Few Kinds of Wrong

by Tina Chaulk

  “It’s your grandmother.”

  And like that the phone is back on the receiver.

  “Wrong number?” Jamie asks.

  “I’m not ready for this. Unplug the phone.” My voice sounds frantic, even to me.

  “What?” Jamie says as the phone rings again.

  “Don’t answer it.”

  “Why? What is it? Is something wrong?”

  “Nan.”

  And Jamie says hello as I put the covers over my head and cry.

  12

  MOM RARELY CALLED the garage. She and Dad managed to stay out of contact most of the hours of the day. So when the call came that day a couple of years ago, when I saw Mom’s number on the caller ID, I knew without picking up the phone that things weren’t right. Dad was on the other side of the garage using an air gun so I couldn’t call out to him and tell him to answer the phone like I wanted to.

  I didn’t say hello, just picked up the phone and listened.

  “Hello?” a voice other than Mom’s said from the other end.

  “Hello. Who’s this?”

  “It’s Maisie. Is that you, Jennifer?”

  “What’s wrong?”

  “Is your father there?”

  “He’s in the garage. I’ll get him.” A sense of relief swept over me. She’d asked for Dad and skipped telling me.

  “No, that’s okay. Could you just ask him to come home? It’s important.”

  Why? What’s happened? Is Nan okay? Why isn’t Mom calling? The list of questions in my brain didn’t reach my mouth.

  “Okay,” I said.

  I got Dad and, at his request, joined him on the ride to the house.

  “Did she sound upset?” Dad asked on the way. He’d asked questions ever since I told him about the call and what Maisie said, my answers not giving him enlightenment.

  “I don’t know.”

  “Well, why didn’t you ask?”

  “I don’t know. I was too surprised that she was calling.”

  I was half afraid when Dad made the turn onto Shea Street. I was relieved to see a quiet street, no signs of ambulances, fire trucks, or police cars. There was nothing outside to indicate why we were there. A tranquil street on a quiet Tuesday afternoon.

  Walking into the house, while less tranquil, did not immediately answer our many questions. In fact, more questions sprang to mind: Why is there blood on the cabinets and floor? Why does Mom have gauze on her arm, shoulder, and neck? Where is Nan?

  Dad kept his boots on as he walked to Mom, crouched down and asked her what happened. Mom tried to answer through the tears that came but nothing she said made sense.

  Dad looked to Maisie.

  “Your mom got a knife.” A thousand words might be provided by a picture, but the picture in front of us was suddenly clarified by those five.

  “Oh God, where is she?” Dad stood up.

  “She’s asleep. I gave her a tranquilizer. The important thing now is to get Grace to a hospital. She’ll need stitches.”

  “Why would she do this?” Dad said to no one. He touched Mom’s face twice, stood up, crouched down and touched her again.

  “She was wild,” Maisie said, looking straight at Dad. Grace called me. She’d grabbed the cordless phone and had herself barred in the bathroom. I could hear your mother screaming on the outside of the bathroom door, pounding on it while poor Grace told me what was going on.”

  “I was just doing the dishes,” Mom finally said. “It was quiet. Your mother was watching TV. The next thing I knew she was screaming for me to get out, and before I could even think, she had the knife. She was so strong, Jack. You wouldn’t believe it. I used both hands to try and get that knife from her, but she wouldn’t let go. When she got my neck, the blood squirted out … I thought I was dead.” Mom’s voice broke into gulping sobs.

  “She was lucky, Jack,” Maisie said. “She got awful close to the jugular.”

  I swallowed. A loud swallow I thought everyone must hear, no saliva in my mouth. It felt like burning sand in my throat. Dad got Mom’s coat and gently put it on her. He slipped a pair of boots on her feet and tied them up. His hand rubbed her calf through her jeans, the way you’d rub a child’s hair in passing. I looked away, jolted by the intimacy I wasn’t used to seeing.

  Dad stood up and turned to Maisie. “You said the contacts you got at Hoyles, you can get her in there quick.”

  “Dad, you said you’d never put her in there,” I piped up.

