I Like You Just Fine When You're Not Around (5 page)

He'd moved carefully that morning, so many weeks before—trying to find matching socks, stepping into an old pair of running shoes. Out of view, he clipped his best friend, his sport watch, to his wrist. He reappeared in her line of sight with just the breath of time she needed to close her eyes; he'd bent and kissed her forehead.

She smiled and rolled onto her side and put her arm around the sleeping body of Thatcher. The more recent memory of the night before returned with the feeling of dense fur on her cheek. Thatcher, eager for breakfast, slapped her tail as Tig pushed to a seated position. She stepped out of bed, silently following her memory of Pete out of their room. Listening to their conversation again now from the vantage point of loss, Tig tried to figure out where her relationship GPS had led her astray. Had she expected too much, or had there been a kind of bait and switch? Had there been signs at the beginning of the relationship that read both
Scenic Road
and
Dead End
? Had she turned toward one and ignored the other?

At the sink, she filled her coffee carafe with water and her thoughts floated to another memory, when Pete had said, “Did you see Hope House called? That private room you were waiting for opened up.”

“Stop pushing! I know she has to go.” She had felt immediately sorry, and said, “Do you think my mom hurt herself on purpose? Do you think on some level she was trying to orchestrate her own death?”

“She cut herself trying to peel an apple. If she wanted to die, I doubt she would try to sever her thumb.” He paused and softened. “If anything subconscious was going on, it was that she didn't want to be a burden. She knew you would never put her in a nursing home unless she hurt herself.”

Tig had snapped her head up. “She'd be right! And, if I had been around during
your
accident, I wouldn't have put you in one, either.”

“Thank God you weren't around. You would have been fired for unethical caregiver infringements.” He raised his eyebrows suggestively and leaned in to her, his private chemistry of odors mingled with her coffee as he drew her in for a kiss. She lingered over the softness of his lips and the contrasting stubble at his chin, her irritation dissipating.

He pulled away and said, “I better go, or I'll write a completely different plan for our day. Go see what your mom wants for breakfast. Which, by the way, I know you are thinking about even as we kiss.”

“How is it that you know me so well after just one year?”

“You're not exactly full of quiet mystery.” He strolled to the door, and without turning his head, said, “I'm making our arrangements for Hawaii. Keep that rolling around your pretty little head.”

Now, as she sipped her coffee alone, it was all she could think of.

Tig walked past flowering lavender, red-hot geraniums, and newly planted rose impatiens lining the brick walkway of Hope House Long-Term Care and Treatment Center. She had originally reserved today for packing for Hawaii. Now she couldn't bear to be home. Tig had arrived at Hope House in time for breakfast, head still wet from a quick shower. Now she glanced at her reflection in the tall mirrored doors of the memory care unit and saw that her eyes were already tired from a restless night, as she approached what promised to be a long day of trying to decipher her mother's confused threads of conversation.

The electric doors parted as if to say,
Let's get it over with.
Just inside the front doors, against the western wall of the foyer, stood a tall glass-covered bird sanctuary. Tig counted eight birds grooming and flitting with indecision around the enclosure.

“Poor bastards,” said a voice near her.

Tig gave a sidelong glance to the older man just inside the door. With his crisp white shirt and blue sports coat, Tig assumed he was a husband or older friend visiting a loved one. “Oh, I don't know,” she said. “They look happy.”

“Sure they are,” he said, making a clicking noise with his tongue, the kind Tig used when she was disgusted with her hair.

Tig smiled politely and watched him walk down the long hallway. Beneath his pinstriped sports coat he wore crumpled blue-and-white striped pajama bottoms that stopped above his bony, hairless ankles and mismatched, ill-fitting slippers. A nurse popped out of a room and guided him down the hall saying, “There you are, Mr. Stanson. Are you sure you don't want to put pants on today?” Tig reconfigured the man in her mind from visitor to inmate, and for just a moment rested her head on the cool glass of the aviary.

