Between the Sheets (37 page)

I have to protect him. Protect him from all the things that would hurt him
.

But that wasn’t Shelby.

That was a smokescreen he’d thrown up to protect himself.

Ty gathered up some of the gifts and left Casey watching that actually pretty funny
Annoying Orange
show.

“Can you tell me what room Evie Monroe is in?” he asked.

The reception nurse, the happy recipient of some of Cora’s fritters, obliged. “Second floor. Room 210.”

His arms full of flowers and magazines and food, balloons trailing behind him, he walked up the flight of stairs to room 210. But when he turned down the hallway, he realized he shouldn’t have bothered. Outside the shut door there were piles of food. Flowers. Books. Two thermoses of coffee. A few balloons that said “Get Well Soon” drifted on a draft.

He wondered if Shelby knew they were there. Or if she was just denying herself the gifts because that was what she was good at.

I want to try
.

The memory of her face as she’d whispered that, the tears in her eyes, the total nudity with which she’d stood in front of him and begged for another chance—it shook him.

Because his odds weren’t good with Shelby. The chances were high she’d crush him in some way and he didn’t know how much tolerance he had left for that kind of pain.

But the chances were also high that she would love him. Save him, even. Drag him and Casey out of their
strange orbit of each other and into something closer. Happier.

A family.

“Oh, Christ,” he muttered. It seemed his faith was not gone. It popped up like a ball held underwater and then let go.

Maybe, in the end, she wouldn’t be able to give him what he needed. Maybe her try wasn’t going to be enough, but right now, he was going to be the guy that gave her what she needed.

He sat down in the empty chair beside the rest of the offerings. He’d wait as long as he could, and all he could do was hope it was enough.

Mom had come out of the surgery. The surgeon, far too young to actually have finished med school if you asked Shelby, said she had come through it just fine. The lung had been reinflated, the small wound there repaired.

“The real trouble was her arm. We have two screws in there now, but she’s going to need another surgery to put in plates.”

“Plates?” she breathed, because none of this was sinking in. Her head was cloudy and slow. Everything seeped into the haze and then disappeared.

“It was a compound fracture,” he told her slowly. “The ulna was shattered in two different places. But she is going to come out of it.”

Shelby nodded, Doogie Howser left, and she went back to stroking the thin, see-through edge of the medical tape that was keeping her mother’s IV in.

I’m sorry
, she thought with every sweep of her thumb, over tape and skin and the small hump of a blue-black vein.
I’m so sorry
. The world faded away past the edge of that tape and the litany in her head. Hours could have passed.

“Ms. Monroe?” Shelby turned to find a woman poking her head through the door. She wore glasses and her long brown hair was in curls. She had the kind of face that instilled a certain relief. A kind of calm. And Shelby was not impervious to it.

“Yes.”

“I’m Laurie, the social worker assigned to your mother’s file.”

Go away
, she thought, out of a terrible lifelong habit.
We don’t want you here
.

“I have some questions,” Laurie said, sitting in a chair across from Mom’s bed. It was a gray morning outside and the weak sunlight barely survived its fight through the glass. “Can you tell me what happened?”

“I wasn’t there. She’d …” Shelby cleared her throat and attempted to sit up straight, having realized she was bent over the edge of the bed. “She’d wandered out into the fields behind the house across the street.”

“Has she done that before?”

“Apparently that was at least the third time.”

“How were you unaware? Most Alzheimer’s patients don’t return when they wander.”

“The boy across the street brought her back home.”

“But didn’t tell you about it?”

She nodded her head, her thumb busy on the edge of the tape.

“Are you the primary caregiver?”

Shelby just opened her mouth and let it all out. Hiring the nurse. The house full of junk. The aggression and the sundowning. The cobbled-together schedule of care. A housekeeper instead of a nurse because she’d been too stubborn to admit they needed one.

“When was the last time you had a full night’s sleep?”

Shelby shook her head. It had been a year. At least.