  Three words I never heard before or after from the headstrong man who, I was sure, believed until that moment that he could control the universe, or at least his small part of it.

  “I was wrong.”

  Blood seeped through the bandages on Mom’s arm and the gauze she had pressed to her neck. Above the deepening red of her gauze collar was such an expression of relief that my arguments not to put Nan in a home stopped before I could say them.

  Maisie had told Dad before, several times, that Mom couldn’t do it on her own but Dad always had a solution. When Nan started to wet the bed, Dad got Maisie to pick out the best diapers; when Nan would no longer stay in the bath, Dad relented to letting someone come in twice a week to do it, as long as Maisie would be that someone; when Nan left the house once in the middle of the night, Dad got a lock on the outside of her door; and when Nan’s screams and banging on that door got too much, he got Nan tranquilizers and Mom gave them to her every night. Mom got her own tranquilizers too, the strain etching in her face and in the dark circles under her eyes and the once-manicured nails that became chewed-off nubs. But his wife bleeding in the kitchen, lucky to be alive, there was no fix for that.

  “Stay with your grandmother,” Dad said as they left.

  “I’ll help you clean this up,” Maisie said, motioning to the blood and to the butcher knife in the sink. She bit her lip.

  “I would have done it already, you know, but your dad had to see this. He had to see it all. That’s what I figured when I saw this. The stress has been slowly killing your mother and he couldn’t see it.

  “Now, we’ll just need a mop and bucket and a cloth. Where does your mom keep them?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Maisie blinked at me, her eyes going to the floor, then back to me. I realized that she expected I should know that information. And suddenly I wished I did.

  “Well, let’s look, hey?”

  By the time Mom and Dad came home, everything was cleared away. The sink, cabinets, counter and floor were sparkling, the knife locked away in a cabinet downstairs. Nan was awake.

  “Dear Saviour, what happened?” Nan asked when she saw Mom with twenty-one stitches, looking like a female version of Frankenstein.

  “Accident. Don’t worry about it. I’ll be fine now.”Mom looked to the window. “We’ll all be fine.”

  Her words wiped the concerned look off Nan’s face and replaced it with a smile. “Good,” Nan said. “Long as we’re all good.”

  I looked away from her happy face.

  The hospital at three in the morning is a surprisingly busy place. Again, there are smokers outside, although fewer than there were during my last evening visit here. The IVs and nightgowns of the evening smokers have been replaced by the black eyes and bandaged hands of the late-night ones. The smoking seems more furious, less about relieving a need than about relieving a tension, their draws deeper, the cigarette ends glowing red.

  Jamie has driven me here in silence. He heard the news from Mom. He passed it on, had tried to soften it.

  The emergency room nurse tells us Nan is in exam room 2 and that only family can go in.

  Jamie rubs my shoulder. “I’ll be here until you come out,” he says. I turn and hug him. The surprised look of pleasure on his face after the simple action makes me follow it with a bigger, longer hug, the pressure of his arms around me hurting my side but making me feel that maybe everything could be okay.

  I hear Nan before I open the door. The voice doesn’t sound like Nan. It doesn’
t really even sound like a person at all. It’s a loud moan, devoid of its humanity.

  I stand outside exam room 2 for at least a minute, listening to this sound and wondering what is behind it, what altered form of Nan is inside and what will I do with it once I go in.

  Nan has been so transformed in the past ten years. She was a plump woman who baked cookies and told me to “put out” to a guy so I could give up being a mechanic and get married. She believed chocolate could cure anything life could throw at you and that man never walked on the moon. She would tell me stories about growing up and what Dad was like as a boy, and she loved to sing, her music the only part of her that consistently clung on through her dementia. That happy, carefree, satisfied, complicated lady left when Pop Collins’ heart stopped beating, late at night on the sofa where Nan found his cold body the next morning.

  “I pressed my breast against him,” Nan once told us, with tear-filled eyes. “Foolish, I suppose. I thought I could make his heart beat again with the help of mine. I tried to share my heart with him, just like I shared it all those years. And he took it with him. I’ve only half a heart left now without him.

