THE GROUNDS OF SHADY GROVE were neither shady nor grove-like. The building was bordered by parking spaces on three sides with a fenced-in backyard featuring a pathway that meandered around a smattering of park benches and scrawny shrubs. All the shade-producing wildlife (mostly fake plastic) was in the lobby, a room that never failed to evoke the sensation that Oliver had stepped out of a parking lot and onto the set of a TV preacher. The fireplace never went out, the books lining the shelves remained unread, and the steady trickle of the cascading fountain always made Oliver’s bladder cramp.
He signed the faux-leather guest book and rested his elbows on the counter, a thick slab of some expensive wood. He then waited for Betsy to finish her phone call while avoiding eye contact with the muscular security guard strategically positioned between the receptionist’s desk and the state-of-the-art security door that led to the patient rooms. Shady Grove always employed imposing specimens with big scary muscles and all the more modern gizmos that Oliver lacked—glittering handcuffs, billy clubs, tasers, mace, and boots fashioned out of bulldozer tires. This all seemed like overkill to Oliver, especially in light of the condition of most tenants. The security detail seemed like everything else in the lobby, overblown for effect.
As he listened to Betsy wind down her phone call, Oliver wondered again if he’d ever work up the nerve to ask her out, but knew he never would. She ended the call and grinned up at him. “If I’m not mistaken, I believe your mom is up on three.”
“Healing bodies?” he said. “Or saving souls?”
“In her case, I’m not sure there’s a lot of difference.”
Oliver found his mother in Room 321, squinting at a thermometer and lecturing Mrs. Tompkins, ironically enough, about taking her vitamins. Mrs. Tompkins didn’t respond. She never responded. She was mostly blind, completely deaf, and borderline catatonic.
“Mom?” Oliver said. “Does Dr. Strahan know you’re up here?”
Delores Miles plucked the yellow plastic thermometer from her patient’s gaping mouth, wrinkled her brow at the readout—a frowny “sick face”—then wiped it with the tail of her T-shirt before tucking it into her green Fisher-Price tote bag. Ever the consummate professional, she acknowledged his question only after she’d secured the Velcro tabs on a blood pressure cuff and started pumping. She had to supply her own sound effects.
“Why of course the doctor knows where your mother is.” Delores motioned with her chin toward the old woman tucked neatly into bed. Her voice was airy, compassionate, the best kind of patronizing, the tone of a stranger comforting a lost toddler in a grocery aisle. It had the opposite effect on Oliver. “She’s been right here for the better part of a decade.”
He didn’t feel like arguing. So he watched his mother work, her lips making a silent count of Mrs. Tompkins’s pulse. Satisfied that her patient would live through lunch, Delores compressed the plastic ball again and held it. She made a hissing sound to replicate the release of pressure, then peeled away the armband and placed the apparatus neatly into her tote bag alongside the bright blue stethoscope, a thick yellow otoscope, and a bulky toy syringe.
“Mom? I think we need to get you back downstairs.”
“That’s a splendid idea.” Dr. Strahan had somehow materialized out of the ether. He treated Oliver’s shoulder to a paternal squeeze as he eased into the room. Both men watched patiently as Delores Miles recorded her patient’s vital signs on a clipboard. After pretending to consider her work, the doctor guided her by the arm to where Oliver was standing and said, “Delores, your son is here to see you.”
Oliver watched his mother turn and appraise him. And for one sliver of one second, her addled brain flirted with recognition. Her shoulders dipped, her head tilted, and the corners of her thin lips lifted. And in that one fleeting instant, although he knew better, Oliver allowed himself to hope. But then it was gone, and the woman he loved more than any other extended her hand in greeting.
“Good morning,” she said in her sweetest phone voice. “My name is Delores Miles and it’s a pleasure to meet you.”
Oliver hesitated, then took her hand in his. It was too cold and impossibly thin. Nothing like the hand that checked his brow for fevers or tucked love notes into his Spiderman lunchbox or held his chubby little hand on countless walks to countless new schools.
“I’m Oliver.”
“So you must be the new physical therapist we’ve heard all those rumors about?”
Oliver looked past his mother. The real doctor stood at the foot of Mrs. Tompkins’s bed, smiling at the last few entries from her chart when his gaze rose to meet Oliver’s. Strahan’s shrug was helpless, sympathetic, a silent reminder that they were doing all they could, that Oliver just needed to be patient and maybe one day soon his mother would snap out of it and recognize her only begotten son.
Oliver extended his arm and she took it. Although he craved his mother’s lost affection, he couldn’t shake the feeling that, at least in her mind, she was flirting with the nursing home’s new physical therapist, who just so happened to share the same name as the son she didn’t realize she had. He escorted her to the elevator, trying to convince himself that misguided affection was better than none at all.
• • •
As a kid, Oliver was fascinated with the philosophical dilemma: If a tree falls in the forest and no one is around to hear it, does it actually make a sound?
He pondered this as he drifted off to sleep at night, while daydreaming in class, and on those odd Sundays when his mom dragged him to church. The mystery eventually solved itself, quite by accident. Or maybe it was divine providence? Someone somewhere had said that coincidence was merely God’s way of remaining anonymous.
Oliver received a handheld tape recorder for his eleventh birthday. At first he went around taping everything—TV commercials, conversations between strangers, and whatever random thoughts he dared speak into the built-in microphone. Eventually, he began recording himself mimicking routines, verbatim, from his favorite stand-up comedy albums. Of course there were no laughing crowds, and he replaced all the nasty words with their G-rated cousins.
