• • • • •
It’s early afternoon, and I haven’t made contact with Seth yet. Instead I’m walking with Tickles through the nursing home. Well, trying to walk through the nursing home. A bigger lady with a blanket over her lap in a wheelchair says, “What a beautiful dog. Can I pet him?” After five minutes of talking with her and letting her pet Tickles, I say we have to get going.
Not ten feet later an old man is hobbling down the hallway with a cane. “What in the holy hell is that thing?” he asks, and pokes at Tickles with his cane. “Rose? Come out here. This kid’s walking a robot. Now I’ve seen it all.”
Tickles attacks the cane and then rears back and growls. “Hey, leave the dog alone. Come on, Tickles.”
I don’t see Susan at the nurse’s station or on the way to my grandma’s room. Maybe she has the weekend off.
“Knock, knock,” I say as I enter Grandma’s cave. Today we’re going to start the puzzle that I brought her last time.
She turns and smiles. “Charlie, my dear.”
“What? Did you say my name, Grandma?”
She then looks absently at the wall. I shake my head, thinking it was my brain playing tricks on me.
“Look who I brought,” I say, gesturing to Tickles.
Her smile grows. She puts her hand out. “Come here. Come here.”
I’m starting to wonder if she’s having a lucid moment. “How about some light in here?” I open the blinds and briefly check the sky. The ferocious heat wave has finally ended.
I look at the clock, and it’s exactly on time. “Oh, Grandma, look at that.” I point to the clock. “It’s on the right time! I don’t know the last time that’s happened.”
I grab the puzzle from the windowsill and go back to the spare chair. “How about we start our puzzle? Want to go down to the rec room?”
She turns her head away from me in defiance. I figure it’s easier to just start the puzzle here than fight her on moving.
Tickles sits down by my feet.
I spread out the pieces on her rolling table. It’s not ideal because it’s pretty narrow, and we’ll have to move the puzzle before I leave. But it’s the only surface available.
“See what the picture looks like?” I hold up the box and point.
“A bridge,” she says without any hint of mental confusion. And her eyes. They’re clear and connecting with mine.
I smile. “That’s right. So we need to find the corner and edge pieces first.” I set the box down beside my chair.
“I know how to put together a puzzle, Charlie.”
I look back up at her, and she’s looking at her thumbs. I stare at her for a brief second. Am I going crazy? The doctor said he didn’t think she’d have any more lucid moments, but I guess I’d like to think she still can.
I’m searching for pieces when she asks, “How’s your father? I’m not sure I’ve seen him since shortly after your mother left.”
I look up, startled. I’d almost believe she was saying these things if she would keep her inquisitiveness when I look at her. Instead I find her gazing into another world. A world for one.
She turns to me and stares into my eyes. “I am no longer living.”
A shiver runs up my spine. “Grandma?”
“Charlie?”
Holy shit! “You’re having a lucid moment? Grandma. Oh my god!”
She shakes her head. “I’m wasting away in here. In this chair. This”—she looks around the room—“is the carcass of my once grand life.”
Holy shit! My grandma is having a conversation with me. That hasn’t happened in more than a year. My eyes fill with tears. “That’s not . . . You have a lot more to live for. It’s all in your perspective.”
“Why doesn’t your father come visit?”
“He’s . . . busy.”
“Still drinking? Fishing? Ignoring the world?”
I nod. “Yeah. He hasn’t been the same since, well, you know.”
“Charlie.” She reaches out to me. I take hold of her hand. Some of the tears are streaming down my face.
“I love you. You know that, right?”
I nod. I nod.
“You take care of yourself, Charlie. You’re so special.” She squeezes my hand. She smiles and then pulls her hand away. She looks out the window, and it’s almost like I can see the haze fill her mind again. Her eyes become the same vacant expressionless eyes that I’ve grown used to.
“Do you want to continue with the puzzle?” I ask.
She tilts her head and smiles at me as if I’m some sideshow curiosity.
“The puzzle, Grandma.” I hand her a corner piece. And she looks at it curiously. “Put it right there.” I point at a spot on the table.
As I keep searching for other edge pieces, she coughs. She doesn’t stop coughing, and I look up at her. The puzzle piece is gone from her hand. “Where’s the piece, Grandma? Where is it?”
I shove the chair back and stand quickly. Tickles stands and barks. Grandma’s hands are grasping at her neck.
“Help! Somebody help!” I yell.
No one’s coming, and I’m growing more worried. “Dammit! Somebody, please! Help!”
Finally a nurse runs into the room and asks what’s happening. “Choking,” is all I can say. He stands behind her. I need to learn the Heimlich maneuver, I tell myself as I watch him dislodge the puzzle piece, which flies out and lands in the pile of pieces on the table.
I swipe all the puzzle pieces back into the box. Dumb idea. The nurse helps Grandma into bed.
Fresh tears cloud my vision.
I sat at the kitchen table reading a book. The house had just started to die. To become a tomb. But I didn’t know it at the time. I hadn’t yet fully realized what had happened or the consequences of it. Grandma was in one of her amazing outfits. She always looked so good, proper, and put together when she left her house. “Never leave your house unless you look like someone worth seeing,” she said to me many times when I was growing up.
My dad was in the garage, or the backyard, or somewhere outside and not in the house.
My grandma stood in the kitchen with me. She was making some kind of casserole for dinner. “Want to help, Charlie?”
I shook my head and closed my book.
“Charlie. This has nothing to do with you.”
I nodded.
“Don’t for a second think it does.”
I didn’t. I didn’t think about it for a second.
A little later I was in my parents’ room looking through a trunk that my mother had kept at the foot of the bed. In it was a collection of pictures, postcards—past lives of my parents. I pulled out a picture of my parents’ wedding day: my mom in her white wedding dress and hair done up, my dad in a black-and-white tuxedo, hair combed and parted on the side. They held each other around the waist at the front of the church. They smiled outward. To the others. To the photographer.
A moment, real or fake, caught forever.
I held the picture. I studied it. I wondered if there were any signs of cracks or fissures, of what would come between this man and woman.
I couldn’t find anything.
I heard my grandma and dad arguing in the kitchen.
“She needed help! And what did you do, Steve?”
“I did help.”
“You were too busy in your own world to reach out. Drinking. Working all the hours you could get.”
“I’m trying to care for this family.”
“You couldn’t care for the woman you loved.”
“That’s bullshit, and you know it.”
“Where were you when she was going downhill? You weren’t there for her. You’d yell and tell her she was an embarrassment.”
“I was trying to help.”
“You pushed her away.”
“Get out. Get out of my house!”
I jumped when I heard a glass break. A door slam. A silence then washed over the house.
I quietly put the picture back into the trunk. Closed the lid. And went away.