholesterol? Don’t forget Puzzles and Reflection Hour this Tuesday at 11 A.M.!
    I let myself into the locked unit. They don’t have tea parties on this side of the door, no bingo. No one here starts their morning with tai chi. I went to Baba’s room, but he wasn’t there. His bed had been made, his TV was dark, and there was a half-full glass ofwater on the bedside table. I was a little relieved. I hate finding Baba in the hospital bed, lying on his side, hand tucked under the pillow, his recessed eyes looking out at me blankly.
    I found Baba in the rec room, sunk into a wheelchair, by the window that opens into the garden. He was wearing flannel pajamas and his newsboy cap. His lap was covered with what Penny called a
fidget apron
. It has strings he can braid and buttons he likes to open and close. Penny says it keeps his fingers nimble.
    I kissed his cheek and pulled up a seat. Someone had given him a shave, and wetted and combed his hair too. His face smelled like soap.
    So tomorrow is the big day
, I said.
I’m flying out to visit Pari in France. You remember I told you I would?
    Baba blinked. Even before the stroke, he had already started withdrawing, falling into long, silent lapses, looking disconsolate. Since the stroke, his face has become a mask, his mouth frozen perpetually in a lopsided, polite little smile that never climbs to his eyes. He hasn’t said a word since the stroke. Sometimes, his lips part, and he makes a husky, exhaling sound—
Aaaah!
—with enough of an upturn at the tail end to make it sound like surprise, or like what I said has triggered a minor epiphany in him.
    We’re meeting up in Paris, and then we’ll take the train down to Avignon. That’s a town near the South of France. It’s where the popes lived in the fourteenth century. So we’ll do some sightseeing there. But the great part is, Pari has told all her children about my visit and they’re going to join us
.
    Baba smiled on, the way he did when Hector came by the week before to see him, the way he did when I showed him my application to the College of Arts and Humanities at San Francisco State.
    Your niece, Isabelle, and her husband, Albert, have a vacation home in Provence, near a town called Les Baux. I looked it up online, Baba. It’s
an amazing-looking town. It’s built on these limestone peaks up in the Alpilles Mountains. You can visit the ruins of an old medieval castle up there and look out on the plains and the orchards. I’ll take lots of pictures and show you when I get back
.
    Nearby, an old woman in a bathrobe complacently slid around the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle. At the next table, another woman with fluffy white hair was trying to arrange forks and spoons and butter knives in a silverware drawer. On the big-screen TV over in the corner, Ricky and Lucy were arguing, their wrists locked together by a pair of handcuffs.
    Baba said,
Aaaah!
    Alain, that’s your nephew, and his wife, Ana, are coming over from Spain with all five of their kids. I don’t know all their names, but I’m sure I’ll learn them. And then—and this is the part that makes Pari really happy—your other nephew—her youngest, Thierry—is coming too. She hasn’t seen him in years. They haven’t spoken. But he’s taking his R & R from his job in Africa and he’s flying over. So it’s going to be a big family reunion
.
    I kissed his cheek again later when I rose to leave. I lingered with my face against his, remembering how he used to pick me up from kindergarten and drive us to Denny’s to pick up Mother from work. We would sit at a booth, waiting for Mother to sign out, and I would eat the scoop of ice cream the manager always gave me and I would show Baba the drawings I had made that day. How patiently he gazed at each of them, glowering in careful study, nodding.
    Baba smiled his smile.
    Ah. I almost forgot
.
    I stooped down and performed our customary farewell ritual, running my fingertips from his cheeks up to his creased forehead and his temples, over his gray, thinning hair and the scabs of hisroughened scalp to behind the ears, plucking along the way all the bad dreams from his head. I opened the invisible sack for him, dropped