And so he didn’t tell anyone, at first out of fear, then out of shame, then perhaps out of habit, until the day he told me. But he decided that day at fifteen that he would never end up in a home for old people. Never.
Chicago to Paris, July 5 and 6, 2007
On the plane Tom thought about all the people he loved from whom he was moving away now at half a thousand miles an hour, at nearly ten miles a minute. One thousand one, one thousand two, one thousand three … Grandchildren he’d never see again. Great-grandchildren he’d never see at all, never hold or tickle or kiss. Perhaps this was all a grand mistake. Could he just step off this plane in Paris and onto another and be home again before anyone knew? But the die was already cast, his property disposed of, the letter mailed. And then there had been my last phone call, the one I had thought long and hard about before making. It was spring then, and spring can be such a cold season in that place.
“Tom, listen,” I said, “I feel as if I need to tell you something. I overheard Uncle Brooks and my mom …”
“I know, I know,” he said. I imagined him taking off his reading glasses, pushing his book away and trying to ignore the fact that the rain outside his window was turning to snow and that he’d just caught himself reading the same page for a third time. “He wants me to sign over power of attorney. Well, I’m not going to do it. I—” “No, it’s something a little more serious than that,” I said. “He’s talking about guardianship. He wants to be appointed your legal guardian.”
“My guardian? Oh, my Lord.”
“Tom, he says you’re losing it. He says he thinks he can prove dementia. Says he can document it.”
“That’s ridiculous, Nora. That’s nonsense.”
“I know, I know. But don’t forget he plays golf with half the judges in the county.”
“I’ll be damned. I can’t believe this.”
“Just to let you know, my mom said no. She said she wouldn’t stand for it.”
But that was all before Tom got stuck between the wall and the toilet. He dozed off sitting on the can in the middle of the night; anymore he sometimes had to sit there a long time, and it was dark and he was groggy and he fell asleep. Groggy. Or senile. He wondered if one condition could simulate the other. He awoke with a start when he slumped to the side, found himself off balance and disoriented, put the palm of his left hand on the seat between his legs and tried to push himself up while reaching in the dark for the sink. But the toilet seat he’d been meaning to tighten for weeks shifted, his left palm slipped, and his right hand failed to find the sink because that sink was in the downstairs bathroom and this one was across the room. This time he lost his balance altogether and fell harder against the wall, sliding down it until he was wedged between it and the cold porcelain of the toilet. He had a brave little laugh, sitting there half naked in the pitch black, but then he couldn’t move. He wiggled and inched and squirmed, but he was stuck and he stayed that way the rest of the night. He slept in starts, dreaming once of the old man named Wayne Rasmussen sitting on a cold windowsill and letting himself fall backward. Then, when he couldn’t hold it any longer, he urinated on the floor beneath himself. By the morning his discomfort had turned to pain, and when he finally heard someone downstairs, he croaked, “I’m up here.”
Later, after my mother had burst through the door and gaped at him, turned away from him, said, “Oh, my God,” been unable not to gasp, after the firemen had greased his sides and worked him free, the ambulance had taken him to the hospital, the doctors had wrapped him and rehydrated him, and he was resting in the emergency room, he tried to make a joke. But my mother said, “No! Don’t! Don’t even try to pretend that this is funny, that this is nothing, that this could happen to anyone, that you’re not an old man. You are old, Dad. I’m sorry. This is just irrational. You shouldn’t be mowing your lawn; you shouldn’t be out on your boat. You shouldn’t be living out there all alone while I lie awake in bed worrying about you. You’re not able to do all these things anymore; I’m sorry. My God, Daddy, you could have died!”
“Okay, Christine,” he said. “Okay, okay.”
“Why can’t you just move into a nice retirement home like everyone else’s parents? Why can’t you think of someone other than yourself? I mean, do we have to …” She didn’t go on, but she didn’t have to. It was that unfinished sentence and the use of the word “irrational” that told him he had lost, that she’d crossed over to Brooks’s side, that the clock was now ticking and his days as a free man were numbered. He would have to act soon if he were to act at all.
But what if she were right? Was all of this self-indulgence? Delusion? Demented hubris? Was he torturing or was Christine overwrought? Was he paranoid or was Brooks conniving? “How the hell should I know?” he said the next day, badly bruised and heavily bandaged, as he stood at the window looking out at Frenchman’s Lake while a light rain fell and Haydn played. “How in God’s name should I know?” And if he didn’t know, if he really didn’t know, he should at the very least appear to go along with them. So he let Brooks buy him a cell phone and painstakingly teach him how to use it, and he dutifully answered their calls every day. He agreed to sell the house, and he agreed to put his name on a waiting list for Hanover Place, “a retirement community for active seniors with thoughtfully designed independent apartments and tasteful, elegant common areas, gardens, and grounds.” He even agreed to sign the forms giving my mother power of attorney in his affairs. But he didn’t sign them. Not yet. “Wait ’til we sell the house,” he said. “It will be easier for me to keep it until the paperwork is complete so one of you doesn’t have to run out here every other day.” He did all of this as if he had suddenly seen the light, and perhaps he had. He acquiesced, he apologized, he accommodated, and he planned.
In truth, none of the “incidents” really worried Tom or mattered to him. The only one that did was the one Uncle Brooks and my mother didn’t know about; I was the only person he told. He found himself one day standing with a shopping cart in the frozen-foods aisle without any idea of what he’d come to buy. Of course he’d often entered a room and been drawn up short because he didn’t know why, but when he’d gone back and discovered the pan on the stove, the open book, the shoes awaiting polish, he’d remembered. This time he didn’t. He never knew what had sent him to the grocery store that day or why there were three frozen pizzas and a can of hairspray in his shopping cart or why, when he went out to the parking lot, it seemed to be on the wrong side of the building or why then he couldn’t find his car, and when he did, it didn’t look right; it didn’t seem to be his car. He told himself that it was because he hadn’t slept well the night before. He told himself it was because he’d drunk a caffeinated cola. He told himself these things, but he wasn’t convinced.
Somewhere high over the Atlantic, when darkness had settled around them, when the dinner dishes had been cleared, the movie shown, the lights dimmed, and the man next to Tom was reclined and snoring lightly, Tom pushed his seat back, pulled the cotton blanket around him, and listened to the drone, felt the occasional shudder of the great craft. As he dozed he recalled falling asleep at night in the backseat of his parents’ car when he was still young enough to do so but old enough to know that he would not be much longer. He remembered listening to them as they talked in soft voices. Sometimes he could hear a song on the radio. Sometimes it rained and he could hear the rhythmic swish-swish of the windshield wipers. He felt then, he felt now, a sense of peace and safety in the warmth and soft lights of the night missile.
And what was he moving toward, if anything at all? Sarah’s soft, rich voice? Her smiling eyes? Her self-knowledge that seemed to allow her to be so damned certain of everything, including him? Could any of that have survived all these years? He did not want to get his hopes up, so he made himself think about, fell asleep thinking about, Tony’s ashes, which very early on the morning of the Fourth of July he had scattered from his pontoon boat on the waters of Frenchman’s Lake. They had created a silvery wake that had ridden the surface before very slowly disappearing beneath it.
His hotel room had doors that opened