by Lisa Wingate
He gave a throaty chuckle, squinting down the hallway. “You know, when I was a young chap, my pap told me no matter where you are, keep your face to the light and the shadow’s gonna fall behind you. I always remembered that. There’s light somewhere in every situation. ” Rubbing a hand across his five o’clock shadow, he pointed at Mary. “I ever tell you I drove them old steam trains after the war? I bet these boys would like to hear about that.”
Brady perked up. “Ohhh, I wike twain,” he breathed. “I got Thomas twain.”
Mr. Fisher turned his attention to Brady. “I seen that show down in the TV room just the other day. They was some kids visitin’ their grandma, and they watched it. Reckon if we could go check? Maybe we could find it on TV.” Mr. Fisher and both boys turned to Mary expectantly.
I took advantage of the chance to exit the conversation. “I was just on my way out,” I said to Mary. “But I’d like to talk with you about Hanna Beth’s condition, when we have the chance.”
Mary focused on me, ignoring Brady, who was trying to pull her toward the commons area. “I’m here every day . . . but you might want to talk to her attending physician or the physical therapist. I’m just a nurse’s aide.”
“Don’t let her kid you,” Mr. Fisher interjected. “She’s the one does all the work around here.”
Mary stumbled forward, both boys tugging her hands. “Boys!” she scolded.
I waved her away. “No, it’s fine. We can talk another time.”
“It was nice meeting you,” she said, then followed Brandon and Brady down the hall, her feet dragging, unable to match their enthusiastic pace after a long day at work. I knew the feeling. Many was the day I worked late wading through the latest Immigration Services e-mail bulletins, filing with Immigration Court on behalf of internationals in imminent danger of deportation, or facilitating visas for multinational corporations impatient to import foreign executives, software designers, and engineers. At the end of an extended day at the firm, I arrived home feeling a sense of accomplishment, only to be quickly mired in parental guilt because the au pair had fixed Macey’s supper, helped her with her homework and her bath, then put her to bed. Part of me was glad the house was quiet, the sofa waiting for me to crash, but part of me realized I’d missed the evening with my daughter. We hadn’t talked about what happened at school, or who’d been in trouble in the lunchroom, or how gymnastics or dance had turned out that day. Having it all was part of the modern myth, the self-inflicted curse that tried to swallow working mothers in a pit of guilt-induced exhaustion.
I’d finally settled for the reality that you could have all of one thing, all of the other, or some of both. Macey was an incredible kid—secure, well-adjusted, smart, with aspirations of becoming a biochemist or Olympic gymnast. It was hard to argue that we hadn’t struck a functional balance. I was glad I wasn’t in Mary’s position, stuck at work without transportation, trying to see to the immediate needs of two young children when my mind and body were tapped out for the day.
As I left the nursing center behind, I wondered, just briefly, if Hanna Beth had felt the push and pull of that struggle. What must life have been like for her? Before she married my father, she was a single mother, teaching at the institutional school, struggling to raise a developmentally challenged son in some tiny faculty apartment on campus. Did she worry about Teddy when her time and energy were taken up with caring for the monumental needs of students more severely handicapped than he? Did she feel that she should be spending more time with her own son, that she couldn’t teach at the school and give him everything he needed? Was that why she quit her job as soon as she married my father? Was that the reason she took my father away from us?
I’d never, ever considered the difficulties of Hanna Beth’s life. Even now, thinking of it felt like a betrayal of my mother, of our family before Hanna Beth. Our lives were good then, privileged. Happy.
My mind slipped back in time, and I lost my way temporarily, drove through the urban streets of Deep Ellum, where old speakeasies and the black jazz clubs of the Prohibition era were being converted from abandoned, run-down buildings into trendy restaurants, art galleries, and nightclubs. When I was young, in the days before downtown revitalization, my mother avoided those areas assiduously. She was uncomfortable even with the aging neighborhoods around the Blue Sky Hill area—where the home my grandparents built with oil money had been passed down to my father. Mother filled out applications to transfer me to a private school with other kids from the privileged bubble of Blue Sky, drove to Highland Park to shop, and tolerated the surrounding neighborhoods as an inconvenience of this temporary location for our family.
