We Are Not Ourselves

by Matthew Thomas

  When she got downstairs she found him sitting at the kitchen table in a state of contained agitation. She could see his deep breathing, the tautness in his fists, one of which still clutched his hat. He asked what had happened. When she told him, his hand on the hat squeezed tighter.

  “I stay here,” he said.

  • • •

  The nurse was trying to get him to eat when Eileen walked in, but Ed was resisting mightily. He flung his arms around as she approached with the fork, and then shut his lips tight. When she managed to get the food in, he calmed down and chewed it thoughtfully for a few seconds, then reconsidered and spat it out on the tray.

  “He did this with breakfast too.”

  “I’ll take over,” Eileen said. She spoke sharply to him, told him to cooperate or else—what? What could she hold over his head?

  “If you don’t eat,” she said, “you’re not going to be allowed to come home.”

  He raised his eyebrows dramatically and took the rest of the meal with little protest. The doctor came around and they discussed how he’d been admitted for altered physical status, an acute sudden change in his condition. The goal would be to rehab him. They agreed on benchmarks: if he could stand on his own and walk to the bathroom, they would release him. Judging from his condition, that seemed sufficiently far off to give her time to adjust to her new circumstances. She needed Ed to do poorly enough for long enough to allow her to figure out what came next.

  • • •

  The next day, she stayed late with Ed. She was famished when she left, and on the drive home, as she contemplated the empty shelves of the fridge, she realized she’d have to order something, though she barely had the energy to make the phone call, let alone figure out what she wanted. She’d never again be able to turn to Ed and say, “What should we eat?” She didn’t want to heat up anything in the freezer. The thought of those frozen carcasses disgusted her. It felt like they were food from a lifetime ago, and indeed they were: they were from her life with Ed.

  When she walked into the kitchen and saw a smock draped over the island and a pot on the stove, she was so relieved that she almost exclaimed her joy.

  Sergei rose from the couch and insisted that she sit. He warmed up the pot and brought a glass of water. He ladled out a healthy portion and presented her with it, then stood watching to see her reaction. It was delicious, a beef stew of some sort.

  “Give me the receipt,” she said. “I’ll reimburse you.”

  He did his habitual hand waving. It would always be like this with him: he was stubborn as a molar. He had cleaned up the evidence of his preparation, so that only the stewpot was left on a clean stove. The sink was empty, the dish drainer clean. Maybe he’d made it for himself; maybe he’d tired of eating cold-cut sandwiches. She had the sensation that this was probably how Ed experienced his meals now: they appeared before him as if by magic.

  She grew uncomfortable at the sight of Sergei gazing down on her. “Please sit,” she said, and he did. He drummed his fingers on the tabletop until his hand latched onto a mail-order catalogue, which he rolled up and used to gently beat the time against the table’s edge as he watched her eat.

  • • •

  In the morning, she woke early to take Connell to the airport. When she was stuck in traffic, she looked at his sleeping form in the passenger seat. Everyone said he looked like Ed, but she didn’t see it.

  He woke up right before they reached the terminal. The need to remove the bags from the trunk promised to make the good-bye mercifully brief. She got out of the car and stood there with him in that scant minute of grace allowed to a person unloading.

  “If you need me to come back—” he said, looking past her through the doors.

  “Not before Thanksgiving. I can’t afford it.”

  “I’m sorry I won’t be here to help.”

  “I have Sergei,” she said. “I’ll be fine.”

  He nodded slowly. He seemed on the verge of speaking, and then he dropped his eyes and looked away before meeting her gaze again, warmly.

  “You’re going to miss your plane,” she said.

  He hugged her and picked up his bags. “Call me back if you need to,” he said. She could tell he intended an air of gravity, but the way he squinted at the sunlight reminded her of when he was a small boy on her lap reaching for the curtains behind her head. How could the years have brought both of them here?

  “Go,” she said, and he turned and went through the sliding doors. She watched him disappear around a corner. A cop pulled up beside the car and told her to move along. She watched the planes out the window and in the rearview mirror until she couldn’t see them anymore.

