His eyes travel toward her voice, hover, and then find me.
“I want to go home,” he says, for all the world like a lost child.
I have to tell him that I live in Kansas and don’t have room for him. I have to tell him I’ll be selling the house. That there is no home to go to.
But the words are a giant, prickly cactus lodged in my throat. My heart hurts, in a truly physical way, an ache that frightens me with its intensity.
A long silence falls. Tears track down his cheeks, but he doesn’t weep, and the silent agony does further damage to my own heart. I cannot begin to comfort his grief; it’s too massive for me to even touch.
Elle feels no such limitation. She settles herself into his lap, wraps her arms around his neck, and leans her head against his chest. “I love you, Grandpa,” she says, and the words shake loose both his pain and my own, so that before I even know it’s hit me, I’m bent over at the waist, torn apart by weeping I can no longer hold back.
I cross the space between us and kneel in front of his chair, burying my face in his knees. His weeping and mine make a rhythm, two pieces of a whole. The third and final piece is missing, will always be missing, but in that moment we begin to heal around that loss, bringing Elle in to complete the circle.
Little by little the intensity of my grief eases. My sobs soften and slow. I hear my father’s breath following this same pattern, and soon I am aware only of our breathing—mine, Elle’s, and my father’s.
I push myself back and sit on the floor, wiping my face with my sleeve and looking around for much-needed tissues. Dad’s arms are around Elle, his cheek resting on the top of her head. His face is wet, his eyes red. She, too, is smudged by tears, and if my heart was not so newly emptied, I would feel a fresh pang at the weight of knowledge and maturity I see there.
Too late I wonder if I should have sheltered her from this. Greg would have. My mother would have. But then I feel the warm tug of connection between her heart and mine, mine and Dad’s, and for the first time in my life it occurs to me that maybe my own weird way of being in the world is right after all.
I’m mulling all of this when the door opens and Dr. Margoni comes in. Her eyes roam over the three of us, and there is no judgment in her expression. If anything, her expression softens, and she offers a gentle smile and also a hand.
“You look like you may be stuck,” she says.
Her fingers are slim and cool, but she is strong. I let her help me back up onto my feet. My body feels different, as if something has shifted. A different center of gravity that makes me feel not weighted, exactly, but grounded. As if I’m not about to fly away next time a puff of wind or emotion hits me.
“So,” she says, once I’m on my feet and have found my way first to the tissues and then to the sink to wash my hands. She passes the box of tissues to Elle, who quietly dries her eyes, and to Dad, who honks his nose loudly, clears his throat, and shifts restlessly in the chair.
“Walter, your blood work is much better. Your blood sugars are better controlled. The dehydration is resolved. Your blood pressure has come down. How are you feeling?”
“I feel like my wife just died.” There’s no bitterness or irony in his tone, just flat acceptance of the fact.
Dr. Margoni nods. “Of course. In a way, that is good and exactly as it should be. That means your emotions are working. Do you know what day it is today?”
She leads him through a catalogue of basic reality. Where and when we are. Which president is currently in the White House. She makes him copy a drawing, pick up and fold a piece of paper, repeat the names of three objects.
Today, he knows some of the answers. He gets the month right, but not the day. He knows he’s in a hospital, but not which one. He picks up a piece of paper as instructed, but forgets to fold it. When she asks him to count backward from one hundred by sevens, he refuses to even try.
For me, this would make total sense. I can only do backward sevens if I have a calculator. But Dad’s always been a whizz at math, especially calculations. We did a contest between his brain and my calculator once. He won.
I watch his face as he realizes he’s getting more and more things wrong, and by the end of the ordeal his hands are shaking.
Dr. Margoni looks grave as she writes a note on her clipboard. Then she sets it aside and gives an assessing look that lights on every one of us. “So, there is no reason to keep you here any longer, and the question becomes this: What next?”
This is the place where I need to dive in with my plan for him to go into supported living.
I can’t do it.
Speaking the words is a physical impossibility, and I realize, in one shaft of illumination, that my life is never just going back to how it was. Whether Walter is my father in blood or not, he has been my father for as long as I can remember. He’s already lost my mother. I won’t be a part of him losing everything else.
“He comes home,” I say.
Dr. Margoni looks up at me, startled, her brows rising into smooth arches of question. “With you? To Kansas City?”
I shake my head. “No. To his house. Here.”
“I don’t understand,” she says, and then, “Let me clarify. I understand that he wants to go home, and that you want that for him. But he’s going to need a lot of help, at least for a while.”
I look at my father and try to picture him as one of those forsaken-looking old people in a wheelchair, dozing in front of the TV in a nursing home. As much as I try to tell myself that they’re not really forsaken, that assisted living is not a nursing home, that maybe he’d be happier hanging out with a group of old people instead of mourning at home, it seems impossible.
But then, the idea of Mom being dead is equally impossible.
Dad doesn’t say anything. He doesn’t need to. His request to come home is still ringing in my ears. He looks small and unmoored and defenseless. A page from one of my childhood books flashes into my head, a Dr. Seuss extravaganza of gratitude not to be an abandoned sock, mistakenly left behind in a dark cave.
Dad looks like the picture of that abandoned sock. Limp. Forgotten. Doomed to disintegrate and unravel, thread by slow, lonely thread, without my mother. Without his home.
Greg and my mother have always said I need to start thinking with my head instead of my heart. My head is ready to supply all sorts of reasons why Dad can’t come home. My heart is whispering something else altogether. I didn’t do what my mother wanted and needed for me to do. If I make the same mistake with my father, I won’t be able to live with the regret.
“I’m taking him home. We’ll figure something out.”
Dr. Margoni beams a smile at me that lights up all my own dark and dusty corners. “You should know that if you take him home now, and then decide you can’t handle it, it may be harder to find him a placement,” Dr. Margoni says. “But he can go home today, if you’re sure that’s what you want to do.”
“I’m sure.”
“Let me go write the orders. A nurse will be in to sign you out in a little bit.”
As soon as Dr. Margoni is out the door, Elle rushes across the room and squeezes me breathless with a giant bear hug. “This is why I love you,” she says. Then laughs and squeezes me again. “Well, one of the reasons. How long can we stay?”
“I hadn’t thought,” Dad says, very quietly. “This will disrupt your life too much.”
“Not much of a life to disrupt,” I tell him, realizing as I say it that this is true. My job is disposable. My apartment contract is up next month. I’m not dating anybody, and none of my friends will miss me much. More importantly, I won’t miss them. Apart from being a mother to Elle, I’ve been skimming the surface of the Life Pool.
And now my skimmer has been confiscated. I don’t have a life jacket. I’m being dunked unceremoniously into the deep end, and I sure as certain had better learn how to swim.