“You know, an injury like this, it generally speeds up
the decline. If she leaves the hospital, it is likely she won’t be able to go to your home.”

Shelby nodded, panic clawing at her throat.

“This is my fault, isn’t it?” She looked up at Laurie, the social worker, with her clipboards and her sensible hair and her answers.

“Why do you think it is?”

She explained the nightgowns she’d found.

“I didn’t even question them. I was just so happy to be emptying out the house, to have Mom on a walk somewhere else and a few minutes to put things back in order and I didn’t—”

“That’s quite a leap, Shelby. Not many people would be able to look at two nightgowns and surmise that Evie had been wandering outside of the house. Especially when the neighbor boy kept returning her.”

“I should have had a night nurse, shouldn’t I?” she asked. “I kept telling people I was fine. That we were fine. But we weren’t. We haven’t been fine in years and I just kept pretending—”

She stopped. Swallowed back the rest of her panic.

“Your mom already lives in the past,” Laurie said. “She needs you to be in the present. It’s not easy making these decisions, but you have a chance to be the daughter she needs now.”

“You’re recommending a nursing home—”

“No. I’m not recommending anything. I’m saying you need to see things clearly and be open.”

“Open to what?”

“All the possibilities.”

How?
she wondered.
How does one do that?

She thought of the nurse with her smile that said so much, of Ty with his capacity for risk and forgiveness. She thought of the kids she taught and their open, willing, loving hearts.

How did one live like that? How did someone get from where she was to where they were?

Laurie patted her shoulder and vanished.

Shelby’s stomach growled and she checked her watch, astonished to find that it was afternoon. The daylight outside had only grown more and more gray.

Her knees creaked as she stood and her back protested as she tried to straighten herself up from her hunched position.

She wondered, as she walked over to the door, if a nurse might loan her some scrubs to wear and if the cafeteria would take an IOU, because after Ty called her with the news about her mother, she hadn’t stopped to grab her purse, so she didn’t have any money and she wasn’t ready to head home to get those things just yet.

In the hallway she wasn’t sure which way to go and she turned left, only to stumble to a halt at the sight of Ty in a chair outside her door.

Ty surrounded by balloons and flowers. Food. A coffee thermos. A stack of clothes from her house. Her purse.

It wasn’t as if something burst inside of her. There wasn’t a giant explosion of everything she’d ever wanted and denied herself. She didn’t suddenly understand what it meant to be open.

But inside, that tiny voice she’d silenced far too many times whispered,
This. This is how you learn. This is where it begins
.

“Hey,” Ty said, looking exhausted and beautiful and silly with a yellow Mylar balloon hitting him in the head, pushed by some unseen, barely felt current of air.

“You’re here.” That was stupid. A stupid thing to say, but she didn’t care. He was here when she’d pushed him away. He was here when he knew all the ways that she might hurt him.

“I am.”

“How is Casey?”

“We’re leaving in a little bit. I just wanted—” He looked down at all the stuff around him. “Oh, hell, Shelby, I just wanted to be here.”

She took a deep breath. Another. Deeper. More. Carefully, she took all those things from his lap and pushed them onto the chair beside him. Taking note of the fritters for later. And then when his lap was empty, his arms open, she set herself right down inside of them. It felt awkward, because she was still awkward—she had a lot of years to unlearn all the terrible lessons of her childhood—but it was right.

His body against hers. The hard thump of his heart against hers. The scrape of his morning beard against her cheek.

It was all right. Very right.

She curled her arms around his shoulders, pressed her face against his neck, and just let herself breathe. Breathe in the calm support of him. The beautiful, willing strength of him.

And she let herself feel better. Selfish, horribly painfully selfish, but true.

What was coming was bad; she knew that. This situation with her mother was only going to get worse, but she didn’t want to lock Ty out anymore.

“I’m so sorry,” she whispered.

“It’s okay.” His wide hands rubbed over her back, in long sweeps from her neck to the top of her hips. He was petting her and she loved it.

