The Lilac Notebook

By Carol Balawyder

Holly Baranov is in the beginning stages of fast advancing Alzheimer’s at 40. Unwilling to care for her, Holly's husband leaves her. While frightened to be on her own, Holly is relieved to be freed from the clutches of a controlling husband.
She moves out of her large home in the middle-class west end section of Montreal and into a small apartment near McGill University where she enrols in a poetry course in the hopes of stimulating her brain.
There she meets Kim Harris, a thirty-something beautiful but damaged law student and Amelia Rose, a twenty-year-old pole dancer in a seedy nightclub who wants nothing more than to graduate, teach high school, marry and raise a family. Both Kim and Amelia were victims of incest, though each see her perpetrator differently. Kim chose law so as to right the justice she was denied while Amelia is angry at the justice system for separating her from a flawed father who was nonetheless her whole world.
When Amelia is found strangled in her apartment, Holly becomes involved in the investigation, both as prime suspect and as a means to defend herself.
Detective Alice Vireovich and her rookie partner, Detective Dan Cardoni, currently investigating the murders of two middle aged men, are also tasked with investigating Amelia's murder: They come to believe all three murders may be linked because of a Van Gogh Starry Night postcard found at the scene of all three crimes.
Holly’s health worsens quickly. She is transferred to a support facility. Along with her fading memory, Holly is also losing her ability to speak and write. She is uncertain whether she killed Amelia as her friend Kim, ex-husband Roy and the police suspect.
A niece (whom Holly doesn't recognize and whose motives she distrusts for suddenly wanting to help her) visits Holly regularly and reads Holly's notes about Amelia's investigation. This eventually leads the investigation away from her as they seem to implicate Kim.
Kim's law teacher at McGill agrees to take on the case pro bono, motivated by her interest in litigating whether damaging effects of childhood abuse pose the question whether murder can ever be justified in such cases.
The expanding investigation leads to more findings relating to the postcard found next to Amelia's body, bringing into view a surprising new suspect.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Carol Balawyder
• Release date: Apr 6, 2023
• ISBN: 9798215409626

Carol Balawyder

I hold an undergraduate degree with a major in English Literature and a graduate degree in Criminology. I have taught English in various colleges in Montreal, Concordia University and Ho Chi Minh University of Technology in Vietnam. During this phase of my teaching career, I developed teaching material including Open For Business (Harper & Row), Windows on Sci-Tech (Thomson Publishing).In the second half of my teaching career, I taught criminology in Police Technology and Corrections Programs. My area of expertise was in drug addiction where I worked in a methadone clinic with heroin addicts. I helped set up and animate a writing workshop for women in prison and have worked in halfway houses and drug rehab centers.My short stories have appeared in Room Magazine, The Canadian Anthology of Fiction, Mindful.org, Between the Lines, Carte Blanche and I was awarded an honorary mention for a play submitted to The Canadian Playwright Competition.I also manage a blog where I write about: Women Nobel Prize winners for literature, writers’ desks, Femmes Fatales, book reviews, India. and my dog, Bau. www.carolbalawyder.com/blog

Book preview

INTRODUCTION

Perhaps you’re the kind of reader who skips introductions and wants to get right into the story. After all, you’re busy and have loads of books lined up on your TBR list. Before you skip this section, I just want to tell you something that you should know about Alzheimer’s disease while reading this book.

The disease manifests itself differently in different patients: disorientation, hallucinations, loss of motor skills, anger, violence, personality and behavioral changes, loss of communication and decline in social skills, wandering. Not to mention loss of memory.

What I was particularly interested in, in this novel, was the loss of the ability to communicate through speech.

Not everyone who develops Alzheimer’s loses this ability, but Holly, the character in this novel, is slowly losing her ability to speak. This gradual process involves forgetting words, increasing hesitation, losing verbal fluency, difficulty using pronouns, especially the articles, using only the present tense, putting words in the wrong order, and asking the same question twice.

In attempting to be authentic in this novel, grammatical errors, gaps in sentences, improper syntax, omissions of certain articles, and incorrect verb tenses are intentional as Holly’s speech deteriorates.

But losing the ability to speak does not mean the loss of the ability to think and even understand to a certain extent. As a dog therapist working with Alzheimer’s patients, I saw this first hand.

Although some patients had lost their ability to speak, they were able to comprehend what I said, smile, and express pure joy.

Knowing this, I hope you will appreciate the challenges associated with this progressive brain disease and realize that not all Alzheimer’s patients manifest the disease in the same way.

