Unblinking

by Lenzo, Lisa;

  At our new house, there’s a lawn and hardly any trees and no turtles or frogs or pond. But summer insects live there, too, and cardinals and chickadees, and of course there are squirrels. I don’t think there are raccoons. But maybe one will follow us from our old house and climb up onto our new porch, press its face to the screen, and look inside.

  ⊙

  My mom says she thinks the new owners of our old house are young, because of your names, Emily and Aaron. She doesn’t know if you have children, but I just want to say this is a perfect place for kids, and don’t be afraid that your baby will die. My mom’s first kid did. But then she had me, her second one, and I lived.

  Unblinking

  When Ralph wakes from his nap, he and Rosie play chess. Rosie sets up the board and the pieces, Ralph helping as much as he can. Then they hunker over the game—silent, intent—and before long Ralph is up by a pawn and a knight. That’s the strange thing about the dementia caused by his Parkinson’s—it’s left parts of his brain untouched. And it comes and goes without warning. Ralph can be coherent and lucid one minute, beating her at chess, and the next he’s off in a different world, one where Rosie isn’t able to follow. Lately, Ralph’s been seeing his only brother, four years younger, who died of a heart attack twenty-two years ago. Ralph will look up at the empty air, break into a happy grin, and call out, “Johnny!” as if Johnny has just walked into the room. Ralph was raised Catholic, but he turned away from religion in his teens, drawn toward the science that would lead him to medical school. He doesn’t believe in angels or ghosts, yet now he is seeing them.

  Rosie concedes the first game, Ralph the second one. They rarely play to the bitter end. When it becomes clear that the other will win, the loser gives in.

  Rosie remembers the games they played when they were younger. Then, the loser was often angry, the winner teasing, even gloating. If Rosie lost, she would bite her lip and go silent. Ralph, grinning, would say in a sugary voice, “What’s the matter, babe?”

  “Oh shut up,” she would answer.

  “What? You’re mad? What are you mad about?” Ralph would ask, as if astonished, enjoying her quiet anger, trying to draw it out.

  “I shouldn’t have let you take that move back.”

  “Well, why did you then?”

  “Because you insisted!”

  “You could have said no! Don’t lay it on me, babe.” He’d still be grinning.

  She would abruptly push back the table and stand up.

  “Aw, don’t be mad,” Ralph would tease.

  “I’m not mad. I’m just never playing with you again, that’s all.”

  And Ralph would laugh with delight, throwing his head back. (Something he can’t do anymore; he can barely turn his neck.)

  But Rosie had enjoyed teasing him just as much—ten, twenty, fifty years ago. Back then, when Ralph realized he’d lost a game, he wouldn’t say, “I resign”—instead he’d start snatching up the pieces and tossing them roughly into the box. Or he’d upend the board, sending the kings and queens flying, scattering across table and floor.

  Rosie would smile as broadly as was possible while still keeping her mouth closed. “Ralphy,” she’d say sweetly, knowing he didn’t want sweetness right then, that her pleasure was an irritant, “it’s just a game. Somebody has to lose.”

  “You didn’t beat me,” he’d say.

  “Oh, really?”

  “Yes. I beat myself.”

  “Oh,” she would say, “so when you win, you beat me, but when I win, you beat yourself?”

  “That’s right. I played a lousy game. I gave that game to you.”

  She’d continue to smile. Then she’d say, “Want to play another?”

  “No.”

  “Oh, c’mon. Don’t you want another chance to beat yourself?”

  “Go to hell.”

  “Oh, Ralphy,” she’d say, laughing, with love in her voice.

  “Kiss my ass,” he’d say. But his anger never lasted. Sometimes he would start setting up the pieces again in the midst of his swearing.