“It’s not,” she told him. She leaned back and looked him in the eyes, something she so rarely had the courage to do, and told him what was in her rapidly expanding heart. “People would say you deserve better. They’d be right.”

“I don’t give a shit what people say.” He ran his hands over her hair, gathering it in his fists at the back of her
neck. It hurt a little, like he needed all of her attention. “I want you. I want to try.”

His beautiful face had grown so familiar to her over the past month, and when he smiled, creating wrinkles and lines around his mouth and eyes, she had to press her fingers against them. Confirming by touch what was too beautiful for her eyes to believe.

“I love you,” she whispered.

He didn’t say he loved her back and that was okay; she’d hurt him, and he was being careful and he had every right not to trust her yet. Not with his heart. Not with Casey.

But they would get there. In time. They would get there.

Chapter 25

One year later

The third Saturday of every month was theirs. And theirs alone.

It started at Cora’s with fritters. And then they went out to Glen Home to see Mom. Shelby, with Ty’s unwavering help, had kept Evie at home after she got out of the hospital for as long as she could. There were round-the-clock nurses that Evie had grown used to, but the stairs got too difficult. Ty modified the bathroom as best he could, but the shower was still too dangerous, and Shelby knew that before something awful happened, she had to make a decision. And the decision was Glen Home.

Shelby went there every day for lunch when Mom was at her best. Shelby, Ty, and Casey came every Sunday after church, and Casey would drop by a few other times after school when he could between piano lessons and his class at the Art Barn.

It wasn’t great. The only one Mom always recognized was Casey, which was such a strange but beautiful turn in the disease. There were days Shelby felt destroyed by guilt that her mother was not living the end of her life in her home as she would have wanted, but Ty just pulled her into his lap and held her until she could bear it again.

But the third Saturday of every month, after taking
Mom some fritters, they drove up to West Memphis to Tilden Rodgers Park.

Shelby pulled into the parking area across from the pavilion and turned off the car. They could see her through the windshield, sitting at one of the picnic tables, her back in the pink jacket hunched against the cold wind. Her unbound red hair blowing in the sharp January wind.

On the table in front of her there was a wrapped package.

A birthday present.

Shelby nearly rolled her eyes at the gift. If that woman thought she could buy her way back into her son’s affections, she didn’t know her son.

“I’ll be right here,” Shelby said.

Casey, still staring at his mother, nodded. “I know.”

“We can leave anytime,” she said. “You don’t have to stay the full half hour.”

“You say that every time.” He flashed her a quick grin and she took a breath. The first in what felt like fifteen miles. This was the fourth monthly visit between Casey and Vanessa. Ty took him to the first one, but that had been such a disaster that Shelby and Casey had decided it would be best if she went.

Casey had asked, actually. And Shelby had quickly agreed, her heart expanding with love.

“I mean it every time.”

“She doesn’t, you know, say anything mean. She mostly asks about school.”

“Good,” was all Shelby said, but she was thinking
she’d better not or I will be a million times worse than Ty would ever dream of being
.

Casey still didn’t open the car door.

“Are you stalling because you don’t want to see her?” she asked. “Because you don’t have to—”

“No. No. It’s fine. I better go.” Casey popped open the door.

She wanted to pull him back, cover him with kisses, but he only allowed that when he was sick or about to go to bed, so instead she grabbed his hand and wrapped her fingers around his. “I love you.”

“Shel-by,” he groaned, but he was grinning, and she grinned back at him.

“Nothing you can do about it, Case. You just have to deal. Now go.”

Casey got out of the car and she watched, holding her breath again.
God
, she really had to stop doing that; she was going to pass out one of these Saturdays.

Vanessa, when she saw him, stood up, and Shelby watched the woman’s face through the windshield. She could not hide her pain, her regret, or her pleasure.

Shelby pulled some papers to grade out of her bag but barely glanced at the fifth-grade identity projects. Instead she watched Casey and marveled at the effect one kid’s piece of art had had on all of their lives.

When the half hour was up, she put the papers away and honked the horn.