Wild Fell (16 page)

“This is
my house
,” he shouted. “
This
is why I didn’t want you to move in with me. I hate all the fussing!” Then, my father, whom I’d never heard swear a day in his life said, “It’s one of the reasons I was so glad your
bitch
of a mother moved the
fuck
out of that bastard house in Ottawa. Fucking cold
bitch
.”

I was shocked. “Dad?” I reached out to touch him, but he slapped my hand away. “Dad, you’re not yourself. This isn’t how you talk. This isn’t the language you use. You need to see someone. You’re scaring me.”

“What?
WHAT?
What does everyone want from me? You and that bitch of a mother of yours! Pushy, pushy,
pushy!
Just leave me alone so I can get ready for work, damn you! I’m going to be late for the office. It’s
late!
”

It was eleven at night. I stared at him with blank horror, then said the only words that came to mind: “Dad, you’re retired. You don’t have to get ready for work. Your work is done. And it’s late at night.” I pointed to the grandfather clock against the wall. “Look, Dad. It’s eleven.”

My father turned and left the room. I heard his bedroom door slam behind him. When I knocked fifteen minutes later, there was no answer. I pushed it open quietly, taking care not to startle him. My father had fallen asleep across his bed, fully clothed. Only when I pulled a blanket over him did I notice that he was wearing a nylon windbreaker next to his skin, underneath his button-down plaid Viyella sport shirt, and rubber snow galoshes on his feet. Careful not to wake him, I removed the galoshes and put them away in the hall closet.

We tiptoed around each other all the next day in a way we had not since my mother had walked out thirty-odd years before. That evening I was unable to bear the tension any longer and asked my father why he had been so quiet all day.

At first he denied that he had been unusually quiet. He denied it brusquely, but then with increased desperation. When he finally confessed to me that he was afraid to speak because he didn’t trust his ability to use the right words to convey what he meant, he broke down and wept tears that sounded like they’d been cut out of his throat with an awl.

The next morning, we made an appointment with Dr. O’Neill, my father’s longtime physician, for a full battery of tests. When the results came back, they were exactly what both of us dreaded: mid-stage, progressive Alzheimer’s.

“Well,” said my father. “Well. My God.”

“This is treatable, though, Dr. O’Neill, isn’t it?” I was desperate for him to tell me it was, even though everything I had already read on the topic had indicated it wasn’t. I’d never wanted more to be wrong about something in my life. “What’s the treatment? What do we do? How do we beat this?”

Dr. O’Neill looked pained. “Well, those are two questions, Jamie, I’m sorry to say. For treatment, I’m going to prescribe memantine hydrochloride—Ebixa, it’s called. It’s an NMDA receptor antagonist, which means it blocks some of the chemicals in the brain that trigger the symptoms of Alzheimer’s.
It’ll help with the memory loss and the confusion. But it’s a treatment, not a cure. It’s important that you know that. We’ll start with twenty milligrams a day—two doses of ten milligrams twice a day. He can take them with or without food, but they have to be swallowed. He can’t chew them. It’s very important that he swallow them.”

My father muttered something under his breath.

“What did you say, Dad? I’m sorry, we didn’t hear you.”

My father spoke sharply this time. “I said, ‘Stop talking about me as though I’m not here.’ I’m an old man with an illness, not a child. I’m still your father, Jameson. I’m still an adult.”

“I’m sorry, Peter, of course you’re right,” Dr. O’Neill said. “Please forgive me. That was very insensitive of us.”

“Don’t condescend to me, either, Dr. O’Neill. Please. I sincerely mean no disrespect, but this is something I’m facing. I need to be spoken to clearly and honestly about it.”

“Will the drugs . . . will they cure him?” I couldn’t stop asking, even though the doctor had already said no. I wanted there do be a different answer. At that moment, I believed that by asking it again, perhaps there was one the doctor hadn’t thought of. “I mean, will they cure my dad?”

Dr. O’Neill took a deep breath. “No, Jamie, they won’t. Your father has expressed an understandable desire that I not sugarcoat this for either of you, so I won’t. There is no cure for this particular disease. It can be managed with drugs, possibly for a long time. But after a certain point . . .”
he trailed off. “Well, after a certain point your lives will be very different than they are now. There will be any number of options at that point. We can discuss them as the situation develops.”

