NINE
In all my years of working at the Examiner and then for Ladiesroom, I’d never had anything come close to going viral. When I’d organized the slide show of nude cyclists that ran with the paper’s coverage of Philadelphia’s annual Naked Critical Mass ride, the pictures had gotten a tremendous number of hits, but that had all been local attention. Nothing I’d done, and certainly nothing I’d said, had ever gained national traction. Maybe it was a slow news week, or maybe it had to do with prudish, hypocritical America’s fascination with anything related to women and sex, but by Sunday night the “vibrator in every purse” sound bite was racking up hits on YouTube (I’d smartened up enough to know not to watch the clip or even glance at the comments). On Monday morning, a nationally syndicated conservative radio host spent ten minutes frothing into his microphone, incensed at the notion that the writers and editors of Ladiesroom—“a pack of pornography purveyors,” as he put it—wanted the government to equip innocent teenage girls with vibrators. Where he got the idea that we were asking for government money, I wasn’t sure, but I welcomed the attention. Every hyperbolic, spittle-flecked “THIS is what liberals WANT!” harangue got Ladiesroom.com another ten thousand hits. More hits meant more attention, and more money. Money: Our corporate masters offered a generous bonus for pieces that topped fifty thousand views. I stuck the cash directly into my Naughty Account, knowing I’d need drugs to get through the backlash, the inevitable dissection of my looks and politics and sex life, or lack of same. I was planning on cutting back . . . just not now. There was even a bit on The Daily Show, with Jon Stewart smirking as he repeated my line: “A chicken in every pot and a vibrator in every purse! Just make sure you don’t get them mixed up,” he said as the screen behind him showed a picture of a Hitachi Magic Wand in a Dutch oven. My inbox overflowed with e-mailed condemnations and praise, which I quickly gave up trying to answer. A “thank you for reading my work” would suffice, whether the reader was telling me that I was a genius and a hero and an inspiration to girls everywhere, or a fat ugly whore bent on making men obsolete.
I tried to distract myself by writing something new. “A Mother’s Guide to the Online World” was the idea I’d been playing with, a series of tips and how-tos for protecting girls on the Internet and in real life. Nothing scared me more than the idea of Ellie as a teenager, among peers who accepted as normal things like girls texting topless shots of themselves to boys they liked, or boys filming sexual activity and then making the video available to their buddies. She was too young for even the most preliminary conversation—only six months ago I’d stumbled through a speech about where babies came from—but I thought if I could come up with a list of what to do and what to say, maybe I’d be prepared for when she was eight or nine or ten or twelve and the conversation was no longer theoretical.
“Mommy, come visit with me!” Ellie would say, banging on my locked bedroom door in the days and weeks after my TV debut.
“Mommy’s working right now,” I would call back, telepathically begging her babysitter to come upstairs and whisk her away. Katrina, bless her heart, meant well, but she would usually come with some elaborate craft or cooking project that would take a while to arrange, leaving Ellie free to wander the house, or bang on my door, while her sitter laid out pages of origami paper or baked gingerbread for a gingerbread house.
Dave, meanwhile, had gone back to being tight-lipped and silent, his face unreadable and his body rigid as he passed me in the kitchen or the halls. I was afraid to try to grill him about L. McIntyre. I wanted to know the truth . . . but I suspected that the truth would burst my opiated bubble, revealing the unhappy realities that even four or five Oxys couldn’t mask—that my marriage was a sham, that my happiness was an illusion, that even though the pieces were in place and everything seemed okay, underneath the veneer of good looks and good manners, the three of us were falling apart.
Or, at least, I was.
Two weekends after my television triumph, the guilt got to me. I woke up early, chewed up sixty milligrams of OxyContin, took a shower, and announced, over a breakfast I’d cooked myself, that I was putting everything on hold and taking Ellie on a girls’ day outing.
“Great,” Dave said. He even managed to smile. Ten minutes after I’d made my announcement, he had his running shoes in his hand, his high-tech lap-and-pace-counting watch on his wrist, and his body covered in various wicking and cooling fabrics made from recycled bamboo. “Bye,” he called, closing the door behind him. Ellie gave me a syrup-sticky smile. “Can we go to my museum? And the Shake Shack? And the zoo? And to sing-along Sound of Music?”
“Sing-along Sound of Music was a special treat. How about you pick two of the other things?” I said pleasantly. Meanwhile, I was performing a mental inventory of how many little blue Oxys I had left, and how I’d space them out to get me through until noon the next day, when my next batch would come in the mail. You’re taking too many, a voice in my head scolded. I stacked dishes in the sink, then rinsed them and put them in the dishwasher, and told the voice to shut up. How much money did you spend last month? the voice persisted. Four thousand dollars? Five? I can afford it, I thought uneasily, shoving aside the memory of the petty cash I’d borrowed, or how worried I was that Dave would take a hard look at our joint checking account. As long as I stay on top of things, as long as I’m careful, I’ll be fine.