  • • •

  She hadn’t been at work long when she received a call from the hospital saying they were going to discharge Ed. The woman said they’d be sending him home around two o’clock.

  “That’s unacceptable,” Eileen said. “I’m not home to receive him. This is too sudden.”

  “It says here you have help with you at home.”

  “Yes.”

  “Then he will be delivered to your home aide. He’s not eligible to stay any longer. He’s stable, his blood pressure is down, he can eat. We have to send him home.”

  “Is he standing?”

  “He can stand with assistance.”

  “Tell me, was he standing on his own when he went in there?”

  “I wasn’t here when he was admitted.”

  “I’ll tell you, then. He was. He walked in from the ambulance. So he is not stable, if you ask me.”

  “I am telling you that he is ready to be dismissed.”

  “We agreed that he had to be able to walk. He has to be able to go up and down stairs.”

  “He can walk with assistance.”

  “I’m going to appeal. I do not agree with the discharge. Medicare gives me two days, no?”

  “That’s correct.”

  “Keep him there, then.”

  She slammed the phone down. Once he was back within her walls, she would have to keep him there until the end. It would be almost impossible, emotionally, for her to deliver him personally to a nursing home, without some event like this interceding to take the guilt away from her. And then she would just be waiting, possibly even hoping in some dark part of her unconscious mind, for something bad to happen to him. She didn’t want to live like that. And the hardest truth was that—no matter how good a nurse she thought she was; no matter that she’d proved, during staffing crises, or strikes, or untimely bouts of mass absence, that she could do the work of three nurses; no matter that she wanted to believe she could give him better care than anyone else could—she wasn’t sure anymore that a nursing home wouldn’t be better for him. This might have been the time for her to summon up the courage to take Ed back into her home, but she couldn’t do it. She had run up against her limit. If this was her only chance to get him out of her hands—and she saw that it was—then she had to take it and live with the guilt later, maybe for the rest of her life.

  She spent the morning calling nursing homes in the area. She couldn’t afford to wait until the end of the day, because the offices would be closed. It wasn’t easy to do; Adelaide seemed to watch her every move.

  When she didn’t have any luck on the phone, she left work early with a knot in her gut and drove up to Maple Grove Nursing Home in Port Chester, half an hour north of her house. They had a place for Ed, and they’d accept her application, but they told her that they wanted three years’ payment up front. It was obvious to her that they didn’t want Ed to go into the Medicaid pool, which paid less than private citizens, bargaining for lower rates. Three years up front, factoring in planned increases every six months, was over $225,000. She would drain her cash reserves to zero and still not even be a tenth of the way there. She’d have to cash out the retirement accounts, because they’d already taken out a home equity loan to pay for Connell’s tuition. Even then, she couldn’t get it done in time.

 
She hadn’t spent an entire career in health care not to pick up any allies along the way. Her friend Emily, whom she’d hired at St. John’s Episcopal, had an in with the state attorney general’s office. Emily had a representative from the office call Maple Grove and get them to drop the demand for up-front payment. Eileen would pay the fee for the first month, $5,800, while the Medicare paperwork got sorted out. Medicare would cover the first twenty days at 100 percent and the next eighty days at 80 percent after a copay. Then she was on her own.

  She called Lawrence Hospital and had them fax in the application for her.

  • • •

  “They’re going to transport him tomorrow,” she told Sergei. “Maybe you can stay awhile in case I need help with anything. He may be coming back, for all I know.”

  Sergei nodded as if to say he hadn’t imagined it going any other way.

  “I’ll pay you, of course,” she said, but she had no idea where she was going to get the money. She would have to figure out these details later. Right now what was important was getting through a difficult time.

  In silence they ate the dinner he had prepared. Something in his face, maybe the roundness of it, took the edge off her anxiety. He seemed to prefer mute expressions to speech, two in particular: a half glower that reminded her of her father’s, and a wide-eyed, almost innocent smile.

