The Erratics

by Vicki Laveau-Harvie

  So, in his new working-class suburb, my relentlessly cheerful father adjusts seamlessly, goes for little walks and drives my sister batty by asking brightly at breakfast, So what are we doing today? He is always up for a car ride to the bank or to the low-rise apartment block where their furnished rental units are.

  My sister adapts with more difficulty to the realities of always travelling with an offsider in his nineties. She is used to moving fast and multi-tasking and she runs head-on into the same equation new mothers must learn to solve: you only go as fast as the slowest member in your wagon-train. She is in agony, transferring items off her list of goals to be met that day and onto tomorrow’s list, weaning herself off her reliance on speedy outcomes. She idles at the kerb a lot.

  I have foreseen this.

  Once my mother was safely institutionalised, not to be released, and Dad was snugly ensconced on his property with round-the-clock care, such as it was, I told my sister that anything more we would do for our father was icing on the cake. We could now walk away and not be involved in his day-to-day issues; we could leave all this to the friend who holds the power, the stranger chosen by our parents to decide upon their care as they decline. However badly we might predict that this would all play out, we could just visit Dad at Christmas.

  I reminded her that Dad went along with my mother in disinheriting us, and removing any right we had to help him in his old age; that, most hurtfully of all, he believed everything she told him about us, even though he now holds other views. It is as a result of his own inability to act that he now barely has a connection with us and has none whatsoever with his grandchildren.

  I have often said all this and most recently, when she changed his documents to name her as carer, carried out the intervention and brought him to Vancouver, I told her bluntly: Do not do this. Not unless you can carry it alone, because I am not here, and I can’t be here every time there is a problem. You will be alone with this, and your partner will have to deal with this, and I can see sinkholes of simmering resentment about to develop between us.

  But we came when the call went out for help that cold December day almost three years ago, and we really can’t stop now. Everything I say to her, I say to myself, and I don’t convince either of us. I know that neither of us can walk away from him, and that my sister’s taking my father in may spell the end of her relationship with me, because she will hate me for not doing half of the hard work. I can’t fix this.

  My father can, however.

  My sister and her partner are preparing for their yearly vacation in Hawaii two months after Dad moves in with them. They have told him from the beginning that they will be going away for six weeks in late winter, and that they have rented a nice unit for him to stay in while they are away. The unit is in a third-age complex called Pacific Peace, a non-profit golden-years operation with ‘assisted living’ and nursing home facilities. Eagles soar above the oak grove out the back.

  My father has a two-bedroom Timberwolf suite, bigger than the Lynx or the Coyote, and named for a mountain dweller never seen this close to the coast. My sister arranges for private registered nurses to be with him every waking hour and administer insulin to his diabetic cat.

  He walks in the manicured grounds with his companions and sits in the pergola watching the squirrels bound across the dewy grass and up the trunks of trees. He refuses most company at his table in the dining room, only tolerating Gerta, who came to Canada from northern Europe years ago and has an accent as weighty as her stolid self. She is a tough and reliably critical woman given to believing the worst about everything and everyone, with some excuse, as rumour has it that she is only here under severe duress.

  She was a woman on the land and comes to Pacific Peace with her cat Stig, a lively farm worker himself. Stig kills various small things outside and drags them into the foyer, eliciting the ire of the director, a woman named, by heavy irony of fate, Felicity. My sister and I will decide that Gerta fills a void for Dad, the empty space reserved for a carping, deluded woman who will endlessly remind him to be wary of everyone around him.

  When my sister and her partner return from Hawaii, the last thing they are expecting is what Dad announces. He has decided not to return to their house, but to stay on at this very pleasant place, in his airy and spacious suite with a view across the road to the potato fields where the weightless white blossoms are just appearing on the plants.

  He says he might even buy the place, by which he means not just his unit, but the whole complex: the park and the trees, the eagles in the air, the coaches that take residents on scenic drives and the coordinated pastel sofas and armchairs in the common area, the elevators and the nice people who come to remind him when to take his meds.

  When I arrive two months later to visit, I find him contentedly talking to Gerta, conversations that usually begin with Do you have any idea how much I’m worth? I join them for meals, and Gerta brings me up to speed on what Dad eats and does not eat. She is big, protective and abrasive, her slate-grey hair cut in a bob with a fringe, like the little Dutch boy who put his finger in the dike in the folk tale. I look at all the pleasant women at other tables. The ratio of women to men is about fifty to one. I take in their pearl earrings and their twin sets, their pastel canes and animated conversations among themselves, their still graceful gestures and the wistful gazes they sometimes slide my father’s way, and I marvel at the complexities of the human heart. He chose Gerta.

  He looks shrewdly at me during a lull in the conversation and then asks me, Do you know how much I’m worth? I reply that no one does really, and he’s off and running.

  There is something wrong with my sister. I know this when I get off the plane for this visit. I arrive at 7.40 am the day before I left Sydney, this sixteen-hour non-stop flight from Australia having crossed the date line and landed on time, as usual. What is not usual is that my sister is not where she always is to pick me up. I wait and she arrives an hour later, flustered, and tells me that she decided on a whim to test her blood sugar this morning before coming to get me. As a pre-diabetic in a holding pattern, she is supposed to do this every month or so. She hasn’t been doing it.

