They Left Us Everything (19 page)

“Who?”

“Plum … Do you know Plum?”

“
I am
Plum.”

“You are?” He looked at me, surprised. “Oh, of course you are!
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… Then who was that girl who was here this morning?”

“That was me.”

“No, no … that other girl who looks like you.”

“That was
me
!”

“Really? Does Plum have dark hair, too?”

“Yes,” I sighed, “she does.”

“Ford Econoline
.
”

“So …” I said, trying to get Dad back on track, “what happened to Puck?”

“Puck Goldsmith?”

“Yep.”

“She was killed … during the war … driving a truck.
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Did you ever marry?”

“Yes, I did.”

“And who did you marry?”

“Don.”

“
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… Any children?”

“Three.”

“Three … really? Good for you! And where were you born?”

“In Virginia.”

“I see … that was your mother’s idea, was it?”

We finally arrived at the gardening centre and I pulled into the parking lot.

“Can we buy persimmon seeds here?” asked Dad.

“Pumpkin seeds, Dad, pumpkins.” I unhooked Dad’s seatbelt and helped him out of the car. He stood, unsteadily.

“Now,” he said, “your mother gets back today?”

“Tomorrow.” I closed the car door and took Dad’s arm.

“Tomorrow’s Friday, right?”

“Today is Saturday.”

“And your mother comes back today?”

“Tomorrow.” I looked up at the signs, looking for seeds.

“Now let me get this straight.” Dad was scratching his head. “You say today is Sunday?”

“No, no,” I said. “Today is Saturday. Mum comes home tomorrow.”

“She comes back Saturday?”

“Sunday, Dad!
Tomorrow
.” I was distracted, trying to find a trolley for Dad to hold on to, and I was no longer sure what day it was or even what my own name was.

“And she’s been gone, what, about two weeks?” asked Dad.

“Two days, Dad.”

Dad took me by the shoulders and looked me in the eyes. “Now,” he said calmly, “I heard what you said, but it’s been about ten days—right?”

“I know it feels like that, Dad … it feels like that to me, too … but it’s only been two days.”

Dad looked up into the sky. “And she comes back when?”

“Shall we buy persimmons, Dad?”

“Cadillac Seville!”
he said happily.
“Discover Ontario!”

Watching over Dad always brought surprises. One day Robin and I had some important paperwork to attend to in the playroom, so we put Dad on the piano stool behind us where he seemed content to stack and unstack the music books. Suddenly, we heard Liszt’s “Liebestraume”—Dad’s favourite, “Dreams of Love”—filling the air. We turned, startled, thinking someone had turned on the radio. But it was Dad’s fingers racing along the keyboard, Dad’s hands crossing back and forth, Dad’s runs soaring and dipping flawlessly as if he were giving a recital—by memory. The music books were upside down on the stand. We hadn’t heard him play like that in years.

As a child, I had the bedroom directly above the playroom and would fall asleep to the sounds of this piece filtering up through the floorboards as Dad played in private with the door closed. When I was too young to understand what he meant,
Dad told me that playing the piano was like making love: one should stroke the keys gently.

I raced for the tape recorder. “Play it again, Dad!” I begged. “Play it again!”

But Dad only blinked. Whatever circuit briefly sparked a reconnection in his brain had flamed out. He went back to shuffling the music books.

Dad loved long walks, and despite the extra locks we put on the doors, his wandering became a chronic worry. For Dad, the local landscape was deeply ingrained. Like his piano playing, once he started on a familiar route, he rarely got lost. It helped if he had the dog on a leash: Sambo knew the way home. But despite Mum’s vigilance, Dad began to elude her. Often he managed to take a train—we have no idea how— and find his way to my house in Toronto. This became an untenable situation for me because I ran a publishing business from home. Dad would show up in the middle of a deadline and I’d be forced to cancel meetings, drop everything, and drive him back home—a two-hour round trip. This was when we hired Pelmo to help with Dad during the day; she and her husband, Tashi, moved into the back of the house and Tashi commuted to his day job from there.