After lengthy deliberations, Ellie decided on the zoo, and burgers for lunch. For two hours, we admired the elephants, held our noses in the monkey house, screamed “Ew!” at the naked mole rats, and sat on a bench eating soft-serve pretzels in the sunshine. I let her have everything she wanted—a pedal through the pond on the swan boats, a pony ride, and a trip on the miniature train that circled the zoo. She got her face painted to look like a leopard (a pink-and-white-spotted leopard) and bought friendship bracelets and a souvenir keychain and widened her eyes in disbelief when, at the Shake Shack, I said she could have both cheese fries and a milkshake, when usually I made her choose one or the other.
The cashier gave Ellie a buzzer—by far, one of the highlights of the Shack. “It’ll go off when your food’s ready.”
“I KNOW it! I KNOW it will!” Using two hands, Ellie carried the buzzer to our table and set it reverently in the center after cleaning the surface with an antibacterial wipe from my purse. “Now, don’t freak out,” she instructed the buzzer.
“Okay. I won’t. I won’t freak out,” I answered, in character as Wa, which is what we’d named the Shake Shack’s buzzers, for the wah-wah-wah sound they made.
“Just be CALM, Wa,” she said, giggling.
“I’m gonna. I-I’m gonna be calm,” I stammered, in Wa’s trembling, not-at-all-calm voice.
“Just say, ‘Your food is ready,’ in a NORMAL voice. Don’t LOSE YOUR BUSINESS,” Ellie said, her eyes sparkling with mirth.
“I got it. I got it. No freaking out. No losing my business. No . . .” Ellie was already starting to giggle as the buzzer lit up and started to hum. “WA! WA! WA! Yourfoodisready!” I said. “Wa! Wa! WAWAWAI’MFREAKINGOUTHEREWA!”
“Wa, calm down! It’s just a burger!” Ellie gave the buzzer an affectionate pat as I continued to narrate its breakdown. An older woman sitting at the counter watched the proceedings. On our way back with our tray, she tapped my shoulder.
“Excuse me. I just want to say how much I’m enjoying watching you and your daughter.”
“Oh, thank you!” I said, touched almost to tears.
“So many parents, you see them on their phones, barely looking at their kids. You’re giving your daughter memories she’ll have forever.”
Now I was tearing up, thinking about what the woman would never see—the times I had been on my phone or my laptop or napping when Ellie wanted my company.
“That’s really nice of you to say,” I said, just as—irony!—my phone rang. I gave the woman an apologetic smile. “Hello? Mom?”
For a minute, all I could hear was the sound of her crying. “He f-f-fell . . . out of bed . . . I tried to pick him up and then he p-p-pushed me . . .”
I sat down in my chair. “Okay, Mom. Take a deep breath. Is Daddy there?”
“He left! He ran away!” Another burst of sobbing. “I tried to stop him, but he pushed me down and he ran out the door. He’s got bare feet, or maybe just his slippers. I couldn’t s-s-stop him . . .”
“Okay.” My head spun. Ellie, for once, was sitting quietly, maybe appreciating the seriousness of the situation, staring at me wide-eyed over the lid of her milkshake. “Do you know where he went?”
“No,” she sobbed. “By the time I got to the door he was gone.”
“Okay. I think you need to get off the phone with me and call the police.”
“What do I say?” she wailed.
“Tell them what you told me. Tell them that Daddy has Alzheimer’s, and that he was confused and that he’s . . .” Run away from home? Wandered off? Gone for a walk in his bare feet? “Just tell them what happened. I’m in Center City, I’m going to put Ellie in the car right now. We’ll be there as soon as we can.” Even as I was talking, I was packing up my purse, handing Ellie a wipe for her face, rummaging for my parking stub and a twenty-dollar bill.
“Good luck,” the woman who’d praised my parenting said as I hustled Ellie out the door, across the street, into the car, and, as fast as I could legally manage it, over the Ben Franklin Bridge and into New Jersey.
There were three police cars at my parents’ house when I arrived, one in the driveway and another two parked at the curb in front of the house. On my way over, I’d had a two-minute conversation with Dave, telling him what had happened.
“What can I do?” he’d asked, and I’d found myself almost in tears, melting at the kindness in his voice.
