INTERZONE 253 JUL-AUG 2014 (4 page)

Now, at eighty-six, it can take him fifteen minutes to walk the 150 feet to the care center’s cafeteria. He gets distracted. Forgets he has a destination. Refuses to be rushed. When he has a walker, he’ll just pick it up and carry it. Often it appears that he’s forgotten how to use it. Several times now the interns at the care center have found him on the floor in the middle of the night, where he has fallen.

Watching him walk is a bit of a nightmare. He’s always on the edge of toppling. He shuffles. A stray thread in the carpet might be enough to trip him.

I’m frightened by the rate of change. Six months ago, when Mom had her back surgery, the event that precipitated their move into the care center, Dad and I parked the car in a hospital garage a quarter mile from Mom’s room. He walked stairs, sidewalks and corridors without help. He chatted about Mom’s progress and my kids.

A friend of mine has terminal cancer. He asked his oncologist how long he had to live. The doctor said, “Your system is compromised. An organ could fail, or an opportunistic infection could set in, like pneumonia. I can’t predict catastrophe, but if nothing like that happens, I look at how fast your health is changing. If the change is observable over years, than you have years. If we’re seeing change over months, than that is what you have. If the change is observable over days, you have days.”

It’s only been six months since he walked unaided to see Mom.

•••

Three in the morning. I’ve been reading
John Carter of Mars
since midnight by the light from my open closet. If I hear footsteps overhead, I’ll have time to turn off the light and feign sleep before Mom or Dad realize I’m flouting my bedtime. I’m eleven years old.

The ceiling creaks. I look up from the book. On my dresser and desk, my aquariums bubble gently. I’ve been trying to breed fancy guppies. Even though the parents’ tails are long, flowing and beautiful, all the babies look ordinary. This has been a disappointment.

The back door rattles. That would be Dad. He’s obsessive about security. He’d equipped the house with heavy storm doors with two locks on them, and the inner doors also had two locks. He’d check them a couple of times a night. Years later, when he bought a car with a remote lock/unlock key fob, he’d open the front door, unlock the car with the remote, and then relock. A couple of hours later, he’d do it again.

He unlocks the back door. I hear the metallic rattling of keys. He’s not coming downstairs, so I return to the book. A half hour later, I realize he hasn’t come back in. What is Dad doing outdoors at 3:30 in the morning?

The third and fifth stair from the bottom creak, so I step long and high over them.

Dad built a telescope before I was born, a ten-inch reflector with a four-foot long barrel. He ground the mirror himself. Mom told me that it had taken months. During the school year, he would schedule a night for my class to come to our house to look at the sky. Last year, my fifth grade class saw Saturn’s rings and Jupiter’s moons. Mom made hot chocolate in a huge pot on the stove. Kids went out our back door into the yard, steaming mugs of hot chocolate in hand to wait their turn.

There’s enough of the moon that I can see Dad standing by his telescope. He’s not looking through it. His head is cocked back. He’s staring up. I watch him for fifteen minutes before I’m too tired and bored. Back in bed, I open my book. Continue reading.

I think I must have fallen asleep before he came in.

•••

My sisters made a box for me at my parents’ house, filled with bits of Mom and Dad’s life that they thought I would want. I haven’t gone through it yet. On top of the stack is a huge, brass telescope that looks like it would be at home on a pirate ship. It’s dinged, but the brass feels warm and smooth under my hand. When fully extended, it’s longer than my arm.

Underneath the telescope sat a magazine with a familiar cover, the September 1963
Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction
with part three of Robert Heinlein’s ‘Glory Road’. It was the first ‘adult’ science fiction I’d read. I had been nine. The paper had long ago yellowed, but it smelled like Dad’s books.

I’m glad they put the box aside for me. I think I’ll make a display for the telescope to hang on my wall at home. Underneath, I’ll have a sign made. ‘Dad. Watcher of the Skies.’