  These days their games are far quieter. Ralph hunches over the board, silent, his large eyes unblinking, his face resembling a mask. But he can still beat her about half the time. Occasionally, if she wins two games in a row, she’ll back off and let him win the third. She doesn’t really mind if she loses. Chess isn’t even her favorite game; she prefers Scrabble. But Ralph hates the Scrabble dictionary with all of its “bullshit words,” and he thinks it’s ridiculous that you can end up with all vowels or all consonants or all one-point letters. So she plays Scrabble with three of her women friends, all four of them retired math teachers from Mumford High. They started out playing biweekly, but as they’ve grown older, they’ve scaled back to once a month. It’s the opposite with chess. As Ralph’s illness worsens, Rosie plays chess with him more and more often. Ralph can no longer read a book, swim a lap, or walk without a walker. Chess is one of his few pleasures that has not yet been subtracted, so he and Rosie play every day that they can.

  This afternoon, after each wins one game, Rosie starts putting the pieces away, and Ralph joins in; his hands tremble and he has trouble closing his fingers, but he grips the rooks and bishops, lifts them, and drops them into the box.

  Today Rosie’s fingers and brain are also clumsier and slower. She is more tired than usual because the day before yesterday, she fired Angels in the Home. The owners of Angels told her she had to start paying a higher rate because Ralph had become harder to care for, and that rubbed Rosie the wrong way. Did they expect things would get better? He has Parkinson’s! Do they know what the word degenerative means? Well, it was a relief, anyway, to no longer have strangers in their apartment all day and night, different ones all the time, some more helpful than others. Most of the aides were very nice, but they don’t need the extra hassle or the expense. Rosie can help Ralph stand up and transfer from chair to wheelchair or wheelchair to bed without anyone’s assistance but his—at least for now, until he gets worse. If he tries to walk without his walker and makes a misstep and falls, she can call the downstairs desk, and they’ll send someone from security or maintenance to lift Ralph back up. Rosie can help him onto and off of the shower chair, and she can roll him on the bed and change his diapers by herself. The last aide bought the wrong size—large, when medium is what fits. She remembers this as they are putting away the chess pieces. “Oh, Ralphy, I forgot we were going to go to the store today for more briefs.” She looks out the windows. The sky, blue all morning, is now a light gray.

  “What time is it?” Ralph asks.

  “A little after four. We can still make it, I think.”

  The part of downtown Detroit where they live is really quite safe, but only in the daytime is it surely safe. At night, or even at dusk, they are taking their chances going out. About a year ago, one of their older friends was mugged a half mile east of here. And last month shots were fired in the dollar store next to the Lafayette Market, the grocery down the street where they shop. Luckily no one was hit by a bullet or even robbed: an employee tripped an alarm, and the would-be robber took off. But then two weeks ago, right at dusk, Fred Munson, who lives in their building, was shot in the stomach by a young man who demanded the keys to his car. The bullet passed through Fred without hitting anything vital, and even though he is seventy-nine, he came home from the hospital after only a week. But he still has a long way to go until he is fully recovered.

  Rosie hasn’t yet told any of their kids about Fred being shot only one short block from their apartment, in the parking lot of the liquor store where she occasionally picks up a bottle of Canadian Club. She’s afraid they will insist that she and Ralph move somewhere safer, even though their son Zachary, who is a nurse, has said that when people as ill and elderly as Ralph are moved out of their homes, they usually go into a rapid decline and quickly die. That’s reason enough to stay in their apartment, where they’ve lived for twenty-seven years. But they also simply like it here. She and
Ralph still enjoy strolling and wheeling along the Riverwalk, through the park right next to their condo, and down the aisles of the Eastern Market on Saturday mornings, pushing through the crowds with their bags of produce hanging from the handles of Ralph’s chair. And if they left Detroit, they would miss their friends who live in their condo, plus those few others who haven’t died or moved out of the area and who still stop by to visit. Ralph has never wanted to live where the majority of people are white and Republican and many are bigots, and while Rosie doesn’t phrase it exactly like that, she feels the same.

  “Let’s go, Rosie,” Ralph says, his voice loud and forceful—sometimes his voice is as strong and unaffected as it was before Parkinson’s. “We’ll have enough time if we leave right away.”

  But there’s no such thing as “right away” anymore, especially when it comes to getting out of the house. First, Ralph has to use the bathroom—the diapers are only for backup; he hates to pee in his pants and then sit in his own piss—and that takes a while. Then Rosie puts on Ralph’s shoes and works his down coat onto him. Finally she gets on her own coat and shoes and finds her keys and her change purse.