Occasionally, Dad got angry and lashed out, but we learned to exploit his long-term memory, resurrecting his navy days during the war when discipline was key. Any time he’d try to raise his arm in anger, we’d say, “Sir! Do you have written permission from headquarters to do this?”

“No, sir!” he’d say.

“Then lower your arm, sir, if you don’t have permission!” And like a dutiful officer he’d obey.

As we passed the twelve-year mark, Dad became more and
more depressed. With arthritic hips he could no longer take his lengthy walks, and without his fitness regime his spirits sagged: he described seeing heavy storm clouds where there were none. Even on sunny days the fog of what we now know to be Alzheimer’s came rolling in relentlessly. Sometimes, Dad thought he saw crowds of people whispering in the bushes. “Who are they?” he’d ask.

It was clear that Mum was at her wits’ end. Frankly, I don’t know how she stood it for so long. I reported to the boys that at a recent church rummage sale Dad had plunked himself down in an antique rocker and gone to sleep. Mum couldn’t rouse him, so in the end she just bought the chair for five dollars and left him there.

Unable to engage Dad in the arguments and lively political discussions that had been a staple of their marriage, Mum was now living with his repetitive, wistful bleats to go somewhere warm. Every day, Dad kept asking, “Bluebells, where are the bluebells?”—remembering, I suppose, the spring flowering of his English youth. We investigated respite facilities to give Mum a break, but they were expensive, so at one of our Sibling Suppers we cooked up a more creative plan. Instead of the $1200 per week the respite facility was charging for a locked ward, we could send Dad on a week-long Caribbean cruise— flight to Miami included! We reasoned that, on a ship, Dad could wander in a circle all day and never get completely lost. Of course, one of us would need to accompany him, so we drew straws: Victor got the short one.

I went shopping and bought Dad new clothes for the trip—a new swimsuit, two new shirts, a lightweight navy blazer, and pale linen trousers. We packed his silk cravats and gold cufflinks, and one of his long, cotton sarongs that he’d worn
to bed every night since his days in the Orient. I wanted to pack his traditional English straw boater, but Victor nixed that idea and packed a cotton baseball cap—something Dad would have never knowingly put on his head.

Midway through the cruise, Victor called Mum from a payphone in the Virgin Islands.

“How’s your father?” she asked anxiously.

“I’ll let him tell you himself,” Victor said. “He’s right here.” Dad got on the phone. Mum asked if he was having a good time.

“Oh, indeed!” he said happily. “We’ve seen Hong Kong, Singapore, and all of South America. Right now we’re flying over Brazil … we should be landing in London any minute!”

When he got back, Dad’s eyes were dancing. “I guess you heard about the trip I had to Europe?”

“Yes!” I said. “Did you have a good time?”

“Marvellous! We saw all of Austria … went right the way round the Mediterranean … then shot through Gibraltar … and arrived back in Florida!”

“Really?”

“Oh yes!” He paused. “Of course, I was left alone for a bit in Israel.”

“You were?”

“It seems your brother wanted to see Greece … but we managed to find each other again, so it worked out just fine.”

The following week, we held a Sibling Supper at a large Italian restaurant on the outskirts of town. We’d booked a quiet private table in the corner, but by the time Victor finished regaling us with stories about his trip we’d become so raucous that the maître d’ had moved the four of us outside to
a table in the courtyard. I asked Victor how he dealt with Dad in the cabin at night, to stop his wandering.

“I just locked the door and put a chair in front of it.”

“And that worked?”

“Sure! Dad would reach for the door … find the chair … and just sit down.”

“Was Dad this confused the whole time?” I asked.

“Yep,” Victor said, “but he was happy! At the pool he spent all day going from one deck chair to another, folding and refolding everybody’s beach towels!”

“Didn’t anyone complain?”

“They tried to … but if a passenger came up to him, Dad would ask them how far we were from Borneo. So then they’d just blink and back slowly away. I heard one guy actually mutter, ‘Oh, about eight thousand miles.’”