It turned out to be temporary in a way she hadn’t anticipated.
In the years I had been away, Deep Ellum, Uptown, and Lakewood had clearly undergone death and resurrection. The streets were now an odd combination of old buildings renovated to contain up-scale loft apartments and shops, and new construction on streets where Prairie and Craftsman-style homes built in the thirties and forties had been bulldozed to make room for McMansions and condominium complexes suited for urbanites seeking an uptown lifestyle.
Driving along Greenville, I passed by Vista Street without recognizing it at first. The huge blue gingerbread-encrusted house that had always marked the turnoff was gone. A quaint shopping center and matching condominium complex stood in its place. I looped around in the parking lot, thinking that if my mother could have seen the condos, she would have been shocked. One of her comforts in leaving the house to my father and Hanna Beth had been her conviction that the entire area was going bad, and eventually even the property on Blue Sky Hill would be worthless. It was probably better that she’d never known about the resurgence in the shadows of downtown. Such knowledge would only have goaded her.
Memories assaulted me as I continued up Vista Street to Blue Sky Hill Court. I could feel my childhood wrapping around me, changing me, taking me back to those months before the divorce. I wasn’t driving, but riding in the back of my parents’ car, traveling from the airport, seeing for the first time in recent memory my own country. The trees, the grass, the hedges and flower beds with their bright colors were startling, the humidity oppressive after the years I’d spent in the desert.
Even compared to our fairly luxurious accommodations in Saudi, the neighborhood on Blue Sky Hill was impressive, my father’s house at the end of the road awe-inspiring, with its expansive lawn, wraparound porches, tall wrought-iron fence, and high leaded-glass windows. I could recall visiting my grandmother there, playing in the third-story attic and the garden house in the backyard, and walking down to the wet-weather creek to watch minnows swim and dragonflies skim the water.
That first day back in the States, as we stopped in the driveway, I bolted from the car and ran through the grass, feeling that I was finally home. The sensation enveloped me once again as I rounded the corner and the house came into view at the end of the street. After the long day of travel, the wild storms of emotions, the unanswered questions, Blue Sky Hill felt like a sanctuary.
As quickly as the sensation developed, it faded. This wasn’t the home I remembered. The house in general lacked the meticulous care of years past. The window frames needed cleaning. The screens were rusted and torn. Around the garage doors, the wooden trim had sun-baked to a crackle, and high on the eaves, long strings of peeling paint hung from the attic dormers. A triangular piece of the leaded glass had fallen out, and no one had bothered to cover the hole.
Resentment swelled inside me as I rolled up the driveway, then parked and turned off the engine. How dare Hanna Beth allow the house, my grandparents’ house, to disintegrate into this condition. If my father was no longer able to attend to things, she should have hired people. My father had investments, royalties in various oil and gas wells, undoubtedly a healthy pension from a lifetime of corporate employment. It wasn’t as if he couldn’t afford to hire help. Stepping onto the driveway, I felt oddly possessive of the house, as if it we
re my duty to set the place to rights.
In the wake of that impulse came the cool grip of reality. I had no idea what awaited me inside. My only information came from a short phone conversation with a Dallas police officer. According to him, Teddy had been found at a DART station, lost and out of money after wandering on and off buses and light rail trains all day, trying to navigate his way to the hospital to find his mother. When the police brought him home, they found my father, half dressed, asleep in a cold, dark house with the stove burners on full blast because he couldn’t remember how to turn on the heat.
After spending some time sorting out the situation, the officer had tracked down my contact information in Hanna Beth’s address book. He called, somewhat impatient by then, and told me they’d had complaints more than once about my father and Teddy wandering lost in the neighborhood, and if something wasn’t done, Social Services would be forced to take over.
