Sticky Notes

by Dianne Touchell

  His dad would sit in the family room a lot fiddling with a tin that had belonged to Grandma. It was an old cookie tin that probably wasn’t all that old, but it had a russet tarnish around the lid that made it look like a shoddy heirloom. Foster had gone through that tin himself once. It was full of musty-smelling bits and pieces that Grandma had obviously wanted to keep for some reason. A few photos, birth certificates, and letters, along with some other things that seemed insignificant: feathers, a couple of shells, old movie tickets. Somehow, though, Foster knew none of the things in that tin had been accidentally placed, and his dad picked through everything meticulously, regularly, as if they were triggers to his memory. Sometimes his dad would just hold the tin in his lap, running his fingers across the lid, and then raise and lower the lid—up, down, up, down—the hinges stiff and squeaky. Foster would watch him, and it was as if he were playing an instrument. He would carry that tin around with him, room to room, wherever he went.

  The one place his dad never went anymore was the backyard. He used to love the backyard. They had one of the few big lots on the street. The distance from the back door to the back fence seemed miles and miles, and at the back fence, hunkered down like an arbor sentry, was a jacaranda. As soon as Foster could walk, his dad started taking him out into the backyard to catch balls and watch clouds and play fetch with Geraldine, their drooling mutt. Dad loved Geraldine. He said mutts were best. Purebreds were full of temperament and malaise. When Foster asked what that meant, Dad told him bad manners and bad health. Dad called Geraldine a genetic jigsaw of proper dogs. She had a crooked face and tender eyes. When the forgetting and shuffling got worse, Foster would hold Dad’s hand and try to lead him into the backyard. But when Geraldine howled for a game of fetch now, it just seemed to upset Dad, and Mom told Foster to leave Dad be. That was when Foster would run out back and climb that jacaranda, just to get away for a little while, and sometimes he’d see his dad watching out the kitchen window, his stare rasping just like his walk.

  Foster’s feelings were tangling him up. No one was explaining to him how he should be feeling, and he didn’t understand the feeling that was bothering him now. He’d see his dad standing in that crooked way of his at the kitchen window, and his pulse would clang like a screw in a tin can. When that first Sunday came and went without pancakes and shortbread, Mom didn’t explain at all; she just poured Saturday cereal into a bowl for him and rubbed the top of his head. Foster suddenly recognized the thing that rolled over him and made him feel sick: Dad was going away somewhere all on his own. And Foster was already missing him.

  Dad eventually had to drop back to part-time work. It was a type of stress leave, apparently. Foster asked Mom what Dad was stressed about, but she danced around the question in a way familiar to Foster—he was getting used to having questions answered in great detail that turned out to provide no answer at all. Dad could work from home now, Mom said. Work fewer hours, work in his pajamas if he wanted to. Mom said this last bit with a bright smile, as if it was meant to be a fine joke, but Foster found the idea of Dad not putting on a suit the last straw. It made him angry. Foster knew all about last straws. It was Mom’s way of putting a full stop at the end of something, of declaring her refusal to entertain another moment of whatever it was that was creating the straws in the first place. So when Foster said with genuine indignation, “Well, that would be the last straw,” expecting Mom to share in his anger, he was instead humiliated to find himself being laughed at.

  Foster was pleased that at least Dad was still dressing for the doctor. They all went with him to the appointment, despite Dad’s protests about being treated like a child. Foster wasn’t allowed to go into the little room where the doctor did his examining. He had to wait in the ugly waiting room that always seemed to have one dead fish in the tank in the corner. He waited a long time—long enough for the room to get really full. He had to start breathing through his mouth because of the sweet-sweaty smell of too many sick bodies pressed together like paper dolls. He wished he had asked to wait in the car.

  There was no talking in the car on the way home. Foster rolled his window down and filled his cheeks with fresh outside air until Mom snapped at him to put the window back up. “It’s too cold,” she said.

