That Good Night

by Richard Probert

  After some more discussion, some of it rather heated, I could tell the Judge was sliding in favor of my kids. I blurted out, “Just wait your honor, your time’s coming.”

  “Is that a threat?” he asked me.

  “No sir, just life talking. You’re on a downward spiral. You’ll understand someday.” With that, I walked out of the court.

  Can you believe it? At eighty-four years old, me, myself, and I ceased to collaborate. I was admitted to a retirement village. What that means is, if you’re not on death’s doorstep, you’re assigned to assisted living. Essentially, that means that they watch you like a hawk and not because they have your welfare in mind. No, it’s because if you fall or hurt yourself they become liable. And no car. That was one of the worst things, losing my car. I’d been driving for over sixty years with a only a few scrapes and a less than a handful of tickets and by damn, they took my car away from me. They might as well as have cut my legs off.

  At first, I had a two room apartment in the Senior Living section of Sunset Home. I was able to “decorate” with some things from home. But not any furniture, or my bed, or any dishes utensils, cookware, or just about anything that might taste or smell like home. I brought my and Lori’s favorite pictures and a few things from my dresser. Hell, I had more stuff when I went on business trips. The thing that was so goddamn depressing was this: there was no going home. This was not home. This sanctuary of the living dead could never be home. There is no way in hell that all the new sounds, colors, toilets, sinks, linens, pillows, chairs, smells, or whatever could possibly be home. Bullshit!

  Connected to Senior Living is what I call Senior Death. If you get sick, which I did, you graduate to a room in the nursing section, which is like moving from a larger coffin to a smaller one. It wasn’t like my kidneys failed or my heart stopped beating. I got the flu. The flu put me in the nursing home, isolation to start with. That was two months ago and while I’m out of isolation, I’m still on death row. Apparently, when I was temporarily moved out of my two room suite, they let somebody else have it. My little bit of home stuff was put in storage, probably in a damn shoebox stuffed in the janitor’s closet. I’m told it might be a year until I can get back to the living section. My guess is that they get bigger cuts from Medicare by having me in the nursing home.

  Soon after Lori’s funeral, the kids started visiting me at home once a month for three days. After day one, coveting would begin. Table tops would be stroked, vases caressed, paintings studied, chairs patted, corners of rugs turned to check the weave, silverware hefted, linens fingered. “Do you watch Antiques Roadshow?” one or the other would ask. A lamp might get, “Where did you and Mom get this? I’ve always liked it and would just love to get one.” All of the sudden, my boys took great interest in my gun collection, even though when growing up they wouldn’t dream of shooting poor Bambi. Who the hell did they think they were kidding? After a few of those visits, I had pretty much decided to change my will so all my earthly goods went to the Salvation Army. And I suppose the kids guessed it, because here I am and all my and Lori’s stuff is theirs. Notice, I haven’t mentioned their names. I will not write or utter their names ever again. At first I felt guilty about all this as if I had done something terribly wrong; or that maybe Lori was a poor mother. But, no, we raised these kids, we loved them, nursed them, nurtured them, wiped their butts and their noses. We paid for college, bought them cars. We gave them life and what did we get in return? Not much.

  The boys got what they wanted, their wives divvying up the spoils like victorious Vikings. My house was sold with the proceeds going into a trust established for my care. My social security check goes to the nursing home, as does my annuity check. My eldest son has Power of Attorney and control of my assets. I had sold my machinery business for a couple million, so his control is no small thing. Legally, I don’t exist. My rights are gone. I’m in a place I don’t want to be with people I don’t want to be with. But I have an ace up my sleeve which I’ll pull out when the time is right. The old man isn’t dead yet. But first, I have to get out of this place.

  Officially known as an Electronic Home Monitoring Device, I wear an ankle monitor like criminals wear when they get sentenced to home confinement. The penalty for two foiled escapes, I wear it like a badge of honor. The first try was spur-of-the-moment. I was lingering around the lobby when a family group was leaving. I simply walked out with them as if I belonged. Out front is a bus stop sign that read “Bus to Downtown.” Next to it was a very inviting bench. A flower pot with geraniums sat to the right. I nervously sat down, convinced that a neat little bus would appear to whisk me away from this place. But that didn’t happen. Like everything else in this place, it was a fake. Within a few minutes of sitting down, I had two white uniformed men sitting on each side of me. The damn bus stop sign was a baited trap for unwitting old people trying to go home. Devious bastards.

