by Nancy Rue
I ignored the question. “Is she so far along that she can’t talk?”
“Hard to say.”
“Do you know how fed up I am with that excuse? Don’t worry about covering your behind with me. Tell me what you think! This is my mother—I need to know!”
McDonald didn’t even flinch, though Max reached for one of my hands. I pulled it away.
“I’ll tell you what I think,” McDonald said, “as long as you understand that it’s just that—what I think.”
“Go for it,” I said.
“I think she’s just decided she’s not going to talk anymore because she can’t completely control what comes out of her mouth. I don’t know her personally, but Dr. Fenwick says she’s a mighty proud woman.”
“So how much longer before she actually can’t talk?” I said. “Give me some kind of time line.”
“Looking at the length of time she’s been showing symptoms,” McDonald said, “I’d say she’s got to resign from the hemo lab immediately. And she can’t live alone once she’s discharged from the hospital.”
“What does that mean?” I said.
“She’s going to need a full-time caretaker,” McDonald said.
“You can’t be serious.” I looked at Dr. Fenwick. “You know her. Can you just hear her reaction to that news?”
Dr. Fenwick took on a pained expression. “It isn’t up to her anymore, Jill. It’s up to you.”
“Don’t you have some family that can help you?” Dr. McDonald said.
“No,” I said. “Her parents are both dead. Her brother was killed in Vietnam. Look, I can handle this on my own. I just need to know my options.”
“Well, my secretary can fix you up with a good social worker,” Dr. McDonald said. “We’ve got agencies, services, support groups—whatever you need.” He fished in his pocket and produced a business card. “Just call my office when you’re ready.”
“You have a few days to decide,” Dr. Fenwick said. “She won’t be released for probably another seventy-two hours.”
“One more question,” I said. “Why did this happen? What caused it?”
McDonald put up a shielding hand. “When I say this, hold your fire,” he said. “We just don’t know.”
“Is somebody working on it? Isn’t somebody doing research, trying to find out?”
“Absolutely. There’s a whole raft of docs in that field. But you see, it’s so rare, we’re behind where we are on Alzheimer’s.”
Dr. Fenwick looked up from his hands. “Jill, they’re doing all they can. You need to focus on your mother’s care.”
I’m glad you know what I need to do, I thought. Because I have absolutely no idea.
My thoughts couldn’t find a compartment to land in, and they were ramming into each other like bumper cars.
Dr. Fenwick stood up. “You know you can call me anytime. I’ll continue to be your mother’s primary care doctor if that’s what you want.”
“Sure,” I said.
McDonald rose, too, and looked down at me from his other-atmospheric height.
“Now, you’re going to have more questions,” he said. “If you want to set up a time with me to chew on this together, we can do that.”
“We appreciate that, Doctor,” Max said. I could feel him groping for something to appreciate in this sea of information even he couldn’t be thankful for.
Dr. Fenwick was already out the door, and McDonald was following him when he stopped and turned back to me.
“This is pretty hard to take,” he said. “But I’ll tell you one thing I’ve learned from families that have somebody with a dementia. They say the key to handling this is to believe that even though the mind and the body may be failing, the spirit is still in there.”
I couldn’t even respond.
“Thank you, Doctor,” Max said for the umpteenth time.
McDonald left. Max sank back into the chair. I went out into the hall and leaned against the wall, where I could see Fenwick and McDonald retreating to the elevator.
Spirit? I wanted to shout after them. That’s very scientific, Doctors. Thank you.
Then I marched to the nurse’s station.
“Where can I get a coffee?” I said.
The next seventy-two hours made up for the slo-mo quality of the previous forty-eight and whipped past at breakneck speed. I attributed the racing in my veins to the amount of caffeine I had started consuming.
I called the social worker Dr. McDonald’s secretary referred me to the next morning. Freda Webster-Claire insisted that we meet in person rather than do business over the phone. She was also adamant that we meet at Mother’s house, since that’s where she’d be going when she was released from the hospital.
“We’ll want to look together to see if that’s our best possible option,” she said.
“There are no other options,” I told her. “That’s where she’s going. All I want is the name of a decent caretaker.”
“We’ll go over all of that when we meet,” she said.
I wondered if Freda Webster-Claire could hear my teeth grinding through the rest of the conversation.
We settled on that afternoon at two. That gave me five hours to get my academic life back on track. At that point, five uninterrupted hours sounded like a huge block of time.
I hadn’t slept the night before anyway, so I’d used the wee hours of the morning to polish off some research and get caught up on paper grading. The big difference between teaching a class as a grad student and doing it as faculty was that staff members had graduate students to do their grading for them. I had to go over every muffed-up differential equation myself. It at least gave me a heads-up that Tabitha was making some progress—she was now up to C-minus level.
I handed back the papers at the end of class and then tried to beat it out of there so I could get organized for the meeting with Nigel that I was determined to have before the day was out. The students were so busy gaping at their papers that nobody—especially not Tabitha—seemed to be aware that I was leaping over vacant chairs to get to the door. She was engrossed in wiping tears off her upper lip as she sat slumped at her desk, looking at the paper as if it were written in Russian.