  When they got home, Mom and Dad went into the kitchen to talk. It was quiet talk at first, but Foster had worked out that if he himself stayed really quiet, he became invisible. Either that or his parents thought he couldn’t hear them. So he waited, and sure enough the volume began to rise. It seemed Dad had come back from the doctor with pills that frustrated him even more. Foster heard Dad say, “I’m not depressed!”

  “You are, Malcolm. I can see it.”

  “If I’m depressed, it’s because I can’t work out why I’m having trouble concentrating. Why I can’t remember things! I’ve worked with numbers all my life, and suddenly Excel looks like abstract art to me. That’s justifiable, reasonable grounds for depression. There’s no pill for a rational human response, is there! Why aren’t they looking at what’s causing this? Treating the symptom won’t get me back to work, will it!”

  It wasn’t a question. Dad never asked questions when he was using his work voice, and he was using his work voice on Mom now.

  “Just try them for a little while, please, Malcolm,” Mom said. “The doctor said in a few weeks you’ll feel better. So much better.” It was a plea. Foster had a feeling Mom was pleading her own case, her own need to feel better, rather than Dad’s. Mom didn’t cope well with other people’s illnesses. They made her fretful. When Foster was sick, he always felt a responsibility to get better as quickly as possible, and with the least amount of fuss and inconvenience. It wasn’t that Mom didn’t look after him, or was angry, but her hand on his brow always trembled and his vomiting made her gag. Dad had told Foster that perhaps her fear of illness came from having been so ill herself. It triggered something in her: a need to rush through and reestablish normal routine as quickly as possible. Illness set off a prickly alarm in her—a fear of frailty in people she loved.

  “I’ll consider it,” Dad said.

  “And perhaps some counseling. The doctor said—”

  “I know what the doctor said!”

  Dad never raised his voice, but he was raising it now. He slapped the air so hard with the words that Foster felt the sting himself. He wanted to step in. The need to say something was very strong, a burly knot deep in his heart. He tried to think of something he could say to fix this. Something that would stop the pleading and the raised voice. Maybe if he said something, it would remind them that he was in the room too.

  But there was nothing to say. So Foster just walked over to his dad’s side and took his hand. Dad looked down and smiled. Mom said, “Not now, Fossie.”

  The pills went into the bathroom cabinet. Mom told Dad to take one every morning after he had brushed his teeth. “You take it the same time every day,” she said. “That way you’ll remember. Please, Malcolm.”

  At first Dad took the pills. Foster would slide the mirrored door of the bathroom cabinet open and check the box. Each day a little blister on the sheet of pills would be popped, and the tiny cavity where the pill had sat would be empty. Foster would count them. But after a couple of weeks, the evidence of consumption became sporadic. Sometimes a pill would be gone. Sometimes it wouldn’t. Foster was sure it didn’t matter if Dad missed one occasionally, but when days began to pass with no indication of the packet having been disturbed, Foster became worried. He considered popping out the odd pill himself and hiding it, so Mom wouldn’t get upset again. But just as he was formulating this plan, it became obvious that Mom was checking the box herself.

  Mom began reminding Dad to brush his teeth. Sometimes Dad forgot to do that. It was like she was trying to prompt the pill taking through association, rather than just telling Dad to take it. She mustn’t have liked his raised voice either. Then Foster noticed a Post-it appearing on the mirrored door of the cabinet. It always said the same
thing: Don’t forget to take your pill. It wasn’t always the same note, though. Foster could tell because the color of the Post-it changed sometimes. But even with all this, Dad still didn’t take his pill every day.

  Then one morning when Foster sat at the kitchen table, he saw Dad’s pill sitting on his plate next to a glass of orange juice. When Dad sat down, he asked, “What’s this?”

  “Your pill,” Mom replied.

  “I already took it.”

  “No, you didn’t. I checked.”

  “I did. I took it.”

  “No. You didn’t. And you haven’t been taking it.” Mom said this while leaning on the other end of the kitchen table. Foster didn’t like the lean. He didn’t like the flattened palms or the arched shoulders or the unbrushed hair. It all made Mom look a bit wild, a bit ready for it. She was pouncy.

