No One Tells You This

by Glynnis MacNicol

  Every few sentences or so, my mother would interrupt with wide, shocked eyes. “Did I really do that? I’m sorry.” I reached over and took her hand but didn’t look at her. I hated saying all this in front of her even though I knew she wouldn’t remember, but now that we were here I couldn’t sugarcoat it. Finally, the doctor turned to my mother: “Jean, I’d like to ask you a few questions.”

  She nodded agreeably. Then he ran through the same basics I’d grown accustomed to hearing. What was today’s date? What year were we in? Who was the prime minister? For the love of Christ, why couldn’t she answer wrong just once? In high school my mother had won awards in both math and French but had dropped both subjects on graduation because she hadn’t received a perfect score on her final exams.

  “Oftentimes in the afternoon she doesn’t know who I am or where she is,” I interjected. I knew it was not part of my role as a calm, collected bystander to interrupt, but I couldn’t help myself. The doctor just nodded and wrote something down on his clipboard. I breathed in and thought, I will not scream, I will not scream, I will not scream.

  After a minute or so he looked up. “I think it would be in everyone’s best interests,” he said, glancing down at my father whose head was still in his hands, “if we admitted you overnight for observation.”

  “Does our insurance cover that?” I blurted out in a panic, not quite able to believe things were working out as I wanted them.

  The doctor looked at me in confusion. I’d forgotten I was in Canada. Every once in a while, when I’d get especially frustrated with the bureaucracy of the Ontario health care system, I’d force myself to imagine my family’s scenario if we’d all lived in the States as a way of calming myself down.

  “Sorry, I live in New York . . . City.” I tacked on the “city” part lest he think I meant I lived in Buffalo.

  He nodded, deeply uninterested. No one is less impressed by America than Canadians. “The nurse will be back with all the papers. We don’t currently have any extra beds, but Jean can stay here until something opens up.”

  I looked around at the tiny, sterile room and my mother sitting obediently on the hard examination table and was reminded of my only stay at a hospital. It had been to get my tonsils out when I was nine. My sister and I had gone in together, a sort of two-for-one deal that was apparently accepted practice in the early eighties. My mother had stayed in our room until the nurse had finally forced her to leave and then anxiously reappeared with the sun the next morning. I was suddenly struck by the reality that I was going to have to leave my mother here. Probably by herself. What had I done?

  “I’ll go home and get her things,” I said to my father. “She’ll need clothes and pajamas and toiletries.” I turned to my mother. “Lie down, Mom, and have a nap.”

  “I think I’d rather go home,” said my mother as though she were ordering from a menu.

  “I know, but you’re going to stay here for tonight. The doctors want to observe you.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “It’s not your fault, Mom.” I’d gotten in the habit of explaining her disease to her, with some vague notion that the facts would balance out her anxiety and keep her tied to the ground and away from the terror that awaited her so many evenings when her mind untied itself.

  “Dad is going to stay here with you.”

  “Oh, okay. And what about Medley?”

  “I’ll walk Medley when I get home.”

  “I’ll come with you,” my mother said, looking around for her coat.

  “No, you have to stay here, Mom. They’re going to keep you for observation overnight.”

  “Oh, okay. Will Jack know to pick me up here? We are going to a dance.” Lately when her mind began to lurch, leaping through decades like a drunk time traveler, it landed on some version of the mid-sixties when my parents met, as if that were the tent pole from which the rest of her life hinged. Sometimes she referred to my father as her “first husband.” “It’s too bad that didn’t work out,” she’d say. “But don’t tell your father I said that. I don’t want him to get jealous.”

  There was some underlying truth to what she was saying. My father now was fundamentally different than the man I remembered from my childhood, when during his up periods he’d been exploding with energy and determination: making up milk shakes from scratch, officiating our swim meets. He had a black-and-white take on the world that from a child’s perspective could make it seem very safe. Perhaps my mother, too, was remembering him from before and after his diagnosis. From before and after he’d lost his job, or they’d filed for bankruptcy. She seemed to have split him into two separate people in her head, which perhaps spoke to the cracks in their marriage better than anything else could. Sometimes it occurred to me that in my mother’s untangling she had begun to tell more truths than she had the entire time I’d known her.