The complexity, the impossibility of the problem struck me as I walked toward the front porch, where all those years ago Hanna Beth had stood in her yellow dress. Why was I here? What was I going to do? What could I do?
Around me, the day was dimming, which seemed appropriate. The shadow of the house overtook me as I climbed the steps, gathered my courage, then knocked on the door. No one answered, so I rang the bell. I could hear movement inside, see a shadow through the glass, but still the door did not open. The form in the darkness behind the frosted window was brown-haired and broad-shouldered, not my father’s.
“Teddy?” I leaned close to the door, closed my fingers over the knob. “Teddy, it’s Rebecca . . . Rebecca Macklin. Open the door. . . ."
CHAPTER 4
Hanna Beth Parker
I’d been a coward, pretending to be asleep when Rebecca came into the room. I knew it was wrong, and wouldn’t solve anything, but still I couldn’t force myself to open my eyes and greet her. Perhaps it was pride. After all these years, I did not want her to see me this way. I was much like a little child, like Teddy when he was young, thinking that if he put his hand over his eyes I wouldn’t be able to see him. Foolish notion, but somewhere in me there was the thought that I couldn’t let her know how bad off I was—that if she knew she would close up the house, pack Edward and Teddy off to some sort of facility—perhaps even this one—and then return to her life in California.
The thought of Teddy in a place like this, languishing with the infirm, unable to enjoy our walks, to feed the fish in the creek and the stray cats, to spend hours in the garden, was unbearable. A change of location would destroy what was left of Edward. The familiarity of the house on Blue Sky Hill Court, the consistency of our routines, was the thread that kept him from slipping off into a place so vast, and dark, and deep that neither of us wanted to consider its bottom. It was impossible to imagine the day when this strong, handsome man, this beautiful soul I’d loved since I was a child, wouldn’t know me. It was impossible to picture my life without his witty jokes, our home without his shoes by the front door (even though he knew I would complain about it), my bedroom without the flowers he sometimes spirited from the garden and left on my pillow. Being ten years younger than he, I always supposed there would be a day when I would experience, once again, life without him. I always knew vaguely that something would eventually have to be done for Teddy. But not yet. Not so soon. It wasn’t time.
My mind cast a net into the sea of despair. Why was this happening? How could God, whom I’d faithfully worshipped in church until Edward became too ill to go, whom I’d trusted when it grew clear that Teddy was not like other children, to whom I’d poured out my prayers for my son, allow this to happen now? How could He leave me at the mercy of the one person who resented my very existence, who had no way of understanding the events that had transpired those many years ago? How could Rebecca return now, when I lay here unable to move or speak, unable to accomplish the most basic human functions, unable to tell her the truth?
I pulled up my net before it could become too heavy, before the catch of impossible questions could drag me under. I could hear Claude Fisher’s voice again outside the door. I thought of him telling Mary and Rebecca that the key to every situation was to keep facing toward the light, to look for the possible good. I’d always found that to be true, but now the darkness seemed too vast for such an optimistic notion.
In the hall, Claude was saying good-bye to Mary and the boys, promising that tomorrow he would tell them more about the trains.
My door swished open, and Mary’s quiet footsteps followed. Poor thing. She was probably worn to a thread by now. I wondered about the problem with her husband and the car.
She stopped by my bed, picked up my arm, which I didn’t know was dangling, and tucked it back in beside me. She was wearing the old blue button-up sweater she always put on when she was on her way out. She looked too weary for a girl in her early twenties.
“That’s better, huh?” she said, folding back the sheet and pulling it up under my chin. “I hope the boys didn’t make too much racket out there.”
“No-ooo.” The word was surprisingly clear.
Mary smiled. “Being quiet isn’t exactly their best thing.”
“Baaa-shin.” This time I managed little more than an unintelligible groan. I’d wanted to ask her to bring the boys in, just for a minute, so I could see them. I felt the usual pang of frustration at not being able to communicate something so simple.
