April 21
Ron’s June 21
Annie brought the crossword books on a Tuesday.
Three of them, large print, from the stack Kim kept behind the register at Good Yarn. Ron went through them faster than anyone expected. Two puzzles a day, sometimes three, filled in with a pencil he kept sharpened to a dangerous point. Carol had joked that the pencil was the most lethal object in his room. Ron hadn’t laughed, which meant he agreed.
She found him in his chair by the window. The painted river caught the late afternoon light and held it in the glass. Greens and blues that didn’t exist outside, not yet, not in April, but Ron didn’t look past the painting. He never did. He sat with it the way you sit with a view you’ve known your whole life. Familiar. Enough.
The whiteboard said JUNE 21. The TV was dark. The crossword from this morning was facedown on the nightstand, finished. The butterscotch dish was half empty.
“Brought reinforcements,” Annie said, holding up the books.
“Thank heavens. I was about to start doing them backwards.”
She set them on the nightstand beside the photo. Ron picked up the first one, turned it over, checked the back cover scanning for the answer key, making sure it was there, making sure he wouldn’t need it.
“How’s the weather out there?” he asked.
“Warm,” Annie said. Which was true. It was seventy-one, which was warm for late April and plausible for late June. The gap between the real world and Ron’s world had been narrowing all week. That helped. It also meant the margin for error was shrinking.
“Good,” Ron said. “I’m tired of being cold.”
Annie sat on the bed. Down the hall she could hear the soft sounds of Meadow View going about its afternoon. A cart rolling over tile, someone’s television playing too loud two rooms away, Diana’s voice asking Mr. Calderwood if he wanted his door open or closed.
A nurse Annie didn’t recognize—new, maybe, or filling in from another shift—came in to check Ron’s vitals. She was young, efficient, gentle with the blood pressure cuff. She didn’t say the date. She didn’t mention the weather. She didn’t look at the whiteboard or the dark television or the stack of Frank’s newspapers on the windowsill beside the photo. She just did her work and smiled at Ron and said, “Looking good, Sergeant,” and left.
Annie watched her go. A month ago that interaction would have been a minefield. Now it was choreography. The whole building had learned the steps. No calendars in the hallways near Ron’s room. No seasonal language. Summer magazines in the common room, swapped out by Carol herself every Monday. The TV in the dining hall set to old movies instead of news. Frank’s newspapers delivered to the front desk in a manila envelope marked R. DRUMMOND – DAILY.
It wasn’t just Annie’s lie anymore. It was institutional. It had protocols and systems and a rotation schedule and a staff that had absorbed the deception so completely they didn’t even think about it. Diana, who had objected from the beginning, now redirected Ron’s questions without breaking stride. Two new aides learned the rules on their first day. No dates. No news. No weather specifics. It was, Annie thought, the most elaborate act of kindness she had ever seen. Or the most elaborate betrayal.
She still couldn’t tell which.
In the hallway, she heard Diana’s voice again, softer now, talking to someone near the nurses’ station.
“How’s the Sergeant today?”
“Still doing crosswords by his river,” Diana said.
Annie smiled at the painted window. His river. That’s what it was now. Not Lisa Cleary’s painting. Not Carol’s solution to a seasonal problem. Ron’s river. The one he watched every day, the one that never changed, the one that held summer for him even when the real world wouldn’t.
She went back in.
Ron was immersed in the new crossword. Pencil moving, steady, left to right. He didn’t look up when she sat down, which meant he was comfortable, which meant the visit was going well. Annie pulled out her phone and pretended to scroll. The room settled into its usual rhythm. Pencil scratching, pages turning, the painted light holding still.
“Seven letters,” Ron said. “Nocturnal insect. Produces light.”
“Firefly,” Annie said.
Ron filled it in. Then he looked up. Not at the crossword. At the window.
“Have the fireflies come out yet?”
Annie’s hands stopped on her phone.
It was a small question. Ordinary. One that anyone might ask in late June in Virginia, when the evenings got long and warm and the fields along the river lit up at dusk like a dream. Fireflies came in June. Everyone knew that. Ron knew that.
It was April.
“Not many yet,” Annie said. “They always come late.”
Ron watched her. Those eyes. Blue and clear and patient, the way they got when he was thinking about a thing he wasn’t going to say. He held the look for a beat. Then two.
Then he nodded. “Late this year,” he said. “Maybe the weather.”
“Maybe,” Annie said.
He went back to the crossword.
Annie sat very still. Her heart was beating fast and irregular and she put her hand on her knee to keep it from bouncing. The room was the same. The whiteboard was the same. The painted river was the same. Nothing had changed. Ron was filling in 12 across and humming a tune she didn’t recognize and everything was fine.
Except it wasn’t.
Because fireflies were a thing you couldn’t put on a whiteboard or print in a fake newspaper or paint on a window. Fireflies was Virginia doing her thing, being summer, and Virginia was not in summer, and Ron had just asked about them the way you ask about something you expect to see and haven’t.
She stayed another ten minutes. Ron finished the puzzle. She unwrapped a butterscotch for him because his left hand was stiff today. He took it without looking up and said, “You’re a good kid, Annie,” the way he said it most days.
“You’re not so bad yourself, Sergeant.” She kissed the top of his head and walked out.
In the hallway, she paused at the window. The real one, the one that showed the parking lot and the road and the sky as it actually was. Gray-blue. Late April. Trees leafing out but not full. The grass green but thin. Nothing like June. Nothing like the world Ron thought he was living in.
She looked back at the door to Room 8. Closed now. Ron on the other side, in his chair, by his painted river, in his permanent summer.
He notices everything, she thought.
Fourteen days. And the questions were getting closer to the truth.
New chapters posted every Monday and Thursday until April 23.