by Unknown
Too many questions. She was shaking with terror. She clenched her teeth to keep them from chattering, tried not to breathe lest they hear her panting. She squeezed her eyes shut and tried to be utterly still. She heard the door creak on its hinges. The rising wind pushing cold air into the room, or the man with the baseball bat? She curled tighter, put her hands over her head, and closed her eyes. Don’t move, she told herself. Stay still until the danger is gone.
“Mom, what the hell! Are you all right? Did you fall? Why didn’t you call me?”
Alex, face white, on his knees by the kitchen table, peering at her. “Can you move? Can you speak? Was it a stroke?”
She blinked and tried to make sense of what she saw. Alex had his coat on. Snowflakes on his shoulders. A wool watch cap pulled down over his ears. Cold air flowing in from the open back door. “I think I just fell asleep here,” she said, and as his eyes widened, she tried to make repairs by saying, “Fell asleep reading at the table. I must have slid right down here without waking up.”
“Reading what?” he demanded wearily.
She tried to hide how much it hurt to roll to her hands and knees and crawl out from under the table. She had to grab hold of the chair seat to lever herself up and then onto it. The kitchen table was bare. “Well, how odd!” she exclaimed, and forced a smile onto her face. “And what brings you by here today?”
“Your neighbors,” he said heavily. “Maureen called. She was on her way up to Emergency with Hugh. She couldn’t stop, but she saw that your back door was open but your lights weren’t on. She didn’t see any footprints in the snow and she was worried about you. So I came.”
“How’s Hugh?”
“I didn’t ask. I came here instead.”
She looked at the kitchen floor. A delta of melting snow showed where the storm had blown into her kitchen. She’d slept curled on the floor with the door open during a snowstorm. She creaked past him to the coffeepot without a word. She went to turn it on and saw the burned crust of dried coffee in the bottom of the pot. She moved methodically as she washed out the pot, measured water, and put grounds into a clean filter. She pushed the button. No light came on.
“I think you probably burned it out,” Alex said heavily. He reached past her to unplug it. He didn’t look at her as he took off the pot, threw away the grounds, and dumped the water down the sink. “I think you must have left it turned on for a long time to evaporate that much coffee.” He pulled her small garbage can from under the sink. It was full. He tried unsuccessfully to stuff the coffeemaker into it and then left it perched crookedly on top.
He was quiet as he put water into two mugs and set them both in the microwave. She went and got the broom and swept the snow out the door, and then wiped up the water that remained. It hurt to bend; she was so stiff but didn’t dare groan. Alex made instant coffee for both of them and then sat down heavily at her table. He gestured at the chair opposite, and she reluctantly joined him.
“Do you know who I am?” he asked her.
She stared at him. “You’re my son, Alex. You’re forty-two and your birthday was last month. Your wife has two children. I’m not losing my mind.”
He opened his mouth, and then shut it. “What year is this?” He demanded.
“Two thousand and eleven. And Barack Obama is president. And I don’t like him or the Tea Party. Are you going to give me a handful of change now and ask me how much more I need to make a dollar? Because I saw the same stupid ‘Does Your Aging Parent Have Alzheimer’s?’ quiz in last week’s Sunday paper.”
“It wasn’t a quiz. It was a series of simple tests to check mental acuity. Mom, maybe you can make change and tell me who I am, but you can’t explain why you were sleeping on the floor under the table with the back door open. Or why you let the coffeepot boil dry.” He looked around abruptly. “Where’s Sarge?”
She told the truth. “He ran away. I haven’t seen him for days.”
The silence grew long. He looked at the floor guiltily and spoke in a gruff voice. “You should have called me. I would have done that for you.”
“I didn’t have him put down! He got out of the yard and ran off when a stranger shouted at him.” She looked away from him. “He was only five. That’s not that old for a dog.”
“Bobbie called me a couple of nights ago. He said he came home from working late and saw you carrying groceries into the house at midnight.”
“So?”
