“It’s nice to meet all of you,” she said as she hoisted her loaded canvas bag higher on her shoulder. “I’m just sorry it has to be under these circumstances. This is my specialty—consulting on Alzheimer’s. And it’s always hard. There will be a ‘new normal’ for all of you that will be difficult to accept, but I’m here to help.”
“Thank you,” Shane said, and he stepped aside to show her into the living room. The siblings followed and they all took seats on the couch and side chairs.
Susan glanced at each of them and then spoke evenly. “This disease and its accompanying problems can bring out the worst in families. Old wounds can open as responsibilities shift. Let’s try to let this bring out the best in us.”
“Well,” Shane said as they all sat facing one another over the pine coffee table, “we can certainly try.”
“You see,” Susan said, “with this disease the family is thrown off center.”
Colleen thought, We were already off center, but she swallowed the comment and leaned forward to hear Susan.
“I’m here to give you coping tools.” She held a folder. “First, there’s paperwork to apply for help—there’s government assistance in certain cases, community support services, and I can help you figure out what your medical insurance will cover. Once you fill out all these forms we can decide exactly what might help. You have to be patient, as the process can be tedious.”
“We might be able to get help from agencies and you?” Hallie asked.
“Yes,” Susan continued. “And decisions must be made about your father’s driving, his living arrangements and his daily life. You must become aware of what will happen as the disease progresses. It is best to be prepared.”
Colleen stood, feeling shaky, needing a breath from the barrage of information. “Would you like some coffee?”
Susan nodded. This woman with her facts and her papers and her forms made Dad’s disease more real in a way she hadn’t expected. Colleen walked to the kitchen and poured coffee into one of Shane’s dark brown pottery mugs with the pub logo etched on the side. “Milk or sugar?” she asked, welcoming the few minutes’ reprieve.
“No, thank you.”
Colleen handed the mug to Susan, who continued, “I know this stack of forms looks overwhelming. But everything you do will help. I have information on how to fully understand your own assets. I have brochures on care facilities, in-home care providers and more.”
“It’s a lot.” Hallie slid the papers around the coffee table like a stack of tarot cards that could read their future. “Medical forms. Insurance forms. And what is this? A living will?”
“Yes.”
“Power of attorney?” Colleen asked.
“While your dad is still mentally able, he must decide who will have the power to make financial decisions once he is unable. This is all the more important because he operates a business.”
“Shane already has power of attorney.” Hallie picked up a paper. “He signed it after Mother passed. You know, just in case.”
“Just in case?” Colleen asked. “Or just because you told him to?”
“Because Shane runs the business.” Hallie stared directly at Susan instead of Colleen.
Susan exhaled a long, jittery sigh as if she’d been through this many times and was hoping that, this once, she wouldn’t have to face a bickering family. “And I need to tell you about these papers.” She held a pile of photocopied sheets. “This is an article by Pauline Boss about the myth of closure. I want you to read it. Alzheimer’s is a disease with a pattern of loss. It’s unlikely that you’ll experience the five stages of grief you’ve been taught. I don’t want you to expect it. I’ve discovered that your experience may be more like what Boss calls ‘ambiguous loss.’”
“Which is?” Colleen asked.
“Where there is a physical presence but a psychological loss.” Susan sipped her coffee and allowed the silence to stretch beyond the comfortable.
“Now what?”
After another thirty minutes of explaining forms, Susan eased from her chair to stand, carrying her mug to the sink and placing it there gently before turning to the siblings. “Go over these papers and we’ll meet later this week. I want you to absorb and read. Most of what I said might slip right past you today. But I want to remind you of a few things. First, you must grieve. Second, you must somehow get yourselves onto the same page with the same plan. From there, we will move on.”
She reached into the back pocket of her pressed khaki pants and placed three business cards on the counter. “Here’s my number for any questions; otherwise, I will see you at our next appointment. And I can’t tell you how sorry I am that you are dealing with this loss. This terrible loss.” She took a few steps toward the door and then turned to face them all with her hand on the doorknob. “You must remember that your dad still has strengths. Many of them. And you can capitalize on those. He has a long history, a rich history. He has his routines and his loves and his loathings. Those don’t disappear. Respect who he is. Look at what he can still do.”
None of the siblings spoke after she left. They sat quietly and still, as if Susan had put them in time-out as their mother had done when they fought over the last piece of pie or whose turn it was in the front seat. Scarcity, their dad used to say, was not the way their family lived. There was and always would be enough for everyone.
Colleen began to leaf through the papers, her heart pushing against her chest with a need to leave the situation, leave the room, run . . .
But this time there would be no running. This time there was no friend in Connecticut who would allow her to sleep on a pullout bed. This time there was no man in a bar waiting to meet her. This time there was no clean and light-filled apartment in the far corner of a repurposed church.
“We have a lot to decide,” Shane said. “Little by little. That’s how we will do this. Take one step at a time.” He held up a placard that Susan had left behind. “This looks like it will be helpful, maybe ease our frustration and his?”
