by Geeta Anand
“I just left Aileen,” John said simply, with his newfound calm. “I just couldn’t take it anymore.”
“Where are you?”
“Somewhere in Massachusetts. I don’t know, Ed. I just don’t know what to do…”
Ed had tried to advise John during another painful crossroads in his life—and he was unhappily aware of John’s marital troubles today. At the Naval Academy, the pair had clicked immediately with a shared sense of humor and daring. As the son of a sailor who had fought in the Korean War, Ed had grown up knowing he wanted to be a naval officer. He was a calmer person than John, but equally ambitious—a quiet leader to John’s more outgoing nature. They’d spent every Saturday of their first year as “plebes,” or freshmen, escaping from campus together in the backseat of Aileen’s car. Plebes were forbidden from straying more than ten miles from the Academy grounds, consorting with females, or drinking alcohol. To be caught doing any one of these things was to lose all privileges for the rest of the year. Together, John and Ed had broken the three cardinal rules of plebe life almost every weekend.
Ed had been a part of John and Aileen’s relationship almost from the beginning. Every Saturday morning, the two roommates had ambled down an alley on the edge of campus, trying to look like they were taking a casual stroll. Aileen was always parked in the alley, waiting eagerly. When they were certain nobody was watching, John and Ed raced to her car, leaped in the backseat, and ducked as she sped the thirty miles to Washington. To make sure the plebes didn’t stray far, the Navy required that they report back on campus at 5 p.m. and again at midnight. That meant Aileen had to ferry the two young men back to Annapolis two times every Saturday, often racing at twice the speed limit to get them there on time.
The fun ended the summer after their first year, when they were required to spend twenty-eight days at sea. That tour of duty soured John on the Navy. Ed spent his days mostly in port in Hawaii, but John’s ship tossed in storms in the Mediterranean and chased Russian submarines around the North Atlantic. He was sick almost the entire time, and the only land they saw was the Straits of Gibraltar. When they finally returned to port, his mother took one look at him and rushed him to the emergency room. He had been fighting mono his entire time at sea and had lost nearly twenty pounds. He wasn’t able to return to the ship for the final day that remained to reach the targeted twenty-eight days of duty.
According to the Navy rules, he was a day short, so he was told he’d be sent back on the water for another cruise over the Christmas holidays. Every college kid longs for the holidays, but with nowhere near the desperation of a first-year military officer whose free time is intensely restricted. John was crushed and dismayed by the unfairness of it all. Many of his classmates had had easy tours of duty, carousing in ports, while he stayed at sea the whole time—sick, no less, and performing his duties flawlessly. Did he really want a life controlled by superior officers enforcing seemingly inflexible rules? It wasn’t like he was enjoying the academics either. He didn’t like the heavy load of science and engineering courses. His eyesight had deteriorated, so he couldn’t even become an F-14 fighter pilot as he’d always wanted. He began to think about going back to Georgetown, where he had spent his first year before enrolling at the Academy. Georgetown had told him he could return any time.
Ed was heartbroken at the thought of seeing John leave. But he tried to be unbiased during the long walks they took by the docks, week after week, John dwelling on the same question of whether to stay or go.
“John, is this all about the cruise, or is there some other reason why you want to leave?” Ed would ask.
“I just can’t get over how unfair it is,” John would growl.
“Think about the investment you’ve made here. You’re so good.” John was on the Commandant’s List, the top third of the class academically, and ranked second in the brigade of midshipman in leadership.
“Is it worth giving all of this up?” Ed pressed.
John’s mother begged him to stay at the Academy, but Aileen didn’t offer any direction. She privately thought the Academy was too constraining, but she believed it was a decision only he should make. She thought there were already too many people trying to influence him, and told him she’d be happy whichever road he took.