Victor couldn’t stop laughing and by then neither could we. Our plates were bouncing, our wine glasses sloshing, and everyone in the restaurant was peering out at our table. All four of us were doubled over.

“But you know what I was thinking?” said Victor.

“What?”

“The rest of us only saw the Caribbean, but Dad saw the whole world—he had the cruise of a lifetime!”

It was the last holiday Dad would take.

Over the next five years, he became less and less mobile and eventually stayed upstairs, bedridden. I had relinquished his personal care to Pelmo; I told the boys I couldn’t do it anymore—it was affecting Dad’s dignity.

The last time I showered Dad, he had crud halfway up his backside. As I was hosing him down, he clung to the safety bar
and said quietly, “I’m sorry, First Daughter … you shouldn’t have to do this.”

“It’s okay, Dad, it’s only a body—it’s not you. I’m sure you did this for me when I was a baby, and I’m happy to do it for you.”

But the truth was I wasn’t happy to do it; it needed to be done and nobody else was there. I thought Dad was too far gone to notice, but it was clear he was having as hard a time as I was.

During his last few months a hospital bed was erected in my old bedroom, where Pelmo spoon-fed him and gently massaged his thin limbs with lotion. I made him a hospital gown in black flannelette with a white bib and bow tie to resemble his tuxedo, and he wore it whenever friends came upstairs to visit.

One night he was having difficulty swallowing, so the doctor sent a nurse to teach us how to hold Dad’s head. She’d never been there before and I could tell from her expression that she was shocked by Dad’s condition. His decline had been so gradual over so many years that we didn’t see what she saw. He was almost a cadaver: he’d been so lovingly cared for, especially by Pelmo, that he’d reached an end point most people never reach while they’re still breathing.

Chris was planning to spend the night, but he’d forgotten his toothbrush and so I volunteered to take his place. For the past decade I’d regularly kept a toothbrush in my glove compartment. Unable to get comfortable on any of the guestroom mattresses, I had dragged a pillow and quilt to the living-room sofa; then I changed my mind and went back upstairs.

“Dad?” I whispered into the dark. “I’m getting into bed with you, okay?”

He was lying on his side. I spooned in behind him, crinkling the plastic sheet and pressing my back against the metal rails, careful not to put any weight on his fragile bones. It was like being in bed with a tissue-paper bird.

I reached across his hip and searched for his fingers.

“I’m here, Dad,” I said softly, “and I’m not leaving.”

His eyes fluttered open but he could no longer speak.

His hand patted mine.

Outside the window, over the lake, the moon was a waning crescent. The only sound was the steady breathing of Mum’s oxygen machine in the hall, its clear plastic tentacle snaking its way across the carpet and into her bedroom next door. It seemed to me incongruous that, after sixty-five years of married life, Mum and Dad were now separated by this thin blue wall—Dad ending up here and not there with her. How many times as a child had I lain in this room listening to them making love on the other side?

Sometime after midnight, Sambo stumbled in from Mum’s bedroom. I could hear the tags on his collar jingling.

“No, Sambo!” I whispered angrily as I put him out, and closed the door.

When I awoke, early morning light bathed Dad’s face with a translucent shimmer; his neck yearned upwards and his cloudy eyes were wide open, but his body was stiff and cold. I hadn’t even heard him take his last breath. I ran into Mum’s bedroom.

“Mum?” I said softly. “I think Dad has died.”

She lifted her head from the pillow and looked at me as though she were trying to get her bearings, but with no surprise. After fourteen years Alzheimer’s had finally stripped Dad of everything; she had said her goodbyes long ago.

Sambo cocked his head up at me, and I wondered, had he been the first to know? Had he come in at the exact moment of Dad’s death, trying to say goodbye?

“Would you call Dr. Breen?” Mum asked.

When Chris and Victor arrived, they went into the snowy garden together and lowered Dad’s flag to half-mast.