“Just give me the fucking plan, Greg. I’m not completely stupid.”
“I hope you are not swearing in front of our daughter. First, find the advance directive if there is one. Second, find a psychologist to do psych testing.”
“The mental health guy did a mini mental status exam on him already.”
Greg sighs, his superior, do-I-really-have-to-explain-this sigh. “A mini mental status test isn’t going to be sufficient to prove that he’s not competent. You need a battery of tests. Administered by a psychologist. You got that?”
“Got it.”
“Write it down. Psychologist, not psychiatrist. There’s a difference. Third, call me the minute cops start talking to either you or Walter. The very minute. Okay? No more free interviews. I’d think you’d know better than that by now.”
His scolding showers over me in a familiar pitter-patter. I don’t need to hear the individual words. I know the message, which generally boils down to “all the ways Maisey has screwed up again.” I set the phone in my lap and pull back out onto the street, waiting for the change of intonation that signals he’s moved on.
“Maisey? Maisey! Let me talk to Elle.”
I pass the phone over. Elle talks for a few minutes. “Dad says to tell you to remember to charge your cell phone,” she says when she hangs up.
Words that I resent all the more because he’s right. This is a thing I would never have remembered.
My parents’ house is a much bigger problem than I am prepared to deal with.
It’s empty, for starters. Not the sort of emptiness you get when people are gone for a couple of hours on a trip to town. It’s the same echoing emptiness I felt sitting beside my mother’s bed and realizing that whatever it is that makes her my mother is missing. Every noise we make, from turning the key in the lock to wiping our feet on the doormat and obediently removing our shoes in response to the little wooden sign that says Shoes that remain by the door will be blessed, seems like an intrusion.
In case the desire for blessing might be missing in some rogue human breast, there’s a picture of a tiny black demon with a pitchfork eyeing the tempting buttocks of a cartoon man who is walking into a house with shoes still on his feet.
If the curse exists, my friendly fireman and a whole slew of ambulance and legal personnel are in for some pitchfork jabs. The new carpet that Mom is so proud of is trampled with muddy footprints and ashes. I stick my head into the kitchen with some thought of finding Elle something to eat and draw it right back, like a startled turtle. More footprints. A dried pool of blood by the island. A buzz of flies, busy with a frying pan on the stove. The stink of something rotten.
“Not hungry,” Elle says from behind me.
My stomach squeezes in on itself, pushing a wave of nausea up my throat, and I back away, breathing through my mouth.
“You didn’t eat breakfast,” I tell her. It comes out as “You diddun ead breagfasd,” and she does that snort-laugh thing, and again we’re giggling, only this time even through the insane laughter, I can feel a noose tightening around my throat.
“Too tired to eat,” she says. “Also, ewww. What was in that frying pan, besides flies?”
I don’t want to know. But I know damn well I’m the one who is going to have to clean it up. First, I tuck Elle into bed. My old bed. It doesn’t look like my room anymore, and I’m glad of that. Mom has repurposed it. Impersonal modern computer desk. Ergonomic chair. A couch/daybed that might have come from Ikea. In the closet I find blankets and a pillow, and Elle snuggles down and is well on her way to sleep before I make it out of the room.
With Elle off to dreamland, the next thing on my agenda is to look for Mom’s advance directive, a document that is beginning to seem as mythical as the holy grail. Still, I make my way to Dad’s study, which is mercifully neat and orderly, all as it should be. I sit down in his chair, gathering warmth and strength from my memories of his steady, gentle presence.
A large planning calendar sits in the middle of his solid wood desk, the squares filled with notes made in his precise, tiny handwriting. The Dad Font, I’ve always called it. A notation for next week catches my attention: Dr. M./POLST.
All the warmth flies away. If Mom was planning a POLST, like Dr. Margoni said, then it’s probable that there really is an advance directive somewhere.
If I were my mother, where would I keep such a thing?
The most logical spot is the four-drawer cabinet that has stood behind locked closet doors in this room for as long as I can remember. Dad takes his clients’ confidentiality seriously.
Finding the keys is too easy. The inside of the middle desk drawer is like an advertisement for one of those little plastic organizer trays. Everything is neatly stowed. It’s the complete opposite of my desk, in which items are piled so high you can’t even see the plastic organizer.
But when I go to open the closet door, it is already unlocked. Behind it, file folders and papers are strewn helter-skelter all over the floor. The top drawer of the cabinet is open. Even the picture of Jesus and the little children that hangs in front of the safe is on the floor, and the safe door is also hanging open.
My heart slams against my chest.
That small, twisted shame I felt watching drool trail down Dad’s chin while he slept resurfaces. I’m not supposed to see this. It’s sacrilege of a sort. My father has made this mess. He left the file cabinet unlocked. The safe open. The closet unlocked.
I put my hands on either side of my head and squeeze them together. This is not my father’s behavior. He doesn’t do this. He wouldn’t do this. That dementia word comes crawling back into my brain, a snake of a word this time, poisonous.
I can’t think of any other explanation for a calm, methodical man to be burning papers in a fireplace, scattering files around like this. I want to sink to the floor in the middle of the scattered files and wail like a frightened child, but I can’t. There’s too much to do. And I am the only person anywhere around to do it.
I begin cleaning up the mess, all the while asking myself what he might have been looking for. The safe contains passports, both his and Mom’s. Stocks and bonds. A copy of their will, which noticeably is lacking any mention of an advance directive. Nothing of any particular interest, like gold or expensive jewelry or some terrible secret.
The files strewn all over the floor are client income taxes, mostly. Mom’s old medical records. A year of utility bills and car repairs and home maintenance. Receipts. Nothing that would indicate a reason to start burning things.
An overwhelming sense of exhaustion creeps over me as I contemplate trying to guess where these files are supposed to go under Dad’s careful organizational system. And then I realize that it doesn’t matter, and I just shove them in any which way, using the Maisey Organizational System, which consists pretty much of “I know it’s in there somewhere.”
If his mind has deserted him, he won’t know or care. If he comes home okay, he can fix it himself.
Curious now, trying to track the unusual workings of my father’s mind, I pick my way through the muddy mess in the living room and crouch down by the fireplace. I saw a movie once where some guilty soul had burned papers, and the words were still visible. No such luck here. The papers are too blackened for me to read any words. A manila folder lying on the hearth looks like a thousand other folders. Beige and noncommittal.
What makes it stand out from all the other beige folders on the face of the planet is my name. There’s a sticky label, printed, that says Maisey.