Colleen took the card from him and read the ten rules out loud. “Don’t argue; instead agree. Never reason; instead divert. Never shame; instead distract. Never lecture; instead reassure. Never say ‘remember’; instead reminisce. Never say ‘I told you’; instead repeat and regroup.” Colleen stopped reading, although there was more. “We are going to have to learn a new way of being with him.”
Shane took the card from Colleen and glanced at it. “Now what? Do we start this now?”
“God, I feel so bad for every time I’ve said ‘remember’ or corrected him or explained. I was only making it worse.”
“We are doing the best we can.” Hallie stood and began to pace the room, chewing on the end of her thumbnail. “First the party. Let’s get that straight and then . . .”
Colleen burst from her chair, the tears she had wanted to shed freezing in her chest, her tears turning hard. “Are you kidding me? You are so obsessed with the party, I can see you just don’t want to think about the most important things.”
“If that’s true”—Hallie drew close to her sister—“then you’re the one who’s spent ten years avoiding the deeper issues with the party that is your life. ‘Just ignore it’ seems to be your motto.”
“Ignore it?” Colleen’s voice felt not her own, but made of old resentment and anger and fear, and something even darker. “How could I ignore it, Hallie? Maybe I’ve stayed away from it. Maybe I’ve turned from it. But ignore it? Hell, no.”
“Stop!” Shane’s voice rang out and they both startled at their brother’s reprimand. “Hallie, why are you so obsessed with the party? It’s simple. You’ve done them before.”
“Let’s go over this timeline. I want to get it right and I can’t. Something is wrong and you both act like you don’t care.”
“A slight overstatement.” Colleen motioned to the pile of stories s
he’d spent all night writing.
“Since we didn’t have time before Susan arrived, let me show you now.” Hallie reached her slender fingers into a leather satchel she’d dropped onto the couch. She withdrew a pile of note cards. From where she stood, Colleen could see Hallie’s loopy left-handed scribbling—a line or two on each card with a date on the top left corner. Hallie reached into her bag again, withdrew a roll of masking tape. She walked to one side of the kitchen, where she began to tape the note cards, one by one, on Shane’s cream-colored plaster walls.
He didn’t stop her.
Shane and Colleen watched their sister with wonder. This wasn’t like her—the extremes of emotion, the barrage of words. Soon the cards were taped in crooked lines.
The first card was Gavin’s birth and they went on in chronological order until 1979, when the dates were scribbled out several times. “Here.” Hallie jabbed her finger onto the wall, at five or six cards. “Dad goes to Ireland, right? In 1979 right after his college graduation? And comes home after several months, immediately marries Mother and moves here to buy the pub. Ten months later Colleen is born.”
“Simple.” Shane spoke quietly; anything else might send their sister off some emotional ledge.
“No.” Hallie took a photo from her bag and set it against the note card. “This is Dad in Ireland and the date stamp says December 1980.” She shook her head. “But he wasn’t there then. He was here, with Mom, and then Colleen . . . a year later.”
“Then the date on the photo is wrong.” Shane took it from her hand. “Damn, when it turns a new year, I write the old year on everything for two months. Someone could have easily written the wrong date.”
“It’s stamped, not written, by whomever developed the film.”
“That doesn’t mean it’s—”
Hallie cut Shane short. “There are more pictures like it. Think hard.” Hallie tapped the side of her head. “Dad is lying to us. There’s something he hasn’t told us. This isn’t dementia. These are cold, hard facts in front of us. Something is off.”
“Does it matter?” Shane approached his sister carefully.
“Yes, it matters. It’s our family. What if he’s lying?” Her voice stuttered on the last word. “Dad doesn’t lie, or I thought he didn’t.”
Colleen tapped the note cards. “So here’s the thing.” Hallie and Shane turned to her. “I found the same problem when I interviewed the real estate agent.”
“Mr. Bivins?”
Colleen nodded. “According to him, the photo I showed him was taken on the day Mother and Dad bought the pub when I was about ten months old—in January 1982. But Dad always told us that he and Mother bought the pub before I was born. I thought Mr. Bivins was confused—that maybe it was just a picture from later and he got the dates mixed up.”
Shane flopped into a chair. “So when did Dad really buy the pub, and why would he lie about that? And what was he doing in Ireland in December 1980, when we were always told he married Mother in May of that year?”
“Exactly,” Hallie said.
“But do any of these dates matter,” Colleen asked, “or is what happened in between the milestones what really counts, the blank spaces between each of Hallie’s note cards? That’s where his life was lived . . .” She pointed at the wall between the cards that stated, “Married Elizabeth” and “Colleen born.”
Shane said, “Yes, but we need the markers to navigate, to . . . It’s what we have.”
“Then you figure it out. You do it.” Hallie threw her now empty hands in the air. “I have enough crap to deal with. This is making me crazy.”
“Enough crap?” Shane asked. “What does that mean?”
“Nothing.” Hallie slumped onto a kitchen chair. “I just mean this.” She took in a long breath to sustain whatever it was she wanted to say. “Look at all we must deal with. And I have two kids to take care of. Speaking of, I’m late. They get out at noon today from summer camp. I have to go . . .”
