That Good Night (3 page)

I think that I would have adjusted if just one person would have taken an interest in me not out of pity, but rather out of love. Lori and I had been members of the Emmanuel Lutheran Church for over forty years. We took our kids there, we gave money, we helped pay for a new organ, we even bought choir
robes for the choir. The minister buried Lori. And what happened after that? I had two visits from the creep, one to inquire if I'd like to give a gift in Lori's name to the church's endowment and the other asking if I was interested in setting up a trust. I got a fruit basket from the men's Bible study fellowship, and an ugly afghan knitted by the ladies sewing circle with a note that read “To warm body and soul.” I got pity, enough to overflow a baptismal font. But not one drop of love.

I thought about going on the road. Bumming around in a camper. Maybe get a dog and write about my travels like John Steinbeck did in
Travels with Charley
. Perhaps I'd write about old people trying like hell to live in a world going so fast that they wobble around just trying to stay upright. But there's not a lot to observe doing 70 mph down an interstate. And back roads aren't much better. Ah, I hate driving anyway. It's like the killing fields out there. In my day, I rested my elbow on the frame of an open window letting country air filter through the car, never going more than fifty miles-per-hour. I bet people today drive coast to coast and never get a healthy whiff of good old cow shit. They eat at fast-food conglomerates and keep the kids entertained with some crappy cartoon flashing its junk through the onboard video system. If I did escape to the open road, I figure that I'd get caught right away like I did on the bench waiting for the bus that never came. I'd have to retake my driver's exam, get a camper, get the vehicle registered and insured. Hell, I might as well paint a line leading to where I was. I wanted to disappear. Just vanish. Maybe make it on the Most-Looked-For-Senior-Citizen list.

The idea of where to go once I escaped came to me while I was chatting with a woman named Emma. Emma is a darling
old lady with azure eyes, crystal clear like blue ice. Her hair is thick and pure white, no blue rinses for Emma. She's one of the few women in this place who still has a shape. She doesn't wear smocks or those God-awful Velcro tabbed sneakers. She dresses in a neatly pressed blouse and a nice skirt with leather pumps. You can tell that she was absolutely stunning when she was young. She stirs an old man's memory. I'd like to have known her back then. Her mind is a bit addled, but then that's consistent with things here. She was wearing earrings in the shape of tiny sailboats. I commented on them. “I wear them every June, for the whole month,” she informed me. Then, whispering to me like she was telling a secret, she said, “Damon gave them to me when we reached the Azores.”

“When was that?” I asked, leaning close to her. I noted a hint of lavender.

“I was seventeen, so that would make it sixty-two years ago this month,” she said smiling. Her eyes glistened with youth.

I said nothing. She continued, “I just graduated from high school. Damon just got out of the Army. It was sparks from the very first moment. He told me he wanted to be a sailor, but the only service that would take him was the U.S. Army. To make up for it he bought a sailboat the day he got out. A tiny little thing but big enough for two. We took off together, Annapolis to Corsica.” Fumbling with her right earring, she added, “With a stop at the Azores.” She leaned even closer, spoke even softer, “We had sex right across the Atlantic Ocean.” Her eyes glossed over, she withdrew back into her chair and fell silent. The movie was over. The book closed. Snippets of memory like Emma's pervaded the nursing home. Like photo albums opening and closing, loops of audio tape repeated over and over. Sweet
secrets, regrets, anger, love. Dusty tapestries. Woven with each birth, folded with each death. All pretty much the same colors.

I sailed once upon a time. Up and down the east coast. To Nova Scotia, Newfoundland, Maine, the Chesapeake. I was damned good at it and sailed mostly solo. I eventually gave it up. I loved it, but it wasn't Lori's thing. I never got lonely sailing solo, but sometimes at anchor tucked away in a remote cove, I'd long to have someone onboard to share the mystery of it all: great sunsets or watching an osprey dive needs to be shared. I have great memories, but few to share, a tiny corner of my own tapestry, perhaps. I used to envy sailing couples like Emma and Damon. All told, I guess I sailed on and off for about twenty years. I managed some terrible storms. Was a whiz at navigation. And I never got seasick. Why not go back to it? No trail to follow—I'd like to meet a tracking dog that could sniff out a boat's wake. My plan took on meaning. All I had to do was get the hell out of here and that thought, the idea of getting out of this place filled me with energy and purpose.