“So why were you buying groceries in the middle of the night?”
“Because I ran out of hot chocolate. And I wanted some for watching a late show, so I ran to the store for it, and while I was there, I thought I might as well pick up some other things I needed.” Lie upon lie upon lie. She wouldn’t tell him that the clock no longer mattered to her. Wouldn’t say that time no longer controlled her. The heater cycled off. She heard it give a final tick and realized that it had been running constantly since she’d awakened. Probably it had run all night long.
Alex didn’t believe her. “Mom, you can’t live alone anymore. You’re doing crazy things. And the crazy things are getting to be dangerous.”
She stared into her mug. There was something final in his voice. Something more threatening than a stranger with a baseball bat.
“I don’t want to drag you to the doctor and get a statement that you are no longer competent. I’d like us both to keep our dignity and avoid all that.” He stopped and swallowed and she suddenly knew he was close to tears. She turned her head and stared out the window. An ordinary winter day, gray skies, wet streets. Alex sniffed and cleared his throat. “I’m going to call Sandy and see if she can get a few days off and come stay with you. We have to get a handle on how to proceed. I wish you’d let me get started on this months ago.” He rubbed his cheeks and she heard the bristle of unshaven whiskers against his palms. He’d left his house in a panic. Maureen’s call had scared him. “Mom, we need to clear out the house and put it on the market. You can come stay with me, or maybe Sandy can make room for you. Until we can find an assisted living placement for you.”
Placement. Not until we can find an apartment or condo. Placement. Like putting something on a shelf. “No,” she said quietly.
“Yes,” he said. He sighed as if he were breathing his life out. “I can’t give in to you again, Mom. I’ve let things go by too many times.” He stood up. “When I came in here and saw you, I thought you were dead. And what flashed into my mind was that I was going to have to tell Sandy that I let you die on the floor alone. Because I didn’t have the strength to stand up to you.” He heaved another sigh. “I need to put you into a safe place so I can stop worrying about you.”
“I’m sorry that I frightened you.” Sincere words. She held back the other words, the ones that would tell him she would go down fighting, that neither he nor Sandy was going to keep her in a guest room like a guinea pig in a glass tank, nor board her out to a kennel for the elderly.
She only listened after that. He told her that he would call Sandy, that he’d be back tomorrow or Thursday at the latest. Would she be all right? Yes. Would she please stay in the house? Yes. He would call her every few hours today, and tonight he’d call her at bedtime. So would she please keep the phone near her, because if she didn’t answer, he was coming back here. Yes. Yes to everything he said, not because she agreed or promised but because “yes” was the word that would make him feel safe enough to go away.
Then she asked, “But what about Richard? Tomorrow is Thursday. I always go see Richard on Thursdays.”
For a moment he was silent. Then he said, “He doesn’t know what day you come. He doesn’t even know it’s you. You could never go again, and he wouldn’t miss you.”
“I would miss him,” she said fiercely. “I always go on Thursday mornings. Tomorrow I’m going to see him.”
He stood up. “Mom. Yesterday was Thursday.”
After Alex finally drove away, she made herself hot tea, found the ibuprofen, and sat down to think. She r
ecalled the men standing in the street last night, the backpack man right outside her window, and a river of chill ran down her spine. She was in danger. And there was absolutely no one she would turn to for advice without running herself into even greater danger. Backpack Man might kill her with an aluminum baseball bat, but her family was contemplating something much worse. Death by bat would only happen once. If her children put her somewhere “safe,” she’d wake up there day after day and night after night. To a woman who had broken free of time, that meant an eternity of cafeteria meals and time spent in a Spartan room. Alone. Because soon Alex would decide that it didn’t matter if he ever visited her. She knew that now.
For the next few days she answered promptly whenever Alex called. She was bright and chipper on the phone, pretending enthusiasm for television movies that she cribbed from the TV guide. Twice she walked down to Maureen’s, and twice she wasn’t home. Sarah moved the accumulating newspapers off her doorstep and suspected Hugh was dying.