  “Dad’s right here,” I said, gesturing to the hallway where my father now stood, signing paperwork. She smiled and nodded.

  It was past 10:00 p.m. when I got on the road. There was no traffic; the weather had cleared up and the roads were now dry. The sky overhead as I sped along was pitch-black. It was the first time I’d been alone—without people, without children, without my computer—since I’d arrived. Ten days. It felt like a century. I turned on the radio. It was silent. I looked down and fiddled with the volume. And then into the void came the sound of an audience clapping and then piano. I’d caught the beginning of a song. Suddenly Bob Seger’s voice slipped into the dark evening with me. I know it’s late, I know you’re weary. How many years had it been since I’d heard this song? I vaguely recalled it on the radio from childhood trips with my parents. I turned up the volume and let the gravelly singing loop its way around me in the darkness like a comforting arm. In the slow-motion tragedy of my mother’s health, and the current chaos of my sister’s home, there was only comfort to be given, and very little to be taken. But as I raced along, howling out the chorus to the empty night, the cold air rushing in the open windows, I felt comforted, if only for the duration of the music, and as the road rolled away beneath me and I sped through the darkness, I also felt very, very alive.

  12. Be Careful What You Wish For

  My mother stayed in the hospital for five days. After twenty-four hours she was moved to a room on one of the higher floors, which she shared with three other people. When I arrived on the second morning she was dozing. She was in the bed closest to the door, separated by a curtain. The only direct daylight came from a window at the other end of the room, and most of it was a secondary reflection off the shiny floor. This was a preview of what the rest of her life would be like if I didn’t get her in a good home.

  I stopped in my tracks when I saw her. She was lying on top of her covers, and over her pajamas she was wearing a bright orange vest, the type construction workers wear when they are working on busy roadways. I backed out of her room without waking her and inquired at the nurses’ desk. They told me the evening before she’d become extremely agitated. “I barely recognized her,” one nurse said with wide eyes. “She had been so gentle all day.” Afterward, they told me, she’d gone wandering off and had ended up in an off-limits area of the hospital reserved for surgery staff. It had apparently taken them a while to realize she didn’t work there.

  “Is this all in her file?” I immediately asked. The nurse nodded, frowning slightly at my clinical reaction. I explained to her the problems I’d encountered and how badly I needed a record of this. She assured me it was all going into the file. “She is very bad.” Again, she sounded amazed. I practically wept with relief that I wasn’t crazy, and then felt so guilty for it I didn’t want to go back into my mother’s room. Instead I went to the coffee shop downstairs and purchased two double chocolate donuts. My pants had grown tighter in just the two weeks I’d been home. There’d been no time for exercise, and the brief amount of pleasure the kids’ chocolate Halloween candy brought me felt like the only comfort I could currently rely on. I de
cided I wasn’t going to feel bad about this, even if it meant saying goodbye to my wardrobe. I was going to take the small bits of consolation where I could get them. When I got back upstairs, my mother was awake and sitting on the side of her bed, bouncing. As I walked in she clapped her hands together. “Oh goody, you’re here!”

  “Hi, Mom,” I said, watching her face to see if my calling her Mom would confuse her. But she just smiled. I leaned over, gave her a kiss, and asked her if she wanted some of a donut.

  “No, no, I have work to do. I think they need me to admit some of the patients.”

  She tried to stand up.

  “I think we should stay here for a bit.” I didn’t bother to explain that she didn’t work here. She seemed so happy, what was the point?

  “No! I don’t want to sit down!” she said sharply. And then she grinned at me again. “Isn’t this wonderful?” Her eyes were wide and alive. “It’s just so nice to say whatever I want. It’s such a relief.”

