by Michael Rowe
“Maybe, Dad,” I lied. “I had a lot of friends. You’re probably thinking of someone else.
I kept a full schedule of classes as long as I possibly could; the house was paid for, I was working, and his savings paid enough for homecare several times a week, but even the rotating home assistance workers who came to help with my father finally admitted that yes, he needed to be watched more than even they and I could manage. But still, I resisted their suggestion of alternate living arrangements for my father.
That remained the case until the rainy Thursday night I got the call from the police telling me they had picked up my father, who had almost been killed wandering in traffic in his pajamas on the Leaside Bridge. When the police arrived, he was stumbling towards the lower railings of the bridge with its deadly forty-five-metre plunge.
The officers had been able to divert traffic long enough to safely rescue him, then calm him down enough to get him into the back of a cruiser. They had been able to identify him by the plastic identification bracelet I’d insisted he wear, one of the few battles regarding his care that he’d given in to with no blowback. The bracelet had his name, our address, and my cell phone number. I was almost hysterical on the telephone, but the female officer’s voice at the other end seemed accustomed to dealing with hysterical relatives and soothing them. Mr. Browning was safe and at the station, she told me kindly. He’d said he was hungry, so they’d given him a sandwich—was that all right?
And he was asking that his daughter, Amanda, pick him up at the station and take him home.
When I arrived at the No. 53 Division police station, my father was docile but uncomprehending. He asked me who I was. When I told him, he said he didn’t have a son, he had a daughter and her name was Amanda.
“He doesn’t have a daughter,” I explained to the two constables who had brought my father to the front desk so they could sign him out. “He lives with me. I’m his son. He has Alzheimer’s. Aside from the actual disease symptoms, one of the side effects of the drugs he’s on is hallucinations and sleep disturbance.”
The younger of the two constables looked hard at me. “Who do you think he’s asking for? He sounds pretty specific. Do you have a sister, maybe?”
“I’m an only child, officer. I don’t have any sisters.”
“Could he be asking about his nurses, maybe?”
“His nurses—pardon me, his ex-nurses, because I’m going to fire whichever one left him alone long enough for him to get out of the house, then didn’t call me immediately—are named Beth-Anne and Florence. I don’t know any Amanda. We don’t know any Amanda,” I corrected. “We don’t.”
The older of the two police officers seemed to intuit the situation more clearly than his colleague, whether by professional or personal experience. He looked at me with a mixture of pity and resignation that led me to believe that he’d seen this before, maybe even up close.
“Mr. Browning,” he said. “If you could just step over here and fill out these forms, we can release your dad back into your custody and you can take him home. Please take care of him. At his stage of the illness, he could hurt himself badly—even hurt other people. I don’t know what he was doing on that bridge, but I do know that it’s always been a magnet for suicides.”
“My father would never kill himself,” I said automatically. “He’s not like that.”
The monstrous enormity of that lie shamed me even as I verbalized it. Of course he’d kill himself. How many times since the diagnosis had my previously happy father wept in his despair and said he didn’t want to wind up as some sort of raving vegetable, dependent on others for everything from feeding him to bathing him to helping him use the toilet? How many times had he slyly asked me (forgetting that he’d already the question a dozen times before) what would happen if the pills he was supposed to swallow were chewed instead?
But I still wasn’t prepared to process the notion of my father trying to kill himself by jumping to his death.
“Either way” the officer said. “He’s going to need better care, Mr. Browning. Much better than the care he has right now. He could have been killed tonight. I’m not faulting you, sir. This is one of the hardest things anyone has to go through—for both of you, really, in different ways. You only get one dad in this lifetime. Like I said, take care of him.”
“I know that,” I said. “Believe me, I know it.”
I felt my father pluck the sleeve of my raincoat. He reached out and caressed the back of my head, the same way he’d done a thousand times when I was a little boy, under the covers in the dim glow of my nightlight.
“You’ve cut your hair, Amanda,” he said dreamily. “You had the loveliest dark brown hair. Just like your mother.”
“I’m Jamie, Daddy,” I replied, fighting back tears. “I’m your son. You don’t have a daughter. There’s no Amanda. There never has been. Please, Daddy, stay with me just a little bit longer. Just at least until we can get home and I can call someone to help us. Please, please, please. Just a bit longer.”
He sighed ruefully. “You should have waited for me on the bridge, Amanda,” he said. “I saw you. I was almost all the way across the road. I was almost there.”
That night marked the end of my father as I’d known him. When I got him home, I gave him his medicine and put him to bed. I pulled the blanket up to his chest and tucked it in so he’d be warm enough. He looked up at me from the pillow.
“Jamie,” he said in an old man’s tentative, tremulous voice. “Would you stay here with me for a little while? Just until I fall asleep? I’m so scared.”
“Of course, Dad. Of course I will. Don’t be scared. I’m here.” I climbed onto the bed and lay down beside him. I put my arm around his shoulders and held him tenderly. In a very short time he was fast asleep in my arms, but I didn’t sleep at all that night, even after I’d left his room and gone into the living room and opened the bottle of Canadian Club I’d been given back when Ame and I were still married, but had never touched.