This novel is categorized as a mystery. It will also, I hope, provide a better understanding of this debilitating disease. The facts I have written about Alzheimer’s come both from my own experiences with these patients as well as from research from highly respected sources on the disease such as the National Institute on Aging, Johns Hopkins

University, McGill Center for Studies in Aging, Alzheimer’s Disease Research Center, Geriatric Psychiatry, the Alzheimer’s Society of Canada, and other reliable sources.

I have taken some liberties in describing the symptoms of this disease although these liberties are neither farfetched nor science fiction as so much is yet to be discovered in understanding Alzheimer’s and how it affects the mind. Although a part of the brain is being attacked by abnormal deposits, that is not the case for every part. Such is the case with Holly. She might be unable to communicate, but she still has thoughts and a heart where she feels love and beauty.

I have tried to remain as true as I could to the development of the disease, yet The Lilac Notebook still remains a work of fiction.

June

1

(T)he first symptoms of Alzheimer’s vary from person to person. For many, decline in non-memory aspects of cognition, such as word-finding, vision/spatial issues, and impaired reasoning or judgment, may signal the very early stages of Alzheimer’s disease.

Inside the Brain: Unraveling the Mystery of Alzheimer’s Disease. University of Pittsburgh: Alzheimer’s Disease Research Center.

Recently Holly had been paying more attention to her disease. She was in a bit of a rush to make the most of whatever time she had left before her disease took over her speech and memory along with her ability to write. Her speech had already started to deteriorate. It happened most frequently when she was stressed or nervous and her words came out like a babbling baby, or worse, a bunch of gibberish. It was terribly embarrassing and so she preferred to speak as little as possible.

Speak up, young lady! Speak UP! That was some ancient man yelling at her while she was trying to recite a poem in her high school English class. She recalled neither the man’s name nor the poem in question. What she still remembered stored safely somewhere in her brain was the feeling of bewilderment followed by her yelling out the poem in her loudest angry voice.

She never should have complained to Roy about her difficulty concentrating on her reading.

I’m having trouble focusing on my book. I find myself re-reading the sentence over and over. The words vanish from my brain like melting ice.

You might want to have your eyes checked for cataracts, Roy said, fiddling with the television’s remote control.

Holly hated how he surfed the channels even when she was in the middle of watching something.

Maybe all you need is a pair of reading glasses.

As for impaired reasoning or judgement, Holly considered both of these aspects of herself normal.

But what was normal?

Was it normal for a forty-year-old woman to be suffering from Alzheimer’s? Was it normal for someone who grew up in a middle-class neighborhood with lots of dreams for her future—dreams such as having a career as a nurse or working for a huge pharmaceutical company—to suddenly have that dream evaporate as if it had fallen right out of her brain, leaking through her skull and disintegrating into the universe never to appear again? Would she ever again have dreams?

***

From the age of twelve Holly watched her mother deteriorate with Alzheimer’s disease. She was well aware of the progression of the disease as she fervently read about it while she witnessed in her mother how the disease was slowly robbing her of the bright, curious, caring and beautiful woman Holly had known. She had even attended, with her father, a support group for caretakers of Alzheimer’s but had stopped going when it was evident that it was not wise to leave her mother alone. Besides, she wanted to give her father a break from staying with her mother while Holly was at school. Fortunately, he could do much of his accounting work from home.

In the years before her mother was taken over by the disease, Holly had witnessed her mother’s happiness while helping her father with his accounting. Then, when it was inevitable that her mother could no longer concentrate on the accounting, she had turned in earnest to her role as housekeeper to her husband and her daughter. Up until then, Holly’s home life had been calm and pretty much uneventful.

This was in the late seventies and into the eighties, when being a mere housewife was frowned upon. Having a career of her own and earning her own money was a woman’s way to freedom, not that it meant giving up her housewife duties.

When she married Roy, Holly was twenty years old and grieving the loss of her mother, who had died just a year before. She was in no mood for a wedding, and even less interested in preparing for one.

In any case, she would have preferred eloping. Her decision to marry Roy was based more on fear of being alone, than on love or passion.

After her mother’s death, her father had made arrangements to move to England to be close to his brother and Holly’s older sister, Amy, who had moved there years ago to marry a man she had met in a student exchange program. There was a twelve-year gap between Holly and her sister. Amy was in her early-fifties while Holly was to celebrate her fortieth birthday in a few months.

After high school, Holly had applied and been accepted for a nursing degree, but had declined the offer. She chose instead to follow Roy, supporting his career goals, leaving her childhood town in the Eastern Townships for Montreal, a city unknown to her.

Roy had not been the kind of man she had dreamed of marrying. She would have preferred a man more like her father—tall and handsome with dark hair and a nice smile. But security and loneliness outweighed dreams and desire. Nevertheless, she would follow in her mother’s footsteps and be a perfect housewife. It wasn’t such a bad life. Her mother had always seemed happy enough and Holly assented that happy enough was good enough.