  “Well, I’m not taking it again,” Dad said.

  “You haven’t taken it!”

  And then Dad yelled a word that Foster had heard before but knew that no one in his house ever, ever was allowed to say. He yelled it. Foster dropped his butter knife on his plate. It landed with a big clang. Mom and Dad both looked at him then, and he found himself in the middle of a moment as raw as a peeled scab. Dad didn’t use bad words. He said the English language is full to capacity with descriptors for anything and everything, and that bad words are just lazy.

  “You haven’t taken it,” Mom said in a quiet voice that Foster found more frightening than Dad’s f-word. “I’ve been checking, Malcolm. You only have to do this one thing to make all this go away. And I can’t help but think that your refusing to do so is a direct attack on me.”

  Dad looked hurt. It was a face Foster didn’t see very much, and it made him feel sore. Dad stood so quickly that his chair scraped the floor. Then he strode out of the room.

  Foster could hear him rummaging in the bathroom cabinet. Mom rolled her eyes at Foster, and he smiled a little bit because he was desperately in need of being aligned with one of them. He couldn’t stand being out here on his own. When Dad returned to the kitchen, he was holding a box of pills. He flicked it across the table, like skipping a stone on a lake. It skidded to a stop right next to Mom’s hand.

  “Go on. Check again. Do it!” he demanded.

  At first Foster didn’t know if Mom was laughing or crying. She sat down, rested her head in her hands, and began shaking and making noises. When she looked up at Dad, Foster could see she was laughing, but laughing in such a way that there were tears coming out as well. Then she gave a big sigh and on the crooked edge of a declining snicker said, “Why are you doing this to me, Malcolm?”

  Dad walked out of the room first. The bathroom door slammed. Mom followed. The bedroom door slammed. Foster leaned across and picked up the box of pills Dad had flung at Mom. It wasn’t the box he’d been checking. He sounded out the name: Tram-a-dol. Under that was Mom’s name on the label.

  Mom had taken Dad back to the doctor with the notes she’d been keeping. Not just notes about Dad taking the wrong pills for weeks, but about all the other funny things he’d been doing as well. Foster had seen her writing in the notebook after dinner with her brow squeezed tight, and when he asked her what she was doing, she said she was keeping a diary about Dad. When Foster asked why, she said, “Because he will need to go for an assessment. Special tests.”

  “What for?” Foster asked.

  “Just to find out if he’s sick or not.”

  “He doesn’t look sick,” Foster said.

  “Yes, I know.”

  “Does he feel sick, then?”

  “Sometimes. In a way. When he’s confused. When he forgets things. That doesn’t feel good to him. Do you understand?”

  Foster did understand, and he found it all mildly exciting. His dad had been to the doctor a lot lately, and having a sick dad had given him some authority among his friends at school. He was going through something, and he was listened to respectfully as he recounted exaggerations and outright fictions about his dad’s mysterious sickness. It gave him some credibility to tell stories about his suffering. People were interested. And when someone would lean in and breathe “Is he going to die?” with all the respect owed someone about to lose a parent, Foster would drop his eyes and whisper, “We don’t know yet.” He never actually believed his dad was going to die, but it was thrilling to be the center of attention when he’d previously had hardly any attention at all.

  It was at school that he got his first inkling that something quite serious might be going on.

  A week after the special tests, Mom and Dad went back to the doctor to get the results. At first Foster was relieved when his mom spat out the diagnosis across dinner. She didn’t mean to spit it. She hadn’t meant it to sound angry and mean. But her face collapsed around the syllables as they skimmed her lips. The last syllable, the “ease,” was barely audible. The relief Foster felt was in the word disease. Diseases have cures. He said, “Oh!” rather hopefully, and Dad patted him on the back. Apparently Dad wasn’t depressed at all. Just like he’d said all along.

  The next day Foster went to school with his new knowledge, ready to impart the next installment to friends whose lives were nowhere near as interesting as his. He told the small knot of boys gathered around him, “My dad has Alzheimer’s disease.”