It was an agonizing decision—one that took months to reach, but in the end, John decided to go back to Georgetown. Ed remembered every detail of the hundred-yard walk from John’s room to the parking lot that day in November 1987: the cold chill of the wind slipping into the neck of his uniform, the sound of their shoes against the gravel, the look of agony on John’s face. Aileen hung back to let the two friends have a final few moments together. At the curb, John had put down his bag and looked around at the buzz of Academy life. Ed saw hesitation rise up for a second and felt a surge of hope. But as quickly as the indecision arose, it passed, and John was reaching up to give Ed a hug. The two men and Aileen stood together for a long minute, arms locked, crying. Then John picked up his bag and walked to the car, leaving Ed and the Navy behind.
Ed, absorbed in the Navy, had missed John and Aileen’s wedding because his ship was in the Persian Gulf. But he visited as often as he could; he thought of them as family. He stayed in their big suburban home near Indianapolis when John was a young lawyer and John Jr. had just been born. He showed up at their two-bedroom apartment at Harvard soon after Megan’s birth. In Ed’s eyes, John and Aileen had always been the ideal couple.
Just recently, Ed had spent several days with them in their new home in New Jersey and was devastated to see what had happened to them. One minute he was downstairs hearing John complain about Aileen and saying he wanted out of this marriage. The next minute, he was upstairs saying goodnight to the children, and Aileen, holding Patrick in her lap, was beseeching him to intervene on her behalf. “Ed, you’ve got to tell John. You’ve got to set him straight. Don’t let him leave us.” She and John had each been on the phone with him again several times after that visit to talk.
And now, here was John again, still in agony, having apparently taken the first step toward leaving Aileen and his kids.
“I just don’t think Aileen and I are right for each other,” John was saying. “We got married so young. We never dated anyone else, at least not seriously. I don’t know if I love her anymore. I’m just not happy with my life. This is not the life I want.”
“Are you sure it’s Aileen that’s the issue?” Ed asked quietly.
“I feel like I’m doing everything. I’m trying to figure out the nursing, I’m trying to start a foundation, I’m calling doctors, and I’m holding down a full-time job,” John replied, his calm giving way to a torrent of anger and frustration. “I can’t even rely on Aileen to manage the nurses. I can’t rely on Aileen for anything.”
“John, I know you’re feeling a lot of pressure. I know this has been a very tough time,” Ed interjected soothingly, listening but carefully refraining from trying to convince John one way or another.
“I can’t even talk to Aileen anymore. We’re in different worlds. She’s walking around planning birthday parties and pretending everything’s fine. She doesn’t want to think about what’s ahead,” John said.
“I think Aileen wants me to leave,” he added, his voice hushing slightly. “I don’t think I’m the right guy for her. I work all the time. I’m no fun anymore. She’d be happier with some big Irish guy who’ll watch TV with her at night—someone who wouldn’t put so much pressure on her.”
Ed thought of Aileen on his last visit—pale and desperate, begging him to make John stay—and couldn’t stop himself from correcting his friend. “John, I know Aileen doesn’t want you to leave,” he said, reassuring but firm. “I know Aileen needs you and the kids need you. I can’t even imagine what they’d do without you. Whatever issues you and Aileen have with each other, the children are the most important thing right now. You and Aileen aren’t going to resolve your issues right away. Maybe you should just set aside your issue
s with each other and keep the focus on the kids.”
John hung up and sat silently in the parking lot for another hour. He knew what Ed wanted him to do, but he didn’t know what he, John Crowley, wanted to do.
Well, that wasn’t entirely true. He did know: he wanted to escape from a life with two sick children and nurses and a wife who seemed in denial that everything was terrible.
But was it the right thing to do?
John listened to the cars swooshing by on the road behind him. He looked up through the front window and watched the full moon beaming down on his face. It bathed the white church in a luminous, tranquil light.
Moments later, the car’s engine revved up and it accelerated out of the driveway onto the interstate—southbound, heading home.
