Losing It (25 page)

Bob had a wild thought – he could just keep going. Get in the car, drive away, never be heard from again. He could pick up Sienna at her residence then drive south. They’d be in the States in an hour, could go all the way to Florida in three days. Two if they pushed it, but they wouldn’t need to push.
They’d be together. Wherever they were, it would just be them.

They were always looking for professors in Florida, he thought.

“I’m sorry to ask you,” Julia said, pleading this time. She was leaning halfway out the door in her old terry-cloth bathrobe, her hair a mess, face drained and puffy with strain and fatigue. He could hear Lenore’s voice from inside, whining about something. “But it would probably save a life if you just took him for a bit. I’m
not
asking you to take my mother,” she added, and he knew one word of disagreement from him – one syllable of protest, of non-compliance – and the detonator would go off. Part of him desperately wanted to do it anyway, to say, “I’m just going to the drugstore,” and then watch the mushroom cloud rise.

“That’s fine,” he said instead, though not cheerfully, not willingly.

“Oh,
would
y
ou
? Oh, thank you!” she said, and if he’d been at the porch still she would have hugged him. He knew that and stayed where he was, feeling brittle, resentful. “I’ll just get him changed. I won’t be a minute.
What is it, Mother?”
she said, then disappeared, the door closed.

Bob stood on the walkway, shoved his hands in his pockets. She wasn’t ready in a minute. He knew she couldn’t accomplish anything in a minute. But she wasn’t five minutes, either, and then she wasn’t ten, which seemed like an hour to Bob anyway as he stood in the chilly air suspended where he was like a puppet. He hadn’t put his sweater on, just his light jacket, because he knew he was just going to be in the car and then the store. He shivered, paced a bit up and down the walkway. The maple tree in the front looked naked and dead. In just a few days most of the leaves had blown off. There they were, lying on the lawn, one more thing for him to look after.

He didn’t want to go back in. Chilly as it was, being outside still felt better than being in the madhouse.

When fifteen minutes had passed, Bob almost decided to leave. He could probably be back before Julia had Matthew ready anyway. He’d say, “Too late,” as he walked in the house with his little bag from the pharmacy. “Too late,” he’d say, and watch the meltdown.

But when twenty minutes had passed he stepped back onto the porch, put his hand on the door handle, and watched, both knowingly and in amazement, as the inside door opened and Julia thrust a hat-and-mittened, jacketed boy at him. “I’m sorry, it couldn’t be helped,” she said crossly. “I’d be happy to take him if you want to stay here with
her.”

“No,” he said calmly, reasonably, as sweet-naturedly as he could summon. He took the baby in his arms. “Matthew and I will have a good time.”

“There are a few other things I need you to get,” she said in her way. A few other things. Bob rocked back on his heels as she produced the list. “We need the children’s multiple vitamins,” she said, “not the dinosaur ones, he won’t take those, but the robot ones in grape, not cherry. We need toothpaste, too, both a new tube for us and one for Mother. She uses Longworth’s tooth powder, there’s only one place that has it, it’s the McIntyre’s downtown on Rideau Street. Do you know the one I mean? I’m sorry, if you can’t manage I’ll do it myself later. I just thought that since you’re going -”

“I didn’t say I couldn’t manage it,” Bob said stiffly.

“Well, you gave me your look.”

“What look?” he asked. Ten seconds to meltdown. He could feel the detonation building.

“Your look,” she said lightly. “Like you’re putting up with me.”

Bob tried not to look at her that way.

“I’m sorry. Anyway,” she continued, “I need sanitary napkins. I know you don’t like to get them but it would save me a trip and I do get condoms for you. I like the Daisy Clear but not with the wings. You might as well get the bulk box. I love you,” she said, and handed him the list, leaned out the door, and caught his ear with a kiss that was close to being a bite. “I
adore you,”
she whispered. She gave his bum a very familiar squeeze, right there in the doorway, and as he turned away she said, “Oh, and diapers, please. I think we need him in disposables at night. Check the weight to get the right size! He’s twenty-nine pounds, if you can believe it!”