She’s crying? I thought. Nobody cries over calculus.
I decided to leave her with a little dignity and pretended not to notice her as I proceeded toward the door. But one particularly large snort made ignoring her impossible. I looked right at her the very moment she tore her eyes away from her score and looked imploringly back at me.
I groaned inwardly and said, “You want to come to my office for a minute?”
She was out of her seat before I even finished the question, trailing down the hall after me like an abandoned cocker spaniel on roller blades.
She gets five minutes, I promised myself. That’s all I have to spare.
The usual contingent of second-year males was in the hall as we passed, though they didn’t seem to notice that Tabitha was now sniffing loudly enough to awaken Jacoboni over in Escondido Village. Just in case they did decide to do some kind of empirical analysis of Tabitha’s behavior, I closed my office door behind us when we went in. She didn’t even wait for me to clear off the chair—she just plopped right down on a stack of manila folders, dropped her face into her hands, and sobbed. All I could think to do was look for Kleenex, but since I’d started tutoring her, she’d pretty much cleaned me out.
She finally got enough control to paw through her backpack and produce one that was only semi-used. She blew noisily, reminding me of Max. I was going to have to start buying tissue in bulk.
“Look,” I said, when I thought she’d finished wiping her nose, “you can’t look at it as a C-minus. You have to view it as improvement. You flunked the first exam, right?”
She nodded miserably, hair spilling against her cheeks and sticking in strands to the leftover tears.
“We’re going to have three more, and you have the option of dropping your lowest grade. If you keep coming
in for extra help, I guarantee you at least a B for the quarter. I know it’s not an A, but—”
“Why is it this hard?”
“I could give you a number of reasons,” I said, “but you don’t have that kind of time. Just for starters, it’s a higher level of math than you’ve had before. It’s college. It’s Stanford.”
“That’s not what I mean,” she whimpered. “This is—this is, like, what God has asked me to do. I told Him I would follow His will in everything in my life, and this is where He’s led me. Only why is it still so hard? I mean, why isn’t He helping me?”
“You don’t even want to go there with me,” I said.
She went anyway, dragging me right behind her.
“I always thought that if I was doing what God told me to do—if I was living in obedience to His will—He wouldn’t let me fail.”
“Look, if you’re having some kind of spiritual crisis,” I said, “maybe you ought to go talk to your priest.”
“Pastor.”
“Whatever. I don’t think I can help you with this part. If you’re struggling with the product rule, the chain rule, the quotient rule, I’m the one to talk to. But when it comes to God—”
“How did you know you were supposed to be a mathematician?”
“I was good at it, and I wanted to do something I was good at and something that made sense to me. Plus I didn’t want to follow in my mother’s footsteps and become a medical doctor.”
She was blinking her enormous gray eyes at me as if she was suddenly fascinated. I had to blink myself. Where the heck had that come from? I glanced at my watch. She’d already used up seven of her five minutes.
“Listen,” I said, “if you’re having this much trouble with math in your first college course, you probably ought to rethink your major. Who knows, maybe you heard wrong.”
“It couldn’t be wrong. My parents are so sure of it.”
“Your parents?” I said. “They picked out your major for you?”
“Well, yeah. Not, like, totally. I mean, we all three sat down and went through my grades and my test scores and tried to figure out where God was leading. They figured God was pointing me to something like math because otherwise He wouldn’t have allowed me to be accepted at Stanford.”
I stared for a moment. “Really? I didn’t know God worked in Admissions.”
She blinked again, as if it was finally dawning on her that I hadn’t been “born again.” You’d have thought I’d slapped her across the face.
“Okay, look, we’re getting off the track here,” I said quickly. “I can’t tell you why this is so hard for you. I can’t tell you why things aren’t working out the way you and your parents thought they were going to. All I can do is help you with the math. But whatever it is you do to make your decisions, do it again and see if some other major doesn’t…what, present itself? However it is that works.”
I stopped before I could offend her any further. The poor kid already looked as if she was going to need therapy because she’d just discovered everybody she went to for help wasn’t going to quote the Bible.
“You’re coming in tomorrow, right?” I said, standing up and reaching for the doorknob.
She nodded.
“Look over your test, write down the things you don’t get, and we’ll start from there.”
She gave me one more long look before she slid for the door. Then she looked over her shoulder and said, “So I guess you don’t pray, huh?”
“I don’t what?” The words were out before I could catch them, swallow them, or at least disguise them.
“Pray. I need to discern God’s purpose in all this. Since you’re so sure you’re doing what you’re supposed to be doing, I thought if you prayed…”
She trailed off. I felt as if I looked like her, mouth gaping, eyes blinking. It was one of the few times in my life I had ever been at a complete loss for words.
She just waited. Since it was obvious she wasn’t going to leave until she got an answer, I finally said, “No, I don’t pray. But how about if I hold a good thought for you?”
