Blue Sky Hill [01] A Month of Summer Page 11

  “Oh, good, you’re awake,” Mary said as she wheeled the woman around to the side of my bed and parked the chair. “Mrs. Parker, this is Ouita Mae Barnhill, Dr. Barnhill’s grandmother. She’s here with us, healing up from a little surgery and doing some volunteer reading to keep busy. Dr. Barnhill thought you two might enjoy spending time together.”

  I wanted to tell Ouita Mae that I wouldn’t be much company, but perhaps the lack of words was a mercy, considering my mood. In truth, it was kind of her to read to me, particularly when she was just healing up from surgery. Clearly, Dr. Barnhill came by his caring ways naturally.

  Mary gave me an encouraging smile as she exited the room, leaving the two of us alone.

  Ouita Mae sighed, reached for the book on the table. “You probably don’t really want company,” she said matter-of-factly, opening the book to the place where my last volunteer reader, a student from SMU, had tucked in a scrap of plastic from her soda bottle label as a marker. “I didn’t want company after I had my stroke. I couldn’t talk, nor anything, and I hated having people see my face saggin’ and my hands curled up. I looked lots worse than you, by the way. You don’t look bad a’tall, sweetie. Of course, you’re younger than me, so you’ll heal up in no time. I was eighty when I had my stroke. Left side.” She held her hand in the air between us, turning it over and back. “You can’t tell it now, though. Don’t let this chair fool you, either. That’s just because I had this orthoscotic surgery day before yesterday. I got some problems with my legs, but I usually get around pretty good.”

  “Ooooh,” I said, and for the first time in weeks, the hope I’d been fostering grew and radiated warmth. If Ouita Mae Barnhill could come through a stroke and return to a normal life, so could I.

  Clearing her throat, Ouita Mae slipped her reading glasses onto the end of her nose and turned her attention to Pirate’s Promise. “I like a good love story with a happy ending,” she remarked, then began reading aloud the story of Gavin and Marcella’s star-crossed romance. When we reached a scene in which Gavin and Marcella could no longer resist the attraction between them, she paused after the first kiss, skimmed ahead, and said, “This don’t leave much to the imagination. Reckon it’ll do to say that, even though his pirates raided her father’s ships and caused her daddy to lose all his money and die a broken man, she’s sure got a thing for him, and she can’t keep herself from it. He ain’t lookin’ for a woman, but he hasn’t ever seen one like her.”

  I couldn’t help myself. I laughed.

  Ouita Mae smiled at me. “Makes me think of bein’ young, lookin’ at a boy, and feelin’ the kind of love that takes your breath away. You know, I got a sweet little neighbor girl who’s twenty-four. I’ve known her since she was born. She’s been dating the same boy off and on since her junior year of high school. After all these years, they decided they ought to get engaged, start planning a wedding. A part of me was sad to see it, a little. I’m afraid she’ll just get married, go on through life with the fella that seems safe and easy, and she’ll never feel the kind of passion that Marcella’s got for Gavin.” Misty-eyed, she turned to me and added, “You know?”

  “Yeeesh,” I whispered, because I did know. I had that kind of passion for Edward. Even now, I felt incomplete without him near.

  Ouita Mae rested her chin on her hand and sighed, then returned to the story. In her relaxed, slow-paced East Texas accent, the tale of Lord Winston’s plot to steal Marcella from her pirate lover and force her into marriage took on an entirely new flavor—a bit like hearing John Wayne read Shakespeare. Occasionally, Ouita Mae paused to insert comments that made me laugh. I let my worries go and just enjoyed her company.

  By the time she closed the book, the lunch trays were being delivered, and in the hall, ambulatory patients were moving to the cafeteria. I was surprised that so much time had passed. “If that Lord Winston isn’t a sorry lot. He’s got Gavin and Marcella gettin’ along about like two alley cats in a tow sack,” she said, as she set the book on my night table. She braced it against the lamp so that the pirate’s picture was facing outward. “Thought you might want somethin’ to look at.” Winking at me, she turned her chair around. “I’ll come back tomorrow, and we’ll find out what happens next.”

