Accidentally on Purpose

by Mary F. Pols

  “Fine,” she said. The blue of her eyes had faded. There was a curious mix of vagueness and intensity to them; she’d study our faces, not as if she was trying to figure out who we were, but, rather, as if she was determining the content of our souls. Under her questioning gaze, I often felt as though I’d done something wrong. There always seemed to be disappointment in those eyes. I didn’t know if it was real or my own projection that the woman who loved to travel, who was always plotting her next trip, hated being trapped in this place.

  I’d held Dolan up to her. Her long finger came out, gnarled by her arthritis, and touched his perfectly rounded cheek. His eyes were open, wide and blue.

  “Here’s your newest grandson, Mum,” I had said, feeling my voice start to tremble. “My baby. This is Dolan Edward Pols.”

  Her eyes were only on him. She stroked his cheek again. “He’s beautiful,” she said, her tone serious and somber. There were tears in her eyes. I had put him into her arms for just a few seconds and she held him, but for the first time ever with a grandchild, she seemed too timid to relax and enjoy the weight of a baby in her arms.

  We had sat awhile longer. Visits to dementia and Alzheimer’s wards were like entering black holes. The time there seems endless, yet you never felt as though you’ve been there long enough. I remember feeling that way as we left.

  I was right. It never is enough.

  THE SIGHT OF MY FATHER actually out of bed and walking should have been encouraging, but he’d had so many ups and downs in the past year that I’d learned not to be optimistic. I’d also learned that the only thing that really made me feel better was to be with Dolan, who was so vibrantly, definitively alive. Later that afternoon, I was sitting out in the yard at Benet’s house, watching Dolan chase the cat, when Beth’s red minivan pulled in. While she extricated Sid from his car seat, Isabella and Julia came tumbling out and began making their way to us. Isabella was wearing a very ladylike floral dress and a stern look that was pure Benet.

  “Don’t chase Tishy,” she admonished Dolan. “She doesn’t like that.”

  Julia chimed in with her high, breathy voice. “Leave Tishy alone.”

  Dolan stood stock-still. He glared back, a look I recognized from the mirror. But he didn’t say anything. He was smitten with Isabella and more than a little scared of Julia, who policed his every movement in the house, lest he touch anything of hers. Together they were confounding, both fascinating and daunting. I thought back to how much I’d wanted a girl and realized that if I’d had one, the three of them would have been like a keg of dynamite.

  Isabella softened. She was fond of her smallest cousin. She was five, after all, the mature one in this group. “Do you want to go on the play structure?” she asked, coming over to take his hand. He allowed himself to be led away to it. It was an impressive thing, ladders, swings, a slide, and monkey bars. We never had anything remotely like this as kids.

  Benet came walking across the lawn, carrying a couple of glasses with limes in them.

  “Stimulating beverage?” he asked.

  That was our mother’s expression, used just about every afternoon. Usually she meant something caffeinated, though.

  “Don’t mind if I do,” I said, taking one. I sniffed it. Gin. “So, does Dad think this play structure is an abomination?”

  “I thought he might grumble but he hasn’t said anything,” he said. “Could be that he just didn’t focus on it. It’s not like he’s been out in the yard much since we moved in.”

  We sat and watched the kids playing. Dolan was climbing a ladder.

  “He’s coordinated,” Benet said. “Clearly not from his mother.”

  “I just wish he’d got Matt’s skin instead of mine,” I said. “He’s doomed to a lifetime of sunburns.”

  “How is Matt?”

  “He’s okay,” I said. “He doesn’t like his job, but at least he’s employed.”

  Matt’s temp gig at the bond trading firm had evolved into a full-time job with benefits shortly after my mother died. His work there was mostly clerical, and I knew he found it unspeakably dull. But we both knew he needed to get something solid on his résumé, and I for one was grateful that he’d been steadily employed for this long.

  “I think he’s looking forward to me being on the fellowship so that things will be less stressful in general for us,” I said. “And he’s planning a trip to Baltimore with Dolan in October, for his mother’s sixtieth birthday.”

