A Month of Summer (24 page)

A pang of jealousy sliced through me, sharp and unexpected. I wasn’t accustomed to having to share Teddy with anyone. Even though he and Edward loved each other, they were never close in the way Teddy and I had always been. Kay-Kay was pleasant with him, but generally she stayed about her business. Keeping the house and taking care of Edward occupied most of her time.

“Tonight, I’m guarding the pepperoni,” Rebecca went on, and Teddy laughed again. I wondered if she was mocking him, if all of this was a performance for my benefit. Was it really possible that Rebecca, who’d resented Teddy all her life, could have developed an affection for him?

I reminded myself that to believe anything less was selfish and petty, not in Teddy’s or Edward’s best interests. We were, after all, at Rebecca’s mercy. There was little choice but to hope Teddy’s magic could win even her.

The conversation ebbed, and Rebecca’s gaze flitted nervously over me. I searched for the truth in her face. What did I see there— resentment, fear, pity? How did she feel about her father, now that they had spent some time together? Why hadn’t she brought him with her today? Getting Edward out of the house was a challenge, but between Rebecca, Kay-Kay, and Teddy, they could have done it. What if something was wrong with Edward? Changes of any kind were difficult for him. He relied on his daily routine, the same people present, the same things to do. How had he reacted to Rebecca’s presence? Did he know who she was?

Gathering my courage, I made up my mind to try the question. But the words were a jumble in my head. Nerves pulsed in my throat. What would they think when they heard me like this? What if Teddy was frightened by it? I formed the words very carefully in my mind. Edward. Where is Edward? “Derrr-d, ger-ble Derrr-d?” It was only nonsense sound. The muscles in my jaw tightened in frustration.
Where is Edward?
“Derrr-d?”

Sensing the rising tide of emotion in me, Teddy patted my hand. He hated to see anyone upset. “It okay, Mama. It okay.”

Rebecca fiddled with the strap on her purse, and she glanced toward the door, as if she were considering leaving. “Don’t try to talk, Hanna Beth. Teddy just wanted to see you. To make sure you were all right. We’d probably better let you rest.” She checked the door, took a step away.

“Nnnooo! Derrr-ddd!” I sounded like the screaming woman down the hall, like a deranged old person spitting out gibberish. “Derrr-ddd!” Grinding my teeth, I closed my eyes, tried to be calm, to relax, picture the sounds, do the things the speech therapist had taught me. I’d named, with some clarity, twenty-one cards today— comb, brush, car, boy, dog, milk, and a host of others. Now I couldn’t manage to ask after my own husband? Was there no point at which I would finally become functional again?

“We’d better go.” Rebecca put her hands on Teddy’s arms to guide him out of the chair.

“Nnnooo!” I hissed. “Nnnooo!”

Teddy pulled inward, kneaded his fingers against his chest, his eyes darting toward his lap. Swiveling away from Rebecca, he curled into the chair. She froze, uncertain of what to do, then grabbed the nurse’s call button and pressed it.

Mary came in the door. “Is everything all right?”

“She’s upset about something.” Rebecca held up her palms in a gesture of helplessness. “I don’t know what to . . .”

Mary glanced at Teddy, folded in the chair, worrying the front of his T-shirt, then she leaned over the bed. “What’s the matter, Mrs. Parker?”

“Derrr-ddd,” I said again. Even with imagination, no one would ever decipher
Edward
from that.

Mary smoothed sweat-matted strands of hair away from my face. She took a washcloth from the nightstand, dampened it, and wiped my forehead. “All right now, Mrs. Parker. Stress only makes things worse. If you want us to know what you need, you have to calm down.” The cloth felt cool and calming against my skin, soothing the heat in my cheeks. “Take some deep breaths, and really think about each sound, all right? You can do it. There’s no hurry. We’ll all wait until you’re ready.”

I closed my eyes, relaxed against the pillow, nodded, breathed in, breathed out, tried to clear my mind, then looked at Mary again. “Airrr? Wh . . . wh . . . airrr?”

Her head inclined to one side, her thin brown eyebrows arching together. “Where . . . all right. Where’s what?”

“Derrr-ddd.” Edward’s name was no clearer than before. “Derrr-ddd.”

Mary frowned. “I’m sorry, Mrs. Parker. I didn’t understand that part. Do you want me to go see if the speech therapist is still around? You might be able to point it out on her cards.”