  “Aaann-ooo,” I said, which didn’t sound much like thank you, but Ouita Mae nodded, patting my foot as she wheeled her chair past.

  “Don’t you think a thing of it, y’hear?”

  Mary poked her head in the door. “You ready to go down to the dining hall, Mrs. Barnhill?”

  I beckoned Mary to the bed, moving my arm in a clumsy, sweeping motion, then letting it fall to the mattress.

  Mary crossed the room and stood by me, glanced at the pirate on the book’s cover, and blushed. “Did you need something, Mrs. Parker?”

  “K-ul Rrr-buk-uhhh.”

  Mary sighed, inclining her head sympathetically. “I’m sorry, Mrs. Parker. I don’t know what you’re asking for. Want me to turn on the TV?” She picked up the remote.

  “K-ul Rrr-buk-uhhh,” I said again.

  Mary lifted her hands helplessly. “I’m sorry.”

  “Oh, for heaven’s sake.” Ouita Mae paused halfway to the door. “It’s clear as day. She wants you to call Rebecca.”

  Mary’s face lifted with understanding as Ouita Mae disappeared down the hall. “Call Rebecca,” she repeated. “I’m sorry, Mrs. Parker, I should have gotten that.”

  “Yesssh,” I repeated, relieved that finally I’d communicated. “K-ul R-buk-uh.”

  Mary’s look of excitement quickly faded. “Mrs. Parker, they’ve been trying to call the contact number in your file for a couple days now, and it’s not a working line.” Fidgeting with the water glass, she frowned. “They don’t have any way to get ahold of your family.”

  They don’t have any way to get ahold of your family. The reality of the words struck a hard blow. All my previous joy flew from the room like a sweet scent before a storm. Why would our phone have been disconnected? How? Much of the recent past was foggy in my memory, but years ago, Edward had arranged for all of our monthly bills to be drafted automatically from our bank account. We’d had a disagreement about it, because I was afraid the bank’s computer might fail to pay on time. Edward laughed and said that computers don’t forget things, people do. There was no way our bills could have gone unpaid.

  Unless Rebecca had changed things. Unless, as I feared, she was closing down the house, moving Teddy and Edward … where? What if this was her final revenge for my taking her father from her all those years ago? Having heard only her mother’s side of the story, she probably had no reason to feel charitable toward Edward, or toward me. At twelve, she was powerless, but now, all the power rested with her.

  The idea tensed the pit of my stomach, tying a hard knot of fear. I grabbed Mary’s hand on the railing. “Myeee hhh …” I couldn’t form the word house. My house. My house. My house. “Myeee hhhow.” That isn’t right. That’s not right. I turned my body, tried to reach for the TV remote.

  “Mrs. Parker, what are … the TV?” Mary took the remote and turned on the television. “All right, tell me when you see something you want to watch.”

  I waited while she flipped through the channels. A commercial came on, something about vinyl siding. “Hhhow! Hhhow!”

  Mary turned to the screen, took in the picture. “House?” she muttered, then, “House! Your house?” Her lips parted in a silent Ohhh. “Mrs. Parker, you can’t go home right now. You have to stay here until you’re better.”

  “Nnno.” The sound was louder than I’d expected. It filled the room “Yyyou ugg-go.” We’d practiced stop and go in speech therapy, thank goodness. I punched my hand clumsily toward the screen again.

  She considered the words for a moment, like a contestant trying to solve a puzzle. “You want me to go home?”

  My hand fell against the railing, my arm exhausted by the effort. “Yyyyou hhhowt uggg-go. Myeee.”

  “You want me to go to your hous
e?”

  “Yesh,” I breathed, and let my head sink to the pillow. “Yyyou ugg-go.”

  Mary drew back, unsettled by the dawning realization of what I was asking her to do—something far beyond the scope of her job. What choice did I have but to ask, to plead with her? There was no one else. There was only Mary, with her wide jade-colored eyes and her soft heart, who might understand that I needed to know what was happening to Edward and Teddy.

  Without Mary, I was helpless.