  Rosie could run this errand more quickly on her own, but she doesn’t like leaving Ralph alone—sometimes he gets confused about how long she’s been gone and goes looking for her. After coming home twice to find him helpless on the floor, Rosie decided it was no longer safe to leave him behind. And Ralph doesn’t like her going to the store by herself, anyway. Ralph still considers himself Rosie’s protector, though any potential mugger can see that he’s no longer strong enough to defend even himself. He thinks she is safer in his company, as if his mere presence or his will alone can keep her from harm. And she does feel more secure when the two of them go out together, even though Ralph’s strength is greatly diminished, as is her own, now that she’s eighty-one, has arthritis in her hands, and has shrunk several inches, to five feet three.

  Rosie locks their door behind them and wheels Ralph’s chair to the elevators. One arrives quickly; she backs him into it, and they descend the six floors. But pushing him from the bank of elevators to the lobby seems harder than usual, as if something is wrong with the chair. She keeps going, though, until Ralph loudly calls, “Damn it, Rosie, stop!”

  She stops pushing. “What’s wrong?”

  “We forgot to put on my footrests.”

  “Oh, shit,” Rosie says. “We better go back and get them.”

  “No, it’ll get too late,” Ralph says. “We can manage without them.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Yeah. I can lift my feet and walk them as you push.”

  This works fairly well on the tiled floor near the elevators and in the lobby. As they pass the front desk, Itembe, the newest security employee, rises to open the doors for them. Rosie and Ralph thank him, and he wishes them a good evening. Pausing outside the apartment entrance, Rosie notes that the sky has grown slightly grayer. She considers driving to the store. Their car wouldn’t appeal to a carjacker—it’s a Honda Civic, six years old. Fred Munson had been driving his brand-new Lincoln Continental when he was shot. But it’s become more and more difficult for Ralph to transfer onto a car seat, even with her help. It is easier to simply walk.

  Rosie wheels Ralph through the main entry area onto the condo’s circular drive and from there down to the sidewalk. Ralph helps by lifting his feet and “walking” them in front of the chair. It’s awkward, even though Ralph is doing a good job of shuffling his feet. Rosie wishes they’d gone back for the footrests.

  The concrete outside their building entrance is smooth and well maintained, but once they are on the public sidewalk, the going is rougher; some of the square, concrete slabs are tilted at slight angles, with short, weedy growth filling in the cracks where two slabs fail to meet. They’ve gone less than thirty yards when Rosie realizes that Ralph is slipping out of his chair. His missing footrests not only provide a shelf on which to prop his feet, they also help to hold the rest of his body in place. She stops the chair and manages to lift him up a little, but soon after she resumes pushing, he starts sliding back down, his nylon-covered down coat slipping against the chair’s vinyl. When Rosie stops to pull him upright again, Ralph says, “I think you better just push. We’ll never get there if we keep stopping.” So she does.

  But halfway down the long block, she sees what a bad idea this is—all the little jolts from rolling over the irregular pavement have caused Ralph’s butt to slide to the edge of the seat. His head has slipped to the edge of the seatback, and his legs are sticking out at odd angles in front of the chair. “Can you scoot up a little?” Rosie asks.

  “Are you kidding? Look at me. I can’t move at all.”

  It’s as if he has no muscles or bones, as if he is a bag of sand that has slipped down and halfway out of the chair. His neck is pressed against the top edge of the seatback—only his head, hanging out over the back of the chair, prevents him from slipping down further. Without a strong upward boost, he is eventually going to slip further forward and down until finally he falls onto the sidewalk.

  Rosie locks the brakes and tries to pull Ralph up to a sitting position. She can’t budge him a fraction. If she tries to back up, Ralph will slip off the seat onto the pavement. He might hit his head or wrench his back. And she’s forgotten his hat, which would have protected him at least a little if his head struck the concrete. They should have gone back for the footrests! She looks back at their apartment building—it’s too far away to call to or run to for help. Like she could run, anyway. She can’t even walk briskly anymore.

