When Abe rolled her onto her back and cradled her head in his lap, Ruth was conscious, but only dimly, her eyes glazed and insensible, her expression slack, a string of saliva clinging to her chin.
“Ruthie, talk to me,” he said.
She groaned, and when her lips moved, she managed a slur of unintelligible syllables. Her hair was matted with blood in back; Abe could feel it, slippery between his fingers. He placed a folded towel on the floor and lowered her head back down upon it.
“Everything is gonna be okay,” Abe assured her, a churning nausea at work in his gut.
Almost as pressing as Ruth’s condition was the awful realization of his own negligence. How could he let this happen? If Ruth did not survive this ordeal, he would never forgive himself.
Abe clambered to his feet unsteadily, and the room began to spin once more as he felt his way along the wall to the basin, then into the bedroom, navigating four feet of open ground to the dresser, where he braced himself once more as he reached for the telephone.
It took less than five minutes for the paramedics to arrive. Forty years ago, it would have taken thirty-five; when they moved to the island in 1959 it might have taken two hours. For all that was wrong with the world, some things got better, and more efficient, but clearly Abe was not among them, standing by helplessly, still dizzy, the flashing lights playing havoc with his ninety-year-old synapses, several drops of urine spotting the front of his pajama pants as the EMTs loaded Ruth onto the gurney and into the ambulance.
“I hate to say it, Dad, but we warned you this would happen,” said Anne, who had managed to wrangle an early flight out of Denver, rented a car at Sea-Tac, and driven clear around the Tacoma narrows to Silverdale, all before Abe could formulate a defense.
Standing beside him in the corridor, Kyle set a hand upon Abe’s shoulder in solidarity, though it was still clear he was in agreement with his sister.
“You can’t do this alone, Dad,” he said.
The gradually accelerating slide into indignity had finally reached avalanche proportions. Abe’s inadequacy and incompetence had ultimately rendered him defenseless against the will of his children. What could he possibly say to redeem himself? If only Maddie had been there to defend him, maybe then Abe would’ve stood a chance. At this point, he’d be lucky if Anne and Kyle didn’t consign both of them to a nursing home.
“She was supposed to wake me up, that was the routine,” Abe said, a last-ditch effort to save face. “If your mother wouldn’t have been so proud, she would have nudged me like usual, and I would have helped her to the bathroom, and we wouldn’t be here right now.”
“So, like, in an alternative universe?” said Anne.
“Go to hell,” said Abe.
Indeed, his daughter’s condescension burned. Who anointed Anne judge and jury? Anybody might have slept through the ordeal. Likewise, anybody might have slipped in the night and banged their head on the toilet. It was an accident, not a crime.
“I’ve already made the arrangements at Twin Pines,” said Kyle. “We were lucky to get a bed on this notice. Like I said, Medicare will cover it for a month. We can go back to the drawing board after that.”
“What does that mean?” said Abe.
“One day at a time,” said Anne.
There it was: the subtle decree that his own future was no longer negotiable, that Ruth’s fate lay firmly in the hands of his children.
“What does your mother think about all of this?” said Abe.
“How should I know?” said Anne. “Why don’t you go in there and ask her?”
“Look, Dad,” Kyle said. “It doesn’t matter what Mom says. We gotta do what’s best for her. She needs proper care; we’ve been saying it all along.”
Though there was no sign of internal bleeding, Ruth was to remain at St. Mike’s through the night, where her progress would be monitored. Anne and Kyle booked rooms at the Quality Inn, rather than stay at the farm, which might have been an affront to Abe had he not begrudged their interference in his life.
“Dad, you should just crash in my room,” said Kyle. “I asked for two queens.”
But Abe refused.
“What about Megs?” he said. “You didn’t think of that, did you?”
“She’s just a dog,” said Kyle. “Call the Callahans, have them let her out.”
“She’s gotta eat, too,” said Abe. “Remember?”
