We Are Not Ourselves (65 page)

She had to get some distance if she wanted any hope of falling asleep, but she wanted to be close to him, so for the first time in years she attempted to sleep facing him. She didn’t think she would actually drift off, but the next thing she knew the room was flooded in light.

•  •  •

That morning, a Saturday, she wanted to pay a visit to Cindy, who’d had her gall bladder out, but she didn’t want to bring Ed. She left him with Connell and drove to Nassau University Medical Center.

When she walked in that night, she found all the lights out except for a cabinet lamp in the kitchen, and Ed lying on the cold bricks of the vestibule. She cursed herself as much as she did Connell, because she’d had a strange intimation of disaster when she’d left. She knew she couldn’t trust him, and she’d left Ed with him anyway. She called his name and got no answer.

She couldn’t lift Ed, couldn’t even get him to sit up. It was as if rigor mortis had set in while he was still alive. She rushed to the cordless phone and saw a note that said that Connell had gone to the city to meet some friends. Rage coursed through her. She brought the phone back with her to Ed and set it down. She didn’t want to call anyone until she absolutely had to. She tried to get under him and wedge him up under her thighs, but she
couldn’t get a purchase on him. She tried to roll him onto the rug, but he was raving, and she gave up and tried to soothe him, to no avail. He was making his clicking noise. His body was seizing up. He had never felt heavier. She wondered whether she could manage the situation until Connell got home, but most likely he would take the last train out of Grand Central.

The ambulance arrived in minutes. Two guys strapped him to a gurney and she rode with them to Lawrence, where he was admitted. The trip in the ambulance must have revived him, because he walked in with assistance, but in the ER he went wild, screaming, flailing his arms and striking one of the orderlies. They used restraints to tie him down.

“Why?” he kept asking. “Why? Why?”

He looked less healthy than he had even a few days before. It amazed her how quickly catabolic processes could take over a body once they’d begun. She hadn’t noticed how skinny he’d gotten, how bad his teeth were, how much he needed a haircut.

She stayed as late as she was allowed. At home she couldn’t bring herself to go up to the bedroom, so she just sat at the kitchen table. She hadn’t consciously intended to wait up for Connell, but after a while she realized that was what she was doing. She tried to watch television in the den, but she couldn’t concentrate on any of the shows. The only thing that made any sense to her was to sit in the silence of the kitchen. She chewed her rage, grinding her teeth.

He walked in at two fifteen. She sat silently looking at him.

“What are you doing up?” he said, throwing a canvas bag down on the island.

“I asked you to stay with your father. Why did you leave him alone?”

“It was only for a little while.”

“What made you think it was okay to leave him alone?”

She had shouted. She saw the boy flinch, his eyes widen with fear. He picked the bag off the counter and put it across his chest as if he might make a run for it.

“He was asleep in bed when I left. He wasn’t going anywhere, and you were coming home in an hour.”

“Well,” she said. “He went somewhere.”

•  •  •

She went upstairs to put her head down for a moment. The next thing she knew, the room was bright and Sergei’s throaty greeting was booming up at her from the bottom of the staircase. It was one o’clock in the afternoon. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d slept so late. She remembered that Ed was in the hospital.

She went to the banister and looked down the landing. “I should have called you,” she said. “With everything that was going on, I forgot. I didn’t need you to come.”

He stood in the vestibule holding his hat against his chest. “You not go to church today?”

Lately he had taken to coming earlier on Sundays, to be there when they returned from twelve o’clock Mass.

“Something’s happened with Ed,” she said. “He had some kind of collapse. He’s in the hospital.”

“I stay here with you,” he said.

“I’m leaving soon.”

“I stay anyway.”

“That won’t be necessary.”

“I stay with you,” he said again, this time more decisively.

Connell wasn’t in his room. She called downstairs to him, but he didn’t answer there either. She dressed without showering, not because of the late hour but because with Ed’s absence it felt like Sergei was a guest in the house, and even though Sergei had passed many hours there sitting and doing nothing, she had a strange feeling of having to attend to him.