  “Sixty,” Benet said. “Jesus. Adrian will be sixty in two years.”

  “Matt has no idea how lucky he is to have such young parents,” I said. “It’s good for Dolan too; he ought to have those grandparents around for a long time. Meanwhile, here we are, you and me, in our forties with little kids. Just like Mum and Dad.”

  “Yep,” he said. “We’re old.”

  My parents had planted most of the trees in the yard: the hemlocks behind us, the row of pines in front of us, the lilac bushes that filled in the borders. It felt so comforting to know that a whole new generation was going to grow up there. “It’s good you bought the house,” I said. “You going to turn into the Wag or the Grinch?”

  The Wag was our nickname for our mother. It had become a proper noun, a verb (to wag, as in, to behave like our mother), and an adjective.

  “Bit of both, I expect,” he said.

  THE NEXT DAY, the head nurse said she no longer felt my father could make informed choices about his own health care. We decided that there would be no more antibiotics after this cycle. It was inevitable that the pneumonia would return, and when it did, it would be allowed to do its work. “Pneumonia,” my father used to say. “The old man’s friend.”

  When my mother was dying, it hurt tremendously—much more than I thought it would, given how desperately I wanted her to be free of her misery—but we’d still found ways to laugh. We grew punchier with each day that passed. She’d gone nine days without hydration or nutrition, then ten days. Suddenly it was September. The Republican Convention was in full swing in New York. The Red Sox were at the end of a three-game series with Anaheim. My teenaged nephew Matthew sprawled on the empty bed across from my mother’s, watching the game on the tiny TV that came out from the wall on a retractable arm, like a piece of dental equipment. Wib had pulled a chair up to the light and was turning the pages of a magazine. Dolan was lying in my arms. He’d finished nursing and was staring up at me, reaching for my face and hair. Benet had come into the room. “Hey,” he said. He nodded at Matthew. “Anything happen while I was driving over here, Termite?”

  “Nope,” Matthew said. “Still winning.”

  “Could be three for three,” Benet said. “So you’re not watching the convention?”

  “Like we’re not already depressed enough,” I said.

  Benet stepped to Mum’s bedside. He stroked her forehead. She didn’t stir.

  “Hi, Mumma,” he said. “You want to watch some Red Sox?”

  He turned her TV on. George Bush’s face filled the screen. Benet stepped back and listened.

  “Why are you turning that douche bag on?” Matthew said. As a teenager, it was his due to be surly, but in this case, his tone of voice was dead-on.

  “If this doesn’t kill her, nothing will,” Benet said.

  “We can’t have her die with that voice in her ear,” I said. “That’s just cruel.”

  “And if there is an afterlife she’ll be pissed at us when we all get there,” Wib said.

  “You’re right,” Benet had said, turning the channel to the Red Sox.

  On the twelfth day, Alison announced she couldn’t go back anymore. We’d been summoned to the nursing home the night before for what we thought would be the final good-bye. We’d all wept and stroked her and told her how good she’d been to us. The space between her breaths seemed to be growing.

  But my mother had rallied once again. While Benet and Beth were putting their brood to bed, the rest of us gathered gloomily for another dinner of Thai takeout a
t Alison’s.

  “I’m done,” Alison said. “I’ve said good-bye. I just can’t do it again.”

  Benet strode into the house with a wineglass in his hand. With his house and Alison’s only a block apart, mugs of coffee and glasses of wine went back and forth almost every day. “Okay,” he said. “Who is going to go over there and put a pillow over her face?”

  “I think it should be Wib,” I said. “No one would ever suspect her.”

  “But Alison is so efficient,” Wib said. “No fuss, no muss.”

  “It should be Adrian,” Alison said. “He’s the oldest. Let’s call him and tell him to get up here.”

  Then we laughed until Wib snorted and Alison said she was about to wet her pants and even Benet, who smiles sparingly, had to walk out of the room to cover his grin.

  But with my father that week, even if we could have thought of anything funny to say to one another, none of us could have laughed.