•••

Dad picks at the skin behind his ear. He’s sitting on the chair by the door into his care center apartment. His focus is on the carpet a couple of feet in front of him. His fingers move slowly, rubbing the skin, pulling gently at his hair. I wonder what he’s thinking about, or if he’s thinking at all.

I have a theory about Alzheimer’s: the brain is traveling, but it’s not making a trail. Maybe he’s remembering a conversation he had thirty years ago. Maybe he’s thinking about orbital mechanics from when he worked for Martin-Marietta. It doesn’t matter, really, because he won’t connect the next thought with the last one.

Of course, he might not be thinking at all. Maybe his brain is idling, stuck in neutral. I can’t tell, and that’s frightening. His eyes move sometimes, and he blinks. His lips separate slightly, then press together.

Six months ago, the last time we had a real conversation, he said, “The thing about getting old is that people talk to you, but you can’t follow what they’re saying.”

When I leave the care center now, I always tell Dad that I love him. I don’t remember telling him that when I was a kid. I hug him – his shoulders are frail, like bird wings. His breath has gone bad. I wonder if he’s brushing regularly.

Sometime in my early forties, I noticed that Dad and I never said “I love you” to each other. It might have been around the time his mother died that it occurred to me. I talked to him on the phone. He’d gone back to Indiana for the service. I wanted to offer some comfort, but I didn’t know what to say to him. He sounded business-like on the phone. “I’ll be home in two days,” he said, no hint of loss in his voice.

“I’m sorry about grandma,” I said. “I love you.”

“She was gone for a long time before she died,” he said. It had been a decade since she’d recognized him last.

“I’m sorry,” I said again.

“Well,” he said, “it wasn’t unexpected.”

After he hung up, I realized he hadn’t said that he loved me. For a long time after, I made it a point to say “I love you” when I talked to him on the phone, but he didn’t say it back for years.

•••

When I was fourteen, Dad and I created a UFO sighting. We didn’t mean to. For a couple of months, we’d been experimenting with hot air balloons. Dad had found a pattern for them in
Mechanics Illustrated
, and I did the assembling. We cut the panels from a roll of tissue paper, then glued the edges together to create increasingly larger balloons. Dad made a launching station out of a three-foot section of one-foot in diameter, aluminum air duct he mounted on a stand. For the bottom, he shaped a pad from fiberglass ceiling insulation that he soaked in oil and gasoline. We launched several balloons this way that would fill with the hot smoke and rise fifty feet. The balloons didn’t last long. Anything would rip them, and the heat source sometimes threw sparks that set the balloon afire before it cleared the launch pad, but we persevered.

Finally, our largest balloon was ready: a nine-foot tall monster that had taken me two weekends to assemble. We waited for the breezes to calm as they frequently did near sunset, filled the balloon, and then let it go. It wafted noiselessly upward, out of our back yard, over the house, and continued to rise. We’d never done a balloon this large! A wind current we couldn’t feel carried it away, and it occurred to us that a balloon this large might be a hazard. What if it came down on someone’s windshield!

We rushed to the car, but the wind carried the balloon across blocks. By the time we backed out of the driveway, it was already several streets away, and it was difficult to see from the car. We lost it, and all we could hope for is that it came down harmlessly somewhere, or was stuck in a tree. We joked that we had discovered a new way to toilet-paper someone’s house.

The next day, though, the local paper reported a series of UFO sightings. Numerous people reported a large object hovering over the town at sunset. We looked for where the witnesses lived, and they were all east of us. They’d seen our balloon, lit by the setting sun behind it, glowing in an orange light, numinous and stately, and, evidently, otherworldly.

•••

“We don’t believe he’s a flight risk,” said Shelly, the care center’s director, “but we have found him wandering at night a couple of times.”

My sisters and I look at each other around the round table tucked in the corner of Shelly’s office. We’re having a status check meeting. The care center takes notes about the resident’s needs and behaviors, and the family brings any concerns they have. It’s humane and gentle, but it’s hard to think about making decisions for Dad because he can’t make them for himself.