“Oh,” she said. “Then I guess I’ll pray for you.”
When she was gone, I shook my head to the empty room. No wonder you’re having trouble with calculus, honey, I thought. You’re just a little dense.
That was all the time I had for Tabitha’s spiritual condition. I scooped up the now-warm folders from the chair and spread them out on my desk. My plan was to have my meeting with Nigel that afternoon, but I wanted to be able to hand him the work I’d already done on the new thesis at the same time, as evidence that this thing with my mother wasn’t going to affect my progress or my performance. As a matter of fact, I decided as I pored over the work I’d squeezed in between grading papers the last three mornings from 4:00 A.M. to 8:00 A.M., I wasn’t even going to tell him or anybody else in the department that Mother had Pick’s Disease. The more separate I kept that from my real life, the better.
Besides, I wasn’t even sure I believed it yet.
At noon, I was on my way out the back door to grab a bagel at the Terrace when Deb hailed me from the opposite end of the hall. I tried to pretend I didn’t hear her, but Jacoboni poked his head out of Peter’s office door and said, “Hey, Jill. Deb’s calling you.”
“Oh, really,” I said.
“People are tryin’ to work here, Deb,” Jacoboni said. “You wanna hold it down?”
Deb blinked at him furiously and continued toward me, some kind of flowing, East-Indian-looking costume flying out behind her.
“Well, Deb, darlin’?” Jacoboni said, slanting casually in the doorway. “Do you plan to be functional as well as decorative today?”
“Jill, tell me you’re on your way out to pick up three dozen cookies, and I’ll kiss your feet,” Deb said.
“Why would I be going out to—” It hit me like a freight train. “Is today that stupid tea?”
“Why, Jill!” Jacoboni said, his hand pressed to his chest in mock indignation. “Are you referring to an opportunity to meet with the best mathematical minds Stanford can bring together as ‘stupid’?”
“You forgot?” Deb said. She tossed the unruly curly hair off her forehead with a jerk of her head. “I teamed up with you because you never forget anything. You have a mind like a steel trap. What happened?”
“Don’t have a stroke,” I said. I dug into the pocket of my jacket and produced a roll of ones. “I blew it. I’m sorry—just, here—take this and buy my share. I’ll do all the legwork next time.”
“Are you going to help me set up?” Deb said. “What time?”
“The seminar’s at four-thirty, the tea’s at three-thirty—we ought to set up about three o’clock.” She glared at Jacoboni. “If we set it up any sooner, the vultures will have the table cleaned off before the speaker even gets there.”
Jacoboni shrugged. “I plead innocence.”
“Tell me you can be there at three,” Deb said to me.
I did a quick analysis in my head. I was meeting Freda Webster-Claire-Smith-Barney or whatever her name was at two o’clock. If it took longer than forty-five minutes for her to realize that all I wanted was the name of a good caretaker, I was getting another social worker anyway.
“I’ll be there,” I assured her.
Then I skipped the bagel and went up to the first floor, poured myself a cup of coffee, which was now strong enough to stand a spoon up in, and headed back down to retrieve my folders and attempt to get a meeting with Nigel. Just then Nigel himself stepped out of the department office. For once something was going my way.
“Dr. Frost,” I said. “Just the person I was looking for. Do you have a minute to talk about my new thesis?”
“Of course,” he said. “We can go up to my office right now if that works for you.”
I debated over whether to race down and get my folders but decided against it. A bird in the hand and all that.
Nigel led me unhurriedly up the steps to the second floor, nearly
driving me crazy in the process. I had to force myself not to grab him by the arm and propel him forward.
“How’s your mother?” he asked.
“What?” I said.
“Your mother. How is her recovery?”
“Oh. She’s coming home in—” I glanced at my watch—“about forty-eight hours.”
“She’s doing well, then.”
“Yeah,” I said.
He didn’t say anything else on the interminable remainder of the walk to his office. Except for my slight irritation with him a few days before, it was the first time I could remember feeling uncomfortable with Nigel. It had been apparent from the start of our advisory relationship that he wasn’t going to intimidate me and I wasn’t going to have to be Miss Congeniality around him. Since then, through the preparation for my area exam at the end of my third year, and through my research last year and this, we’d worked together like a well-oiled machine. Now I felt like the proverbial squeaky wheel.
But I didn’t have much choice. If I didn’t get this taken care of now, I wasn’t going to be able to focus on handling Freda. And if I didn’t handle Freda, Mother was going to come home to an empty house. Who knew what that meant at this point?
We were in Nigel’s office before I realized he was talking again, glasses already in hand.
“Your new proposal is fine,” he said. “As I mentioned the other day, if there is any fault at all, it may be overly aggressive.”
I hadn’t even sat down yet, and I stayed standing. “Could you flesh that out for me?”
He perched the glasses on the end of his nose, then took them off. With his usual maddening slowness, he sat down in his chair and folded one leg precisely over the other.
“I don’t want to run the risk of being scooped again,” I said. “I was merely—”