10
Sharon
Spring 1999
Pennington, New Jersey
On a Saturday morning soon after, a black limo pulled up at the end of the cul-de-sac and stopped outside the Crowley house. John and John Jr., dressed almost identically in jeans and blue “Navy” sweatshirts, were throwing a Nerf football back and forth on their front lawn. The car door opened and out stepped a short, buxom, middle-aged woman with shoulder length platinum blonde hair, dressed in bright orange from her sequined baseball cap to her knit pantsuit and her Birkenstock sandals. White gold rings glittered from every finger and rows of bracelets hung from her wrists. Walking briskly up to John, she stuck out an arm, smiled, and said, with a pronounced Arkansas drawl, “You must be John Crowley. Hi, I’m Sharon Dozier.”1
As he nodded, slightly stunned, she breezed past him toward the front door, asking, “Where are the kids? Are they inside?” She had disappeared into the open doorway before he could answer.
John stayed outside for a little while, throwing the ball some more with his son, feeling disconcerted. He couldn’t believe she had showed up for a first meeting in that getup, but he supposed he should have taken a cue from what he’d seen as her unconventionally loud, pushy tone on the telephone.
John had returned home from his agonized drive that night and slid into bed beside Aileen, determined to make things better. He vowed to stop blaming her for the children’s bad nursing care and work instead to find a solution. As a first step, he persuaded Bristol-Myers to drop the agency that took as its fee part of the hourly rate that the company paid for nursing. As a self-insured company, Bristol-Myers could bend the rules in extreme circumstances, and the company agreed to allow John to serve as the nursing coordinator and use the full hourly fee to hire more qualified help. By pooling the nursing allowances for both Megan and Patrick, John calculated he could hire someone to live with them and manage the children’s medical care. So he had agreed to pay a headhunter $20,000—almost all of his Bristol-Myers bonus from the previous year—to find him “the Marcus Welby of nurses,” someone superbly trained but also possessed of a gentle, pleasant temperament, a grandmotherly figure who could live with them and stabilize the household.
The headhunter had found two potential candidates—both from out of state. John’s first choice, a grandmother from North Carolina, had dropped out of contention after an initial phone conversation, unwilling to move to New Jersey, leaving only this Sharon to be interviewed in person. In a phone conversation, she said she didn’t want to move either, but she was willing to live with them during the week if he would pay for her to fly home to New Hampshire on weekends. That sounded unworkable, but he had no other candidates, so he arranged for her to fly down for a visit.
“C’mon, let’s go inside and see what’s going on,” he said to his son with a sigh. Their regular Saturday nurse had not shown up, so Aileen was inside attending to Megan and Patrick. Aileen had given John the go-ahead to look for a nurse manager, but with little enthusiasm. She had given up entirely on the possibility that they could find a good nurse. He dreaded her reaction to this lady, afraid she would dismiss her as a crackpot and blame him for yet another nursing problem. This day was surely headed the way of all others at home—downhill, he thought. Sharon Dozier was never going to work out.
In the den, he found Megan and Patrick sitting in their usual spots on the couch, watching TV. He walked into the adjoining kitchen where Aileen, washing dishes, rolled her eyes at him in a dry, sardonic “I told you so” kind of way.
“Nice outfit,” she whispered.
“Maybe it’s hunting season in New Hampshire,” he quipped, relieved that at least Aileen was willing to laugh at the situation. “Where is she?”
He followed Aileen’s gaze to the floor on the side of the couch closest to Megan. Sharon was crouched beside the ventilator, fiddling with the adjustments.
“Oh my God,” John said, shocked.
“Hi, Mr. John,” Sharon called out brightly, having heard his last loud exclamation. “I’m just showing Miss Aileen here the best settings for the kids. They were set too high.”
“I told you over the phone, Sharon, about the insurance company insisting that you not touch the kids or their medical equipment because you don’t have a license to practice in New Jersey,” John said politely but firmly. The woman had just arrived, and she was already breaking the rules.
“I’m here all day for my interview, Mr. John. I may as well help you guys. You sure need it,” she said with a big smile.
“Well, you’re right about that,” he said, taken aback by her confidence and total disregard for the rules. Unlike the other nurses who came in and out like the shift workers they were, Sharon was clearly ready to help. There was something refreshing about that, and he suddenly felt very grateful. She seemed to implicitly live by one of his foremost rules in life: “It’s better to ask forgiveness than permission.”