Sarah set the clocks to remind her when to go to bed and remained there, head on the pillow, blankets over her, until another clock rang to tell her to rise. She did not look out of the kitchen windows before ten or after five. The day that a flash of motion caught her eye and she looked out the window to see the girl run past in her hat the colors of freshly fallen acorns, she rose from the kitchen table and went to her bedroom and lay on the bed and watched The Jerry Springer Show.
The nursing home called to tell her that Richard had pneumonia. She sneaked out that day, caught the bus, and spent the whole morning with him. He didn’t know her. They had taped an oxygen tube under his nose and the pink hissing sound reminded her of a balloon endlessly going flat. She tried to talk over it, couldn’t, and just sat holding his hand. He stared at the wall. Waiting.
The next evening Sandy arrived. It startled Sarah when she walked in the front door without knocking, but she was glad to see her. She had driven over the mountains with her friend, a gaunt, morose woman who smoked cigarettes in the house and fountained apologies for “forgetting” that she shouldn’t. Sandy had bought Safeway deli Chinese food and they ate at Sarah’s table out of Styrofoam clamshells. The friend and Sandy talked of the friend’s divorce from That Bastard and of Sandy’s upcoming divorce from That Idiot. Sarah hadn’t known a divorce was in Sandy’s future. When she gently asked why, Sandy suddenly gulped, gasped that it was too complicated to explain, and fled the room with her friend trailing after her. Sarah numbly tidied up the kitchen and waited for her to come back down. When neither of them did, she eventually went to bed.
That was the first day. The next morning Sandy and the friend arose and began stripping the unused bedrooms that had been Alex’s and Sandy’s when they were teens. Sarah felt a mixture of relief and regret as she watched them finally emptying the closets and drawers of the “precious mementoes” that Sarah and Russ had longed to discard for years. “Lightening the load,” Sandy called it, as they discarded old clothing and high school sports gear and required-reading paperbacks and ancient magazines and binders. One by one they carried the bulging black garbage sacks down the stairs and mounded them by the back porch. “Time to simplify!” Sandy’s friend chortled cheerily each time she toted out another sack.
They ate sandwiches at lunch and then brought back pizza and beer for dinner. After dinner, they went right back to work. Sandy’s friend had a laugh like a donkey’s bray. Sarah escaped her cigarette smoke by going out into the dusky backyard. The evening was rainy, but when she stood under the copper beech, little of the water reached her. She stared out at the street. Empty. Empty and fog free. A calm neighborhood of mowed lawns and well-tended houses and shiny cars. Sandy came out with another bulging garbage bag. Sarah gave her daughter a rueful smile. “Better tie them shut, dear. The rain will ruin the clothing.”
“The dump won’t care, Mom.”
“The dump? You’re not taking them to Goodwill?”
Sandy gave a martyred sigh. “Secondhand stores have gotten really picky. They won’t take a lot of this stuff and I don’t have time to sort it. If I take all these bags there, they’ll refuse half of them and I’ll just have to go to the dump anyway. So I’ll save myself a trip by going straight to the dump.”
Sarah was drawing breath to protest, but Sandy had already turned and gone back for more. She shook her head. Tomorrow she would sort them herself and then call one of the charities for a pickup. She simply couldn’t allow all that useful clothing and all those paperbacks to go to a dump. As the friend plopped down another sack, a seam split and a shirt Sarah recognized popped from it. Sandy came behind her friend with another bag.
“Wait a minute! That’s your father’s shirt, one of his good Pendletons. Was that in your room?” Sarah was almost amused at the idea that a shirt Sandy must have “borrowed” so many years ago would still have been in her room. But as she came smiling to the bag, she saw another familiar plaid behind it. “What’s this?” she demanded as she drew out the sleeve of Russ’s shirt.