  This morning her reading is off the charts and she is going to the hospital as soon as she drops me home. I take a nap and when I wake, my sister probably explains to me what is going on with her, what they recommended at the hospital, but my jet-jangled brain does not transfer this to memory. I cannot now recall what she said.

  What I do remember is that after dinner that evening, my sister complains that her tongue is a bit swollen, something that happened several times when she was on our parents’ property with her friends months earlier, when they were getting ready for the estate sale. She takes an antihistamine and we all go to bed.

  Her partner wakes me an hour later, bursting into my room to tell me to throw on some clothes if I want to go to the hospital with them. My sister is already in the car when I stumble into the carport seconds later, her partner at the wheel, backing out of the drive while I am still climbing into the back seat. My sister is unrecognisable, her eyes slits in her swollen face, her breath rasping as she struggles for air, her hands batting at her throat. Her partner guns it down the sleeping street, slows slightly at the red light at a main intersection before speeding straight across the six deserted lanes against the light. At the hospital, we leave the car in the ambulance bay with the doors open and help my sister stagger into Emergency.

  She has worked in hospitals all her adult life. She knows the drill. She collapses on the admissions desk and people surround her, coming out of nowhere, carrying her through the swinging doors into a place of flashing lights and tubes and monitors, blocking me and her partner and shouting that we cannot follow, that we need to go sit on the blue plastic chairs in the waiting area.

  We do. We sit down in the sudden silence with all of the other people who stare and then turn their eyes away, relieved that whatever is happening to them is nowhere near as bad as what t
hey have just seen. I drink some water as my sister’s partner goes out to move the car.

  Then we wait.

  Chapter 25

  When they let us in to the emergency ward to see my sister, she is sitting propped up in the bed, drooling. She can’t swallow and her tongue is so swollen she cannot talk. She is communicating by gesture and grunt that she needs a suction tube to deal with the dribbling. She is as wall-eyed as a horse trapped in a canyon, jittery and terrified, but she’s still trying to take charge.

  Above her head, the monitors pop and ping incessantly. Blood pressure alert, heart rate alert. And yet they keep putting the nebuliser mask on her to administer more steroids, elevating those readings further each time. She keeps tearing the mask off, and she’s right.

  They think she is in anaphylactic shock due to an allergy, and you give steroids for that. The trouble is that this isn’t working, so they give her more of them. The monitors are trying to tell us that she will stroke out or arrest if this goes on. Her partner, a medical person herself, is speaking quietly but with some urgency to the people around us. She keeps her own counsel at all times, but I read concern in the tight set of her shoulders, the short, sharp way she is moving her hands as she talks.

  Nobody knows what my sister has, but it’s looking less like anaphylaxis by the minute. In fact, she has angioedema, and the emergency doctors could conceivably kill her by treating her for allergy, but they cannot know this. They are the first responders, whose job it is to keep her alive. They treat what they see and if it is quacking like a duck, they can only deem it a duck.

  I sit next to my sister, not even considering that this might worsen and end here, not knowing that the statistics show you have only a 48% chance of surviving this kind of attack. I am solid in a faith firmly rooted in the viewing of medical drama on TV that the people working here are heroes. No one makes mistakes and nobody dies. This allows me to sit quietly beside her, patting her leg under the sheet.

  Some time before dawn she improves. They send us home and will summon us later to pick her up, after they have observed her for a while.

  She comes home later that day looking normal, with no idea why she came so near to not making it, and afflicted with a text-book case of what newspapers, when reporting the mad and murderous behaviour of bouncers in clubs or melt-downs in gyms and on sporting fields, refer to as ’roid rage. She is hyped-up, so high on steroids that her feet barely graze the ground. She is in perpetual motion, and carries on a non-stop, animated dialogue with her inner crazy person. It will take days for this to wear off.

  She goes off at her partner, at me, at the friends staying with us, like a cluster bomb: a flash of sulphur igniting, words she cannot take back delivered with such force and conviction that you have to believe she means at least some of them. In this state she has done nothing to bring upon herself, part of my sister’s keen distress must result from her registering what she is doing, and hearing what she is saying.

  Her need for movement means that the dog gets a lot of walks. I accompany her to stride around the running track at the local high school and she explains to me that we need to plan out the rest of my stay. We need some goals, steps to get there. I plan to survive if possible. That is my goal. I do not say this.

  What I do say is that I would like to see my father every day but beyond that, we can do whatever she likes.

  Wrong answer.

  No, she shouts. No, no, no! She throws the doggie bag of poo on the ground. She stamps her feet in a frenzy. No, no, no, she tells me. That is not how it has to work. He should not get back better than he put in. You come here to see him, in spite of what he did and didn’t do. I practically have to die to get your attention.

  I will not forget my dismay at hearing what she says but I am also thinking that perhaps, when she is better, I will make her laugh. I will comment on the cultural inappropriateness of a middle-aged white lady doing something resembling a First Nations war-dance on the oval. It’s what I do.