My father’s laugh was a sharp, dry bark. “I think you mean
deteriorates
, Dr. O’Neill. You should have been an airline pilot, sir. I could easily picture you addressing the passengers of a perpendicular 747 about to crash nose-first into the Atlantic. ‘Please listen for further announcements as the situation develops.’”

Dr. O’Neill smiled thinly, but with what appeared to be sincere sadness. He had been my father’s doctor for ten extraordinarily healthy years. “I’m sorry, Peter,” he said. “I wish there was a better prognosis. But staying as positive as possible is essential.”

“I’ll work on that, Dr. O’Neill,” my father said dryly. “I promise I’ll work at staying positive.”

My father’s downward progression was swift, likely swifter than any of the three of us expected it would be when we left the office that day.

He barely slept at night. Instead, he roamed the house, opening drawers and cupboards and upending the contents. After a while, I stopped turning on the burglar alarm because he set it off every night past midnight when he dropped cutlery and plates on the floor, convinced that it was morning, and I was fifteen years old, and he had to cook me breakfast before I went to wrestling practice.

He was also occasionally convinced that he and my mother were still married, and that we were all living in the old house in Ottawa, and it was still the early 1970s.

He furrowed his brow. “What was the name of that little girl you used to play with, Jamie? What was her name?” Before his illness, my father remembered every detail of my childhood with a sense of recall that was almost eidetic.

“You mean Hank, Dad? Are you talking about Hank?”

He thought about it. “No, that wasn’t her name. That’s a boy’s name, anyway. It was something else. What was her name? You used to spend a lot of time together playing in your room. Come on, damn it. You remember.”

“Well, her real name was Lucinda, but no one called her that except Mom. Well, and Hank’s mother—she never called her Hank. She was my best friend, remember? She came to my wedding. She was my best man.”

He mulled this over. “
Lucinda
.” He tasted the word, closing his eyes, trying to place it in some sort of recollective context. “No, that wasn’t her name. I’m sure of it. Damn it. Some other girl.”

“Maybe, Dad,” I lied. “I had a lot of friends. You’re probably thinking of someone else.

I kept a full schedule of classes as long as I possibly could; the house was paid for, I was working, and his savings paid enough for homecare several times a week, but even the rotating home assistance workers who came to help with my father finally admitted that yes, he needed to be watched more than even they and I could manage. But still, I resisted their suggestion of alternate living arrangements for my father.

That remained the case until the rainy Thursday night I got the call from the police telling me they had picked up my father, who had almost been killed wandering in traffic in his pajamas on the Leaside Bridge. When the police arrived, he was stumbling towards the lower railings of the bridge with its deadly forty-five-metre plunge.

The officers had been able to divert traffic long enough to safely rescue him, then calm him down enough to get him into the back of a cruiser. They had been able to identify him by the plastic identification bracelet I’d insisted he wear, one of the few battles regarding his care that he’d given in to with no blowback. The bracelet had his name, our address, and my cell phone number. I was almost hysterical on the telephone, but the female officer’s voice at the other end seemed accustomed to dealing with hysterical relatives and soothing them. Mr. Browning was safe and at the station, she told me kindly
.
He’d said he was hungry, so they’d given him a sandwich—was that all right?

And he was asking that his daughter, Amanda, pick him up at the station and take him home.

When I arrived at the No. 53 Division police station, my father was docile but uncomprehending. He asked me who I was. When I told him, he said he didn’t have a son, he had a daughter and her name was Amanda.

“He doesn’t have a daughter,” I explained to the two constables who had brought my father to the front desk so they could sign him out. “He lives with me. I’m his son. He has Alzheimer’s. Aside from the actual disease symptoms, one of the side effects of the drugs he’s on is hallucinations and sleep disturbance.”

The younger of the two constables looked hard at me. “Who do you think he’s asking for? He sounds pretty specific. Do you have a sister, maybe?”

“I’m an only child, officer. I don’t have any sisters.”

“Could he be asking about his nurses, maybe?”