I shook my head. There was no card for
Edward
in the speech therapist’s bag of tricks. I took another breath, tried to think things through. “Howww-t,” I said finally. It was a word I knew I could make. One Mary would understand. We’d been through this conversation before. “Wh-errr . . . howt?”

Mary considered the question for a moment. “Where’s your house? Are you asking if you can go home now?”

I shook my head. Even I wasn’t addled enough to believe I would be going home today.

Mary contemplated again. “Are you asking about your house? How things are there?”

“Yesh!” I exploded, my hands shooting off the bed in a moment of Herculean triumph. “Yesh, yesh, yesh! Howt?”

A buzzer going off in the hallway snagged Mary’s attention. Someone else needed her. “Well, I imagine Rebecca and Teddy can tell you all about that. I’ll leave you three alone to talk, all right?”

Rebecca gave Mary a grateful look. “Thank you for helping, Mary.”

“Oh, sure.” Mary pulled the front of her button-up sweater together, seeming embarrassed by the compliment. With her slim figure and no makeup, she looked like a shy teenager in a woman’s clothes.

“Tanks, Mar-eee.” Teddy crossed the room, grabbed Mary’s hand, and shook it. As he’d grown into a man, we’d tried to teach him that hugging people wasn’t usually an appropriate way of showing gratitude. Even his exuberant handshakes sometimes put people off.

Mary didn’t seem to be bothered. She closed her free hand over their intertwined ones, smiled at Teddy, and said, “You’re welcome, Teddy.”

“Mama don’ talk good,” he observed.

Rebecca blanched.

Mary’s gaze flicked in my direction, then back to Teddy. “Your mom’s getting better. Sometimes after a stroke people have to work really hard for a while.”

Teddy shrugged, blissfully unaware of the emotion in the room. “It okay, some-time I don’ talk good, too.”

The four of us laughed, and Teddy came back to the bed and sat down, smiling. He had a way of easing the most difficult situations. He responded with humility and love when other people were afraid to act.

“I’ll leave you all alone,” Mary said, and left the room.

“By-eee, Mar-eee!” Teddy called after her.

Teddy began telling me about the plants in the backyard, and how he’d gathered pots in which to start the seeds we’d saved from last year, and how he’d found some good dirt and carried it home in a bucket.

“Ere?” I asked. Teddy turned his head aside and ducked his chin the way he always did when he wanted to avoid answering a question. He knew I was wondering where he’d found pots and dirt. We hadn’t been to the garden center to buy those things yet this spring, and last year, Edward had thrown away the box of seedling pots by mistake. I was beginning to suspect that Teddy had been out of the yard. His look of avoidance confirmed it.

“I findin’ dirt,” he muttered, twisting his fingers in his lap, then checking to make sure the zipper on his pants was up. “Good dirt.” He didn’t look at me. He’d always been very good about not leaving the yard. Even when he saw neighbors pass by with bicycles and baby strollers and other things that fascinated him, he only went as far as the sidewalk, never past it. Why would he do such a thing now? Why would Kay-Kay let him? Why would Edward? Even on his bad days, Edward still knew that Teddy wasn’t to wander alone.

“Daaa?” I asked, because I’d already failed at trying to make Edward’s name understood. “Daaa-duh?”

“Daddy Ed gone hop-sital.” Teddy watched my reaction closely, clearly wondering whether I thought it was all right. “Daddy Ed gone hop-sital, but he comin’ back, Mama. A-becca say, Daddy Ed comin’ back.”

Rebecca’s face went pale. She rubbed her thumb and forefinger over her eyebrows. Her hand was trembling.

A tidal wave of panic collided with my more mundane thoughts, sweeping them away, stirring everything into an impossible mix. Edward in the hospital? What was wrong? How could Kay-Kay let that happen without coming and telling me?

“Right, A-becca?” Teddy sought assurance from Rebecca when there was none from me. “Daddy Ed comin’ back.”

“Yes, Teddy, Daddy Ed’s coming back home in a day or two.” Rebecca looked as if she wanted to be anywhere but here.

“Not like Kay-Kay.” Teddy combed his fingers over his hair, pulled slightly, then combed, then pulled. The motion was rough enough that it should have hurt, but he didn’t seem to notice. He was focused on Rebecca, waiting for confirmation.

She paled another shade, nervously chewing the side of her lip. “No, Teddy, not like Kay-Kay.”