  I will only be pushed so far however, and I insist that I will see Dad every day.

  We stomp back home and the following days pass in a state of uneasy truce, me getting taken to task for caring more about getting my laundry done than spending time with her, for preferring to browse in a children’s shop for my granddaughter while she and a friend go look at homewares. I don’t even know what those are.

  I try my best. We all do. She becomes gradually less livid, but remains dictatorial. At breakfast the day of a barbecue she has refused to cancel on the pretext that we can all just pitch in and it will be fine, she circulates a list of chores to be accomplished for the barbecue to be a success.

  We are to pass it around the breakfast table and, at each passage, put our initial after a task we choose until there are none left. I choose ‘Cut tomatoes for salad’, initial that item and pass it on. My second choice is ‘Put greens in salad bowl’. At the third passage I can’t help myself and, straight-faced, suggest that I don’t think I can do more. My sister looks solemnly at me and says that of course she does not expect anyone to commit to more than he or she can do. I honestly can’t tell if she’s having me on.

  Later, as we prepare in the kitchen, I whisper to my sister’s friend that she has to cover for me, because I need to go get my dad. She will have to do my two initialled tasks for me. I don’t want to talk to my sister about it. The friend gives me a you-need-a-hug look but she is holding a potato peeler and just nods sympathetically.

  It’s just the drugs talking, I tell her. I know this. Still, I start counting the days until I leave like an insomniac counts sheep, hoping she won’t relapse in the interim.

  At the barbecue, I hear the fellow who was our host at Christmas talking to my sister about steroids. He says, I know, I know. You listen to yourself saying these things to the people you love. You hear what you are saying, and yet you can’t stop yourself.

  She gets better. We walk the dog at the park where her friends, all owners of labradors, assemble. The dogs play well together, most are well-trained, and I’m happy to be out in the air with everybody until the day of the dogfight.

  A new dog, who is being looked after by one of the labrador owners, has been added to the mix. He’s a working dog, a mongrel, scrappy and rangy. His interest is in herding everybody, and he circles the canines and the humans, nudging and nipping to get everyone rounded up. I cringe as he bangs into the back of my knees, the dog-owners yell, frenzied barking breaks out, and I am nearly bowled over by rolling, roiling masses of dog.

  My sister steps in front of me, pushes me back against the wall of the toilet block, and says, Don’t move. Then she wades out into the dogs to sort things out.

  I don’t think I told her afterwards how proud I was of her, how safe I felt. I did, however, tell her that I wouldn’t go to the dog park again, but I would go to cat parks if she knew the whereabouts of any. She was delighted with this comment and relayed it to her dog-owner friends.

  When I visit my father, he reminisces. He says, Do you remember the time…? I don’t because usually I wasn’t born. I say, Tell me about that again, Dad, and he does.

  But something in his brain has stretched and snapped like an old elastic band. Whatever kept his grip on reality firm and his strong auto-censor in place is dissolving, and disparate things are spilling out. I’m getting Dad 2.0, director’s cut. When I invite him to tell me about that again, I’m expecting more tales of financial derring-do and how much he’s worth, but there is a change.

  I am hearing stories of single-engine planes over the jungle, of being spirited out the back door of bodegas where he was eating by minders who hide him under a canvas in the bottom of a pirogue and paddle him down the river to safety. There are tales of women, important and influential women but damsels in distress nonetheless, snatched out of harm’s way by his courage.

  I know that after he retired from a big oil company when he was sixty, he set up his own one-man petroleum consultancy firm with my mot
her as co-director. I always presumed that he did this to be able to claim some of her extravagances against tax.

  He did go to dangerous places for clients. He was in Pakistan when Ali Bhutto was assassinated in 1979, and stopped over in France with us on his way home. I’ve seen the Columbian stamps in his old passport. I don’t believe everything in the stories he’s telling me but there may be truth there. I have no clue what he did in those places.

  After dinner at the retirement home, I watch him fold his napkin next to his plate and lean back in his chair, doing what people have done forever around fires in caves and at kitchen tables and over lavish place-settings at gala fundraisers – settling in to yarn and embellish, to tell the stories of who we are or who we think we are.

  He interrupts the flow of the narrative and looks around to see if anyone can hear, then leans across the table and says, like a conspirator, But when she saw the size of my penis, she just backed away, and said Oh, no. No, no. He smiles to himself.

  I stare into my coffee cup, resisting the urge to put my hands over my ears and chant la-la-la-la-la. I have seen my father in the shower and have no doubt that he was a fine figure of a man when he was younger, but I need more resilience than I have right now to deal with so much too much information. I take my leave and walk around in the little communal garden outside as I wait for my sister to pick me up. The asters are blooming. I study the asters.

  I get into the car with her and tell her about the misfirings in Dad’s head. I tell her about the lady’s backing away and about her comment. My sister has to pull the car over because we are laughing until the tears run down our faces and the tears keep coming for quite some time.

  At the airport when I’m leaving, my sister, who is now acting completely normal, looks worried and says, Was I very mean to you?

  I tell her it was the drugs talking.