  My second escape was pre-meditated. I tried leaving with the food delivery truck—a stowaway who boarded via the kitchen’s back door. At the next stop, the deliveryman discovered me hiding behind some Del Monte carrot crates. The Sunset van was summoned and I was returned to the home, like a truant that skipped school. I was called a “bad boy” and fitted with a security strap fixed around my left ankle. The device was programmed to alert staff if I ventured into what they called unauthorized places. I told them all to go screw themselves, which only got, a “Now, now, let’s not go potty-mouthed on us.” The staff’s use of language hovers somewhere around the first grade. I’m an eighty-four year old man, for Christ’s sake, not a six-year-old boy. Whatever sanity I had left coming into the place was quickly eroding. A few more months of this crap and senile would be a justifiable term. And, I’m afraid to admit, even welcomed.

  The ankle monitor is no-nonsense. Shiny black, it had a fastener that cranes could use to lift girders. Go out a door or into an unauthorized space and Security is on you like ugly on an ape. For fun, now and then I stick my leg out a door and run for my bed where Security finds me smiling. Rather than annoy the guards, it only enhanced their quasi-military pea-sized brains. Since being fitted with the damn thing, I’ve turned all of my attention to getting out of the place. Escaping is really no end in itself. It needs to be a part of a plan, a cog in gears that mesh, turning slowly with power and grace, like a torque converter.

  My escape would be masterful, like Clint Eastwood’s in Escape from Alcatraz. Perhaps it’ll become a legend, inspiring others to try. The old WWII movie The Great Escape joined Escape from Alcatraz as my inspiration: Heroic Americans befuddling overly pure-gened Germans by digging a tunnel right under their stinking feet. If prisoners of Alcatraz and a bunch of unfed POWs could do it, so could I. And like them and countless others who slipped past prison guards and barbed wire, crawled through claustrophobic tunnels, scaled walls, outwitted sophisticated electronics, and made fools out of experts, I, Charles Lambert, would find my freedom. And I could afford it, too. What I mean to say is that I have a bunch of money hidden away. That’s the ace up my sleeve. It would rot in safe deposit boxes before I’d let it get into the hands of my kids.

  I began making lists of where I wanted to go and what I’d do when I got there. Home was out of the question. There was no home. Friends? Listen, when you’re old and your spouse dies, friends and neighbors disappear. You become a loner. And it’s not just because your friends don’t want you around, it’s also because you get bored being with them. It’s just no fun. Everything changes. Your personality changes, reverts to some hidden part of yourself that you either hate or admire. You go out and can’t wait to get home. You get home and there’s nobody to talk to about the day’s events. It’s an endless cycle of gloom and doom. Death begins looking good. It’s the going home together that matters. Without that, life sucks. Or at least it did for me.

  I think that I would have adjusted if just one person would have taken an interest in me not out of pity, but rather out of love. Lori and I had been members of the
Emmanuel Lutheran Church for over forty years. We took our kids there, we gave money, we helped pay for a new organ, we even bought choir robes for the choir. The minister buried Lori. And what happened after that? I had two visits from the creep, one to inquire if I’d like to give a gift in Lori’s name to the church’s endowment and the other asking if I was interested in setting up a trust. I got a fruit basket from the men’s Bible study fellowship, and an ugly afghan knitted by the ladies sewing circle with a note that read “To warm body and soul.” I got pity, enough to overflow a baptismal font. But not one drop of love.

  I thought about going on the road. Bumming around in a camper. Maybe get a dog and write about my travels like John Steinbeck did in Travels with Charley. Perhaps I’d write about old people trying like hell to live in a world going so fast that they wobble around just trying to stay upright. But there’s not a lot to observe doing 70 mph down an interstate. And back roads aren’t much better. Ah, I hate driving anyway. It’s like the killing fields out there. In my day, I rested my elbow on the frame of an open window letting country air filter through the car, never going more than fifty miles-per-hour. I bet people today drive coast to coast and never get a healthy whiff of good old cow shit. They eat at fast-food conglomerates and keep the kids entertained with some crappy cartoon flashing its junk through the onboard video system. If I did escape to the open road, I figure that I’d get caught right away like I did on the bench waiting for the bus that never came. I’d have to retake my driver’s exam, get a camper, get the vehicle registered and insured. Hell, I might as well paint a line leading to where I was. I wanted to disappear. Just vanish. Maybe make it on the Most-Looked-For-Senior-Citizen list.

