A deadline loomed for a grant John took on, knowing that getting it turned around in time was going to be tough. First True Home, a nonprofit that provided emergency housing for battered women, teetered on insolvency, and they were paying John five thousand dollars to quickly get a complicated federal proposal out in time. In his effort to prove to Robin that his commitment to supplementing the cost of Larry’s care, John was glad to pick up the job. That would cover half a week of Larry’s care right there.
He put his feet up, his laptop resting on his legs. He withdrew to “the zone,” that fertile, fuzzy-edged place where his mind was set free to roam, and he considered the plight of a battered woman in need of a bed. In no time, his brain obediently dealt the words. Sometimes, his typing just felt like taking transcription:
“When a home becomes unsafe,” he began, “shelter becomes critical. For a night, for a week, or as a first comforting way station en route to a healthier, happier life.”
John shrugged. Grant proposals compete against scores of worthy causes, trying to sway a foundation manager or government drone charged with slogging through dozens of such appeals each day. The bad economy had gutted charitable giving at precisely the moment when nonprofits that served the most vulnerable needed the most help. The money was still there—sometimes in the hundreds of thousands for the right cause—but the odds of grabbing it were horrible.
The trick was to write right up to the line of compassion without crossing into schmaltz. John always started thick with mawkishness, but then pulled it back word by word. His job was ultimately to reduce human despair to a kind of strategic rhetorical exercise. His knack for emotional distancing was a plus.
John stretched contentedly. The proposal would be good, eventually. He felt the welcome call to really dig in when the winsome peal of “Over the Rainbow” broke the silence. As John reached for his phone, he regretted how the song now instinctively made him set his jaw before taking a deep, calming breath.
He used to love “Over the Rainbow.”
“Hi, Mom,” he said softly. Rose didn’t understand caller ID, let alone custom ringtones. It was some kind of magic trick, her son always knowing it was her on the other end.
“Can’t sleep?” John asked.
“Did you remember to…? Shoot!” Rose cursed with frustration.
The words stopped coming to her early on, the first sign that something was wrong. Rose could maintain a conversation with her usual verve, but then would skid to a halt as a trapdoor opened and the words fell away. In the beginning, she’d recover and carry on, but over the past year the occasional lost word became entire thoughts. She would embark upon a sentence, then have no idea where she was headed.
The abrupt silences that came to complicate John’s relationship with his mother were clumsy and strained. If he tried to help her by guessing at the word, she’d bristle. If he didn’t try to help, she’d bristle. He came to let the silences stretch on until she chose how she wanted to proceed. It was important for her to maintain as much control over her life as she could.
“Why did I call you?” she finally said impatiently.
John took another deep breath. “I got you in with Dr. Kelly in a couple weeks. Was that it? I put it on your calendar last time I was over, remember?”
John heard the rustling on the other end and knew she was surprised to find it written right where he said it would be. Her defeated tone told John she knew that this thing she forgot was another thing she once knew.
“No, that wasn’t it.”
John rubbed his eyes. “Did it have anything to do with Mike?”
“Is he there?” she asked eagerly.
He looked around the room, as if it was remotely possible. “He’s got one of his band things. You won’t see him until morning, remember? Mom, he’s forty-five years old. You can’t stay up all night worrying about him.”
“It wasn’t that. I remember now. It had something to do with … Shoot!”
“Mom, you need to go to bed and stop stressing about these things. If it’s important, you’ll remember it.” This was an expression Rose used throughout her life, whenever anyone had a harmless lapse of memory. John in turn came to employ it, but he realized for the first time what an awful thing it was to say to someone with dementia.
“You sound tired,” Rose said. “Everyone else in bed?”
John squirmed in his chair and stared past his feet, propped up on Larry’s bed.
“Yep,” John said to his mother, despairing at his deceit. He put in regular work hours at the hospital between his father’s overnight treatments. Cell phone reception was acceptable in the dead wing, but the lack of even an old school dial-up connection freed John from the time-wasting lure of the internet. It was actually the ideal place to get serious work done.
“Why are you working so hard all of a sudden?” Rose asked. “Are you and Robin having trouble with…? Shoot!”
“Our money is fine, Mom,” John sighed. “We’ve just got some expenses, and we need to start thinking of Katie’s college fund.”
“You know I’m going to help you with that, when the time comes.”
“I know. We appreciate it,” he said, knowing that there was no guarantee that Rose’s money would sustain herself, let alone her granddaughter’s education.
No one anticipated Larry dying so young, so John’s parents failed to pay into premiums for long-term health care back when they would’ve been a bargain. The plan Rose paid into now was okay, but she was as physically strong as she was mentally frail. Her body could soldier on for years after her mind gave up the fight, and that would get expensive. Sometimes at night, John wondered how this would all work out.
“It’s late,” he said quietly. “Promise me you’ll get some sleep.”
“You, too.”
“I will,” he said. “I have some things to finish up here, then I’m turning in. Goodnight, I love you.”
“Love you.”
He looked at Larry, sleeping in the shadows. His father’s breathing remained ragged and labored, but Walt said that was normal. He told John to be alert for any changes in the sound and to inform Gloria immediately if he had concerns.
The vital signs monitor kept track of Larry’s status with a hypnotic sameness. But as Walt warned early on, it was not uncommon for Larry’s heart rate or oxygen level to shoot high or dip low for a moment, causing the unit to beep and the display to go from green to red before normalcy was returned.
“Your vitals would do the same if we hooked you up to that thing,” Walt explained. “That’s just being alive.”
For the first several nights, John fixated on Larry’s every breath, anxiously noting the slightest variation until he realized that such intense scrutiny would quickly drain him. He had to keep reminding himself that ceasing to breathe—one of these days; maybe tomorrow—was the only obligation Larry had left.