I smiled at the phrase ‘flight risk’. At the pace he walked now, I could spot him thirty minutes and he wouldn’t be out of sight.

I’d talked to him before the meeting. It had been a good morning for him. More connected, although ‘connected’ now meant that he would stay on script longer.

“How are you doing?” he’d say. He rested one hand on top the other, his skin so frail I thought I should be able to see the nerves and veins beneath.

“Just fine, Dad.”

“And your boys?”

“Fine too.”

“Pretty good weather we’ve been having.”

“Yes, I think so too.”

But if I wandered off the script, like asking him about the food, or if he’d made friends at the center, he’d say, “I don’t know. Guess I haven’t thought about it.”

Shelly said, “Last night, he made it to the doors to the Memory Support Center. They’re locked, of course, so he couldn’t have gone in, but he had to pass several people to get there. None of them saw him.” She laughed. Shelly’s a slender woman, dark hair, dressed in a brown pant suit. When we’d met, she’d told me that before she took the job in the center, she’d been a middle school English teacher. We talked shop for a little bit, but like all English teachers, we ended up discussing how time consuming grading was. “I don’t miss that,” she’d said. “The residents don’t write papers.”

“What about the outside doors?” I said. I had a vision of him pushing through them, into the night, wandering down the street.

“Locked and alarmed. A receptionist mans the front desk by the doors twenty-four hours a day. We are very conscious of resident safety.”

I think it’s interesting that none of the employees in the care center call their wards ‘patients’, which is how I think of them. The first day I’d visited the center, I passed a very old woman tucked in a couch. She was almost on her back, her chin pressed to her chest. She said so silently I nearly missed it, “Help me.”

I told an intern, and within seconds three of them were bending over her.

I wondered what was wrong. How long had she been like that, unable to speak loud enough for anyone to hear?

Near the front doors of the center is a beautifully burnished maple dresser. Fresh flowers in a vase grace the top. On either side of the flowers stand a framed photograph of a care center resident. Old, very old, but well-dressed and smiling for the camera. I’d been to the center several times before I realized each was a photograph of the latest person to die. ‘With fondest thoughts, we celebrate Elizabeth Donner’, read the brass plaque on the frame’s bottom. ‘1928–2014’.

I can’t remember seeing the same photograph twice, and there are only ever two portraits. I suppose on a bad day, someone’s memorial might be on the dresser for an hour or two before the next one replaces it.

The care center is a way station, a train platform with nice bedrooms and compassionate attendants. I know the whole circle of life narrative. I’m not denying death, but underneath the friendly wallpaper and shiny dining area furniture and spotless glass I feel the cold fingers waiting to reach out. My dad is here.

“Many of our Alzheimer’s patients are nomadic,” said Shelly. “Sometimes they’ll sleep twenty hours a day, but we don’t know which twenty.”

“Dad never slept through the night,” said one of my sisters.

I thought about Dad at the telescope. Naturally, he wouldn’t sleep at night. There were stars to see.

Someone said, I don’t know who, “Maybe he’s looking for Mom.”

A breath caught in my throat, and I realized I was almost crying.

We talked for another half hour. Since I was in town, I could be more helpful. I would take Dad to his doctor’s appointment the next day instead of one of my sisters.

•••

Dad needed help into the car. I’d been maneuvering him from his room in the care center to the passenger pick up and drop off area for twenty minutes. He paused for a long time at the front doors, as if he didn’t know what to make of the sunlight. I hadn’t been able to get him to use the walker, so I’d gripped his pipe-stem thin arm the whole way.

He fastened the seat belt on the third try. “’39 Ford,” he said. “Great car but it didn’t have a rumble seat.”

I wasn’t sure what he was talking about. My mind was on other matters, though. I would take Dad to and from his appointment, then I’d drive home, but I’d forgotten the box with the telescope my sisters left for me. Dad’s house was not on my way home. We’d have time to swing by the house before the appointment, but it would be the first time he’s been home since before Mom died. Most of the furniture was gone. Bookshelves were empty. Would he recognize it?