“Just sit tight . . . Actually, you know what? Can you call . . .” What was the woman’s name? I pulled to the side of the road and rummaged through my wallet until I found the business card I’d tucked in there for this very moment. “Kathleen Young. She’s at Eastwood—you know, the assisted-living place out here?”
“Kathleen Young,” Dave said, and repeated the phone number after I read it.
“If she’s not working on the weekend, ask for whoever’s handling intake. I went there a few weeks ago, just to check it out, so they know me, and they’ll at least know my dad’s name and his situation. If you tell them what’s going on, maybe they’ll have a bed for him, or they’ll be able to find us someplace that does.”
“Got it,” said Dave. “Call when you can.”
I parked on the street behind one of the cruisers, grabbed Ellie, and raced into the house. My mother was on the couch with an officer in uniform on each side of her. My father, in sweatpants, his bare feet grimy and one big toe bleeding, was sitting in an armchair, his face completely blank. He was missing his glasses, and his hair hadn’t been combed.
“Oh, Dad,” I said. I put Ellie down and half sat, half collapsed on the couch next to his armchair. He didn’t move, didn’t acknowledge me, just kept staring into the middle of the room as my mother, bracketed by cops, cried into a fistful of tissue. “What happened?” I asked the room. My mother continued to cry. My dad continued to stare. Finally, one of the cops, who introduced himself as Officer Findlay, said that they’d found my father two blocks away from the house, walking toward the elementary school in his bare feet. “He appeared disoriented, but he didn’t give us a hard time.”
“Climbed right in the backseat and let us take him home,” said the second officer. “Your mother was explaining your dad’s situation . . .”
“We should call his doctor,” I said to my mom. I hoped, foolishly, that she’d say she’d already done so—that she’d done something. Of course she hadn’t. She just sat there, mutely, shaking with sobs.
“I’m going to call,” I told the police officers.
I got Ellie situated in front of the television set, handing her the remote and watching her eyes widen as if I’d given her a key to the city, and went upstairs to my dad’s study to try to reach his physician. Of course an answering service picked up. I left my name and number and a brief version of the story. Then I called Dave.
“They have a bed available,” he reported. “But it’ll have to be paid out of pocket until you finish giving them your dad’s insurance information. They’ll need a copy of your parents’ tax returns, too. I’m going to e-mail you all that information,” Dave said, in his full-on brisk-and-businessy reporter mode. “There’s an Emily Gavin you’ll be talking to—she’s handling intake over the weekend. They e-mailed a packing list that I can forward along . . .” While Dave kept talking, I let my eyes slip shut.
“Do you think . . .” I swallowed hard. Here was the part I hadn’t quite figured out, the puzzle piece I’d never managed to snap into place. “Honey, would it be okay if my mom stayed with us for a while?”
I’d expected objection, at least a pained sigh. But Dave’s voice was gentle when he said, “Of course it’s fine.”
I started to cry. “I love you,” I said as the call waiting beeped to let me know that someone from my dad’s doctor’s practice was calling.
“Love you, too,” said Dave.
I sniffled. How long had it been since I’d felt that certainty, that unshakable belief that Dave had my back? And did he know that I had his? Would he come to me in a crisis, or just try to get through it on his own . . . or, worse, would he turn to L. McIntyre, with her understated makeup and sleek ponytail, and ask her to help?
My father’s doctor was calling from a movie-theater lobby. “Count yourself lucky that no one got hurt,” he said. “Now, clearly, Dad’s ready for a higher level of care.”
I agreed that Dad was.
“You picked out a place?” He’d given my mother and me a list of possibilities the same day he gave us my father’s diagnosis.
“Eastwood has a bed for him.”
“Good. They’re good people. Don’t forget to bring two forms of ID when you go. Pack all his medication—they’ll probably let him take his own meds for the first night, then they’ll have their doctors call in new scrips for everything, just so they know exactly what he’s taking, and when, and how much.” I half paid attention as he explained the process of getting my dad situated—what to pack, whom to call—as I tried to figure out how I would actually get my father to Eastwood. Could I leave Ellie with my mother while I drove my father there? What if he got confused, or even violent, or refused to get in my car, or refused to get out of it when he saw where we were? Maybe I’d wait for Dave to make the trip from Philadelphia and have him come along. That would work. I thanked the doctor, got off the phone, closed the study door quietly . . . but before I went downstairs, I detoured into the bathroom that had been mine when I was a girl. The seat was up, the hand towels were askew, and something white—toothpaste, I hoped—was crusted on the cold-water handle at the sink. I ignored it all, shoved my hand deep into my bag, retrieved my Altoids tin, and piled two, then four, then six pills into my mouth.