Behind the central nursing station sat a blond woman with a telephone resting on her shoulder, a chart opened on the desk. She wore a uniform top patterned with patchwork bears with stethoscopes and wide smiles examining each other for pathogens. Tig hurried and counted twenty-two steps past the main desk to her mother's door. A dark-haired man in street clothes exited the room next to her mother's, holding a plastic water pitcher. Tig eyed him for signs of non-patient status: matching street shoes, unstained khaki pants, shirt buttoned correctly, knowing grin.

“I'm visiting my mother,” he said, a dimple punctuating his smile.

“Can't be too careful,” Tig said, embarrassed to have been caught in her shoe-to-collarbone assessment.

“It's true,” he said, “I noticed right away you weren't wearing white Velcro shoes and an elastic waistband.”

Tig glanced at her own mother's room and said, “You know you're a regular here when you can engage in nursing home banter.”

The man smiled and looked like he might say more. She had an impulse to touch his arm, to sit and leave her lipstick on the edge of a Styrofoam coffee cup while telling him her troubles. It should have been awkward, this pause, but instead it felt like a breath. A moment untouched by the trudging march of time. Tig touched her hair and said, “Ah, well.”

He smiled again. “Yes.”

On the door, just under her mother's room number (twelve), hung a framed biography of the resident within and a photograph from her past. The picture was the same one that Tig had kept on her desk: her youngish mother with her daughters and Tubby, the family's beloved, fat black Labrador. Tig had written her mother's story carefully so the nurses and therapists would have some idea of the fullness of the life beyond the heavy door.

Hallie Monahan worked for 35 years as a veterinarian in the clinic that she opened in 1971. She was known for her good sense, compassion, and humor where people's pets were concerned, and she made home visits long after medical doctors stopped making them. She was married to Daniel Monahan for eighteen years until his untimely death at 43. Consequently, it was she who taught her two daughters how to throw a baseball, to make killer seafood paella, and to take the fishhook out of a Saint Bernard's nose. While she preferred the chaos and expense of several animals in her home, her girls always came first. Her eyes have always been robin's-egg blue, her left incisor always a little cockeyed, and her singing voice more than a little flat. She went to Paris once and forever after peppered her conversation with French, just for fun. Hallie was never dull, scattered, or priority-confused. She was and always will be a force of nature—so enter with a smile and leave your old-lady expectations at the door. Welcome.

Now Tig thought it seemed obituary-like, and wanted to take the red pen from her purse and edit it where it hung. She glanced down the hall and saw the dark-haired man at the nurses' station looking in her direction. She waved and pushed into the room, and there she stayed until she decided that maybe her presence was causing more harm than good.

Around four-thirty
P.M
., her mother began her transition from sweet-natured and pleasantly confused to irritated and aphasic. At six
P.M
. she was angry and insistent that she wanted to go home. Beseeching looks accompanied her plaintive requests.

“I want to go home,” was really all that was left of the evening. Tig tried distracting her with photo albums of dogs, took her for a walk in the greenhouse, and even plied her with leftover pie from her dinner.

And between mouthfuls Tig would become hopeful, then disappointed, when she realized that what she thought was a conversation was really just a broken record of the same request.

“I want.”

“I know. You love pie.”

“When?”

“Always, you've always loved pie.”

“Can I.”

“You can always have pie, Mom.”

“Go home?”

“You are home, Mom.”

Her mother, entirely disgusted, came out with the very clear, “You eat it,” shoving the wheeled hospital table away with the half-eaten slice of pie. Tig put her fork down and swallowed the mouthful of overly sugary pie filling that left a slick residue on her tongue. When the nursing assistant came in to help her mother to the bathroom, Tig said, in almost as wretched a whisper as her mother, “I want to go home.” And she did.