  Wasting away to the thin, frail Nan who started to forget small things like paying the light bill, then the names of loved ones, then onto sitting behind the steering wheel of her Chevy Impala when she was driving me to a family dinner at Swiss Chalet and asking me how she was supposed to start the car. Names, faces, recipes, knitting, gardening, history, laughs, games, all followed. All but music.

  Then the Nan who lived with us, the one who kept us awake at night, who broke things, who knocked down the cans Mom set up outside her door to alert us that Nan had left her room, and who blocked up the toilet with Mom’s new towels.

  Then Nan in the Seniors’ Home. The one who had resigned herself to die once Pop had, but who, in a rare moment of lucidity, told us the day she entered the home that this was the place she would die.

  “I’ll go to the garden here,” she said that day.

  Nan’s view of death had always been a garden. “If there’s no God, the garden will just be dirt, but if He’s up there, it will be full of the most beautiful flowers, full of life everywhere, and I’ll smile the biggest smile.”

  “And what if you go to hell, Nan?” I asked her every time she told me this.

  “Weeds, my dear, all weeds and the devil will make me pull them forever.”

  Then the Nan who was the time machine. The blessed sanctuary where I could find relief from pain. The sound inside exam room number 2 makes me fear that sanctuary is gone forever.

  Even when I turn the handle to the door I hold it there in my hand for seconds, knowing this line is about to be crossed and that I’ll never be able to unsee what I’m about to see.

  I push open the door and they stand next to Nan’s bed: Henrietta, Chuck, Mom, and Bryce.

  For a second I’m filled with anger that Bryce is here, in our space. He is not immediate family. Not any family in the strictest definition. I’m about to say exactly that when a renewed moan brings my eyes to Nan.

  Her face is drawn and slack at once. Her lips don’t move in the moan, one hand flails frantically, trying to communicate something and getting nowhere. I haven’t seen a face so changed since the time I watched Dad’s change from alive to dead, that grey, chalky look that replaced a ruddy healthy glow.

  The mask Nan wears is horrifying because of the sounds, but mostly the desperation in her eyes. There is a wild, terrified person needing to understand what is happening.

  I walk straight to her. “Nan, you’ve had a stroke and they’re going to help you here.” The moans become louder, her movements more pronounced, her left arm grabbing my hand in a fierce grip. “Nan, it’s okay,” I shout over her sounds. “We’ll make sure you’re okay.”

  “I don’t think she knows who we are,” Bryce says and the fearful look in her eyes and terrified sounds make sense.

  “Mrs. Collins,” I say, my experience telling me exactly what to do, “you’re in a hospital and the doctors will be here soon. You’ll be fine. You can’t talk right now but we’re here for you.”

  I watch her relax, eyes calm as the moaning stops.

  “Aunt Henrietta, can I talk to you outside?”

  Henrietta looks from me to Mom, to her husband. “Why?” she asks.

  “Outside, please. I don’t think Mrs. Collins needs to hear us.”

  “Oh for God’s sake, why can’t you talk to me?” Mom says. “Will everything have to go through Henrietta now? Are you eight years old?”

  Her words sting and their impact is shocking. She said this in front of Aunt Henrietta. A woman Mom felt judged her through every second of her marriage to Dad.

  Henrietta looks at Chuck with her bottom lip turned down and eyes wide in a gesture of “Well now, what have we here?”

  I walk out. “Aunt Henrietta, please come out here,” I say as I exit the room.

  Mom rips open the door behind me and stands in front of me, legs apart and hand on hip.

  “Why is Bryce in there?” I point at the room door.

  “Why wouldn’t he be? Your father isn’t here so—”

  “What? So, he replaces Dad everywhere? First in your bed and now in there with Nan.”

  “Your grandmother has had a stroke. Like it or not, we’re here as a family, and like it or not, that still includes Bryce. He was always family. You’ve said it yourself a million times.”

  “Before he fucked my mother.”

  For the first time in my life, I feel the sting of a slap on my cheek. I stand in stunned silence.

  When I look at Mom I expect something akin to guilt or surprise on her face but see hurt and defiance instead.

