by Scott Walker
Not long after he moved to Charlottesville for graduate school, Robert had gotten the address of his great-uncle Luis’ daughter who had visited Spain thirty years before and met some of the cousins there. He wrote to her, telling her he wanted to try to contact them, but she did not reply. When he asked his great-aunt Pilar about it, she said: “Oh, she’s a strange one, Robert. She never visits or calls, and I don’t really have any contact with her.” A frustrating dead end, he thought again as he drifted off to sleep.
Chapter 32
May 2004
Robert’s cell phone rang as he climbed into his forest green Jeep Wrangler at the Safeway supermarket. He was living in Arlington, Virginia, outside Washington, DC. He worked at night as an editor for a company that produced news briefings every morning for lobbyists and politicians. He did his grocery shopping at 8 a.m., after finishing work and before dragging home to try to sleep for the day. No one ever rang him in the morning.
“Mom?” he said, recognizing the number but not expecting her call. “What’s up?”
Panic fringed Brenda’s voice, and she talked in a rapid stream. “It’s Mom. The distress alarm sounded in her apartment half an hour ago and they can’t get in because she has the safety lock on. They’re waiting for the fire department to come and break in, and they keep calling to her through the door, but she’s not answering them back. They just hear the cat meowing constantly.”
For the first decade after Sam died, Virginia lived in a condominium Brenda and Tom rented for her. She loved decorating it as she wished and sitting on the terrace watching the robins, cardinals and blue jays splash in her cast-concrete birdbath and eat seeds and suet from her feeders. But a series of mini-strokes had made her left leg stiff and unreliable, forcing her to move into an apartment in a semi-assisted living facility. The physical impairment took a toll on her psychic health. The joyful time of freedom had passed so quickly.
When Robert visited her on his rare trips to Huntington—his nocturnal work schedule and the difficulty of getting any time off from the small startup company made normal life nearly impossible, Virginia was usually sitting in her apartment with her cat, watching television.
“Why don’t you go down to the lounge with the other people, Granny?” he would ask.
“Oh, I don’t want to sit down there with those old women,” she would scoff, though Virginia was older than most of them. The one thing she did like about the place was that it had bingo night on alternate Mondays. They played for a quarter a board, and she proudly returned to the apartment most times with a handful of coins.
“I’m afraid she’s had a major stroke,” Brenda said. “I’ve called her phone a dozen times, but she doesn’t answer, and she always has it with her. I’m on my way down there now.”
With minor incidents and irritations, Robert managed only with great difficulty not to erupt in a fit of frustration. But in moments of true crisis, a single-minded focus overcame him. “Okay,” he said to his mother. “Try not to overreact. It could be anything, not necessarily the worst thing. I’ll go home and pack a bag and drive straight there. Let me know when you hear something definitive.”
Brenda called back a few minutes later. “She’s alive,” she said without a greeting. “She went to the bathroom, without her walker, and she fell. Probably that bad leg gave out.”
“How is she?” Robert asked.
“They think she broke her hip,” Brenda said. “She’s in a lot of pain and is on her way to the hospital.”
A broken hip at eighty-four was a bad thing. “Will they replace it?” he asked.
“Probably … maybe … I don’t know.” Brenda sounded terrible. “They’ll have to see how bad it is and then decide. Are you on your way?”
“Just about,” Robert said, zipping his suitcase. “I just have to corral the cat and get her into her box and in the car, and then I’ll leave.” He checked the time. “I should be there by five. Call me as soon as you know anything more.”
While Robert was driving, his mother called and said that it was indeed a bad break. The doctors wanted to fuse the hip. The procedure was much less difficult, and they doubted she could recover from replacement surgery well enough to have any mobility. Virginia overruled them. She insisted on the full hip replacement. She would rather die now than be confined to a bed or wheelchair for the remainder of her life.
His grandmother was resting when Robert arrived. He hated everything about hospitals: the smells, the sterile corridors, the machines, the lighting, the angst radiating from every room and person. He could not believe he had dreamed of being a surgeon when he was a boy.
Virginia was sedated, but she stirred when he came in. She took his hand weakly and spoke to him softly. “Hi, Robby. I’m so glad you’re here.” Her lips, creased by wrinkles from decades of cigarettes, were sunken without her false teeth in, but her hazel eyes smiled.
“Of course, I’m here, Granny,” he said. He stroked her thin, white hair. “How are you?”
“Not so good.” She sighed and closed her eyes.
“I know, Granny,” he said. “But it’ll be okay. Tomorrow, you’ll get a bionic hip. You’ll be like the Six-Million Dollar Man.”
Virginia opened her eyes and managed a weak smile. “I don’t know about that, Robby. We’ll see.” Her heavy lids slipped closed again.
Robert kissed her on the temple. “You sleep now, Granny, and I’ll see you in the morning before the surgery.” She had already sunk again into slumber.
* * *
Virginia dreamed she was a young woman again. Standing on an empty beach, she curled her toes down into the wet sand and relished the squishing, grainy coolness. The stiff, warm breeze felt as if it was blowing through her and carrying with it every pain and worry of her life. It seemed as if she could float off the sand and fly out over the blue sea on the wind like the gleaming white gulls.