  The idea of where to go once I escaped came to me while I was chatting with a woman named Emma. Emma is a darling old lady with azure eyes, crystal clear like blue ice. Her hair is thick and pure white, no blue rinses for Emma. She’s one of the few women in this place who still has a shape. She doesn’t wear smocks or those God-awful Velcro tabbed sneakers. She dresses in a neatly pressed blouse and a nice skirt with leather pumps. You can tell that she was absolutely stunning when she was young. She stirs an old man’s memory. I’d like to have known her back then. Her mind is a bit addled, but then that’s consistent with things here. She was wearing earrings in the shape of tiny sailboats. I commented on them. “I wear them every June, for the whole month,” she informed me. Then, whispering to me like she was telling a secret, she said, “Damon gave them to me when we reached the Azores.”

  “When was that?” I asked, leaning close to her. I noted a hint of lavender.

  “I was seventeen, so that would make it sixty-two years ago this month,” she said smiling. Her eyes glistened with youth.

  I said nothing. She continued, “I just graduated from high school. Damon just got out of the Army. It was sparks from the very first moment. He told me he wanted to be a sailor, but the only service that would take him was the U.S. Army. To make up for it he bought a sailboat the day he got out. A tiny little thing but big enough for two. We took off together, Annapolis to Corsica.” Fumbling with her right earring, she added, “With a stop at the Azores.” She leaned even closer, spoke even softer, “We had sex right across the Atlantic Ocean.” Her eyes glossed over, she withdrew back into her chair and fell silent. The movie was over. The book closed. Snippets of memory like Emma’s pervaded the nursing home. Like photo albums opening and closing, loops of audio tape repeated over and over. Sweet secrets, regrets, anger, love. Dusty tapestries. Woven with each birth, folded with each death. All pretty much the same colors.

  I sailed once upon a time. Up and down the east coast. To Nova Scotia, Newfoundland, Maine, the Chesapeake. I was damned good at it and sailed mostly solo. I eventually gave it up. I loved it, but it wasn’t Lori’s thing. I never got lonely sailing solo, but sometimes at anchor tucked away in a remote cove, I’d long to have someone onboard to share the mystery of it all: great sunsets or watching an osprey dive needs to be shared. I have great memories, but few to share, a tiny corner of my own tapestry, perhaps. I used to envy sailing couples like Emma and Damon. All told, I guess I sailed on and off for about twenty years. I managed some terrible storms. Was a whiz at navigation. And I never got seasick. Why not go back to it? No trail to follow—I’d like to meet a tracking dog that could sniff out a boat’s wake. My plan took on meaning. All I had to do was get the hell out of here and that thought, the idea of getting out of this place filled me with energy and purpose.

  SATURDAY, JUNE 23

  Sunsets follow sunrises. Sunrise, sunset, like the song says. Endless hope followed by endless rest. The great cycle of life. Well I wasn’t ready for the endless rest part. It might make sense poetically to equate death with rest, but it doesn’t make any sense to me. I figure that death is it. Nothing afterward, no matter what the Lutherans, or Shirley MacLaine, or anybody else says. No flying up to heaven or morphing into something else. As far as I’m concerned, it’s over. I’ll take the hope of morning any day. Give me light over dark. And the sea over land. At sea, sunny or stormy, it’s all about light, how it dances and cavorts with swells and waves, changing every second: blues and grays, reds and purples, misty greens and yellows. Take unimaginable beauty, mix with turbulent winds and threatening seas, and it turns into a dynamic force that sings songs of life and death and courage and faith and hope. Not like fluorescent white or institutional green that speak nothing to the spirit while robbing the heart of hope. God, I need to get out of here.

  My plan was simple enough: Escape, buy a yacht, and sail until I die. I wondered if Frank Morris (Clint Eastwood’s character in Escape from Alcatraz) had such a simple plan. Probably to start with. Escape is usually fantasy. Carrying it off though is pure reality. For Morris, it entailed making a raft out of raincoats, digging a hole through the cell wall, making a fake head to stick on his cell pillow to confuse the guards, scaling a wall, jumping over some rocks, swimming through ice cold water, and overtaking the meanest currents on the West Coast. Freedom is a real taskmaster. Escaping Sunset might be easier than what Frank Morris had to contend with, but it was an escape nonetheless. And it did require planning. It relied on luck and demanded creativity. And, for sure, a co-conspirator.