Sunsets follow sunrises.
Sunrise, sunset
, like the song says. Endless hope followed by endless rest. The great cycle of life. Well I wasn't ready for the endless rest part. It might make sense poetically to equate death with rest, but it doesn't make any sense to me. I figure that death is it. Nothing afterward, no matter what the Lutherans, or Shirley MacLaine, or anybody else says. No flying up to heaven or morphing into something else. As far as I'm concerned, it's over. I'll take the hope of morning any day. Give me light over dark. And the sea over land. At sea, sunny or stormy, it's all about light, how it dances and cavorts with swells and waves, changing every second: blues and grays, reds and purples, misty greens and yellows. Take unimaginable beauty, mix with turbulent winds and threatening seas, and it turns into a dynamic force that sings songs of life and death and courage and faith and hope. Not like fluorescent white or institutional green that speak nothing to the spirit while robbing the heart of hope. God, I need to get out of here.

My plan was simple enough: Escape, buy a yacht, and sail until I die. I wondered if Frank Morris (Clint Eastwood's character in
Escape from Alcatraz
) had such a simple plan. Probably to start with. Escape is usually fantasy. Carrying it off though is pure reality. For Morris, it entailed making a raft out of raincoats, digging a hole through the cell wall, making a fake
head to stick on his cell pillow to confuse the guards, scaling a wall, jumping over some rocks, swimming through ice cold water, and overtaking the meanest currents on the West Coast. Freedom is a real taskmaster. Escaping Sunset might be easier than what Frank Morris had to contend with, but it was an escape nonetheless. And it did require planning. It relied on luck and demanded creativity. And, for sure, a co-conspirator.

There wasn't a single person in the entire nursing home that I could trust to keep a secret. Secrets are commodities in nursing homes; they gain value with each telling until something new comes along. Sex is a big gossip item. And truth be told, there's lots of it. New couples pop up every day. Yes, old people can still cuddle, stroke, kiss, and make love, and why not? Why suppress what little lust remains? If anything, it should be encouraged. It's fun to talk about sex and all that. But what gets the most attention in the gossip mill is when staff members cross the line and have sex with patients. (Officially, patients are referred to as clients here at Sunset, which I think is nonsense.) Oh yes, it happens more often than you know. Then, of course, there is stuff going on between staff members, between visitors and patients, and between visitors and staff. And who knows what goes on in the kitchen? But trumping sex in the gossip mill are escape stories. A missing patient is the worst thing that can happen to a nursing home. Insurance companies go crazy over it. Government overseers swarm the place like locusts. Nursing homes blame it on senility as if it is some grand surprise. The press loves escapes:
Old Man Escapes Nursing Home to Find Better Life
. “
I just wanted to go home
,” sa
ys tearful eighty-nine year old
. Who wouldn't read an article with headlines like that? “
Disappeared, presumed dead
,” would work just fine for me.

Getting rid of the security strap was first on the list. This was no delicate matter. The bright black plastic must have been made by some devious packaging specialist. I kept picking away at the battleship-tough plastic with a fork I lifted from the cafeteria. No use. Google told me that buried in the plastic were thin wire cables, probably wound from piano wire. I gave up on the idea of cutting the damn thing. I tried using bacon fat that I saved in a napkin from breakfast to try and slip the thing off. No good. I rubbed my ankle raw with a piece of sandpaper I took it from the hobby shop (no electric tools or any sharp objects; how the hell were you supposed to make anything?) hoping that they'd take the damn thing off to let me heal. Nope. I got to wear it on my other ankle. Dan Forteneau (I called him DF—you figure it out), head of security, told me to stop fooling with the strap or I'd get billed for damaging property. I wanted to kick him in the nuts.

After a whole lot of angst, hours of planning and fretting over my escape plans, it dawned on me that I needed help, somebody on the outside I could work with. At my age the list was pretty short. I used to run a company that machined parts for the defense industry. Any one of the guys in my machine shop would have had that strap off in two shakes of a dog's tail. Not a one of my old workers is left. And the company's gone, too. And that's how it went. Everybody was either dead or as far removed from my life as a waterfall is from a desert.