“So, the Callahans can feed her.”
“I’ve gotta stop at the grocery store, she’s out of wet food,” Abe lied. There were at least six cans in the pantry.
“It’s not like she’s gonna starve,” said Anne.
“Hell, she could stand to miss a few meals,” said Kyle.
“It’s gonna be dark soon,” said Anne. “You don’t need to be driving around in the dark. And what if it snows?”
But Abe was adamant. There was more at stake than Megs’s appetite or a good night’s sleep. There was the principle.
Abe drove home, clutching the wheel, squinting through the darkness on Highway 3. Halfway to Poulsbo it did indeed begin to snow, big, fat, wet flakes, swirling and diving in the headlights, playing tricks on Abe’s eyes. When he arrived back at the farm, he opened the door and called out Megs’s name. He turned the porch light on as Megs emerged from the house and descended the front steps.
Abe took a seat on his porch rocker as he waited for Megs to pee. Al Duncan wasn’t wrong about the old chairs, he ought to have taken better care of them over the years. They’d served the Winters so well, through countless summer evenings, stretching back over four decades. How many times had he and Ruth rocked gently, side by side, looking out through the spring rain at the sodden farm? How many conversations and reminiscences, how many hours of easy silence, had they shared out there on those chairs to a chorus of heat-dazed crickets? It felt wrong, one of the rockers being empty.
When Megs struggled up the steps, she proceeded directly to her raggedy old bed between the two rockers and laid herself down heavily with a sigh. There, the two of them remained in silence for five or ten minutes, watching as the snow began to gather on the driveway.
The following morning, Ruth was discharged with seven stitches in the back of her head. She was relocated to Twin Pines, where Anne, Kyle, and Abe were all waiting to oversee the transition as she was loaded off the ambulance, past reception, down the corridor to Room 4.
Even as Ruth was deposited in her new bed with the help of two orderlies, she could see Abe, Anne, and Kyle in the hallway through the open door, obviously discussing her fate. It was clear from Abe’s body language that he was making some sort of stand. He looked ridiculous, stooped and disheveled and half-crazy. His lips were parched and receding, his wispy hair in disarray. He’d buttoned up his shirt wrong, so there was a little pucker at his sternum where the button and the hole were misaligned. It was hard to imagine he was persuading Anne or Kyle in any way, but it wasn’t for lack of trying.
God, how Ruth loved him.
Her new room was just as Ruth had anticipated, drab and institutional, a menagerie of chrome and plastic utility, partitioned crosswise by a thick, gray curtain, blocking off the window. From the other side of the curtain, Ruth could hear the steady hiss of a mechanical ventilator, punctuated abruptly by an unnerving cessation every three seconds. Though she had no idea who occupied the other bed, they were apparently in worse shape than Ruth. But that was no consolation. Though some of her vitality was returning, Ruth was still shaken by her setback. If this was to be the new normal, condemned to live the remainder of her days enfeebled and unable to tend to her own basic needs, Ruth would have preferred death.
Her days at Twin Pines were a portrait of routine: At 6:40 a.m., she was given a breakfast of pureed protein and a chocolate-flavored Glucerna, which she took through two straws. Though the nurses pushed liquids on her constantly, Ruth partook of what she reasoned to be the bare minimum, trying to avoid the indignity of assisted toilet trips.
Every couple of hours, an aide popped in to check her vitals and ask a litany of routine questions regarding Ruth’s pain, appetite, mobility, vitality, and comfort. Lunches consisted of flavorless mashed potatoes, no doubt of the powdered variety; pureed chicken and vegetables; and a dessert cup of lime Jell-O or chocolate-and-vanilla-swirl pudding. These repasts were invariably accompanied by the ceaseless hiss and pause of the ventilator on the other side of the curtain.