  There wasn’t a single person in the entire nursing home that I could trust to keep a secret. Secrets are commodities in nursing homes; they gain value with each telling until something new comes along. Sex is a big gossip item. And truth be told, there’s lots of it. New couples pop up every day. Yes, old people can still cuddle, stroke, kiss, and make love, and why not? Why suppress what little lust remains? If anything, it should be encouraged. It’s fun to talk about sex and all that. But what gets the most attention in the gossip mill is when staff members cross the line and have sex with patients. (Officially, patients are referred to as clients here at Sunset, which I think is nonsense.) Oh yes, it happens more often than you know. Then, of course, there is stuff going on between staff members, between visitors and patients, and between visitors and staff. And who knows what goes on in the kitchen? But trumping sex in the gossip mill are escape stories. A missing patient is the worst thing that can happen to a nursing home. Insurance companies go crazy over it. Government overseers swarm the place like locusts. Nursing homes blame it on senility as if it is some grand surprise. The press loves escapes: Old Man Escapes Nursing Home to Find Better Life. “I just wanted to go home,” says tearful eighty-nine year old. Who wouldn’t read an article with headlines like that? “Disappeared, presumed dead,” would work just fine for me.

  Getting rid of the security strap was first on the list. This was no delicate matter. The bright black plastic must have been made by some devious packaging specialist. I kept picking away at the battleship-tough plastic with a fork I lifted from the cafeteria. No use. Google told me that buried in the plastic were thin wire cables, probably wound from piano wire. I gave up on the idea of cutting the damn thing. I tried using bacon fat that I saved in a napkin fro
m breakfast to try and slip the thing off. No good. I rubbed my ankle raw with a piece of sandpaper I took it from the hobby shop (no electric tools or any sharp objects; how the hell were you supposed to make anything?) hoping that they’d take the damn thing off to let me heal. Nope. I got to wear it on my other ankle. Dan Forteneau (I called him DF—you figure it out), head of security, told me to stop fooling with the strap or I’d get billed for damaging property. I wanted to kick him in the nuts.

  After a whole lot of angst, hours of planning and fretting over my escape plans, it dawned on me that I needed help, somebody on the outside I could work with. At my age the list was pretty short. I used to run a company that machined parts for the defense industry. Any one of the guys in my machine shop would have had that strap off in two shakes of a dog’s tail. Not a one of my old workers is left. And the company’s gone, too. And that’s how it went. Everybody was either dead or as far removed from my life as a waterfall is from a desert.

  It was Emma again who triggered a thought. We were sitting in the sun room, a closet-like space with one small window facing south. Emma was telling me her sailing story again. She did so word for word with the same pauses, inflections, and sexy little smiles as before. Emma lived only in her memory. While Emma was telling her story, I began visualizing a memory of my own that took me back to a day many years ago. That morning I had weighed anchor early, to starlit skies and light winds. My plan was to sail from Gran Manan, an island between Nova Scotia and Maine, to a small inlet named The Cows, with an ETA of mid-afternoon. But, as I approached The Cows, I just couldn’t relinquish the helm: the sky was too blue, the water too green, and the winds just right. In other words, I just couldn’t stop sailing in such perfect conditions. About an hour later, all hell broke loose. A fast moving storm swept in from the Atlantic with high winds. The seas became a witch’s brew with sharp foamy waves. I reefed sail, and did what any sailor does in a storm: pray. Things were going well, until my idle prop found an errant net floating just below the waterline. The boat struggled to make headway. The seaway had her in its grips. Trimming the main, I was able to bring her into the wind which had every intention to rip the now flapping sail to destruction. Fiddling with a boat hook, I was able to free the net from the prop and off I went. It was after dark before making the small Down East harbor of Corea, Maine. I dropped my hook in a tiny, well-protected cove, grabbed my bottle of scotch, and swore that I’d rather sell the damn boat than venture out ever again. I either lost my confidence or gained my senses. Either way I was ready to forsake my unrequited love of the sea. A few hours later, I was awakened from a sleep of the dead, by a boat that came up alongside. Hailing me, the guy wanted to know where my hook was so he wouldn’t drop his over mine. Now this kind of query can only come from a careful and courteous sailor. I had quite a bit of rode out (anchor line) and felt that a change of wind in such a small cove would inevitably lead to trouble. So, rather than take the chance, I invited him to tie alongside. He accepted. While he prepared his lines for the tie-up, I busied myself setting out some fenders. In minutes we were two boats on one anchor. Some coffee on my boat and a few shared war stories later, a friendship was born.