When she got downstairs she found him sitting at the kitchen table in a state of contained agitation. She could see his deep breathing, the tautness in his fists, one of which still clutched his hat. He asked what had happened. When she told him, his hand on the hat squeezed tighter.

“I stay here,” he said.

•  •  •

The nurse was trying to get him to eat when Eileen walked in, but Ed was resisting mightily. He flung his arms around as she approached with the fork, and then shut his lips tight. When she managed to get the food in, he
calmed down and chewed it thoughtfully for a few seconds, then reconsidered and spat it out on the tray.

“He did this with breakfast too.”

“I’ll take over,” Eileen said. She spoke sharply to him, told him to cooperate or else—what? What could she hold over his head?

“If you don’t eat,” she said, “you’re not going to be allowed to come home.”

He raised his eyebrows dramatically and took the rest of the meal with little protest. The doctor came around and they discussed how he’d been admitted for altered physical status, an acute sudden change in his condition. The goal would be to rehab him. They agreed on benchmarks: if he could stand on his own and walk to the bathroom, they would release him. Judging from his condition, that seemed sufficiently far off to give her time to adjust to her new circumstances. She needed Ed to do poorly enough for long enough to allow her to figure out what came next.

•  •  •

The next day, she stayed late with Ed. She was famished when she left, and on the drive home, as she contemplated the empty shelves of the fridge, she realized she’d have to order something, though she barely had the energy to make the phone call, let alone figure out what she wanted. She’d never again be able to turn to Ed and say, “What should we eat?” She didn’t want to heat up anything in the freezer. The thought of those frozen carcasses disgusted her. It felt like they were food from a lifetime ago, and indeed they were: they were from her life with Ed.

When she walked into the kitchen and saw a smock draped over the island and a pot on the stove, she was so relieved that she almost exclaimed her joy.

Sergei rose from the couch and insisted that she sit. He warmed up the pot and brought a glass of water. He ladled out a healthy portion and presented her with it, then stood watching to see her reaction. It was delicious, a beef stew of some sort.

“Give me the receipt,” she said. “I’ll reimburse you.”

He did his habitual hand waving. It would always be like this with him: he was stubborn as a molar. He had cleaned up the evidence of his
preparation, so that only the stewpot was left on a clean stove. The sink was empty, the dish drainer clean. Maybe he’d made it for himself; maybe he’d tired of eating cold-cut sandwiches. She had the sensation that this was probably how Ed experienced his meals now: they appeared before him as if by magic.

She grew uncomfortable at the sight of Sergei gazing down on her. “Please sit,” she said, and he did. He drummed his fingers on the tabletop until his hand latched onto a mail-order catalogue, which he rolled up and used to gently beat the time against the table’s edge as he watched her eat.

•  •  •

In the morning, she woke early to take Connell to the airport. When she was stuck in traffic, she looked at his sleeping form in the passenger seat. Everyone said he looked like Ed, but she didn’t see it.

He woke up right before they reached the terminal. The need to remove the bags from the trunk promised to make the good-bye mercifully brief. She got out of the car and stood there with him in that scant minute of grace allowed to a person unloading.

“If you need me to come back—” he said, looking past her through the doors.

“Not before Thanksgiving. I can’t afford it.”

“I’m sorry I won’t be here to help.”

“I have Sergei,” she said. “I’ll be fine.”

He nodded slowly. He seemed on the verge of speaking, and then he dropped his eyes and looked away before meeting her gaze again, warmly.

“You’re going to miss your plane,” she said.

He hugged her and picked up his bags. “Call me back if you need to,” he said. She could tell he intended an air of gravity, but the way he squinted at the sunlight reminded her of when he was a small boy on her lap reaching for the curtains behind her head. How could the years have brought both of them here?

“Go,” she said, and he turned and went through the sliding doors. She watched him disappear around a corner. A cop pulled up beside the car and told her to move along. She watched the planes out the window and in the rearview mirror until she couldn’t see them anymore.

•  •  •

She hadn’t been at work long when she received a call from the hospital saying they were going to discharge Ed. The woman said they’d be sending him home around two o’clock.