  There was a pause. A couple of them looked confused. Then James Maher, whom everyone called Jimmy, snorted and said, “Old-timer’s disease, you mean.”

  Some of the others started to laugh. Then Foster was confused. His only knowledge of old people came from his grandma. Old people had skin like crepe paper and smelled of cough syrup and mothballs.

  “My dad’s not old,” Foster said. “This is serious.” His “this is serious” was far from compelling. It was a quasi-question.

  “This is what it is, Fossie,” Jimmy continued. “Your old man will go crazy and die. Well, he’ll go crazy and then die. But he’ll be crazy for a long time first.”

  “My dad’s not old!” Foster repeated, a bit louder than he meant to. He was horrified. He was still standing there, twitchy and indignant, as most of them wandered away. Someone leaned in and breathed, “Is he going to go crazy and die?”

  Foster dropped his eyes and whispered, “We don’t know yet.”

  For the rest of that school day, Foster couldn’t concentrate. Jimmy Maher’s words formed a ropy nimbus in the center of his brain that no amount of teacher admonishment could dispel. He couldn’t add numbers together, as they seemed to grow legs on his page and march away before they could be calculated. He couldn’t write a story, because no ideas would penetrate the smog of panic that had settled in the back of his throat. He couldn’t color a picture, because his fingertips were as flailing and obstinate as fat, bald babies. Stupid Jimmy. Putting crazy in his head like this. Stupid Jimmy. Stupid Dad. Foster had a hole in his heart the size of the moon.

  It never occurred to Foster to question Jimmy’s assessment of the diagnosis that had landed on the kitchen table the evening before in a volley of Mom’s spittle. Foster floundered between the two reference points he had been given since his dad had patted him on the back for his optimism. Alzheimer’s and crazy.

  When Mom picked Foster up after school, he wanted to ask her if the crazy was real. But he didn’t. Mom had a certain expression that closed her face like a door. It was her don’t-talk-to-me face, and she was wearing it the entire journey home. When they did get home, it was to smells and sounds Foster liked. His mom had been cooking. There was the metallic odor of Brussels sprouts and the sweet whiff of a roasted meat crust. Foster liked sprouts. Slathered in butter and salt, cooked hard so they popped in his mouth. The fire was alight. It cracked and spat as it consumed the damp bits and wood sap. The TV was on. There was a time when Dad wouldn’t have been home from work yet, but today he was sitting in front of it. Foster walked up to the side of the recliner his dad sat in and leaned on the arm. His dad turned slightly and then turned back to the program he was watchi
ng. It was a little kid’s show. Foster didn’t even watch it anymore. Some presenters in bright outfits were singing about brushing your teeth.

  “Dad?”

  No response.

  “Dad!”

  “Yes, Fossie?” his dad answered without taking his eyes from the TV.

  “Dad, are you going crazy?”

  Dad smiled, and Foster didn’t know if he was smiling at him, his question, or the TV. That same smile appeared a lot lately. He had seen Mom on the receiving end of that smile and had seen her look sad about it. He had heard Mom describing that look to someone on the phone as being the memory of response, or how to respond, to a gentle tone of voice.

  “What?” Dad said.

  “Are you going crazy?” Foster asked again.

  “Foster!” Mom was behind him, standing in a bent way with a wild face. She looked like an overwrought pipe cleaner. “Leave your dad alone. Go find something to do until dinner.”

  Foster snapped upright at his mom’s admonition. Then he ran outside and climbed the jacaranda, simmering in branches that held him like a dancer’s arms.

  Foster had a set of plastic army men that he would stage battles with. Dad had taught him about some famous battles, and they used to re-create the best battles among the blankets and pillows on Foster’s bed. Foster liked the battles for people better than the battles for land. He found it easier to fight for a few inches of quilt if there was a rescue involved. So he would put some men on Pillow Top Mountain under an overturned clothespin basket and fight for their release. He would make all the noises too—the prisoners wailing and the army chanting and weapons popping and grinding toward victory.