The Last Cadillac

by Nancy Nau Sullivan

  I went out the front door again, and this time I paid close attention to the Kleenex on the walk. They hadn’t blown away, but it was a still morning. The cat brushed up against me again, agitated and meowing loudly. What about the cat? Yes, the cat had been outside when I opened the door. She was a house cat, and she’d not gone far. She never stayed out long, and she had not been at the window mewing to come in, which was her usual way of getting our attention almost as soon as she went out the door. If Dad had taken the car, he had probably let the cat out when he left. It had to have been recently.

  I started walking down Willow Avenue toward Gulf Drive, more out of nervous energy than anything else. Then I picked up the pace, sandals flapping loudly on the broken shell that skittered over the asphalt. Not a soul, nor a car was on the street, and not a sound, except for the doves cooing in the bushes. I had three blocks to go to get to the main drive, and then I saw something, a dot turning off Gulf Drive toward me. I stopped and peered down the street. The dot was definitely a shade of mocha, moving slowly and growing larger and larger, the sunlight beaming off glass. I started to run. I ran fast toward the dot, as fast as my flip-flops would take me.

  I ran all the way down Willow Avenue. When I was within ten feet of the Cadillac, I screamed, “Stop!”

  But the driver was already stopped, right in the middle of the street.

  Dad was hunched far down in the driver’s seat, his white knuckles gripping the wheel and his hat pulled down so low I couldn’t see his face. I yanked the door open and grabbed him around the neck with joy and relief. He was stiff as a tree trunk. He didn’t even turn to look at me; he just stared straight ahead.

  “Ow,” he said, flinching inside the circle of my arms.

  I remembered the bad neck and the arthritis, so I let him go, reluctantly.

  “You’re killing me,” he yelped.

  “I’d like to.” But I was laughing. “Dad, where have you been?”

  “Oh, I don’t know. Just down to see Leonard at the shop. Had a feeling things weren’t going too well down there.”

  “Dad, Leonard’s in Indiana.” This information had no effect on him whatsoever. He was lost in another world. He hadn’t seen Leonard, his beloved foreman and right-hand man, since he retired and left town for Florida. I thanked God he hadn’t been looking for Leonard in south Chicago traffic on a Saturday morning. The traffic on Anna Maria Island was thin and slow, and when a car went by, it was clocking about twenty. It was still no place for my father to be driving around. He could hardly manage his two-hundred-pound frame, much less a two-thousand-pound car.

  Dad looked back down the road and kept his hands on the wheel.

  “Dad, I’ve been worried to death about you. Please, don’t do this again.”

  “Do what again?”

  He looked up at me, the confusion deep and impenetrable in those sea-blue eyes. It wouldn’t do any good to try and untangle the morning’s crazy adventure. His senility was like water rushing through my fingers; I couldn’t grab hold of it, understand it, manage it at all. Some days were just like that, most of the time now. No one had told me the depth and breadth of that senility and—especially—how it could come and go. I would get frustrated when he couldn’t remember something, but in that moment, he couldn’t. Later on, on another day, he could. It was the progression of the disease; the dementia came and went without an itinerary. We just had to follow along and do the best we could. That would have been the pill to die for, one that leveled out and rebuilt or, at least, stabilized the senile brain, one that gave comfort to the demented—and, as a result, to the supposedly sane.

  It wouldn’t do any good to ask him where he’d gone, because he usually didn’t remember details. Details were confusing, unless they happened fifty years ago. Standing in the street, sizing him up, it looked to me like he’d already spent what lucidity he woke up with. I had no idea how long he’d been up, but it had to have been a strenuous, tiring morning for him. I had to deal with The Now to get through to him and figure out a way to budge him away from the wheel, permanently.

  With the car door open, we took up the width of the road, and thankfully, the place was deserted. I put my hand on his arm, afraid he would resist, but he stayed rooted to the wheel. Sometimes he was docile as a child, and other times, he grunted and rumbled like an old bull. I’d never been able to manage if he started flailing around or became violent. It was still something to watch for. The therapists and nurses warned me about that, too, but I was getting used to Dad’s change of moods, from confused to lucid, but mostly cooperative. Every day I had a different dad.