  After they finished eating she dismissed him as he started to clean the dishes. He protested and would only leave the room when she insisted that she needed to use the kitchen phone to spread the news about Ed. She called as many people as she could, until it got to be too late, even accounting for time zones. She left the bunker of the kitchen to face the rest of the first floor, turned off all the lights, and walked up the stairs to the lonely bedroom to pack a bag for Ed.

  It was a preposterous exercise. She couldn’t reduce his wardrobe to a few essentials at a moment when everything seemed essential. There was also the problem that what was essential to Ed wasn’t always essential to her. Some of his favorite shirts should have become cleaning rags long ago. She took out the bag they used for short trips and started filling it with three or four of everything; then she brought down a bigger bag from the attic. She would have time later to figure out exactly what he needed, but she wanted him to have enough in case of mishaps the first few days. Then she saw his peacoat. It was missing buttons and threadbare at the elbows, wrists, and collar. He looked like a homeless man in it, but he’d insisted, perversely, on holding on to it, as if he’d never left the cold-water flat he’d grown up in. His stubbornness drove her crazy. And yet his lack of interest in material things had allowed them to save a good deal of money relative to their incomes. She held the peacoat in her hands until she almost broke down, then put it back on a hanger and took a newer coat from the closet.

  • • •

  She walked through the day in the haze of her lack of sleep, feeling her boss’s eyes on her, as if Adelaide could sense her mind was somewhere else. They moved Ed at noon, but she couldn’t call. She wanted to pull Adelaide aside and assure her that she had no aims on her job, but how could she do so without seeming insubordinate? She felt lucky to have a job, but she saw no way to communicate that without smelling of desperation. Once Adelaide sensed weakness, she would surely seize on it. Eileen didn’t blame her entirely. Mayor Giuliani’s office, in its push for health care efficiency, had HHC working middle management to the bone. Ruthlessness was more or less demanded of Adelaide if she wanted to keep her job. Eileen had been on the other side of these managerial squeezes, at St. John’s Episcopal. It had bothered her at first to think that her days of carrying the heavy burdens of upper management were behind her, but now she didn’t care at all.

  It was time now to be smart—smart and strong. She wondered whether she’d ever have a chance to be foolish and weak. She feared it would be when everyone else was foolish and weak again too, only this time around there wouldn’t be anything romantic about their foolishness; they’d be old and doddering and needy. At least she wouldn’t be alone in it, the way Ed was. Ed was surrounded by people, but there was no one in that building like him at all. He was younger; he’d given up more of life. But there had rarely been anyone anywhere like Ed, even when all had been well. He was smarter than most, more sensitive. In that regard he was more prepared for the loneliness of senescence than she was. He’d been a stranger in the world for most of his life.

  86

  After work she drove up to the home. She made her way to the circular reception desk from which the hallways radiated. Below the counter ran a ring of binders with red labels on their spines bearing the letters DNR, for Do Not Resuscitate. She had indicated in her application that she wanted this designation for Ed, but still that stark, resigned lineup took her by surprise. An odd few didn’t say DNR, and it filled her with shame to see them, because it meant those families hadn’t given up hope, or they were willing to stick it out until the end, the very end, the end of science and technology.

  She was directed to a television room. Wheelchairs were arranged around the perimeter. The room was full of women older than her husband, some by decades, whose gazes seemed directed less at the program than at the light the set cast. There were a few men, frail and reduced; she didn’t spot Ed at first, but then there he was, hidden behind a man who distended and released his cheeks as though blowing on a tuba. Ed looked as if he’d been caught in a traffic jam. He was moaning quietly. When she stood before him, his moan turned into a wail, and he pumped his arms up and down. She wheeled aside the tuba player, who looked at her skeptically as he puffed out, with an audible pop, the air he’d been holding in. She asked at the desk to be directed to a common room, thinking not to disturb Ed’s roommate.