  She looks up the street. It’s empty except for a slow-moving older black man coming their way, his head bare despite the cold, wearing a worn jacket and baggy pants that are slipped too far down, not in the style that young people affect, but like Ralph’s pants slip accidentally at times—Rosie is always pulling them back up. As the man draws closer, Rosie sees that he is only around fifty and that he is obviously homeless. But he seems alert and steady enough on his feet to help them, so she calls to him: “Sir?”

  The homeless man slows his steps even more.

  “Sir,” Rosie says again, “can you help us, please? My husband is slipping out of his chair.”

  The man’s gaze runs over them. He seems uncertain or puzzled. “Want me . . . want me to call 911?” he asks. He reaches into one of his baggy pockets and pulls out an older-model cell phone.

  “Oh, no, we don’t need an ambulance,” Rosie says. “He’s not hurt, he’s just slipped down too far, and I’m not strong enough to get him back up on my own. But if you take one arm, and I take the other, we can pull him upright again.” Rosie wants to suggest that the man hitch up his own pants first—she is afraid they might slip down further as he pulls up on Ralph, and then she’ll have two men all twisted up in their clothes. But she keeps quiet, and the homeless man steps in close, releasing a smoky, acrid smell from his jacket as he pulls up on one side and Rosie pulls up on the other.

  They manage to get Ralph upright and his butt replanted near the inside edge of the seat. “There you go,” the man says. “You all right now?” he asks Ralph.

  “I’m fine now,” Ralph says. “Thanks very much for your kindness.”

  “That’s all right, Pops,” the homeless man says. “But can I ask you a favor? I need five dollars to get me something to eat.”

  Rosie reaches into her pocket and pulls out her change purse, in which she carries not only change but also bills and her credit card. She unzips the purse and finds a ten, which she holds out to the man.

  “God bless you and keep you safe,” the man says, slipping the bill into his pants pocket. Then he turns away and continues down the street, walking more swiftly.

  Rosie returns the change purse to her pocket and her attention to Ralph. They need to get going and get back home before dark. She grips the wheelchair’s handles and resumes pushing. “Ralphy,” she says, “try to hold yourself up straight.”

  �
�What the fuck do you think I’m doing?” Ralph says. “I’m not trying to fall.” Rosie sighs but otherwise wheels him in silence, easing him carefully over the bumps of the slanted walk. Then Ralph asks, “Where’s Mike?”

  “Mike?” Rosie says. “He’s in Nebraska.”

  “He was here a minute ago,” Ralph says, seeming surprised that Mike, their oldest son, is gone.

  “That wasn’t Mike, that’s just some man we don’t know who stopped to help us.”

  “I know that,” Ralph says. “Mike was standing behind him, off to the side. I wonder why he didn’t come closer.”

  “Michael’s in Nebraska,” Rosie says. “He was here visiting us two weeks ago, remember?”

  “He was here just a minute ago, too,” Ralph insists. “Standing a few feet off. Or, if it wasn’t Mike, it was someone who looked a lot like him.”

  “Oh,” Rosie says. She wonders if Ralph is seeing his dead relatives again. She hopes he won’t have any difficult or disturbing hallucinations until they are safely home. Sometimes at night he becomes argumentative and insistent—he’ll say he needs to get up to go to a family member’s wedding or a funeral, and Rosie is almost unable to keep him in their bed.

  Ralph is slipping down in his chair again. Rosie stops, pulls him up a couple of inches, then resumes pushing. The sky is turning a purplish gray. It’s right around dusk. They will never make it home before dark. But at least they reach the little strip mall and then the grocery store, which is at the mall’s far end, without Ralph slipping down too far.

  Outside the Lafayette Market, a private security guard is sitting in his car. The owners of the market hired Eagle Security Services after those shots were fired in the adjoining dollar store. Rosie wonders if the liquor store where the carjacking happened hired any security afterward. She hasn’t been back since Fred Munson was shot. If she shops there again, she won’t walk or drive there at dusk or after dark. Poor Fred! How terrible to be shot, to have a bullet rip through your belly. But it could have been much worse. After the first shot, the man aimed the gun at Fred’s face. A woman in the parking lot screamed, “Don’t shoot him again, please don’t shoot him again!” Fred threw his keys to the ground, and the carjacker scooped them up and drove off.