  “Dad, why don’t you scoot over and let me drive for a bit?” I tried for a light tone, like I was offering him a bowl of spumoni, his favorite ice cream.

  He began to give it up. His fingers relaxed slightly on the steering wheel, and he slumped a little in the seat. Then the moment froze and clicked into my brain, to stay there forever in memory, of Dad and me and the Cadillac, in the middle of a sunny bright morning with a single bird looping overhead. The air was so full of promise for a day of boating and picnics, sunbathing and walking on the beach, but instead I felt that other events were ahead for us. I was going to another level of taking care of Dad, of protecting him from himself, and I was scared.

  His grip tightened.

  I waited, and then I ran my hand up and down his arm, gently, but he didn’t move. He kept holding on to the steering wheel like it was the only tangible thing in a permanent state of fog. He acted the same way when I drove him around, or when he got into the shower, or entered a stairwell, or into any situation where he didn’t have control anymore. He hung on to the handlebars for dear life. He was afraid, too.

  At least we were in it together.

  He looked away, and I couldn’t see his eyes except for the straight white lashes under the brim of that hat. I waited for him to mentally get his bearings. He’d gone out for a spin, not really knowing what he was doing, and now, he’d finally come back to us, and we were all safe. I was just glad he was safe.

  We were at a crossing where the tie between us was about to pull tighter, and for once, I waited patiently for him to respond. I had to move slowly to get through this, to build whatever understanding we could—even if the reality was that he might forget the whole thing in a minute. I didn’t want to think about that. I always held on to the belief that some of my dad was always in there somewhere, and would stay in there until the end of him. We needed a new understanding, mostly for safety’s sake, and I didn’t want to reach out and take it, so I waited for Dad.

  “Dad?”

  “Yes?” He lifted his face and he fixed his eyes steadily, surely, without taking them off me, and I let that gaze be a strong link between us. His expression changed from a blank stare to one of sweetness and peace, and I saw a lot of the old dad come back.

  “I’m so tired. Let’s go home,” he said. “You drive. It’s your turn.”

  I hadn’t yelled at him. I’d waited patiently for him to get a grip on the moment and respond. In the words of my grandmother, he was a poor soulie lamb. And he admitted that he was tired.

  He was slipping further and further away. Into dementia.

  I hated that word. Dementia. It was a black hole; it was taking my dad, the smartest and strongest man in the world, a fact I had to accept even as I watched, and hoped for good days, while his mind drifted away.

  We made it step by step back into the house. I steered him to the breakfast table, half coaxing, half dragging, and when I fixed him a bowl of frosty flakes with a banana on top, he perked up. He started to put globs of sugar on the cereal before I caught him, and then he began wolfing it down. Sometimes I let him get after the sugar bowl; it wouldn’t kill him, like the booze and cigarettes. I kept a parental eye on him and the kids. But I had definitely let my guard down this morning, I thought, staring out at the canal. I needed to tighten the controls, lock the doors and hide the keys, because I couldn’t afford to slack off.
Dad finished the last lick of milk, like the cat.

  Just then, Marilyn’s car crunched over the shells in the drive, and two seconds later, she appeared in the doorway. “The Commando’s already up?” she said, as she plopped a large canvas bag on the kitchen floor. I was wiping up the counter, and Dad was talking to the cat at the breakfast table.

  “The Commando’s been up and out already,” I said. I told her how we started out our day. Both hands went up to her cheeks so fast I thought she’d lift herself off the ground.

  “He what?”

  She skipped out of the kitchen and over to his side at the table in the family room. She began poking around at his back and arms. He looked up at her, with a blank, tired expression. I noticed for the first time what a good job he’d done of dressing himself. He’d managed to get his nightshirt tucked into his khakis, his jacket on, and his boat-shoes—sans socks—on to his feet, but he looked mighty tired.