“Oh, Mom.” Sandy had been caught but she wasn’t repentant. “We’ve started on Dad’s closet. But relax. It’s all men’s clothing, nothing you can use. And it has to go.”
“Has to go? What are you talking about?”
Sandy sighed again. She dropped the bag she carried and explained carefully, “The house has to be emptied so it can be staged by a realtor. I promise, there’s nothing in these bags that you can take with you.” She shook her head at the shock on her mother’s face and added in a gentler voice, “Let it go, Mom. There’s no reason to hang on to his clothing anymore. It’s not Dad. It’s just his old shit.”
If she had used any other word, perhaps Sarah would have felt sorrow rather than anger. Any other word, and perhaps she could have responded rationally. But “shit”?
“Shit? His ‘shit’? No, Sandy, it’s not his ‘shit.’ Those are his clothes, the clothes and possessions of a man I loved. Do what you want with your old things. But those are mine, and I am not throwing them away. When the time comes for me to part with them, I’ll know it. And then they will go somewhere where they can do someone some good. Not to the dump.”
Sandy squeezed her eyes shut and shook her head. “Can’t put this off any longer, Mom. You know it’s why I came. I’ve only got this weekend to get all this stuff cleared out. I know it’s hard, but you have to let us do it. We don’t have time for you to be picky about it.”
Sarah couldn’t breathe. Had she agreed to this? When Alex had been there, talking and nagging, she had said, “Yes, yes,” but that didn’t mean she’d agreed to this, this destruction of her life. No. Not this fast, not like this! “No. No, Sandy.” She spoke as firmly as if Sandy were still a teenager. “You are going to take all my things back upstairs. Do you hear me? This stops now!”
The friend spoke in a low voice. “Your brother warned you about this. Now you’ve upset her.” She dropped her cigarette and ground it out on the porch step. She left the butt there. “Maybe you should call your bro. She looks really confused.”
Sarah spun to confront the friend. “I’m standing here!” she shouted. “And you and your stinking cigarettes can get out of my house right now. I am not ‘confused’; I am furious! Sandy, you should be ashamed of yourself, going through other people’s things. You were taught better. What is the matter with you?”
Sandy’s face went white, then scarlet. Anger flashed across it, to be caged by dignity. “Mom. I hate to see you like this. I have to be honest. Your mind is slipping. Alex has been updating me. He told me he’d talked to you about this, and that you’d looked at the brochures together and chosen a couple of places you’d like. Don’t you remember at all?”
“We talked. That was all. Nothing was decided! Nothing.”
Sandy shook her head sadly. “That’s not what Alex said. He said you’d agreed, but he was taking it slow. But since that last incident, we have to act right away. Do you remember how he found you? Crouching under your table with the do
or open in a snowstorm?”
The friend was shaking her head, pityingly. Sarah was horrified. Alex had told Sandy, and Sandy had spread it to her friends. “That is none of your business,” she said stiffly.
Sandy threw up her hands and rolled her eyes. “Really, Mom? Really? Do you think we can just walk off and say, ‘Not my problem’? Because we can’t. We love you. We want to do what is right. Alex has been talking to several very nice senior communities with lovely amenities. He’s got it all figured out. If we use your social security and Dad’s pension, Alex and I can probably scrape together enough extra to get you into a nice place until the house sells. After that—”
“No.” Sarah said it flatly. She stared at Sandy, appalled. Who was this woman? How could she think she could just walk in and begin making decisions about Sarah’s life? “Get out,” she said.
Sandy glanced at her friend, who hadn’t budged. She was watching both of them, her mouth slightly ajar, like a Jerry Springer spectator. Sandy spoke to her apologetically. “You’d better go for now, Heidi. I need to calm my mom down. Why don’t you take the car and—”
“You, Sandy. I’m talking to you. Get. Out.”
Sandy’s face went slack with shock. Her eyes came back to life first, and for a moment she looked eleven and Sarah would have done anything to take back her words. Then her friend spoke knowingly. “I told you that you should have called your bro.”
