and get a statement that you are no longer competent. I’d like us both to keep our dignity and avoid all that.” He stopped and swallowed and she suddenly knew he was close to tears. She turned her head and stared out the window. An ordinary winter day, gray skies, wet streets. Alex sniffed and cleared his throat. “I’m going to call Sandy and see if she can get a few days off and come stay with you. We have to get a handle on how to proceed. I wish you’d let me get started on this months ago.” He rubbed his cheeks and she heard the bristle of unshaven whiskers against his palms. He’d left his house in a panic. Maureen’s call had scared him. “Mom, we need to clear out the house and put it on the market. You can come stay with me, or maybe Sandy can make room for you. Until we can find an assisted living placement for you.”
Placement. Not until we can find an apartment or condo. Placement. Like putting something on a shelf. “No,” she said quietly.
“Yes,” he said. He sighed as if he were breathing his life out. “I can’t give in to you again, Mom. I’ve let things go by too many times.” He stood up. “When I came in here and saw you, I thought you were dead. And what flashed into my mind was that I was going to have to tell Sandy that I let you die on the floor alone. Because I didn’t have the strength to stand up to you.” He heaved another sigh. “I need to put you into a safe place so I can stop worrying about you.”
“I’m sorry that I frightened you.” Sincere words. She held back the other words, the ones that would tell him she would go down fighting, that neither he nor Sandy was going to keep her in a guest room like a guinea pig in a glass tank, nor board her out to a kennel for the elderly.
She only listened after that. He told her that he would call Sandy, that he’d be back tomorrow or Thursday at the latest. Would she be all right? Yes. Would she please stay in the house? Yes. He would call her every few hours today, and tonight he’d call her at bedtime. So would she please keep the phone near her, because if she didn’t answer, he was coming back here. Yes. Yes to everything he said, not because she agreed or promised but because “yes” was the word that would make him feel safe enough to go away.
Then she asked, “But what about Richard? Tomorrow is Thursday. I always go see Richard on Thursdays.”
For a moment he was silent. Then he said, “He doesn’t know what day you come. He doesn’t even know it’s you. You could never go again, and he wouldn’t miss you.”
“I would miss him,” she said fiercely. “I always go on Thursday mornings. Tomorrow I’m going to see him.”
He stood up. “Mom. Yesterday was Thursday.”
After Alex finally drove away, she made herself hot tea, found the ibuprofen, and sat down to think. She recalled the men standing in the street last night, the backpack man right outside her window, and a river of chill ran down her spine. She was in danger. And there was absolutely no one she would turn to for advice without running herself into even greater danger. Backpack Man might kill her with an aluminum baseball bat, but her family was contemplating something much worse. Death by bat would only happen once. If her children put her somewhere “safe,” she’d wake up there day after day and night after night. To a woman who had broken free of time, that meant an eternity of cafeteria meals and time spent in a Spartan room. Alone. Because soon Alex would decide that it didn’t matter if he ever visited her. She knew that now.
For the next few days she answered promptly whenever Alex called. She was bright and chipper on the phone, pretending enthusiasm for television movies that she cribbed from the TV guide. Twice she walked down to Maureen’s, and twice she wasn’t home. Sarah moved the accumulating newspapers off her doorstep and suspected Hugh was dying.
Sarah set the clocks to remind her when to go to bed and remained there, head on the pillow, blankets over her, until another clock rang to tell her to rise. She did not look out of the kitchen windows before ten or after five. The day that a flash of motion caught her eye and she looked out the window to see the girl run past in her hat the colors of freshly fallen acorns, she rose from the kitchen table and went to her bedroom and lay on the bed and watched The Jerry Springer Show.
The nursing home called to tell her that Richard had pneumonia. She sneaked out that day, caught the bus, and spent the whole morning with him. He didn’t know her. They had taped an oxygen tube under his nose and the pink hissing sound reminded her of a balloon endlessly going flat. She tried to talk over it, couldn’t, and just sat holding his hand. He stared at the wall. Waiting.
The next evening Sandy arrived. It startled Sarah when she walked in the front door without knocking, but she was glad to see her. She had driven over the mountains with her friend, a gaunt, morose woman who smoked cigarettes in the house and fountained apologies for “forgetting” that she shouldn’t. Sandy had bought Safeway deli Chinese food and they ate at Sarah’s table out of Styrofoam clamshells. The friend and Sandy talked of the friend’s divorce from That Bastard and of Sandy’s upcoming divorce from That Idiot. Sarah hadn’t known a divorce was in Sandy’s future. When she gently asked why, Sandy suddenly gulped, gasped that it was too complicated to explain, and fled the room with her friend trailing after her. Sarah numbly tidied up the kitchen and waited for her to come back down. When neither of them did, she eventually went to bed.
That was the first day. The next morning Sandy and the friend arose and began stripping the unused bedrooms that had been Alex’s and Sandy’s when they were teens. Sarah felt a mixture of relief and regret as she watched them finally emptying the closets and drawers of the “precious mementoes” that Sarah and Russ had longed to discard for years. “Lightening the load,” Sandy called it, as they discarded old clothing and high school sports gear and required-reading paperbacks and ancient magazines and binders. One by one they carried the bulging black garbage sacks down the stairs and mounded them by the back porch. “Time to simplify!” Sandy’s friend chortled cheerily each time she toted out another sack.
They ate sandwiches at lunch and then brought back pizza and beer for dinner. After dinner, they went right back to work. Sandy’s friend had a laugh like a donkey’s bray. Sarah escaped her cigarette smoke by going out into the dusky backyard. The evening was rainy, but when she stood under the copper beech, little of the water reached her. She stared out at the street. Empty. Empty and fog free. A calm neighborhood of mowed lawns and well-tended houses and shiny cars. Sandy came out with another bulging garbage bag. Sarah gave her daughter a rueful smile. “Better tie them shut, dear. The rain will ruin the clothing.”
“The dump won’t care, Mom.”
“The dump? You’re not taking them to Goodwill?”
Sandy gave a martyred sigh. “Secondhand stores have gotten really picky. They won’t take a lot of this stuff and I don’t have time to sort it. If I take all these bags there, they’ll refuse half of them and I’ll just have to go to the dump anyway. So I’ll save myself a trip by going straight to the dump.”
Sarah was drawing breath to protest, but Sandy had already turned and gone back for more. She shook her head. Tomorrow she would sort them herself and then call one of the charities for a pickup. She simply couldn’t allow all that useful clothing and all those paperbacks to go to a dump. As the friend plopped down another sack, a seam split and a shirt Sarah recognized popped from it. Sandy came behind her friend with another bag.
“Wait a minute! That’s your father’s shirt, one of his good Pendletons. Was that in your room?” Sarah was almost amused at the idea that a shirt Sandy must have “borrowed” so many years ago would still have been in her room. But as she came smiling to the bag, she saw another familiar plaid behind it. “What’s this?” she demanded as she drew out the sleeve of Russ’s shirt.
“Oh, Mom.” Sandy had been caught but she wasn’t repentant. “We’ve started on Dad’s closet. But relax. It’s all men’s clothing, nothing you can use. And it has to go.”
“Has to go? What are you talking about?”
Sandy sighed again. She dropped the bag she carried and explained carefully, “The house has to be emptied so it can be staged by a realtor. I promise, there’s nothing in these bags that you can take with you.” She shook her head at the shock