After lunch followed physical and speech therapy on alternating days. Physical therapy saw Ruth wheeled to the “gym,” a cloistered, low-ceilinged room, perhaps fifteen feet by thirty feet, with padded floors and three-hundred-sixty-degree handrails, the entirety of its square footage crowded with treadmills, yoga balls, and steps leading nowhere. Here Ruth was subjected to an excruciating sequence of leg stretches and routine practices such as getting in and out of her wheelchair and climbing the steps.
For speech therapy, Ruth remained in her bed, where she was made to recite the alphabet endlessly when she wasn’t practicing words with “s” and “j” sounds: glasses, and messy, and castle, and jaw, and joke, and pajamas. Additionally, she was compelled to contort her mouth into all manner of positions and hold it open for twenty seconds at a time, all so she might one day be reasonably intelligible again. Ruth hated the way she sounded, like her mouth was half-full of water and she had a fingerling potato for a tongue.
Over the course of that first week, though their communications through the drawn curtain were infrequent, Ruth learned that her roommate was named Tish, and she’d been there for three weeks, and her Medicaid was about to run out. Tish was only seventy-five years old, a divorcee more than half her life, with one child, a CPA living in Gig Harbor who had not visited in the weeks she’d been at Twin Pines.
Every other day, Ruth was assisted into a plastic chair, where she submitted to a sponge bath and a change of gown while her sheets were replaced. Visiting hours presented Ruth’s lone relief from the tedium of patient care, Abe being her sole frequenter by design. Not only did Ruth not wish her friends and fellow congregants to see her in such miserable condition, but she didn’t want to inconvenience them with the forty-minute round-trip drive. Every afternoon without fail, Abe arrived at Twin Pines to sit bedside, reading aloud to her, talking about everything and nothing at all, flipping through the five or six available TV channels, or sometimes just sitting quietly beside Ruth as she dozed off. He was always there when she awoke.
But on the seventh day, Ruth was given to understand when her breakfast arrived that the snow had returned and was beginning to stick. It seemed certain that Abe would not make the trek on bad roads, though she might have expected him to call and tell her as much. Maybe the phone lines were down. What would see her through the afternoon? She was out of unread magazines. Though Abe had brought her a few volumes of poetry, somehow the optimism of Browning or the sensual charm of Keats seemed out of place in the dreary confines of her room at Twin Pines. And there was sure to be nothing on TV to relieve the ennui of Abe’s absence.
After speech therapy, compelled by tedium and disappointment, Ruth solicited the orderly to help her out of bed and wheel her out to the lobby with a thin cotton blanket on her lap for warmth, setting Ruth before the huge picture window to leave her there, looking out at the snow. There were nearly four inches of accumulation, enough to bow evergreen limbs and likely render the less traveled roads all but impassable.
Ruth gazed out at the parked cars huddled in the lot gathering snow. Even as she was appraising the scene, she saw the Subaru crest the rise into the lot and immediately start going sideways down the incline, skating narrowly past the line of parked cars before straightening out miraculously, not two feet from sideswiping a van. Ruth watched in disbelief as Abe piled out of the driver’s side clutching a canvas grocery bag and began the harrowing trip across the lot in his galoshes. Breathlessly from her wheelchair, Ruth tracked her husband’s methodical progress, every slip, slide, and potentially disastrous misstep of the way, until he reached the glass doors intact against all odds, yanking his stocking cap off his head as if it were an annoyance and shaking the snow off it as he stepped into Twin Pines.
He squelched in his galoshes right past Ruth toward the front desk before she called him back. His thin hair was more disheveled than ever as he clutched his wool cap in one hand and the canvas bag in the other, the collar of his mackinaw jacket folded under on one side. Several days unshaven, his chin stubble had caught a bit of blue-gray lint. To see his stooped figure framed in the picture window, the snow fluttering down behind him, his jaw slightly agape, his expression blank, it seemed a miracle that her husband wasn’t stranded in a ditch somewhere along the way.