Bob smiled numbly as he turned away. His feet were cold from standing so long. Matthew started gurgling about a squirrel and Bob opened the van door, put him in his baby seat in the back. “A five-minute errand,” he said to the boy as he buckled him in. “Do you see how this works? You want to go out for a five-minute errand and you end up with a yard-long list that takes you all the way to Rideau Street buying sanitary napkins!”

Matthew said, “Kwirrel! Kwirrel!” and pointed out the window.

20

“H
ello,” Julia said into the phone. She was in the master bedroom, had shut the door, did not, at that moment, know exactly where her mother was or what she might be doing. “Is that Lisette Tremblay? Oh, wonderful, you’re there. Yes, hello,” she said, and introduced herself, her voice sounding foreign, as if it belonged to some other daughter whose neck was not wooden with strain, who didn’t have what felt like an arrowhead buried deep behind her left eyebrow. “We met in the summer. I’m sorry to call you on the weekend, but you’ll remember that my mother, Lenore Carmichael, is looking for a room in a full-care facility …”

Lisette Tremblay did remember her, and Julia remembered Rideau Gates, with its tired carpets, bored-looking attendants, the vague odour of vomit in the elevator. It had been “no, thank you” then, but now she was desperate, and Lisette Tremblay had seemed like a caring, competent person who wouldn’t choose to work somewhere that wasn’t worthwhile. It was hard enough to get hold of anybody on a Sunday, but of those Julia could get answers from, the waiting list at Rest Haven was a year and a half, at Tanglewood almost two years. And under no
circumstances would she take her mother back to those incompetents at Fallowfields.

“Yes, yes. And are you still looking?” Lisette Tremblay asked. A lilting French accent. “Your mother does not need full-care though, does she?”

When they visited in the summer, they’d just been looking for a smaller place for her mother, for a bit of extra care; they didn’t know then that her mind was in the process of rapidly falling apart. So Julia told the woman the story of the diagnosis and explained what had happened at Fallowfields. Low noises of surprise or empathy came over the line – Julia remembered from their summer meeting how this woman would suck her teeth when she concentrated.

“She must be kept absolutely safe. There is no negotiating this,” Julia said. “She must be well fed and looked after by competent professionals who’ve been properly trained in dealing with Alzheimer’s sufferers.”

“Of course. Yes!” Lisette said, but added, “You know, Fallowfields really has an excellent reputation.”

“You have to understand,” Julia pressed. “I can’t leave my mother there any more. I have no
confidence …”

“Absolutely,” Lisette said, as if she understood. But how could she? It hadn’t been her mother wandering in the wild waters at Hog’s Back. Suddenly Julia thought, they stick up for one another, these old-age-home workers. Probably residents at Rideau Gates wander loose all the time too. She was so angry that she had to stop and ask Lisette to repeat what she’d been saying, which turned out to be a variation of what Julia had already heard elsewhere: “It’s just that full-care, you know, it’s a much longer waiting list. There are so many now. I think it would be best if you brought her back to Fallowfields. If she still has a bed there.”

“Thank you. Thank you anyway,” Julia heard herself say. She pressed the phone back on its cradle while her pen dug deep black lines into the pad balanced on her knee.

I can’t look after her, Julia thought. I wish I could but I’m just not a saint! And she remembered how her mother would spit out those words at her father. How majestic she could be. “You must have married the wrong woman. I am just not a saint!”