  “Commando? You out driving your tank this morning?” Marilyn squeaked. “You leave that to the generals, you hear?”

  “Sure, sure.” He was agreeable when attention was lathered on. “But, you know, I’m awfully tired. I think I’ll take a little nap.”

  We tucked him into bed and stood in the bedroom doorway, shaking our heads at him. Dad was already snoring. “He’ll get a ‘showa’ and good head wash when he gets up,” she said. She ran off to the laundry room, talking to herself and getting into a lather about the misadventures of The Commando.

  I went out to the patio and sat at the table drinking coffee, in a daze of relief that we had survived until 10:00a.

  Then Marilyn stopped midway between the kitchen and the laundry and shouted at me through the kitchen window.

  “Where in heaven’s name did he go?”

  “I have no idea. I tried to get it out of him, but he was too confused, and too tired. If the sheriff shows up, we’ll know. But so far, so good.”

  I was hoping he hadn’t stuck up the Circle K for a pack of smokes, or run over a jogger. He may have had a mission, besides going off to see Leonard, but I would never know. I was still amazed he’d driven more than three blocks away and back—which was all the evidence I had—and I was relieved more than I could say that he was back safe and sound.

  A heron alighted on the dock and picked along carefully, and then it took off over the canal. The danger was outside, and inside, and this was one of the things I didn’t consider when Dad so innocently made his announcement, sitting on the patio at the dollhouse up North: “I’m going with you.”

  The phone rang and cut through the morning silence. I almost didn’t answer it. I didn’t want to talk to anyone after the hunt for Dad. I just wanted to re-group and maybe mop the floor for the tenth time that week, a therapeutic exercise that seemed to let my demonic energy flow out through the squeegee. I especially didn’t want to talk on the phone. I’d have gotten Caller ID if I weren’t so cheap—and call waiting, if I were ruder.

  No question about it, during that particular stretch of time in my life, I was isolating myself and becoming dangerously anti-social, but this was something I didn’t see, nor would I admit, if asked.

  I let it ring six times. Unfortunately, I picked it up.

  It was my sister the nurse. “How are you?” she said, in an official tone.

  “Do you really want to know?”

  31

  THE PLUME

  “I’m fine,” I said. I lied. “We’re all fine.”

  My impulse was to cut the conversation short. It was too bad that it had come to this. I didn’t want anything to do with my sister the nurse.

  I tried to speak in a friendly tone, but the sound of my voice stiffened with each the syllable. We always started off in a fairly civil manner, but I knew where it would end, with a plume of annoyance rising up inside me. She always wanted something, but she never asked for it directly. She led me along and we inevitably ended up in a free for all. Our relationship was a disaster. I regretted how far we’d come from the days when she wore an eyelet bonnet, when I had just turned seven and she was barely seven months, and I was so happy to take care of her! We had grown apart as sisters, and the further apart we grew, the less agreement we had on the best way to care for Dad. In fact, we never agreed on anything.

  “How are you doing with Dad? Do you have help, and some time to yourself?”

  “Oh, yes,” I said brightly. “We’re a little family down here.”

  “He has a family up here, too, you know,” she said.

  I didn’t answer.

  Finally she said, “Don’t you think you should get on with your life, instead of babysitting Dad?”

  “Excuse me? I’m not babysitting Dad.”

  “Well, maybe not exactly. But that’s what I’d call it,” she huffed.

  “Well, I don’t. He lets me know what he wants, and I can usually figure out what he needs. He’s getting along fine. We all are.”

  “I think I should take over. I have a better handle on what he needs, you know, as far as the meds and therapy and such.”

  “We have doctors and drugstores down here.”

  “That isn’t what I mean and you know it.”

  “No, I don’t know it. And, goddamit, what do you mean?”