It was Emma again who triggered a thought. We were sitting in the sun room, a closet-like space with one small window facing south. Emma was telling me her sailing story again. She did so word for word with the same pauses, inflections, and sexy little smiles as before. Emma lived only in her memory. While
Emma was telling her story, I began visualizing a memory of my own that took me back to a day many years ago. That morning I had weighed anchor early, to starlit skies and light winds. My plan was to sail from Gran Manan, an island between Nova Scotia and Maine, to a small inlet named The Cows, with an ETA of mid-afternoon. But, as I approached The Cows, I just couldn't relinquish the helm: the sky was too blue, the water too green, and the winds just right. In other words, I just couldn't stop sailing in such perfect conditions. About an hour later, all hell broke loose. A fast moving storm swept in from the Atlantic with high winds. The seas became a witch's brew with sharp foamy waves. I reefed sail, and did what any sailor does in a storm: pray. Things were going well, until my idle prop found an errant net floating just below the waterline. The boat struggled to make headway. The seaway had her in its grips. Trimming the main, I was able to bring her into the wind which had every intention to rip the now flapping sail to destruction. Fiddling with a boat hook, I was able to free the net from the prop and off I went. It was after dark before making the small Down East harbor of Corea, Maine. I dropped my hook in a tiny, well-protected cove, grabbed my bottle of scotch, and swore that I'd rather sell the damn boat than venture out ever again. I either lost my confidence or gained my senses. Either way I was ready to forsake my unrequited love of the sea. A few hours later, I was awakened from a sleep of the dead, by a boat that came up alongside. Hailing me, the guy wanted to know where my hook was so he wouldn't drop his over mine. Now this kind of query can only come from a careful and courteous sailor. I had quite a bit of rode out (anchor line) and felt that a change of wind in such a small cove would inevitably lead
to trouble. So, rather than take the chance, I invited him to tie alongside. He accepted. While he prepared his lines for the tie-up, I busied myself setting out some fenders. In minutes we were two boats on one anchor. Some coffee on my boat and a few shared war stories later, a friendship was born.

A Mainer through and through, Bob Liscome was a hell of a sailor. Which means besides knowing how to tackle the wind, he knew how to fix things. Sailboats are always breaking down. There's just too much that can go wrong. And the engine on these things can be as reliable as a drunken janitor. Bob was a fixer. An independent Mainer who built his own house, cut his own wood, fixed his own trucks, and didn't give a rat's ass what people did, said or thought. Each summer thereafter, we'd meet up and do some serious sailing. It was because of Bob that I regained my sailing legs. The shaking legs of storm-tossed sailors might come from fright, but they build muscle.

If he's still alive, he'll be living right where he always did, Bickles Island, Maine. And I'll bet my life (not worth a lot these days) that he'll come and get me out of this place. All I have to do is make a few phone calls—not an easy thing in a nursing home that locks its phones up like wise daddies lock up their guns.

Visitors are always welcome at Sunset as long as it's between the hours of 4 p.m. and 7 p.m. on weekdays and between 1 p.m. and 7 p.m. on weekends. Patients gravitate like a huddled mass toward the lobby about an hour before the posted times. Some desperate for a visitor, others just to watch the passing parade. Emma never sat in the lobby; Damon was always with her. I was a watcher. I couldn't venture past the red line taped on the floor or I'd set off my alarm, so I took a chair back near the receptionist's desk to watch the world go by. My favorite place was next to a plastic fig tree, leeward of the creepy eyes of DF, who hung around the reception desk like he was about to thwart an attempt to steal state secrets.

I was sitting under my plastic fig tree when I noticed a young family pass by: quintessential American foursome—mom, dad, girl, and boy. The boy was fidgeting with a shiny black rectangle. How the hell that boy didn't bump into anything and everything was beyond me. His eyes were glued to the thing like he was witnessing something miraculous. And, maybe he was. They signed in at reception and disappeared down the white hallway. I followed. The main hallway is an affront to any sane individual over the age of two. The best way I can describe it is by comparing it to a Sunday school corridor where pastel images of biblical scenes are pasted to the walls. Lots of lambs and stuff like that. Only
here, the cardboard cutouts reflect whatever holiday is in vogue. Halloween is particularly offensive to anyone who has ever had to bear nursing home life. Further down the hallway there's a bulletin board showing pictures of clients playing games, sewing, dancing—if that's what you call limping around in a circle, a few mug shots of forced smiles. What you don't see are photos of people picking noses, puking and drooling, or spilling food.