The next day, I brought Dad to the MacNeil Institute, the best private residential facility for Alzheimer’s patients in Toronto I could afford. Even today I remember how preternaturally, cruelly bright that sunlight in the parking lot was to my dry, red eyes and how much it stung as we laboriously made our way up the ramp to the front door.
When my father realized I was leaving him there, he cried and pleaded, telling me he didn’t want to stay there; he wanted to go home with me.
Of all of the crucifying ordeals my father and I had endured together since his diagnosis, leaving him here, while he begged like a child for me not to abandon him, was first one I had grave doubts about my being able to survive.
And then, at the most desperate moment, like an angel of light, Nurse Ardelia Jackson appeared from behind the swinging doors leading to the locked ward corridor and came over to us.
Without saying anything to me, she linked my father’s arm lightly in hers. “There now, Peter,” she comfortingly. “What’s all this fuss? Everything is fine. It’ll be all right, you’ll see. Come along now and take a walk with me. Jamie can come along in a bit. Let’s get to know each other a little bit, shall we? There now. It’s all right. We’ll just stroll.”
My father calmed at once. It was as though Nurse Jackson had drawn the terror from him like yarrow. As they walked away together down the corridor towards his new home, the place where he would spend the final stages of his life, my father turned back just once. “Jamie,” he said. “You go on home, son. I’m going to walk for a bit.”
Though my heart was utterly breaking, I still noted with joy that my father had called me Jamie, not any other name. He knew me again. How long he would know me, I wasn’t sure.
But he knew me then, and I knew he was aware that he was saying goodbye.
That was three years ago. In the time between that day and today, my father slipped entirely into the hazy, oblique world of his illne
ss.
I visited him at the MacNeil Institute every day, usually after classes, but occasionally also in the morning, before school started.
Then, late one black November night, my world changed once again.
I was driving home from school after staying behind to work with my student actors on the school’s production of Arthur Miller’s The Crucible. I had been teaching the play at the same time the students were acting in it. That afternoon in class, there had been a rousing discussion about small-town sexual hypocrisy and the roiling passions locked away beneath Salem’s rigorous façade of pious New England propriety. As a teacher, I had been quietly proud to see that the passion I had been able to get out of my students that afternoon in class had carried through to that night’s rehearsal.
It had been raining all day, an early-winter drizzle that began to freeze as evening fell. After sundown, the temperature had steadily dropped until the cold and wet turned the roads and highways slick and black and slippery as wet glass.
In my mind, I had been replaying the scene near the end of the play when Jeff Renwick, who was playing John Proctor, had delivered Proctor’s wrenching soliloquy about losing the dignity of his name by confessing to witchcraft when so many of his friends had gone to the gallows rather than besmirch their own with a false confession.
“Because it is my name! Because I cannot have another in my life! Because I lie and sign myself to lies! Because I am not worth the dust on the feet of them that hang! How may I live without my name? I have given you my soul; leave me my name!”
When he had finished, I had tears in my eyes. And I was not the only one in the auditorium who did. The applause had begun slowly, but it reached a crescendo that echoed through the rehearsal auditorium and out into the corridor.
I was smiling at the memory and tapping my fingers on the steering wheel when my car was abruptly sideswiped by a drunken lawyer making an illegal left-hand turn. The impact sent me crashing into a guardrail, or so I was told later.
When I woke from the coma in traction three days later, the attending physician asked me if I knew who I was, or where I was.
My first words to him were, “Leave me my name.”
I spent almost six months in hospital recovering from a variety of injuries, including a mild brain trauma that nonetheless left me unable to focus for long periods of time. This particular injury, of all the damage I sustained, effectively ended my teaching career.
On the upside, between the insurance and the money the lawyer’s family paid me to avoid me suing them for everything they had, I found myself with more money than I’d ever seen in my life. Certainly it was enough to ensure my father’s continued care at the MacNeil Institute. It was also enough money for me to fulfill a dream I’d cherished ever since my divorce: the dream of leaving the city and all its painful memories. I didn’t want to be more than a half-day’s drive from the MacNeil Institute as long as my father was alive, but as it now stood, I was marking time. I couldn’t teach and I was too young for anything resembling a retirement.
So when I came across the advertisement in the Globe & Mail for the sale of a turn-of-the-century estate on a private island in Georgian Bay in excellent repair—suitable for a family or as an income property/guesthouse—for a price that was a virtual steal, I did something I’d never done in my entire dogmatically practical, safe, honourable life: I bought the house, sight unseen.
The very act of cutting the cheque felt almost pornographic in its decadence, but it was that very sense of abandon that allowed me to envision a life beyond the grim borders of the one in which I found myself. The point was, I had never done anything like that in my life, and I now could.
On the telephone, when I’d called to tell Hank that I’d bought the house, she’d asked me if perhaps its impulsive purchase was another symptom of the brain injury.
I’d laughed and replied, “No, it’s a symptom of having enough money to afford to be able to make mistakes, even big ones. And buying this house—which has a name, by the way, “Wild Fell”—on a crazy impulse is the first fun I’ve had in years.”