  If she told me she was the “professional” one more time, I was going to throw the phone in the canal. But she was the nurse, and she wanted control of Dad. I had the control. Before we left for Florida, Dad designated me his health care representative. My sister the nurse didn’t say a word to me at the time, and I hadn’t given the matter much thought. It was a piece of paper, a simple piece of paper that just made sense because he was coming to live with me. His family doctor and Joe, the accountant, pointed this out. I didn’t even have the presence of mind to think of it—with all my lists and plans to move out of there as fast as I could. But the issue of the health care authorization remained at low boil in the relationship with my sister the nurse. She didn’t throw it in my face exactly. Instead, she needled and annoyed, called me with insistent, off-the-wall demands that made no sense at all.

  I felt that plume of annoyance puffing out as big as a hot air balloon.

  “Look, he likes it down here, and he’s doing just fine,” I said. I didn’t mention that he nagged me for martinis, as he reached out to grope his therapist’s rear end. I also left out the part about his early-morning spin around the island. I wondered where he went, but it was the last thing I’d ever mention to her. I couldn’t level with her. She was still telling everyone that I had kidnapped Dad, according to one cousin. That hurt. I hadn’t tied him up and hustled him out of Northwest Indiana; he wanted to go.

  I couldn‘t be honest with her, and God forbid, let on that I wasn’t in control of the situation with Dad. I’d just have to keep all the doors shut and locked, along with my mouth.

  “Why don’t you visit him?” I asked, trying to wind up the call and diffuse the plume that was ready to burst into flame. “I’ll get you a plane ticket.”

  “You’ll get me a plane ticket. That’s nice of you,” she said. The sound of her voice froze our connection in one unbending, brittle line, from North to South. “I just can’t fly off like that.”

  “Oh, now you can’t just fly off. That’s interesting. How about that magic umbrella of yours, Nurse Poppins? You’ve never missed a party, and you came to see Mom all the time. Now you can’t come down and see Dad once in a while, even if I get you a ticket.”

  There was dead silence on the line as I stood in my kitchen and bit my lip, and she adjusted her nurse’s cap.

  “I don’t want you to get me a ticket,” she said. “I don’t want to visit him. I want him to come back up here and live near us. And, by the way, what puts you in a position to buy ME a ticket?”

  “Ah, there’s the rub, isn’t it. That I would buy you a ticket with his American Express card, which he has asked me to do. For all of you.”

  “Really.”

  “Really,” I said, qui
etly, not letting the plume take over and smother me. “And I would, if you’d let me.”

  I didn’t give a flying fig if she came down to Florida to visit or not. I was sick of her needling and hoped she’d leave me alone. No, leave us alone. Maybe the hostility would evaporate and we could get along, even make some sense of it all.

  Who was I kidding?

  I hung up. My hand was still cramped from gripping the phone in a strangle-hold when it rang again. Now I was definitely not going to answer it, but I did. It was Lucy.

  “You’ve done everything, and if I can give you a break, I’d like to do it so you can get your life back on track.”

  “Huh? Who have you been talking to?”

  “Why?”

  “Because I just had an unpleasant conversation with our sister, and I don’t feel like having another one with you.”

  “Oh, stop it. Why do you get so defensive? And why do you let her bother you? She’s just trying to do her job. She’s a nurse, for God’s sake, and you’re the oldest. Never the twain shall meet.”

  “Well, you got that right. But she gives me a fat pain.”

  “Forget it. You’re doing a great job. He loves it down there. I know he does, and she knows it, too. So what the fuck?”

  “You have such a nice way of putting it.”

  “I’m trying to help you over here,” she said. “Jesus almighty, you must be burned out.”

  “I’m doing all right.”

  “Just all right? Is all right good enough?” she said. “Come on. What do you think?”

  “What do I think? No one’s asked me that. Ever.”

  “Well, I’m asking you now. What do you think about taking a break?”

  Until she said it, it never occurred to me to think about taking a break. If I did, I would have to think about how off-track life had gone. Our mother was dead, our father was in Florida, and the family was tattered beyond repair, it seemed. It was a good time to think, for once.