“No. He does not have dementia. There are no mood swings. She fell. That’s the most direct—”
“And he didn’t call an ambulance. Was there an advance directive, do you know? He claims these were her wishes, to not go to the hospital.”
“No, I don’t know. If she made a directive, she never told me.”
“And you’re sure he isn’t suffering from dementia?” Mendez persists.
“No! No, he’s fine. We talked last week. He was perfectly lucid.”
“Sometimes people with Alzheimer’s can hold it together for a while, at least for short stretches of time. When was the last time you were here, to observe him over an extended time period?”
The words pull out the lynchpin of a towering pile of accumulated guilt that crashes around me and buries me to the ears. How would I know? I haven’t visited home in three years. I talk to my parents every week, but the calls are brief and superficial. If my father’s been slipping, I didn’t notice, but then I’ve not discussed anything more difficult than the weather and the Seahawks with him. As for my mother, she’d never submit to something so demeaning as Alzheimer’s, or allow anybody she loved to suffer from it.
“You are the only immediate family member we have been able to locate. Is there another relative closer? You are in Kansas City, is that right?”
“Yes,” I tell him. “I’m in Kansas City. No, I have no siblings and Mom has no living relatives. Dad’s only sister died over a year ago.”
“So you don’t know of any terminal illness or advanced planning? Would she want to be on life support, if that’s required?”
“No. I don’t know. She might not have told me.”
An image flashes through my head: my mother lying senseless and helpless, stuck full of tubes like a semi-animate pincushion, my gentle father, suddenly red-eyed and hunchbacked, leaning over her with a bloody knife.
“I’ll be on the next plane.”
“Perfect. Please call the hospital. I can give you the number. Do you have something to write with?”
I can’t be this person. I can’t make decisions between wheat, rye, and sourdough. How the hell am I going to sort out what to do with my parents?
“Do you have a pen? Are you ready?” Officer Mendez is persistent.
“Elle, get a pen.”
She’s back in a heartbeat, writing down the numbers I repeat to her. Mendez hangs up.
My world takes on an air of unreality. This is someone else’s smoke-filled kitchen. The tile pattern on the floor sucks me in to a geometric tangle of blue and tan and a bile-colored, putrid green. There are scratches bitten in to it by the legs of chairs.
“Who puts tile like that on a floor?” I ask. “It’s beyond hideous.”
“Mom.” Elle’s voice, taut with anxiety and frustration, draws my eyes. Now that I’m sitting, she’s taller than me. It’s wrong to be looking up at her like this; it changes the angles of her face, makes her look older.
If I say any of the words out loud, it’s going to make what Mendez told me true. Just a few more minutes is all I want, a little more time to sit here in a comfy cocoon of denial, but Elle won’t give me that. So I tell her. Not all of it. Just part of it, the part I can manage to get my mind around.
“Grandma’s in the hospital. It’s serious. I need to go and help Grandpa.”
This is the reframe of the century, and Elle is too smart to buy my story. “You were talking to the police.”
“Grandpa’s a little . . . confused. They want to put him in the psychiatric ward. Or maybe jail.”
Irrational laughter bubbles up at the image of Dad in jail. I doubt very much that my father has ever incurred so much as a parking ticket.
“You’re scaring me,” Elle says.
Her voice sounds far away, but these words are the key to whatever strength lies at the core of me. I am the parent. I am the responsible one.
“I’m sorry. Don’t be scared.” I put my arms around her and rest my head against her chest. She grounds me, and I manage to get the deep breaths going, and with them my brain starts to function again in fits and starts of coherence, punctuated by long oceans of drifting memories and daydreamed fears.
“I need to book a flight. You’ll have to stay with your dad—”
“No way.”
“Elle.”
“I’m coming with you.”
“You are not. You have school.”
She shrugs that off. “I can make up a week of work in, like, a day. You know I can. I’m coming.”
“What about English?”
“I’ll write Mrs. Wilson her stupid vacation thing and send it to her. Come on, Mom. It’s not like she’s going to fail me.”
When Elle thinks she’s right, she’s as unshiftable as a block of granite, and I can tell by the particular firmness at the corners of her lips that this is one of those times.
“Look, sweetheart, I’m going to be busy.”
“Right. You’ll need help.” She’s no longer looking at me, her fingers tapping away at her phone. “We fly into Spokane, right? Wow. We could still catch an eight o’clock that would get us there by midnight. How long is the drive into Colville, again?”
“Elle.”
“Do you want to get a hotel or drive up that night? You’re gonna be awfully tired, although you can sleep on the plane.”
“Elle. You can’t go.”
“Why can’t I?”
Because. That’s the best answer I’ve got, and it’s not an answer that has ever worked on this child. I have no logic-based reason to tell her no. She’s right about school. She can pull off straight As without any effort when she sets her mind to it. Even Mrs. Wilson, for all her unhappiness about Elle not following directions, won’t fail her.
As for taking care of Elle, the reality is she’s more likely to take care of me.
I don’t want to go through the heartbreak ahead. I don’t want Elle to go through it. So I offer her the only thing I’ve ever been able to offer her: the truth.
“I want you to remember your grandparents the way you know them now. Grandma’s . . .” I choke on the words, take a breath, try again. “Grandma’s had a very serious accident. She’s in a coma. And Grandpa is apparently not himself, maybe getting senile. I don’t want you to see them that way.”
Elle fixes me with what I call her old-soul look, an expression that encompasses compassion for me and wisdom far beyond what any sheltered child should have gathered in a short life.
“I want to say good-bye,” she says. “I don’t care if it hurts.”
This, as she knows, I can’t deny her, and she goes back to her search. “So you should grab these flights, quick. And book a hotel if you want one. We can rent a car at the airport and talk to my teachers tomorrow.”
I cave. Leaving her with her father would be the right thing to do, maybe, but I want her with me. “We need to pack,” I tell her.
“I’ll pack. Good thing yesterday was laundry day.”
“Good thing. You know what else is a good thing?”
She looks back at me over her shoulder, already halfway out of the room to complete her part of the mission. “What?”
“You, Elle. You are the best thing, ever.”
Chapter Three
In the fifteen years he’s worked as a fireman and a paramedic, Tony has seen strange things, sad things, and outright disturbing things. He’s witnessed deaths accidental and purposeful, traumatic and peaceful. He’s played a part in so many dramas of tragedy and salvation that sometimes he thinks he’s seen everything, but then a case unexpectedly gets under his skin.
Like this one.
An old man, so frail in appearance that a tiny puff of wind might blow him over, sits on the bed beside a comatose woman, holding her hand. She lies motionless, pale as death, the only sign of life the painful rasping of her breath.