She had no financial worries as Roy came from a relatively wealthy family, and in time he would pull in a handsome salary. Holly believed that because she married Roy it was her duty to love him. At least try. And she did. As best she could.

It was a small wedding, with most of the guests coming from Roy’s side of the family. As was customary, her father attended and gave her away. Amy and her husband also attended. They hadn’t stayed very long and were mostly jet lagged from their trip overseas. Holly had felt disappointed for she would have liked to have someone who knew her mother to mourn with her. She had imagined that she and her sister would have got to know each other better. Make up for lost time.

Roy’s family demanded all the pomp and circumstance of a wedding. The absence of her mother had left Holly with a feeling of gloom. What should have been the happiest day of her life was one of the saddest.

As for Roy, he had married Holly for convenience. A settlement. There were the tax benefits if you were married. More importantly, he wanted a stay-at-home wife, and the girls he’d dated in high school all dreamed of careers.

Roy, too, had come from a family where the wife was expected to stay home and cater to her husband. As an only child, his mother doted on him and so Roy was used to being taken care of. Housework and all the duties that came along with it were left to the woman of the house. It was the way he had been brought up and he expected things to continue this way. As far as their roles as a married couple were concerned, Roy and Holly were a perfect match.

Deep in her heart, Holly knew that she hadn’t been Roy’s type. His type was more the movie queen although he was far from attracting such a woman. Later, his career as a fund manager might have charmed more beautiful women. However, the ambitions of homecoming queens did not include being a housewife. Holly’s did though. She was content to look after Roy and be a good wife.

She took her job as housewife seriously, mastering the art of homemaker. As Roy’s stay-at-home wife, Holly considered herself a domestic worker for which Roy gave her a generous salary along with a credit card which she used mainly for making sure that she always had at hand the right cleaning supplies for keeping her home free from dirt, dust, and grime. She took care of buying the groceries, preparing the meals, and washing up after. Occasionally, she treated herself to the beauty salon, or had her nails done.

She even had a uniform for her job as well: a pair of jeans with a sweat shirt, and in the summer athletic shorts and a light T-shirt. She’d spent hours reading books and magazines about housekeeping, cooking, and how to keep your husband attracted to you. She read the Guide to Being a Good Wife—a book that had once belonged to her mother—and other books that reiterated that a man liked coming home to a clean and orderly house.

When Roy was about to come home, she showered and changed into something more appropriate for greeting a husband: her jade green shirt dress with a belt at the waist and a pair of ballerina shoes. Looking good, she had read in one of her magazines, was essential for keeping a husband satisfied.

Taking care of a home, decorating it, maintaining it, getting workers to come in when there was something wrong with the plumbing or electricity; it was her domain, her own queenhood, and she took care of it lovingly, willingly, and with pride. For many years, she’d never ached or had any desire for her once-upon-a-time dream of becoming a nurse.

In the beginning, they did enjoyable things together, such as seeing a show or driving to Ste. Anne. Brunch on a terrace overlooking the canal. It was all so romantic. At least for Holly it was, watching the sailboats glide by. She smiled and waved back at the people on the boats having a good old time. It would have been nice if they had travelled more, visited her sister in England, but Roy hated flying as much as he hated being on the water.

Besides, she’d also read that marriage was full of compromises. Though if she were truthful to herself, she’d have to admit without apology or excuse that she did most of the compromising.

Although they weren’t always in the same room, she enjoyed her evenings with Roy in the house. As she cleaned up the dinner dishes, Roy was upstairs in his office. Knowing he was somewhere in the house gave her a sense of security and stability.

Cleaning was her favorite part of her housewife duties. She kept the house spotless and dust free to combat Roy’s allergies. The task was satisfying because one immediately saw the results. She loved the smell and sheen of freshly waxed floors and the lemon-scented furniture polish which lingered in the living room for hours. Sometimes, when she performed her tasks, she would sway to Motown music. Listening to Al Green’s "Let’s Stay Together" made Holly long for a more romantic relationship with Roy. She wished he would say things like loving you forever or—for no particular reason—come home with a bouquet of flowers. But again, there was his allergy to flowers.

So, Roy wasn’t the romantic type. Was that so bad?

In the early years of her marriage, it all seemed enough, but then a dissatisfaction began to rise within her. She questioned if she could ever fall in love with Roy as she had hoped would happen. She envisioned herself being more than Roy’s housewife.

But the realization had come too late. She had already started to notice signs of Alzheimer’s and it frightened her to have to go through this alone. Besides having more trouble concentrating, she was having more difficulty speaking. It became increasingly difficult to read.