• • •

Outside, the temperature felt a simpatico seventy degrees, there was nary a breeze, and she caught sight of a handful of lightning bugs hovering a foot above the ground. This was a night for lovers. In her car, she closed her eyes, feeling the eyelid grit of the chronically sleep-deprived, then after a few minutes opened them again and drove the already too-familiar route from Hope House to her own home. Once in her driveway, the thought of moving from the seat of her car up the steps and through her door felt impossible and without reward. It was as if she were at the starting line of an obstacle course where the grand prize was entry into another obstacle course, this one called “Pain for Your Troubles.”

Finally she shoved out of her Subaru and hauled herself into her house. Tig remembered the last time she had come home late from a night at Hope House. Just as she had put her hand on the cool, brass knob it had been whisked from her with a rush of air. Pete had been in front of her, his hair wet from a shower, his handsome face washed clean. Without a word, she had placed her head on his chest, both of her arms hanging straight at her sides.

He had said, “Another tough night, I take it.” Without removing her head from the center of his sternum, Tig nodded and took in the distinct smell of Pete. She always said, after a shower, that if Pete could bottle his own particular mix of boy and man-earth-scent, they could market it together as a kind of couple's therapy. One whiff and you were sure you were home. The trick to maintaining that pheromone bliss, Tig knew, was that both people involved must not speak—a bargain Tig could never keep.

She'd said, “I don't want to leave her.”

Pete, having heard this many days and nights and mornings, picked up an army-green book bag and an old canvas mail bag filled with running clothes and said, “The truck is coming in a week. All the moving boxes, tape, and bubble wrap are in the garage.” With hands as dry as an old Western saddle, nails shortened to the quick, he briefly touched her cheek and said, “This is a good thing.”

Only now did she remember what she'd mumbled just loud enough for him to hear: “For who?”

Now that Tig knew what was coming, that he'd leave without her, she wished that she'd stuck to her guns, that she'd said, “I need another month.” She had wanted to stay and help her mother, to pack up their family memories slowly, maybe even alone without the over-motivated audience that was Pete. But she had not asked for more time. She had not. She had been game. And this is what she had gotten for being game. She got to be alone.

Inside the house, she turned and watched the ghost of Pete slouch through the front door and sling his bags over his shoulder. In her mind he mounted his bike with a graceful kick over the seat. Pete, whose exuberance she both loved and chafed against, because of his healthy no-holds-barred way of thinking. The kind of thinking he inherited from his almost bionically healthy parents and shared with his Olympic-swimmer sister, the people in his life who never, ever false-started or asked for a sag wagon of support like Tig had. She pushed through the screen, and called to this Pete apparition, “I get it, Pete. I was difficult. I didn't want to go. But you loved me, I know you did.”

Ghost Pete said, “Call Wendy,” over his shoulder, and it was this innocent, imagined phrase that seemed to begin her final unraveling.

It was early-afternoon at Hope House. Tig could tell the time not by a clock, but by the post-meal anxiety that was just beginning to ramp up. Nobody had lost their speech yet, but there were a lot of complaints about the food.

She'd spent a fairly calm day with her mother doing three things: thinking about Pete while walking her mother, replaying their relationship for signs of dissatisfaction while walking her mother, and attempting to use her counseling techniques to clear her mind while walking her mother.

During bathroom breaks, she looked at her smartphone's priority number directory, and looked for clues to Pete's insistence that something wasn't right between them. It didn't take long to see what Pete might have characterized as “unexciting": her cell favorites listed the number one position as her sister Wendy, then Hope House, Tig's job, and Corner Pizza sequentially down the list, all occupying the premier real estate positions in her phone. Wasn't this proof of disorganization and a busy life, though, not a prioritization of importance?

She ached to talk to Pete, to deliver the speeches she had prepared last night while tossing between sleep, outrage, and grief. She wanted to shout, “How could you?” sometimes with fierce anger, other times with a sad emphasis on her feelings of rejection.

A female voice asked from behind the privacy curtain, “How do you wear your hair, Mrs. Monahan?”

“That's nice of you to ask. I like it pulled back. A ponytail is fine. It keeps it out of my eyes when I'm working with the animals.”