  I knew immediately this wasn’t her illness talking. My mother was the direct product of a 1950s upbringing: assertiveness or thwarting convention was not allowed. She had never been able to overcome this. Whatever was dissolving in her brain, like a gel cap around medicine, was now releasing years, maybe decades, of unexpressed thoughts. We seemed to have moved into a phase, who knew for how long, where carefully contained, pleasant smiles and gentle accommodation were a thing of the past. It was the singular blessing of an otherwise relentlessly cruel disease, but all I was able to think of as I watched the gleeful look on her face was what a waste of time all the good behavior had been. Her whole life stretched behind me now, and from this vantage point it seemed so short. And these concerns about other people’s opinions, which had dominated my mother’s thinking, seemed so fruitless and unworthy. I was overwhelmed with sadness for her. At least she had no regrets; she couldn’t remember anything long enough to have regret over it. Another tiny blessing I supposed.

  •

  When I wasn’t at the hospital or running the kids around, I was on the phone. After much telephoning I had convinced the social worker in charge of my mother’s case, a woman named Debbie whom I’d never met in person but who currently wielded an overwhelming amount of control over my mother’s fate, to loop me in on the updates she was giving my father. Each time she called, before giving me any information, she reminded me that this was not how things were “usually done.” Normally, only the person who held power of attorney could be directly contacted by an official. I’d nod silently, rolling my eyes; I had a New Yorker’s respect for how things were usually done, which was to say, not a great deal. I operated under the assumption there was always a faster way around the system if you knew someone. But there was no point in voicing it here. I was not in New York; there was no skipping these lines in Canada.

  But finally, finally, it seemed we were getting somewhere. A few days after my mother had been admitted, Debbie actually called me. “The social worker who did the assessment notes that your mother has experienced a significant decline in her functionality. She also noted in the file that your mother had been admitted to the emergency room.”

  I nodded my head vigorously but said nothing.

  “She’s recommending your mother be put in the queue for home care.”

  “What does that mean exactly?” I readied my pen, anticipating a new series of names and numbers.

  “It means when she reaches the top of the list and a bed becomes available she will have the option to take it.”

  Oh, thank God. “How long will that take?”

  “We don’t have access to that list.”

  I closed my eyes and put my head down on my sister’s bed, reminding myself yet again the sort of circumstances I’d be dealing with if we were in the States.

  Debbie went on in her practiced voice. “But generally it’s about nine to twelve months.”

  I took a deep breath. My mother needed help in nine days, not nine months. But so did everybody, I knew. “Is there any way to accelerate that?”

  “If at her next assessment in three months something has significantly changed we may be able to move her onto the accelerated list. In the meantime, what I need from you, or actually from your father, is the list of your top five nursing home choices.”

  Three months. It was hard for me to imagine where we’d be in three days, let alone three months, but it was something. I went over the nursing home list. I’d managed to get four of the good homes in; now it was just a matter of deciding on the least worst option for the fifth slot. Basic rooms were covered by the government. In the good nursing homes, the basic rooms were essentially like hotel rooms, airy, with sunlight and often a private bathroom. In what I had come to call the bad nursing homes, the basic rooms were narrow and dark, and bathrooms were shared. The private rooms in the bad places had shorter lists and made me feel less ill, but my parents’ retirement income couldn’t support the extra amount they’d need to pay for very long. I stared at the list for a while, and then filled in the last slot with the least worst bad place I’d seen, and marked the private option. I’d go back to the churn of an office writing job if I had to cover the difference. It would be easier to bear than the thought of my mother lying in a dark corner somewhere.

  •

  I went back to New York at the end of the two weeks as planned, and my mother returned home, while we waited for her number to come up. All the rigid competence that had fueled me since my arrival dissolved the second I stepped foot in the airport. My sister, now just over two weeks out from delivering a baby, dropped me off. The kids, eyes intent on the DVD screen, barely looked my way when I opened the back door to kiss them goodbye, but I felt as if I were being torn in two. My life in New York, which had been shimmering proudly in my vision all those quiet nights with my nephew, now became a distant point on the horizon in my mind, small and ever-retreating. As I walked away I felt poisoned by guilt. What was holding me in New York after all? Maybe I should ditch everything and come home and take care of everyone. Was I being selfish? Was I spoiled? Was I always going to feel the need to defend my life, even just to myself?