Being a chronically shy kid, Oliver made these recordings in an abandoned tree fort he’d discovered the previous summer on the outskirts of his neighborhood. One April afternoon, as he was perfecting a Steve Martin bit that compared smoking to flatulence, a pleasant breeze escalated into a violent wind. Nashville may not be Kansas, but she did have to endure the occasional tornado. Somewhere in the middle of scrambling down out of the tree fort and sprinting home, he dropped the recorder. Even more than losing his prized birthday gift, Oliver was mortified at the thought of some neighborhood kid finding it, recognizing his voice on the tape, and playing it for the entire fifth grade.
It took hours of pleading to talk his mom into finding a flashlight and helping him search the woods. Amazingly, they found the blocky plastic machine facedown and unharmed, sheltered under the massive trunk of a felled oak tree. Oliver snuck the flashlight and the recorder under his covers that night. After replacing the soggy batteries, he was more than a little dismayed to learn that his Steve Martin routine was gone, erased forever. But what he did hear was the wind whipping itself into a frenzy, a series of splintering creaks, then a violent cracking sound, followed by the impossibly long, impossibly loud whoosh of thousands of wet leaves thrashing against thousands of others as they attacked the ground.
Mystery solved.
That first playback was nothing short of thrilling … and a little disappointing too. Because that’s when he realized that the point of all his philosophical pondering was not discovering the actual solution. That part proved anticlimactic. No, the point was to wrestle with the question. There had been dozens of others through the years, but none more nagging or unanswerable than this: If a son is born to a mother who no longer recognizes him, does that then make him an orphan?
• • •
As he led his mother back to her room, Oliver had to ignore urge after urge to brag about the Downers audition email burning a hole in his back pocket. Whether she could help it or not, Delores Miles didn’t really seem to care much about his stand-up career. Which always made Oliver feel like he cared too much.
Once inside, he noticed the dusty outlines on the bookshelf that marked the exact locations where Oliver persisted in setting up framed photos of the younger, happier versions of his mother and himself, and that she then methodically took back down again and hid facedown in a drawer.
The tape recorder was right where he’d left it.
It seemed that although she could no longer bear to look at her only son, she couldn’t seem to get enough of his preadolescent voice.
She climbed dutifully onto her bed and pulled the covers up over her knees. When Delores was up and roaming the halls, she moved with the clinical precision of an accredited medical professional. When she wasn’t nursing patients she was preaching at them. Delores had been unabashed about proselytizing in line at the grocery store, during parent/teacher meetings at school, and apparently upon waking up with men she was not married to. After the move from prison to Shady Grove, Delores limited her revival tactics to impromptu sermons in the TV room and baptizing patients against their will. But once ensconced in her own room, she reverted seamlessly back into the role of patient. Her real biography, however, remained complicated and unreliable, a moving target with no discernable bull’s-eye.
She said, “Would you mind storing my medical bag there on the shelf?”
Oliver took the colorful doctor kit and placed it alongside the row of first-edition John Irving novels he’d given her two Christmases ago. He’d learned to cope with the fact that he’d paid a few thousand dollars more than what the volumes were actually worth, but not with the sad realization that she’d taken the personalized inscriptions to heart (delusions of grandeur was just one of her many symptoms) and dreamed up an imaginary love affair with the master storyteller from New England.
Oliver sat in his mother’s old recliner and watched her stare at the ceiling. He remained grateful that Shady Grove allowed the more ambulatory patients to furnish their rooms with relics from their past. The theory was that it made the residents feel more secure. It calmed them. In his mother’s case, the hope was that it might trigger some contagious memory. Oliver had crammed her room full of familiar furniture and knickknacks, but they had no noticeable effect on her. He tried not to let it hurt his feelings.
His mother began to show symptoms during his junior year in high school, even when she was sober. It started in her eyes. They would track along, smooth and normal, then just stop and shake erratically, sometimes refusing to move at all. Other times one pupil would dilate while the other remained tiny and unfocused. A friend from school said it made her look like a cartoon character after a blow to the head. Oliver stopped bringing friends home after that.
When Delores Miles was officially diagnosed eight years ago, Oliver was more relieved than dismayed. His mom was finally going to get the help she needed. Or so he thought.
Wernicke-Korsakoff sounded more like a European law firm than a mere vitamin deficiency. The doctors eventually crammed Oliver’s brain with one technical explanation after another about his mother’s disease. But it really boiled down to the fact that she refused to eat and never stopped drinking. It was no secret that Delores Miles was an alcoholic. But by the time her particular condition had a name, it was too late to do anything about it. She persisted in trading food for alcohol, starving her body and eventually her brain. In an attempt to simplify the diagnosis, her primary physician kept insisting the alcohol had depleted her supply of “essential vitamins and nutrients,” making it sound like the remedy could be found in a box of Pop-Tarts or breakfast cereal.
“So far,” Dr. Strahan had said, “there is no cure, only coping.”
“And how do we do that?”
“Treat her normally, or as normally as she will allow. Talk to her like she’s your mother, no matter how she talks to you. Tell her stories from her past, help her retain her dignity, and if you’re a religious man, pray.”
So Oliver coped and talked and prayed. Or at least he tried.
She cleared her throat, a deliberately awkward gesture to bring her visitor back to reality, or at least her version of it. The crook of Oliver’s arm was still warm from her touch. It radiated a fading intimacy that made him want to crawl into her bed and snuggle up to her like he did when he was ten. But the one time he actually attempted it, she’d hit the Nurse Call button and tried to get him arrested. Instead, he swiveled her old recliner around and rested his feet on the lowest rung of her bed rail.
When she met his gaze again, she looked self-conscious and even a little frightened. “I’m sorry,” she said. “Tell me your name again?”
“Oliver. Oliver Miles.”