Mary didn’t seem to notice. “Your daughter was here while you were sleeping. She seems nice.”
I didn’t answer. Perhaps it was best that I couldn’t. Someone as sweet as Mary could never understand the kind of family strife that separated us, or the anxiety I felt at our coming back together.
Mary gazed down at me, her thoughts seeming to drift. “They’ve reduced your medications some, so you might not sleep quite as soundly at night.”
I blinked, because I didn’t have the energy to attempt another word.
Mary hovered a moment, seeming reluctant to leave, even though her eyes were drifting shut. She gave the covers a final check and patted my arm through the blanket. I hoped she and the boys didn’t have far to travel home. I closed my eyes so she wouldn’t feel as though she had to remain at my bedside.
There was a faint, familiar scent on her hands—baby lotion, perhaps, or powder-scented wipes. A childhood smell, the link to a memory, a happier time. I drank it in, grabbed the line and pulled it closer, imagined that it remained after Mary left. I imagined that I was cuddled on the sofa with Teddy when he was tiny. I’d almost conjured the feel of his little body curled so perfectly against my chest, when something clanged in the hall, pulling me from my reverie.
Outside in the corridor, two nurses were talking about the new incontinence therapy program.
“Okay, no,” one was saying. “The probe looks kind of like a tampon, only it’s metal and it has a wire attached to it. The one end of the wire has the probe, and the other has the little connector that plugs into the computer. You know, like your digital camera plugs in with.”
“Ohhhhhh . . . ,’’ the other nurse answered. “Well, then what happens?”
“The patient goes into the bathroom and inserts the probe, then you plug it into the computer and try to make the little birdie fly by squeezing the Kegel muscles. The harder you tighten the pelvic floor, the higher the birdie flies.”
“You’re kidding,” the other nurse said.
I groaned to myself, hoping that my pelvic muscles came back on their own as I recovered. If Gretchen arrived tomorrow with a metal probe and a laptop computer, I was going to rise from my bed by sheer force of will and walk home.
“If you don’t like birds, you can use a fish,” the first nurse added. “You make the fish swim faster on the screen.”
“That’s just weird.”
“It’s really pretty cool, and it works. All of us in PT had to use it during training. Rosie and I are good. I can make that fish swim a hundred miles an hour.”
The response was a moan. “Oh, stop. This is what y’all are doing during those lunchtime training sessions? Sitting around making the birdie fly?”
“We’re thinking of putting some money in a pool and hosting the incontinence Olympics.”
“You people in PT have waaaay too much time on your hands.”
“Hey, if you can’t have fun with incontinence training, what can you have fun with?” The two of them laughed together. “Oh. Oh, I’ve got to tell you this one. The other day we had our first set of test patients. So we give them the probes, explain everything, and send them into the bathroom to insert. This one poor little lady stays in there forever, and when she finally comes out, she has the wrong end in.”
“The part with the computer plug on it?”
“Yeah. Poor thing.”
“All right. That’s it,” the second nurse said. “I’ve had all the retention and elimination I can stand. I’m going to get something to eat.”
They parted ways in the hall, and I lay there wanting to laugh. I imagined flying birds and animated fish, metal probes and rows of nurses competing in the incontinence Olympics. Gretchen took the field, towering over all the other competitors. She was wearing a fishing hat, carrying a lug wrench in one hand and a glistening stainless steel probe in the other. Just before the gold medal ceremony, a door slammed down the hall.
I listened to the rhythmic beep of an oximeter; the occasional clang of metal on metal; the rattle of a gurney passing by as a patient was transferred, probably back to the hospital; the wailing of the moaning woman, who cried out repeatedly that she was dying and needed help. The ones with dementia seemed more restless late in the day, as if they were anticipating the night ahead, when the lights would dim and the hallways would empty of visitors. When night fell, it was easy to feel vulnerable, lost in this large, cold place. At night, I was like a child in a dark bedroom, afraid to close my eyes, sensing hidden threats in the shadows.