  “Don’t you dare speak like that about me,” she says, oblivious to the other people in the hallway who are staring at us. “You don’t get to judge me. You have no idea.”

  “He’s Dad’s best friend.”My voice breaks with hot raspy tears.

  Mom grabs my arm and pushes me toward the all-too-familiar family room where a man is sitting but says, “Excuse me,” then leaves when we enter. Mom, who would normally apologize for being lumpy if someone walked over her, does not respond, “Oh, that’s okay, we’ll leave,” as I expect, but says, “Thank you.”

  “He was Dad’s best friend,” Mom says. “Was. Your father is dead, Jennifer, and I am not. I don’t know why you can’t accept that or why you seem so angry at me. Everyone tiptoes around you and tries to make you happy, despite your constant sadness. I cried for him too, you know. I grieved and I mourned. And so did Bryce. But while we were holding each other up, struggling through to get better and come out stronger and more supportive, you have just angrily clung to your grief, like proof of how much you loved him. Even Aunt Henrietta talks about it. We all try to work around you and deal with you with kid gloves. And you choose to judge us. All the time. No one has as much pain as you. Well, I slept with his shirt for weeks. I cooked his dinner for two months and put it in the oven until I’d throw it out the next morning and cry about it. I miss him too.” Tears are streaming and it’s difficult even to understand her words now. “You were never alone in this. You just chose not to see the rest of us.”

  I have no words. Maybe I could have gotten through this easier. Maybe I needed to share it. But I pushed everyone aside and they all know it. I just stare at her and blink.

  “I.”

  She waits but no words come after “I.”

  “The word is ‘we.’ Everyone around you wants to help you and to hold you but it’s this ‘I’ that gets in the way. It’s ‘we.’ We. Not you against us. We against everything, whatever it is.”

  Mom paces around the room, clutching her fist to her chest. “Oh God, I’ve been waiting to say this. I should have said it sooner but I didn’t know how to get through all of this.” She points to me, to the space around me.

  “You said you were never happy with him. So how the hell can you be so sad about him dying? He was just ou
t of the way. You were just waiting for the joy, weren’t you? You put it on his headstone, for God’s sake.”

  “What?”

  “Who puts anything about joy on a headstone? He was dead and you were looking for joy. Because you never loved him.”

  “Is that what you think?” She shakes her head. “I didn’t say I didn’t love him. He. And you. Were my life. Now I just want my life to include me.”

  “Well, why didn’t you leave him? Or why didn’t you stay away when you did leave? Why did you come back?” Finally the question I have waited so many years to ask is out there. “Because.” She pauses. “He told me about you.”

  “What about me?” I ask.

  “He came to Nan Philpott’s and told me how you couldn’t stop crying. How you wouldn’t eat or sleep. I came back for you. I’d do anything for you. Every night, when I’d call and pray that you would talk to me and you wouldn’t, it killed me. I would have done anything just to talk to you again. So I came back.”

  I inhale, trying to catch all the air I feel is leaving me. My hand goes to my mouth. “Dad told you that?”

  She nods, tears still falling, maybe for a different reason now, all the anger gone to some loving place.

  “Then you were never happy because of me? You stayed there and … for me?”

  “Not just for you. For … I don’t know. It doesn’t matter why. I came back. And I did love your father. Maybe not the way you think I should have, but I did.”

  “But I was … Thank you.”

  “Oh, Jennifer. I’ve been wanting you to be happy, waiting for you to be happy.” Her eyes don’t move from my face. “I wanted that verse on your father’s headstone for you, my love. You were so lost in sadness. I wanted you to see that the sadness would end one day.”

  She touches the side of my face and wipes my tears away. “I don’t know how to make you whole again.”

  “Me either,” I whisper.

  13

  DAD AND I were watching The Cosby Show. Claire Huxtable had her arms around a young Rudy, dispensing motherly love and advice. An ache started in my stomach and rose to my chest, making it uncomfortable to breathe. I had always taken my mother’s hugs for granted, as much a part of her as not hugging or kissing was a part of Dad. Suddenly, Mom being gone and the absence of the potential for a hug overwhelmed me. I walked over to Dad and sat next to him on the couch.