“You know, there’s something nice about a person who isn’t afraid to break the rules,” John relented. “I’ve become pretty good myself at arguing against all the stupid rules. When Megan first came home from the hospital on a ventilator, we were told that after the first week we could only have eight hours of nursing a day. Parents are supposed to manage their child’s nursing care the rest of the time. ‘I’m sorry, but that’s our rule,’ our caseworker said. And I told her, ‘Yeah, I heard about that rule. That’s a very good rule. Now let me tell you why it doesn’t apply to my children.’ I told the caseworker that Aileen has two other children to take care of, a baby and a four-year-old in preschool. There’s no way she can watch over Megan’s medical needs while also attending to the other children. My company now pays for round-the-clock nursing.”
“Well, you are lucky, Mr. John, that’s all I’ll say,” Sharon said. “I know plenty of families that don’t have the nursing they need.”
“Lucky—that’s funny, Sharon,” John said, suddenly quiet. “I haven’t thought of us as lucky in a long time.”
All day, Sharon attended to the kids, talking nonstop at a high volume. After she had adjusted the ventilator settings, she began to find other flaws in the children’s medical care. “Miss Aileen, you shouldn’t do that,” she said, when she saw Aileen using the same suctioning machine to clear Megan’s and Patrick’s tubes. “You need to get the insurance company to pay for another one of these. You’re going to give him every infection she has.” At feeding time, she questioned why Aileen was giving the children so much formula. She thought they were getting too much food and it wasn’t good for them. She asked to see the supply room, and Aileen led her to the corner in the basement where they kept a few extra tubes and medicines. “These are all the supplies you have?” Sharon asked, incredulous. She told Aileen that they could order extra supplies so they didn’t have to keep reordering and run out. “I didn’t know that,” Aileen responded to each thing. “Nobody told me that.”
“Don’t feel badly, sugar,” Sharon said. “Nobody ever teaches parents the rules of good nursing and the tricks about ordering supplies. They teach you how to save your children’s lives, and home you go. But there’s a lot more to good nursing care. It’s taken me thirty-three years to learn
what I have.”
When it came time for the children to take their afternoon naps, Aileen told Sharon that they needed to carry the little ones and their ventilators upstairs to their beds. Aileen lifted Megan into her arms, asking Sharon to follow, lugging the ventilator and battery. Sharon had to ask Aileen to pause every few steps so she could catch her breath. Once Megan was settled, the two of them went back downstairs and repeated the routine with Patrick.
As they settled Patrick into his bed, Sharon piped up again, “Where are the emergency bags, Miss Aileen?” Aileen said they had a bag of emergency medical equipment downstairs. “You really ought to have one beside each of the kids’ beds,” Sharon commented.
Sharon waited by the bedroom door as Aileen kissed Patrick goodnight, nuzzling the little boy under his neck. Once she closed the door behind her, she paused, her hand on the knob, and looked off into the darkness of the hallway. “You know, I’m thirty-one years old, and never in a million years did I think my life would be like this,” she said, her voice thin and distant, unconsciously conveying despair.
Sharon’s heart went out to the young mother. She thought of her own two adult daughters, Misty and Christy, and shook her head. Nope, neither one of them could handle a situation like this—of that Sharon was convinced. With her long auburn hair, porcelain complexion, and tired green eyes, Aileen looked both beautiful and forlorn.
“Sugar, there’s no way you could know all of these things unless somebody showed you how,” Sharon said, reaching up to give Aileen a hug. How in the world, she wondered, did this young mother get through one single day—let alone wake up the next morning and go through the same brutal regimen again?
All day, Sharon tried not to be critical and overbearing, but she couldn’t help herself. She was bossy by nature, and she thought the children’s medical care was a mess. It was exhausting attending to two children on ventilators, and nobody had told the Crowleys they could demand more equipment to make their lives easier. They ought to get a second set of ventilators and IV poles so they didn’t have to lug the equipment up and down the stairs twice a day, she thought. She’d tell them that some other time.