She turned from the surf and saw a cheerful-looking man walking slowly but purposefully up the beach. He wore a long, white tunic and flowing cloak. The coverts of pale grey wings rose above his shoulders. She thought, but did not say aloud, “Who are you?” when he stopped before her.
“I am Gabriel,” he replied with a wry smile, though he also did not speak.
She stared at him, unable to form a specific thought.
“It will be difficult,” he said, again without speaking aloud. “But I will be with you. Robert will be with you.” He spread his powerful wings, a magnificent sight, and leapt out over the rolling waves, without another word or glance.
The gulls cried. The surf crashed. The breeze blew. Virginia stood alone on the beach and watched a white sailboat move silently across the horizon.
* * *
The surgery was a success. The recovery was not. Medicare paid for thirty days of intensive physical therapy in an excellent private rehabilitation facility. Despite her weakened condition and the intense pain, Virginia progressed little by little over the month. At the end, she could take several halting steps on her own, supporting herself on the waist-high parallel bars. Her determination had endeared her to the therapists and nurses. To continue paying hundreds of dollars a day for the treatment, however, Medicare demanded more rapid progress than Virginia could achieve.
Robert had returned to Arlington and work the week after Virginia’s surgery. Brenda and Tom met with the rehab hospital’s administrator. The woman was supportive and sympathetic during the brief encounter in her well-appointed office, but she made it clear that Virginia would have to be moved out of the facility by the end of the week unless they could begin covering the costs personally. Four days.
Brenda and Tom trudged slowly and silently down the pastelcolored corridor toward Virginia’s room. Brenda was sad, because she knew this place was her mother’s only hope of walking again. She was frustrated, because the Medicare bureaucracy was so inflexible. She was angry, because they could not afford to pay the bill themselves for Virginia to continue the treatment.
“Hi, Mom,” Brenda said as they entered Virginia’s room. She struggled to keep as much emotion from her voice as she could. The room looked more like a hotel than a hospital.
Virginia turned her attention from the local television news and smiled. “I took nine steps today,” she said.
Brenda leaned over the bed’s barely noticeable rail and gave her a quick hug. Tom sniffed and blinked hard and looked to the distraction of the television.
“That’s great, Mom,” Brenda said. “You’re doing so good. And they all like you so much.”
“I like them, too,” Virginia said. “I don’t hardly even feel like I’m in the hospital.”
Brenda felt nauseated. “I know, but you know it’s not the only nice place in town. And you’re getting so much stronger, you could keep improving even if you weren’t here.”
Virginia did not like Brenda’s tone, at once hollow and edgy, or that she was clearly beating around something. “What is it?” she asked curtly.
Brenda looked at Tom. He glanced at her, then back up at the television.
“It’s Medicare, Mom,” Brenda said, indignation creeping into her voice. “They will only pay for one month, and this place charges way too much for us to pay for it. They just told us that you have to go at the end of this week.”
Tears began to pool in Virginia’s eyes, but she continued to stare directly into Brenda’s.
“I’m sorry, Mom, but we’re going to have to move you to a … uh … a retirement home.”
Virginia looked away, turning her face as far away from Brenda as possible.
Brenda reached out and touched her on the arm. Virginia shook it off. “Oh, Mom, please. Don’t make this worse than it already is.”
Virginia refused to look in her daughter’s direction.
“It’s not like they used to be. It won’t be some awful old nursing home,” Brenda insisted.
Virginia exhaled sharply at the words nursing home.
“They’re retirement communities, with lots of activities and people there to help you,” Brenda said. She knew it would never happen, but she added: “To give you more physical therapy so you can walk again.”
Virginia acknowledged nothing. Her anguished gaze remained fixed on the wall to the side of the bed.
Brenda grew quickly frustrated. After all I’ve done for her, she thought, she shouldn’t treat me like this. “I’m sorry, Mom,” she said. “There’s nothing else I can do. Look, I know the woman in charge of a nice place just over in South Point. I’ll call her first thing in the morning and see if we can get you in there. It would be perfect.”
It was as if Virginia had turned to stone.
Brenda lay a hand on her mother’s rigid shoulder. “Love you. We’ll see you in the morning, Mom,” she said. “Come on Tom, let’s go.”
Chapter 33
The Thanksgiving after Virginia fell, Robert started working remotely for the news briefing company. He moved to New Orleans. The city had enthralled him since the first time he visited it when he was living for a time in Lafayette, Louisiana. He disliked the trashiness of Bourbon Street, but he adored the rest of the French Quarter. “Of course you love it,” Jack had wisecracked. “It’s the least American place in the country.”
There was some truth to the joke. In the Quarter, off the drunkentourist vortex of Bourbon Street, the city’s colonial soul still lurked among the French Creole cottages and Spanish townhouses. The pace and spirit of the city bore no resemblance to any American place he knew. Robert found an apartment in a two-hundred-year-old triplex on Orleans Avenue, four blocks back from the Cathedral.