“That’s unacceptable,” Eileen said. “I’m not home to receive him. This is too sudden.”

“It says here you have help with you at home.”

“Yes.”

“Then he will be delivered to your home aide. He’s not eligible to stay any longer. He’s stable, his blood pressure is down, he can eat. We have to send him home.”

“Is he standing?”

“He can stand with assistance.”

“Tell me, was he standing on his own when he went in there?”

“I wasn’t here when he was admitted.”

“I’ll tell you, then. He was. He walked in from the ambulance. So he is not stable, if you ask me.”

“I am telling you that he is ready to be dismissed.”

“We agreed that he had to be able to walk. He has to be able to go up and down stairs.”

“He can walk with assistance.”

“I’m going to appeal. I do not agree with the discharge. Medicare gives me two days, no?”

“That’s correct.”

“Keep him there, then.”

She slammed the phone down. Once he was back within her walls, she would have to keep him there until the end. It would be almost impossible, emotionally, for her to deliver him personally to a nursing home, without some event like this interceding to take the guilt away from her. And then she would just be waiting, possibly even hoping in some dark part of her unconscious mind, for something bad to happen to him. She didn’t want to live like that. And the hardest truth was that—no matter how good a nurse she thought she was; no matter that she’d proved, during staffing crises, or strikes, or untimely bouts of mass absence, that she could do the work of three nurses; no matter that she wanted to believe she could give
him better care than anyone else could—she wasn’t sure anymore that a nursing home wouldn’t be better for him. This might have been the time for her to summon up the courage to take Ed back into her home, but she couldn’t do it. She had run up against her limit. If this was her only chance to get him out of her hands—and she saw that it was—then she had to take it and live with the guilt later, maybe for the rest of her life.

She spent the morning calling nursing homes in the area. She couldn’t afford to wait until the end of the day, because the offices would be closed. It wasn’t easy to do; Adelaide seemed to watch her every move.

When she didn’t have any luck on the phone, she left work early with a knot in her gut and drove up to Maple Grove Nursing Home in Port Chester, half an hour north of her house. They had a place for Ed, and they’d accept her application, but they told her that they wanted three years’ payment up front. It was obvious to her that they didn’t want Ed to go into the Medicaid pool, which paid less than private citizens, bargaining for lower rates. Three years up front, factoring in planned increases every six months, was over $225,000. She would drain her cash reserves to zero and still not even be a tenth of the way there. She’d have to cash out the retirement accounts, because they’d already taken out a home equity loan to pay for Connell’s tuition. Even then, she couldn’t get it done in time.

She hadn’t spent an entire career in health care not to pick up any allies along the way. Her friend Emily, whom she’d hired at St. John’s Episcopal, had an in with the state attorney general’s office. Emily had a representative from the office call Maple Grove and get them to drop the demand for up-front payment. Eileen would pay the fee for the first month, $5,800, while the Medicare paperwork got sorted out. Medicare would cover the first twenty days at 100 percent and the next eighty days at 80 percent after a copay. Then she was on her own.

She called Lawrence Hospital and had them fax in the application for her.

•  •  •

“They’re going to transport him tomorrow,” she told Sergei. “Maybe you can stay awhile in case I need help with anything. He may be coming back, for all I know.”

Sergei nodded as if to say he hadn’t imagined it going any other way.

“I’ll pay you, of course,” she said, but she had no idea where she was going to get the money. She would have to figure out these details later. Right now what was important was getting through a difficult time.

In silence they ate the dinner he had prepared. Something in his face, maybe the roundness of it, took the edge off her anxiety. He seemed to prefer mute expressions to speech, two in particular: a half glower that reminded her of her father’s, and a wide-eyed, almost innocent smile.

After they finished eating she dismissed him as he started to clean the dishes. He protested and would only leave the room when she insisted that she needed to use the kitchen phone to spread the news about Ed. She called as many people as she could, until it got to be too late, even accounting for time zones. She left the bunker of the kitchen to face the rest of the first floor, turned off all the lights, and walked up the stairs to the lonely bedroom to pack a bag for Ed.