  Ed wailed and thrashed, trying to twist in his seat to get a look at her. When he made to rise, the seat belt stopped him, and if he tried to rise farther, the barest push on his shoulder made him fall back in the chair. After making a couple of turns at the end of corridors, she arrived at the common room, which was blessedly empty. She closed the door behind her and wheeled him to a wicker chair, where she sat facing him. He continued to wail. She tried to soothe him with a hand on his shoulder and he slapped it away. She tried to touch his face and he motioned to bite her. He was seething through his teeth. She insisted on smoothing his hair. He looked wild, unkempt. Already they had dressed him in an outfit that looked shabby and unmatched. She would have to speak to them about that. The easiest way to get them to give him good care was to let them know that she would be around, that they couldn’t slip. It was the same with the nurses she supervised.

  For a few moments he suffered her attempts to pat his hair down, but then he put his hand to his scalp as though deliberately to mess up the work she had done.

  “I know you don’t want to be here,” she said.

  “No.” He shook his head. “No, no, no, no. No.”

  “I’m here. I’m going to be here. I’m going to be here every day.”

  There was a confused sadness in his expression, a struggle to convey what he was feeling.

  “I couldn’t take good enough care of you at home,” she said, swallowing hard. “I couldn’t keep you safe.”

  He fell quiet. She was finding it hard to keep herself together. She was determined to get through this without breaking down.

  “No,” he said.

  “Okay,” she said. “This is just for now. It’s temporary. When you stabilize, we’ll get you out of here.”

  He snorted at the word “temporary,” as if a bit of the old humor were back. Then he slipped back into the wailing, only now it was weirdly dislocated from the conversation and seemed almost meditative. He stared into the distance. She shook him to make him stop, and finally, mercifully, he was quiet.

  “I can’t be here during the day,” she said. “But I’m going to come after work, every day. Do you understand me? I’ll be here all the time. You’re going to get sick of seeing me.”

  His eyebrows sh
ot up. “No, no, no!” he said.

  “Don’t worry about me,” she said. “I’m going to be fine. I’ll have help.” She reached to pat down his hair again, and he batted her away with a shocking directness and force.

  “No!” he shouted, less in plea than command. He was pointing a finger at her. “No! No!”

  “No what, Ed?” She had a creeping feeling he understood something. She hadn’t said she was keeping Sergei on, but she sensed that it was the topic between them now.

  “What is it?” He grew quiet again, brooding, his bottom lip pushed out, his chin tucked, his eyes searching hers.

  “No.” His voice was meek, but the note it struck was final.

  “No what? You don’t want me to have help?”

  “No.”

  “All right,” she said. “I’ll get by. I’ll manage.”

  “No,” he said again.

  • • •

  A vestige of evening light lingered in the air as she headed back. She decided to take a detour through town. She took Valley off Pondfield and drove up the hill, into the warren of expensive homes. The road curved quickly and with little give; she had to pull over once to let a car pass. Lush trees shouted their vigorous greens, balancing the calm of the Tudor revival homes, every one of which seemed perfectly placed and spaced.

  She stopped in front of Virginia’s home. She wondered whether Virginia had ever seen her there, whether she’d noticed how often the same car stopped outside her house or across the street for a little while and then drove off.

  She drove down the hill and took Garden, stopping next to the empty tennis courts. When they lived in Jackson Heights, she’d bought Ed private lessons with a pro at the tennis center in Flushing. She never forgot her admiration at the way he held his own with Tom Cudahy the first time she saw him play, or that he’d so thoroughly assimilated the little coaching he’d gotten that he’d turned himself into a decent player. Tennis seemed like the perfect sport for him to take up, or at least the perfect one if he arranged his life the way she wished he would. The exercise would satisfy him, tiring him out as effectively as the long jogs he liked to go on. The courts were state-of-the-art, and the pros who taught there were trying to get on the US Open circuit or just coming off. It was the kind of place where Ed would meet people, make the right contacts, and form an ambitious plan he might not otherwise conceive of. It lacked that deliberate grandeur of a country club that she knew he would balk at. Still, he objected to the extravagance and didn’t attend a single session. Connell wouldn’t go either. The two-hundred-dollar credit never got used.