“What were you thinking, driving out here in this mess?” Ruth demanded.
“Aw, it’s just a little snow,” Abe said, waving it off. “The roads were fine.”
But Ruth knew how he’d grown to hate driving in the snow.
“You shouldn’t have come,” she said.
“Well, tough luck,” said Abe. “I’m here. I brought you a new stack of magazines, and some books.”
He dug the stack of magazines out of the bag and piled them in her lap.
“You wanna go back to the room?” he said.
“Sure,” said Ruth.
As Abe pushed her down the corridor, Ruth flipped through the magazines, touched to see the new Poets & Writers, which meant Abe must have made a special trip to Eagle Harbor Books. Back in the room, Abe helped her out of the wheelchair and into the bed, which proved a more difficult task than it had been at home, the bed being a good foot higher off the ground.
“Bess keeps calling the house,” said Abe. “She wants to visit, and I don’t know how much longer I can hold her off.”
“Fine,” Ruth conceded. “But only Bess. Please nobody else. Not the Duncans or the Jacobsons. And not in this weather.”
“Got it,” said Abe. “She’ll be glad to hear it.”
They lapsed into silence, or near silence, as the ventilator chuffed softly behind the curtain. Abe reached for the remote and turned on the TV, though neither of them paid the screen much notice.
“So, the kids,” said Abe at last.
“What about them?”
“They keep pushing me, they’re relentless,” he said.
“About?”
“About after.”
“After I die?”
“No, no,” said Abe. “After this place. In two or three weeks.”
“I come home,” she said.
“Exactly,” he said. “They keep leaning on me to sell the farm.”
“Maddie?”
“Well, no, not Maddie,” Abe said. “Mostly Anne, but Kyle is on board.”
“And what do you tell them?” said Ruth.
“Hell no, of course,” Abe said. “Too bad if they don’t want the farm. I do, and you do. Right?”
He sounded a little unsure on the last.
“Of course,” Ruth assured him.
There it was in plainspoken certainty, the sum of their adult lives, everything Ruth and Abe had built together in nearly seventy years of marriage, all the work, and sacrifice, and vision, the goal of providing a bounty for their children, a wholesome, stable environment in a beautiful setting, a place where Ruth and Abe had crafted memory upon memory for Anne, and Karen, and Kyle, and Maddie, birthday parties, weddings, countless holidays, the endless reiteration of the seasons and all their attending joys, the kiddie pools and leaf piles to jump in, and her children didn’t care enough to preserve it. What a life.
“How’s Megs?” she said.
“Eh,” said Abe. “Not so good. She peed on the floor again last night.”
“Maybe it’s time,” Ruth said.
“No,” said Abe. “We’re not there yet.”
He might have been talking about himself, or Ruth, for that matter.
“You probably shouldn’t leave her alone too long,” said Ruth.
“She’ll be okay,” said Abe. “I put a towel down.”
Poor Megs. Poor Abe, poor Ruth. If you were lucky enough to live a full life, they left you a towel to pee on in the end.
Thankfully, temperatures had risen during the three hours of Abe’s visit, and the snow was on its way to melting by the time Abe left Silverdale for the farm. Ruth made him promise he’d call when he arrived safely home, but she was already asleep when the call came in, an orderly later informed her.
Late that night, Ruth was awakened by the sudden whoosh of her roommate’s ventilator being removed, even as the lights came on and a pair of harried paramedics wheeled in an empty gurney, disappearing behind the curtain, loading Tish on, and moments later reemerging with her, hurrying her out the door and down the corridor.
For forty-five minutes following Tish’s urgent evacuation, Ruth’s mind raced with speculation and concern for her bunkmate. But despite her inquiries to the orderly who came to check on Ruth an hour later, no information was forthcoming. Eventually, Ruth fell back to sleep.
In the morning, a different orderly pulled back the curtain, and sunlight flooded in from the window. And from that day forward, Ruth had the room to herself.