  CHAPTER 9

  Rebecca Macklin

  The days were passing in a blur of phone calls and visits to utility companies, cleaning the house and throwing out all the rotten food, hours spent digging through piles of mail, both opened and unopened, which my father had randomly combined with paperwork from the file cabinet in his office and stacked in odd places. There seemed to be no pattern to his actions, only a determination to protect various pieces of information from those people, who came and went silently, rummaging through the house, moving things, hiding bills beneath the paint cans in the garage, stealing the peanut butter and tucking it under the bathroom sink with the spare toilet paper. When I brought home groceries on the first day, half of them disappeared before the next morning. My father insisted that those people had come and eaten the food. I found hamburger rotting under his bed two days later. If he didn’t take his sleeping pill in the evening, he moved through the rooms at night, turning the lights on and off, sometimes talking to those people, sometimes threatening them, sometimes hiding from them.

  He wanted to be sure that I, Marilyn, didn’t listen to anything those people said about him. They told lies. They wanted him to be fired from his job. In the evenings, when his delusions reached their height, he was certain that Teddy was one of those people. He screamed at Teddy, tried to make him leave the house. Teddy ran upstairs to his bedroom, turned out the lights, and stayed, no matter what time it was. My father had trouble navigating the stairs, so Teddy was safe there. If he turned out the lights and kept silent, Daddy Ed would eventually stop hollering from the entry hall.

  Teddy had developed an amazing set of coping mechanisms for dealing with the increasing dementia. He’d learned to get up early, make peanut butter and jelly sandwiches for breakfast, eat quickly, leave a sandwich by my father’s chair, then go to the backyard, where various stray cats waited for crusts of bread and Teddy’s tender attention.

  For whatever reason, my father wouldn’t enter the backyard, so Teddy could remain there unmolested, except for an occasional back-door rant, during which Teddy hid in the garden house. When Daddy Ed slept in the afternoons, Teddy came in, made sandwiches again, took one, left one by the chair, then went back outside. In the evening, he sneaked inside and hid in the coatroom or the maid’s pantry until my father went to bed. On windy nights, he carried seedlings with him in his makeshift pots and put them inside where they wouldn’t blow over. He was preparing for spring planting of the flower beds, convinced that growing the plants and readying the flower beds would make Hanna Beth come home.

  Watching him work outside, I felt a nagging sympathy and an intense sadness. Teddy knew everything about plants—how to grow them, how to nurture them, how to prune the rosebushes and thin the iris bulbs—but he couldn’t understand the events taking place inside the house. He couldn’t comprehend the severity of his mother’s condition, or the fact that raising a multitude of seedlings wouldn’t bring her back. He was convinced that if he kept planting, she would come. When she did, he was certain she would fix Daddy Ed, and things would be normal again.

  If only the problem were that simple. After three days of house-cleaning, sneaking the gas man in to relight the pilot lights on the stove and furnace, replacing pieces of the cable box, which I later found hidden in a kitchen drawer, and arranging for the electric service, I felt as if I’d been dropped into some strange docudrama about the monumental problems facing the elderly and mentally ill.

  The difficulty of caretaking, an issue I’d only considered in the context of my mother’s lupus, became increasingly clear. In my mother’s case, there were shop workers and a live-in maid to help her. Even on her worst days, I knew she was in good hands when I couldn’t be there with her. When I returned, she would be peacefully reading a book or watching TV in the apartment above the shop, or she’d be downstairs rearranging displays and showing customers the latest goodies from the garment district. Her surroundings would be immaculately clean, everything in order, sweet-smelling, despite the collection of prescribed medications, exotic essential oils, and herbal remedies on the counter.

  When I left the house on Blue Sky Hill, even just to go to the closest grocery store, to the electric or gas company offices, or to the bank in a futile effort to gain access to my father’s accounts, I had no idea what I would return to. I left Teddy behind in hopes that if something happened, he could handle it, but the truth was that Teddy was even more lost than I was.

  On the third day, the utilities finally in order, the television fixed, and stashes of rotten food cleaned out, the house took on a vague sense of sanity. My father found the television both mesmerizing and calming. The old reruns on TV Land were a particular comfort to him. They fit neatly within the time period into which his mind had slipped. He’d decided that we had just returned from Saudi.

  “There you are, Marilyn,” he’d say, when I walked through the living room. “Shouldn’t Rebecca be coming in from school?”