He roamed the streets for hours, day after day. He sat reading in cafés and in his walled courtyard, the cat lolling under the banana tree. He explored the bars, restaurants and jazz halls with his teacher friends from Lafayette. In his attic bedroom, he could hear the steam whistle music of the sternwheelers on the Mississippi. Other than still having to work at night, Robert was in heaven.
Like many other lovers of New Orleans, Hurricane Katrina drove him from the city where he had quickly begun to hope he would live for the rest of his life. His apartment on the high ground of the French Quarter survived with little damage, but the city’s wrecked infrastructure made it impossible for him to work from there.
Robert landed in Naples, Florida, after two months of wandering from one friend’s house to another and staying with his parents and sister. Naples could not have been more different than New Orleans, all posh and manicured, but he found the prospect of living ten minutes from the Gulf of Mexico inviting. The Florida beach town atmosphere almost was as satisfyingly different as the Mississippi Delta had been.
And there was a woman in Naples, a teacher with whom Robert was intensely involved when he taught U.S. history at a private high school in Lafayette between graduate school and the job in Arlington. Shortly before the hurricane, they rekindled their relationship. She had come to New Orleans to visit her family. They met for a drink at Napoleon House, and they each felt the tug of their old affection.
The tempestuous relationship foundered a second time less than a year after Robert moved to Florida. But he enjoyed the quiet life he found there. He spent every morning after work sitting in the sun on his little patio. He read voraciously, drank too much, and watched the ducks, cranes, cormorants and pelicans living out their routines in the artificial lake. On the weekends, Robert drove over to a pristine beach in protected parkland and luxuriated in the solitude by the gently lapping Gulf.
For his second year in Naples, Robert’s cat and a retired man from Indiana who lived two condominiums down were his only companions. The man would walk past Robert’s patio every morning with his black Scottish terrier, and they would chat about politics and the news of the day while Robert petted the feisty little dog. At Thanksgiving, Robert prepared the full traditional fare and invited the man and the Scottie for dinner.
* * *
Huntington, West Virginia
August 2007
Robert drove the twenty hours up to West Virginia to visit his parents and his grandmother. A month remained on his second, one-year lease for the condominium in Naples. He had decided to move to St. Augustine, on the Atlantic coast in north Florida. The artificiality of Naples had begun to grate on him, and he had taken an instant liking to the old Spanish colonial capital on a recent weekend trip there.
He stayed in Huntington for two weeks, as had become his custom over the years. It was long enough to feel like a substantial visit, yet short enough that he and his parents could accept each other just as they were at that moment, without activating all their old conflicts and patterns.
Robert went nearly every day to the nursing home to sit with Virginia after he woke in the afternoon. The nurses and aides, friendly despite their long hours of difficult labor, always greeted him when he arrived and reported on how Virginia was doing that day. Still, it was a nursing home, no matter what it said on the sign at the entrance.
The low corridors were depressing, with their dull white walls, linoleum tile floors and fluorescent lights. Whether the building was overheated in the winter or over-cooled in the summer, the air seemed to recirculate, hermetically-sealed from the outside. The halls and rooms always smelled faintly of food, bowel movements and cleaning solution. Depending on the time of day, one of the scents overwhelmed the others.
All residents had to share a room. Virginia lived in a double with a frail woman who was approaching a hundred years old. The woman had a brother who visited three or four times a year and a nephew who came less frequently. She passed her days and evenings sitting in a chair in her half of the room, looking at the floor. She was nearly deaf, which suited Virginia. She never felt like talking anyway.
Except for the one morning a week when the aides would haul her up and take her down the hall to be bathed, Virginia had rarely been out of her bed for a year. The physical therapy at the nursing home was occasional and brief. She was not there long before she took the la
st tentative steps of her life.
For the first year, Virginia would let them hoist her out of bed and into a wheelchair to join the other mobile residents for bingo and other games in the commons room. But as the realization set in that she would never return home, Virginia grew increasingly withdrawn and uninterested in the activities. The lack of physical movement exacerbated her emphysema, and she became dependent on bottled oxygen to breathe.
Virginia did get to attend the wedding of her granddaughter Marilyn, the summer after she entered the nursing home. Marilyn hired an ambulance to take her to the church and the country club reception. For those few hours, Virginia’s lively post-Sam personality returned. She was surrounded by people she had known for decades and out in the fresh air. She loved having her hair done and wearing the bright purple dress she chose from a catalogue for the occasion. Her strength waned late in the evening, and the sadness returned as the ambulance came to take her back to the nursing home, but Virginia was thankful for that day.
She was also freed from the home the first two Christmases she lived there. Tom and Robert took her to his parents’ house in a borrowed van to visit for a few hours on Christmas day. The process of getting her there and back severely tried everyone. Virginia was dead weight. Tom and Robert had to wrestle her into and out of the van, from and to the wheelchair. They were terrified they would drop her. So was she, and the fear constricted her breathing, which made her more anxious. The second Christmas, she had put her head on Robert’s chest and wept as he held her sprawled on the floor in the back of the van.
When Virginia was safely in Brenda and Tom’s house, however, amid her little family and the familiar Christmas decorations, the light came back on within her. She had laughed and talked and eaten like a lumberjack. She had so wished she could stay.