  BENET AND I took Isabella and Dolan on an outing to an island in the New Meadows River. I felt guilty leaving Dad’s bedside, but we had been there for four straight days, and it seemed safe to steal away for an afternoon. I was desperate for Dolan to get some fresh air, and especially to give him a chance to be in a boat. He was practically panting by the time we got down to the dock. He sat with his face thrust into the wind, chin buried in his life jacket—which he found aggravating but a price worth enduring for this ride—hair blowing back from his brow, eyes squinting into the sun, a look of pure bliss on his face.

  Maine is known for its beautiful, rockbound, dramatic coast, but what I love most about it is the crazy length of it. We were a twenty-minute drive from home, but as the crow flew, it was only a few miles away. If you stretched it all out, they say, took the whole state and unpeeled every inlet and neck of land as if you were yanking the wool out of a sweater, you’d have a coastline as long as the whole East Coast. Hidden in there, in the folds of that sweater, are all the secret inlets, the forgotten islands, the coves that families believe belong only to them, not realizing that the kayaking couple from Freeport who come in the early morning and the teenagers from Bath who come at sunset with a case of beer also imagine that this place is theirs alone.

  All I could think, looking at all this beauty, was that my father would never see this coast again, never walk through woods that speak, in their small scale, in their bent shapes, of winters past and future springs. He left New Jersey and came to Bowdoin College on a train in 1949 and thought that the pretty campus and the quiet town and this spacious, uncrowded state would be a good place for his growing family. And it was, not just for us, but for him.

  In the summers of my childhood, we’d escape the humid heat in town—“hum-dee-dee” my mother called it—and drive down Harpswell Neck. We’d go past houses that Dad would say they could have bought, back when they were new here and shopping for their future, for $10,000. We’d pass other houses, ramshackle ones, set far back from the road, with overgrown lawns and dirt driveways, and Dad would say, thoughtfully, “You could do something with that house.” We’d look hard to see if there was a telltale light coming through the woods behind these houses, the hint that there might be the much longed for ocean frontage back there.

  “Why don’t you write a book that people would want to read?” I’d say, from the backseat. He’d written three dense philosophical books already. Every time I came upon one of them, I’d leaf through it, looking for something I could comprehend, and each time, be utterly disappointed. “What about a detective story? Something like Lord Peter Wimsey. Then we could have our own beach.”

  In the meantime, we had Lookout Point. There was a small hotel, and a big dock for the commercial fishermen to use, but there were no restaurants or lobster shacks. It was just a place to go to swim. Other Bowdoin professors used it too, and we’d run into them sometimes. “There’s Harv with another pretty young thing,” my mother would say darkly. “Probably a coed,” my father would mutter.

  There were two islands to the left, reachable at low tide if you didn’t mind walking across the squelching, sucking mudflats. The beach—no sand, only pebbles and craggy rocks—was on the other side of a small promontory attached to the land by such a slender spit that you could pretend it was an island unto itself. We’d park our big old silver Mercury on the dirt, just above the tide line, marked by piles of blackened, dried-out old seaweed, and then we’d head up the promontory.

  Prickly blackberry bushes acted as the gatekeepers to the point, but also, as they thinned out up the hill, provided sanctuary in which to change into your suit, with Mum holding up a towel. The path was narrow after that, and the rosebushes and wild grasses grabbed at you as you went by. When you arrived at the clearing, you had reached what we thought of as the true Lookout Point, a grassy clearing at the top, crowned with a clump of gray rocks. Sitting there, you felt as if you had all of Middle Bay spread out in front of you. I thought this was the most beautiful spot on earth. We always paused there before taking the footpath that wound down the hill on the northernmost side of the point and onto our beach.

  “Maybe we’ll find your sweater today,” I’d say to Dad. He’d be wearing shorts, cut from chinos and hemmed by my mother, and one of the sporty white shirts he owned for tennis.

  “What sweater?” he’d say, absently looking out at the bay, his hand protecting his eyes and saluting the sea at the same time.