  There was a strange satisfaction in his asking about me. The sensation came, unwanted, then flew away when I reminded myself that he wasn’t really thinking about me, just remembering the past.

  Teddy didn’t fit easily into his recollections. After trying repeatedly to explain who Teddy was, I finally gave up and started telling him that Teddy was the gardener. Trying to force the current reality on my father only caused him to become agitated, loud, and aggressive.

  Teddy was happy to be the gardener, as long as the house remained relatively peaceful and the TV in his bedroom was working again. He came in and out the back door of the garage and typically sneaked up the stairs when my father wasn’t looking.

  After three days of intermittently searching for information about my father’s doctors and medications, calling pharmacies listed on aging prescription bottles, and talking to administrators at Hanna Beth’s nursing center, I was beginning to wonder if my father had ever received any supervised medical treatment for his illness. The drawers in the kitchen and master bath contained a hodgepodge of prescriptions, filled at different times by various online pharmacies—strange, considering that there was no computer in the house. When I logged on to the Internet with my laptop and Googled the attending physicians listed on the bottles, they hailed from locations throughout the United States and Canada, even Mexico. As far as I could discern, he hadn’t seen a local doctor in well over a year. The last prescription authorized by a nearby doctor was for Aricept, an Alzheimer’s medication. I called Dr. Amadi’s office and explained my father’s situation.

  “I don’t have your name as an emergency contact in your father’s file,” the receptionist informed me. “I can’t give out his medical information.”

  “May I bring him in for an appointment?”

  “Yes, ma’am. When did you want the appointment?”

  “Tomorrow.”

  “Ma’am, we’re running three weeks out on appointments.”

  My frustration bubbled up and poured into the phone. “You don’t understand. I need to bring him in tomorrow. His wife is in the hospital, and he has been alone in the house. I have no idea what medications he’s been taking, or should be taking, and he can’t tell me. He’s confused, and he’s seeing things that aren’t there. I don’t know how long he’s been this way, and there’s no one I can ask. I need to bring him in tomorrow.”

  “Ma’am, our files show that we haven’t seen Mr. Parker in well over a year. I don’t have any record of a request for a transfer of his files, but he must have been receiving
treatment somewhere else.”

  I paused, rubbing clammy palms on my jeans, struggling to keep my desperation from spiraling out of control. I was tired of uncertainty and fear, tired of getting the runaround from utility companies, tired of the bank refusing to allow me to access my father’s accounts, tired of trying to produce order from insanity, alone. “I don’t have any more recent information. I need to bring him in tomorrow. This is an emergency … please.”

  The receptionist sighed. “I can squeeze you in at ten thirty.”

  Relief opened my lungs. “We’ll be there. Can you tell me where your office is located?” As I jotted down the information, a new problem crept to the forefront. So far, I hadn’t seen my father leave the house. My contact with him had consisted of trying to mollify his outbursts, keep him calm—either sleeping or watching television— convince him to take in regular meals when he wasn’t hungry, and reassure him that those people had left the house. I had no idea what might be involved in getting him into the car and to a doctor’s office.

  After hanging up the phone, I went in search of Teddy. At least he was aware of Hanna Beth’s routines, and some information was better than none. He would know how often she took Daddy Ed out of the house, and how she accomplished it.

  I looked for Teddy in the backyard, then in his room, the kitchen, the garage. Finally, it became clear that he was gone.

  My pulse raced faster and faster until it thrummed in my ears, and I felt dizzy. I paced back and forth in the entry hall, looking out the front door, checking up and down the street, alternately walking to the living room and making sure my father was still settled in front of the TV.

  An hour passed, then another twenty minutes. My father fell asleep; I stood on the front steps, trying to decide what to do. In the days I’d been there, Teddy hadn’t left the yard. He’d asked me repeatedly to take him to see his mother, and I’d told him I couldn’t until I had things straightened out at the house. What if he’d grown impatient and decided to try the DART system again? What if he was wandering around town on buses and light rail trains, alone, lost, at the mercy of anyone he might happen across? It was already almost five o’clock. What if darkness fell, and he was still out there?