Did she regret her choice? What was done was done. Que sera sera. There was no sense dwelling on what ifs. She couldn’t change her past. She would try to control her future as best she could.

***

Their house was purchased more than twenty years ago, thanks to Roy’s parents’ generosity. It was a two-story semi-detached house, with the bedrooms upstairs. Holly planted bulbs of daffodils in the small front yard in the fall. The bulbs would light up the front terrace as soon as spring arrived.

The house was much too big for just the two of them. They had bought it hoping to fill it with children. Holly would have loved nothing more than to have a houseful of babies and toddlers running amok, laughter filling the empty rooms.

It would have made her long afternoons more interesting taking care of a baby, taking him or her out for a stroller walk and meeting other women with infants, sitting in a park chatting with them. She had often gone to the park where she sat on a bench away from the sandbox and baby swings observing the mothers or nannies, and pictured herself with her own child, smiling at the other mothers, imagining herself helping her child make friends with the children there, exchanging tips on colicky babies, tantrums, and baby food made from scratch.

She envisioned herself and Roy going on holidays with their children. Disneyland or SeaWorld. When Holly had learned of Roy’s impotence, she was relieved that she would not have to carry the guilt of being the one responsible for their inability to have a child. But she also had felt saddened and let down. She’d even felt angry at Roy although, rationally, she knew that it wasn’t his fault. She had not returned to the park, and each time she crossed a mother pushing a stroller she felt a chill rise in the center of her heart. How easily her hopes could be punctured.

She knew that Roy, too, had been looking forward to having a son and there had been discussions about adoption which never got off the ground. It was after this that the violence began. Not physical violence, although Roy had once raised his fist at her. Holly no longer remembered why. But she’d been mostly marked by the psychological violence. The type of critical violence he used to control her.

His outbursts of denigration must have left him feeling guilty, and he repented by paying his way out, providing her with gifts that she did not enjoy. Her style of clothing was not suited to gaudy jewelry, perfume bottles with smells she could not tolerate, or expensive handbags that did not reflect her personal style. She had only been aggravated by the gifts, disgusted by their meaning.

She had mentioned to Roy the possibility of getting a dog. She even had in mind one of these cute mid-sized black and white mutts, but Roy was against it. He didn’t like animals. He found them dirty and too demanding.

He told her he was allergic to them though she felt it was just another of his many excuses to get his way.

2

Kim stood among a crowd in Central Park in New York City. She was lucky to have found a free parking space in one of the side streets off Fifth Avenue. She had been walking along the lawns and paths in the park since four in the afternoon, oblivious to the dangers which might be lurking there. Had she been aware of the rapes, the assault cases, and the muggings that were committed in the park, she might have been less carefree. She might have merely taken the leaflet being handed to her and not stopped to read it standing next to the man handing it to her. She might not have struck up a conversation with a perfect stranger as a band was playing on a stage.

His name was Tom.

Kim, she said.

He reminded Kim of her next-door neighbor who was gay and with whom Kim often went to a dance club where they would sway to Gloria Gaynor’s I Will Survive. It had become her theme song. And hadn’t she survived?

She had purposely chosen to live in the gay area of Montreal where she wouldn’t be bothered by men. Non-gay men tended to gravitate towards Kim and her beauty. She was hard to miss with her white blonde hair floating down her back. An emaciated woman who stood five feet eight inches tall.

The band’s pretty good, Tom said. It was playing Don McLean cover songs. The exceptionally warm evening and the lights on the stage added to the humidity Kim felt on the back of her neck. Sweat formed on her forehead and she wiped it with the palm of her hand.

She swayed to the music. They’re really good. They sound like the real thing. She examined the man. Normally, she was good at reading people. Especially men. He was taller than her but not much, and slender, and she figured him to be about her own age which was thirty-three. There was something about him that she was drawn to. Perhaps it was that he was ordinary looking: blonde hair with a regular haircut, a plain white T-shirt and a pair of khaki pants. He was friendly and didn’t make any remarks about her looks.

Where you from?

Montreal.

You by yourself?

She thought it best not to admit that. Instead, she said, I came with a friend. She’s with her boyfriend.

Tom swayed to the music along with her. That’s far to come for a concert, he said.

I didn’t really come for the concert, Kim said. I just happened to stumble upon it. She shrugged. She was glad to have someone to talk to. Made her feel less alone amid this throng of strangers. When they played Starry Night, she said, That’s my favorite of all his songs. She sang along:

I could have told you Vincent this world was never meant for one as beautiful as you.

You know all the words?

I told you. It’s one of my favorite songs.

They were not listening. They’re not listening still. Perhaps they never will.

She closed her eyes and when the song was over, opened them. For a moment, she forgot where she was. She wiped a tear forming at the edge of her eyelid. "It’s