  “The red cable one,” I’d say. “The one Mum made for you. That you left on the island.”

  “That was a long time ago, Buglet,” he’d say. “That sweater is gone.” She’d be nearby, kerchief tied over her head, denim skirt on over her suit, a tote bag filled with our towels in her hand, looking out at the bay from the other side of the point. “Let’s not speak of it in front of your mother.”

  There’s a picture of him, looking barely thirty-five, in that red sweater, at the helm of the little sailboat he had, for a brief time, in the early sixties. I think it was the last sweater she ever knitted him; she was so indignant over its loss. Legend was that he’d left it on an island he’d walked to at low tide. I liked to think it was one of the small islands off Lookout Point, because I could look at them and imagine my father, amid the glory of a summer afternoon, maybe watching birds, forgetting the time, and then having to swim for it, too swept away by his surroundings to realize that he was leaving the red sweater behind. My father was always the kind of man who loved days more than things. After my last visit, just two months before, he’d sent me an e-mail with the subject heading “Miss You.” “Here I have been slightly compensated for your absence by a totally splendid day,” he wrote. “Cloudless, crisp but warm, mild breeze, salubrious air.”

  He signed off with “It was marvelous to have you and Dolan Edward here.”

  I had smiled at his obvious enjoyment of seeing his own name reflected in Dolan’s. Then I tucked the note away, not realizing it would be the last I’d ever get from him.

  WE WERE SUMMONED home early from the island. The end was near, and this was not another false alarm. We gathered at his bedside, tentative about our good-byes, for how did you know precisely when to say them? I remember little about the first few hours, except that they were awful. I remember that at about 10 P.M., Benet brought Dolan to me because he had woken up and cried out for his mummy. He leaned against Benet’s shoulder, looking very blond and, at this hour, dazed and discombobulated. But when he saw me, he smiled and held out his arms. “Mommy.” It was a plea, a greeting, and a reminder of my future all at once. I was a daughter saying good-bye, and a mother saying hello. I took him from Benet and brought him out into the hallway.

  “Let’s go run around,” I told him.

  “Let’s do that,” he said. He was just shy of a year and a half, and his predominant approach to all offers that didn’t involve eating or going to sleep was eager enthusiasm.

  There was a big meeting room just down the hall, and we went in there. The chairs were pushed up against the w
all, stacked in threes, as if to say, No party here. The fluorescent lights were dimmed. I put Dolan down on the ground and he toddled off. I couldn’t get over the way he moved, pumping his arms at his sides as if he were running a marathon. I thought of my father, striding purposefully down the town common, swinging his arms.

  “Ball,” Dolan said, triumphantly, emerging from a dark corner with a huge yoga ball, just like my birthing ball.

  “How about that?” I said. “Can you kick it?”

  He tried and knocked himself over. He lay there, giggling. I picked him up, lifting up his shirt to kiss his stomach. “How can you be so beautiful?” I said.

  “Ball,” he commanded, suddenly serious, wanting to be put down.

  We rolled the ball back and forth to each other, five times, ten times, twenty times. He was having a good time, but I knew he should be home in bed, and I should be next to my father.

  “Sweetness,” I said. “Are you tired?”

  “No,” he said. But his hand went up to rub his eye. The telltale sign, the one that never lies.

  “I’m going to take you back to Uncle Benet’s and put you to bed,” I said. “But first let’s go say good-bye to Babbo.”

  “Babbo,” he sang out as I carried him toward the room. “Bye to Babbo.”

  It was the first time he ever said the name we use for my father. I took him into the room and he said it again, cooing it out in long syllables. Then I took him home and waited for him to fall asleep so I could get back.

  The nebulous area between pain and snatches of sleep lasted for hours. Whenever Dad woke up, he tried to get out of bed. He fought death. He looked in our eyes, whispered a few things. There was an agonizing torrent of vomit, an expulsion so violent it seemed to be death itself. I used a suction tube to try to clean out his mouth while the nurse changed his soaked gown. After that, they offered morphine and we responded eagerly, yes, please, as much as you can give him.