“His nurses—pardon me, his
ex
-nurses, because I’m going to fire whichever one left him alone long enough for him to get out of the house, then didn’t call me immediately—are named Beth-Anne and Florence. I don’t know any Amanda.
We
don’t know any Amanda,” I corrected. “
We
don’t.”

The older of the two police officers seemed to intuit the situation more clearly than his colleague, whether by professional or personal experience. He looked at me with a mixture of pity and resignation that led me to believe that he’d seen this before, maybe even up close.

“Mr. Browning,” he said. “If you could just step over here and fill out these forms, we can release your dad back into your custody and you can take him home. Please take care of him. At his stage of the illness, he could hurt himself badly—even hurt other people. I don’t know what he was doing on that bridge, but I do know that it’s always been a magnet for suicides.”

“My father would never kill himself,” I said automatically. “He’s not like that.”

The monstrous enormity of that lie shamed me even as I verbalized it. Of
course
he’d kill himself. How many times since the diagnosis had my previously happy father wept in his despair and said he didn’t want to wind up as some sort of raving vegetable, dependent on others for everything from feeding him to bathing him to helping him use the toilet? How many times had he slyly asked me (forgetting that he’d already the question a dozen times before) what would happen if the pills he was supposed to swallow were chewed instead?

But I still wasn’t prepared to process the notion of my father trying to kill himself by jumping to his death.

“Either way” the officer said. “He’s going to need better care, Mr. Browning. Much better than the care he has right now. He could have been killed tonight. I’m not faulting you, sir. This is one of the hardest things anyone has to go through—for both of you, really, in different ways. You only get one dad in this lifetime. Like I said, take care of him.”

“I know that,” I said. “Believe me, I know it.”

I felt my father pluck the sleeve of my raincoat. He reached out and caressed the back of my head, the same way he’d done a thousand times when I was a little boy, under the covers in the dim glow of my nightlight.

“You’ve cut your hair, Amanda,” he said dreamily. “You had the loveliest dark brown hair. Just like your mother.”

“I’m
Jamie
, Daddy,” I replied, fighting back tears. “I’m your
son
. You don’t
have
a daughter. There’s no
Amanda
. There never has been. Please, Daddy, stay with me just a little bit longer. Just at least until we can get home and I can call someone to help us. Please, please, please. Just a bit longer.”

He sighed ruefully. “You should have waited for me on the bridge, Amanda,” he said. “I saw you. I was almost all the way across the road. I was almost there.”

That night marked the end of my father as I’d known him. When I got him home, I gave him his medicine and put him to bed. I pulled the blanket up to his chest and tucked it in so he’d be warm enough. He looked up at me from the pillow.

“Jamie,” he said in an old man’s tentative, tremulous voice. “Would you stay here with me for a little while? Just until I fall asleep? I’m so scared.”

“Of course, Dad. Of course I will. Don’t be scared. I’m here.” I climbed onto the bed and lay down beside him. I put my arm around his shoulders and held him tenderly. In a very short time he was fast asleep in my arms, but I didn’t sleep at all that night, even after I’d left his room and gone into the living room and opened the bottle of Canadian Club I’d been given back when Ame and I were still married, but had never touched.

The next day, I brought Dad to the MacNeil Institute, the best private residential facility for Alzheimer’s patients in Toronto I could afford. Even today I remember how preternaturally, cruelly bright that sunlight in the parking lot was to my dry, red eyes and how much it stung as we laboriously made our way up the ramp to the front door.

When my father realized I was leaving him there, he cried and pleaded, telling me he didn’t want to stay there; he wanted to go home with me.

Of all of the crucifying ordeals my father and I had endured together since his diagnosis, leaving him here, while he begged like a child for me not to abandon him, was first one I had grave doubts about my being able to survive.

And then, at the most desperate moment, like an angel of light, Nurse Ardelia Jackson appeared from behind the swinging doors leading to the locked ward corridor and came over to us.

Without saying anything to me, she linked my father’s arm lightly in hers. “There now, Peter,” she comfortingly. “What’s all this fuss? Everything is fine. It’ll be all right, you’ll see. Come along now and take a walk with me. Jamie can come along in a bit. Let’s get to know each other a little bit, shall we? There now. It’s all right. We’ll just stroll.”