I searched Rebecca’s face, trying to make sense of the sudden riptide of information. Where was Kay-Kay? Had Rebecca dismissed her from her position? Kay-Kay would never just leave. She’d been completely devoted to Edward and Teddy for over a year now. Night and day, through all the trials of Edward’s illness, through different medications, setbacks, progress, uncertainty, Kay-Kay had been there. Having worked with Alzheimer’s patients in the past, she understood what we were going through. At a time when I didn’t think I could carry one more burden, we’d found Kay-Kay . . . or Kay-Kay had found us. My brain was muddled this morning, but I knew that Kay-Kay was our salvation, our godsend. She’d taken up our burdens as if they were her own. Few people not compelled by the conscriptions of family would have done as much.

I reached toward Rebecca, aching for an explanation. “Pleee . . . Pleees.”

She took a breath, pressed her lips into a straight, tight line, carefully planning her words.

“Pleees,” I said again. “Trrr-ooo-th.”
Tell me the truth.

The moments ticked by on the wall clock, each movement of the second hand filling my mind with terrible possibilities.

“Edward is in the hospital,” Rebecca confessed finally. It bothered me to hear her call her father
Edward
. “Dr. Amadi felt the need to put him in for a few days to run some tests, straighten out his electrolytes and his medications. He wasn’t . . .” Whatever she’d been about to say, she reconsidered and finished with, “He was having some trouble, but Dr. Amadi seems . . .” Her gaze darted off again, searching for a word that might fit softly into the gap. “. . . confident.” She sighed, rubbed the space between her eyebrows with her index finger. Her lashes fell closed. She had Edward’s bright hazel eyes, but other than that, she looked like her mother. She was beautiful, like her mother. Beautiful, aloof, an island of guarded places no one else could touch.

“Kaaayeee-Kaaayeee?” The name seemed to take forever to produce.

Her gaze met mine very directly. “I’m trying to get in touch with Kay-Kay. Can you tell me her last name, where she lives, how I might contact her?”

Trying to get in touch with Kay-Kay.
What did that mean? Had Rebecca run Kay-Kay out of the house and now she was sorry? Was Rebecca the reason Edward’s condition had declined to the point that he was in the hospital?
He was having some trouble,
she’d said. What kind of trouble? What caused it? Was Rebecca’s mere presence, or Kay-Kay’s leaving, enough to tip Edward from the fragile precipice on which he’d balanced these past months?

I felt my jaw tense, my mind begin to spin into an impossible whirl of fear and supposition until everything was an unintelligible blur. A pulse pounded in my ears, made my face grow flush. Kay-Kay lived upstairs. For the past few months, she’d been staying in the garage apartment at night, so as to help with Edward. Hadn’t she? Or were those only plans we’d made for the future, if and when Edward declined? My mind was tangled, the facts unclear. The more I tried to concentrate, the blurrier the details became, the faster they swirled, blending together, becoming impossible to decipher. To us, she was always just Kay-Kay, practically a member of the family, but she had a last name. She was a single girl and lived in an apartment off Greenville . . .didn’t she? Or was I confusing her with someone else? How could I forget such a basic thing as Kay-Kay’s last name?

Morris? No, Morris was the boy who worked at the convenience store down the road. Carson, Smith, Kenwood, Euless. . . .

My face grew feverish, my jaw more tight, the pounding in my ears louder and louder until my entire body burned and the charley horses in my legs ran wild.

“You shouldn’t worry about this, Hanna Beth. It isn’t . . . good for you,” Rebecca soothed, sounding close to panic herself. No doubt she was worried that I’d have another stroke. “Everything’s fine.”

It was strange to hear Rebecca fussing over my health. The only impression she’d ever given was that she wished I would magically cease to exist.

“Kaaayeee-Kaaayeee?” Blood thundered in my ears and my fists clenched the bedsheets with more strength than I’d thought remained. “Howt? Myeee howt?”
I want to know what’s happening at my house.

Teddy retreated to the back of his chair, folding into himself.

Rebecca took a deep breath, swallowed hard. “I’m taking care of things at the house.” Her voice held the forced softness of a mother trying to pacify a child. “It’s all right. Just give me a little time to—”

“Myeee howt!” I heard myself shriek. My fists pounded the bed. I braced my hand, pulled my head and shoulders off the pillow, attempted to rise up, to be taken seriously. “My howt! Whyeee Kaaayeee-Kay ugg-go?” The string of words, the ability to partially sit up, surprised me. In any other circumstances, I would have been filled with elation.