  I got pulled into immigration as I was going through customs at the Toronto airport. I’d half expected this to happen; I’d flown in on one half of one ticket and was now returning on the other half of another. But I was still annoyed. Now that I was on my own and had only myself to look after, I could feel weeks of pent-up emotion starting to leak through the seams; I felt like a dam on the verge of breaking. Still, I kept my mouth shut when the immigration agent finally waved me over to his table and made me unzip my bag. Instead of noting the futility of this search, I silently redirected all my anger at him. I dare you to ask me why I’m flying on two tickets. I seethed in my head over and over as he began rifling through it. I fucking dare you. I wanted so badly to yell at someone. I wanted to scream about everything that I’d just been through. I wanted to say, My mother is dying, and my sister is alone with three kids, and I am so fucking tired. I wanted someone to acknowledge that it was a lot.

  “Did you buy anything?” he asked, gingerly placing the pajama pants I had worn most of the week that were covered in . . . something—it was hard to tell at this point, but one leg was stiff as if it had been doused in starch—on the silver table in front of him.

  “No.”

  He pulled out a toothbrush still in its packaging and held it up to me, eyebrows raised.

  “I bought that.” To my ears, my voice was devoid of emotion.

  “Well, that’s something, isn’t it?”

  Fuuuuuuuck you, I screamed at the top of my lungs in my head. But I knew better than to say anything out loud. I knew if I opened my mouth, even just a bit, all my anger would dissolve into tears, or worse. Do not go over the edge in immigration, cautioned a tiny rational voice in my mind, somehow managing to rise above the encroaching hysteria. You are not that stupid. I was not stupid. When you are your own emergency contact, you learn how not to get
into an emergency if at all possible. I glanced up at the immigration official, pushed it all back down, gritted my teeth, and nodded in agreement; the toothbrush was something, my mistake. A few minutes later he let me go through.

  After boarding the plane, I slumped into my seat, not bothering to figure out if any of the numbers added up to anything. For the first time in my life I was too tired to do my pre-takeoff mathematics. I would let other people on the flight worry about keeping it aloft. I texted Rachel that we were wheels up and didn’t open my eyes again until we’d nearly reached New York.

  As we came down the last stretch of the Hudson, swooping out over the Long Island Sound on the final turn to LaGuardia, the wind began buffeting the plane, making it buck and swoop with stomach-dropping intensity. Around me passengers gasped, and the flight attendants were forced to grip the seats as they struggled to the back of the plane to strap themselves in. But even then I barely moved. I was too drained to be scared. I waited till we began our final descent, circling Manhattan, and I sat up and smushed my face against the window. I gazed down at the city, sparkling below like a million glasses of champagne, the square of Central Park a dark oasis in the center. I pulled out my phone to snap a picture.

  “Is this your first time here?” asked the man sitting next to me. I started laughing. It felt good to laugh. I shook my head. Just your average New Yorker obsessed with her city, I thought.

  The plane dipped. Below I could see whitecaps on the water. Water, water, water, and then, boom, we hit the runway and the pilot slammed on the brakes and we all flew forward. Textbook landing at LaGuardia. I had the momentary sense of relief I got whenever returning to New York, of being back in a place that made complete sense.

  As we waited to taxi to the gate, I scrolled through my backlogged email. People were still responding to Rachel’s baby announcement. Someone had started a separate email chain for a smaller group, cutting Rachel out, about a baby shower, and was directing people to contact me for details since I’d “obviously” be the person organizing it. Another person in the thread included a reminder that if it was going to be brunch it needed to be “child friendly” because not everyone had time for fun single lady brunches anymore. Smiley face.