I told her about my plans to turn it into a guesthouse, which sounded more than ever like a lark when I related it over the telephone. Hank must have sensed something uncertain in my voice, because she waited till I was finished talking, then asked me the sort of to-the-point question in which she specialized.
“How’re you doing, Jamie? Really, though. I don’t want to hear bullshit from you. How’re you feeling about all of this? Not in general, I mean, but right now, at this moment?”
“Right now, at this moment, I feel guilty, frankly,” I told her. “But at the same time, I feel excited, which probably makes me feel even guiltier. I really feel like I needed some distance from everything—the divorce, Dad’s diagnosis, the accident. Buying this house and thinking of turning it into a summer bed and breakfast, or guesthouse, might just be a very expensive pipe dream. But I wanted to forget about it all, at least for a while. Does that make sense to you? Do you think I’m crazy?”
Hank snorted. “I’ve spent a lifetime trying to forget that I was born a girl named Lucinda. What do you think? And yes, of course I understand what you’re saying. And I agree with you. I’ve never seen anyone love his father as much as you love yours, Jamie. And it’s not like you’re leaving the country. You’ll be three, maybe four hours away from him. That’s nothing. If he needs you, or if you feel like you need to see him, we’ll just get in the car and drive.”
“Is it really that simple? That’s sort of what Nurse Jackson has said, too.”
“Yes, Jamie, it’s really that simple.”
“Then why do I feel sick inside about this?”
She laughed at that. “Because you are crazy, Jamie. Just not for the reasons you think you are.” That voice with its rawboned, rational practicality could soothe and calm me like no other.
I asked Hank again, “Do you think I’m crazy? For buying Wild Fell?”
She paused. I pictured her rubbing her chin as she did when she pondered. “First off, no, I don’t think you’re remotely crazy. Buying it, especially sight-unseen, might not necessarily have been my first choice when you came into all that money. Me, I might have done some travelling—”
I interrupted her, a bit more brusquely than I might have wanted to. “You know why I can’t leave the country.”
“As I was saying,” Hank said patiently. “Whatever I might have done, I’m not you. You took care of your responsibilities with it. You can’t teach right now because of your injury, and you don’t want to sit around. All of which is a very long and involved way of saying, no, I don’t think you’re crazy for buying . . .
what’s it called . . . ?”
“Wild Fell.”
“What the hell kind of a name for a cottage is that? What does that even mean?”
“‘Fell’ has at least two meanings,” I said. The faintly pompous, lecturing inflection that had become second nature to me after all those years of teaching embarrassed me. It sometimes manifested itself without warning, especially when I felt challenged, as I now did by Hank. “As an adjective, it means ‘of terrible evil or ferocity.’ But as a noun—which is how I believe it’s used in this case—it refers to a hill, or a stretch of high moorland. Alexander Blackmore, the politician who bought the island and built the house in the early-1800s, came to Canada from Cornwall. Unlike most of the islands in the Georgian Bay region, which are flat, this one actually has a rise, like a cliff. It slopes, too. Mrs. Fowler the real estate agent in Alvina, the nearest town, told me was that Mr. Blackmore had been struck by the romantic notion that it reminded him of the moors of his childhood, except it was right in the middle of a Canadian lake. Hence, the ‘wild’ part. He named the island after himself, and named the house ‘Wild Fell’ in a sort of romanticized homage to his roots.”
“All this fuss over a cottage,” Hank mused.
“This is more than a cottage,” I said. “You’ll understand what I mean when you see it.”
“You haven’t seen it,” Hank said dryly. “Did he live there alone?”
“Not from what I understand,” I said. “He raised a family there. He had a wife and two children—a son and a daughter.”
Hank seemed more curious now. “What happened to them? Who sold the house? Grandchildren? Great-grandchildren?”
“I don’t know what happened to the Blackmore children,” I said. “Mrs. Fowler didn’t say. The house passed from the Blackmore family in Canada to cousins in England who apparently didn’t want the bother of its upkeep, or the expense. According to Mrs. Fowler, no one has lived in it for over fifty years.”
“Jesus, Jamie, are you kidding? Fifty years? The place is going to be a wreck! What were you thinking?”
“Yeah, I thought that, too,” I said. “But they included a home inspection. The results were sort of a surprise.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, the house doesn’t seem to have aged.”
She grunted. “Oh, bullshit. You’ve been totally had, Jamie. Thank God you can afford it.”
“No, really,” I insisted. “Some fire damage to the exterior of one of the wings, and the usual wear and tear. But other than that, it’s in remarkable shape. I read the report, Hank. And for the price I paid for the houswould have been a fool not to buy it.”
“‘Remarkable shape,’” Hank mimicked. “Jesus. I hope Alvina has a decent hotel for you to stay in once you see this dilapidated wreck.”
“You’re a landscaper, Hank,” I said. “If it’s broken, you can fix it, right? You can do anything.”
Now it was Hank’s turn to sound professorial. “I landscape outside, Jamie,” she said. “I make award-winning landscapes out of nothing. If you need a garden outside this albatross of a house of yours, I can probably do it. But fixing up an uninhabited wreck . . .” Hank trailed off. “Jesus Christ.”