Colleen stared at her sister, who was obviously spent. It might have been years since she’d looked carefully at Hallie, but she knew the signs. They’d shared a bedroom for eighteen years, along with a house and a life and all their secrets. Colleen knew exhaustion when she saw it.
“Hallie.” Colleen said her name gently.
Hallie looked up. “Yes?”
Colleen faltered. What was she supposed to say now? Something kind? Ask her sister what was really wrong? What was really draining the life out of her face and eyes? She couldn’t. What if the answer was, You, Lena. You are doing this to me.
“Nothing.” Colleen turned away. “This is tough for all of us. We’ll get through it.”
As an alarm sounded on Hallie’s cell, she departed to pick up her children and Shane headed downstairs to the pub. Colleen stood in front of Hallie’s lopsided timeline. She had never once thought of her dad’s life as a straight arrow from birth until now, as a bullet point list of when and how each event occurred. Instead, she’d thought of how he’d lived his life, the relationships he’d formed and all that he’d given. But now she focused on the notes, and on the dates.
In 1979 Gavin Donohue graduated from college and went to Ireland to travel for several months. He fell in love with a pub called O’Shea’s and decided he wanted to own one like it at home. After working in O’Shea’s he traveled briefly around the country and returned to South Carolina with myths and stories and a grand love of the Emerald Isle, along with a song he’d never let go of—“The Lark in the Clear Air.”
In 1980, right after he returned from Ireland, he’d married Elizabeth in Richmond, Virginia, on May fifth—in a civil ceremony at the courthouse instead of in a fancy church wedding, so that they could use their money for down payments on a house on the May River and a pub that would be their livelihood. They moved to Watersend and began their life together.
In March 1981 Colleen was born in Watersend, which meant her parents had been married for ten months. All perfectly respectable.
And all so simple, until it wasn’t.
Maybe because life never, ever followed an outline. Hadn’t Dad always told them that he and Mother moved to Watersend to buy and open the pub? But if the dates were right on the photos, if Mr. Bivins was right, they’d moved to town before they had a thought of buying McNally’s pub; Colleen had been born here in this place, but well before they owned the pub. According to Mr. Bivins, Colleen had been ten months old and Gavin started working at McNally’s a couple months before she was born, which would make it about January 1981. If so, what had he and Elizabeth been doing between May 1980, when they married, and January 1981?
And there was still the question of when Gavin had really returned from Ireland.
Colleen placed her finger on the wall between the cards, wondering what had happened to her parents in the in-between spaces. Had they not moved to Watersend until after she was born? No. Colleen shook her head. Her birth certificate stated Watersend, South Carolina.
Why would their parents lie about when they moved here or when they bought the pub? What was the point in that?
Colleen sat on the couch and stared at the note cards dangling from the wall. Why would they lie, except to cover something up?
Chapter Twenty-one
A pleasure is full grown only when it is remembered.
C. S. Lewis, Out of the Silent Planet
Dust balls had made their home in the corners of Shane’s former bedroom closet. It was there that Colleen began to pull bags and bins off the shelves, moving piles of clothes, shoes boxes and labeled plastic containers to the floor in search of her baby book. A double bed, dresser and desk completed the sparsely furnished room, which might have been suitable for a visiting monk. Shane had taken most of his belongings with him, while Colleen and Hallie’s room still appeared as it had the day Colleen had left.
Standing on the desk chair,
Colleen finally found the book she was looking for atop the highest shelf; both Hallie’s and Shane’s baby books lay underneath it. She grabbed her book, covered in pink satin that was ripped and torn with the years of storage, nibbled by moths and caked in dust. She ran her hand across the top, where there was a painted image of a stork carrying a blanket laden with a baby wearing a pink bow on her head.
Considering the confusing dates associated with her birth, maybe it was true—maybe the stork had brought her precariously tipped in a blanket over to Watersend. How long had it been since she had looked at this book?
The last time had been with Walter.
They’d been sitting on the edge of her bed, going through old photographs and mementoes.
“I want to know everything about you,” he’d said. “Every moment I missed. Every triumph. Every scar. Every story.” And he’d kissed her.
Colleen shuddered; sitting on Shane’s floor years later, she found that the memory had shifted from sweet to painful and had now become one of disgust. That is what memories do, she thought; the body’s recollection transforms.
She slowly opened the baby book, a dried rose petal falling from its pages and landing on the floor. The first page’s edge had faded to yellow and on it was written her full name and birth date along with a faded color photo of Colleen wrapped in a white baby blanket with only her red and crinkly newborn face showing. Colleen stared at the picture feeling no attachment to it at all—this baby had nothing to do with her, just another photo of a newborn in a hospital nursery.
Colleen flipped to page two. There she was—the photos she’d always known, the ones framed and hung around the house. Dad holding her on a chair in the backyard. Mother feeding her a bottle and smiling lovingly at whoever took the photo, her face flushed. A photo of Colleen in a crib, staring at a mobile of Winnie-the-Pooh, Eeyore, Piglet and Roo. Then what was amiss? This was the baby book of a loved and adored child—pages of photos and notes and records of her first word (boat); the date of her first steps (eleven months); her first solid food (bananas).
The Favorite Daughter Page 19