Julia let her eyes linger on a picture by her bed of her sitting with her parents on a big rock in front of a waterfall. Her brother, Alex, had taken it. Her father and mother were on either side of her; little Julia, about ten or eleven, with short-cropped hair, a sun dress, white knee socks, an underbite that orthodontics would soon erase. Although it was a holiday – they’d been hiking in Vermont – her father was wearing a shirt and tie, long pants freshly pressed, polished leather shoes. He was balding already, had his ubiquitous cigarette between his fingers, but down by his side, away from his daughter. He looked confident, all-knowing, vaguely bored. Her mother was in a skirt and stockings and a pale sleeveless flowered blouse, with low-heeled pumps, though not completely flat. No one would wear them for hiking now. But she looked normal, herself, an arm around her daughter, her mouth set, but just for a moment – she seemed to be on the verge of telling Alex how to take the picture. The falls were behind them, mostly mist and fuzz with this focus and angle. And it was just a trick of the angle, too, that made it seem that they were all on the verge of falling over, were standing innocent and unaware, flushed from the hike so far, had no idea how close they were to the brink.

In the picture her mother looked like a woman of her generation, but who’d had her children somewhat late and reluctantly, a woman who knew seven different recipes for pâté, who folded the napkins like flowers in the wine glasses and was
aware of her partner’s strong suit even if she didn’t always lead to it. A woman who planned birthday parties with the organization of a military campaign, who knew in her bones the minute you failed to brush your teeth or wash your hands or put soiled linen in the laundry hamper, who borrowed guide books from the library months before a vacation and within days of the return had the best photos pasted in an album with cheery captions printed below: “
Alex finds a leaf!” “Trevor looking handsome.” “Lost in a good book.”

She was the backwards-spelling champion of her elementary school, and at breakfast used to torment her daughter with elaborate tests of mental arithmetic, impatiently tapping her fingers on the table while Julia tried to work things out. This brainy, glint-eyed woman who had all the answers but never quite seemed to know what to do with her life. How pathetic she would appear to Julia just a few years later – constantly starting this course or that, on the verge of being saved by Intro to Sociology, the Art of Pottery, or the Bible in Modern Thought. Unable to make up her mind, to commit to something while the whole world was changing.

Too late now, Julia thought. Somehow decades had gone by. She picked up the phone again to give in, to call Fallowfields, but then put it down. It was her last option really, but she didn’t want to think about it now. She carried the framed photo downstairs, where she found her mother squatting on her heels in the den, pawing at the rug.

“What’s the problem? What are you looking for?” Julia asked.

“Nothing!” her mother said, pawing, pawing. It was a strangely animalistic movement, as if she were digging, or cleaning herself off.

“Here, I’ve found something,” Julia said and put her hands on her mother’s to make them stop.

“I believe I have too!” her mother said.

“What have you found?”

“It’s really something,” she said. “I don’t know what it is. I’ve lost the word. How does that happen?”

Julia stayed with her, squatting, holding her hands, until her mother stood up suddenly and announced, “It’s been lovely!” and started walking away. She walked to the sofa and pulled up one of the cushions, examined it intently, then threw it aside and pulled up another.

“Mom, I’ve found a photo of all of us from many years ago that Alex took in Vermont. Do you remember when we went hiking? Here, leave that and come have a look.”

“Is there anything I can get you?” her mother asked. The second cushion went on the floor on top of the first and she uprooted the third.

“No. Please leave that and come sit with me for a moment. I’ve got this photo to show you.”

Her mother took the photo in her trembling hand. “Trevor is going to be so annoyed.”

“No. No, he won’t,” Julia said. “Do you remember this trip? Daddy broke the clutch outside of Stowe and we rode down the hill all the way to the garage. Do you remember that?”

“I do remember that. I remember it very clearly,” her mother said.

“And the little motel where we stayed? A deer came right up to the window in the morning. Daddy wanted to go get his gun but you wouldn’t let him do it. He was just fooling anyway. He hadn’t even brought it. The deer was so tame he ate out of my hand.”

“And we lost the baby,” her mother said sadly.

“No. No, there was no baby.”

“The wolf came. It was
awful
. I remember the sandwiches. Sand, and garlic, and old worms. Just awful.”