by Ann Walsh
“Not today, girl. Karen and I will do it. Get on home with you.”
As we headed for the front hall and our jackets, we heard Mr. Allen objecting. “You’ll not do dishes, Janie. I will; I know how to clean up a kitchen.”
“Thank you for the offer, David, but I’d prefer that Karen did the washing and drying.”
“Sit, the both of you. I can handle it alone.” I could hear Mrs. MacDonald collecting plates and scurrying off to the kitchen.
“You, David, can help most by not breaking any of my grandmother’s china. Stay where you are and have another piece of gingerbread.”
“Only if you’ll stay with me. I’m sure Karen can manage to wash a few teacups without your help.”
A strange noise erupted from Mrs. J. I’d never heard it before, but I figured it had to be a laugh. It was higher pitched than her speaking voice, almost a giggle. But she never laughed, never mind giggled.
I listened, fascinated, to what she said next. “All right, I won’t leave you alone, poor man.” She was flirting!
Robin rolled his eyes. “Come on. Time to go.” We replaced our slippers, shrugged into our coats, then headed out into the dusk.
I was about to say something about it being gross, his grandma being all coy with Mr. Allen, but Robin spoke first.
“I think they’re cute,” he said. “My dad was hysterical when Grandma starting dating, but Mr. Allen’s been really good for her. Too bad he can’t square dance anymore—arthritis. But neither can she with that cast on her leg, so it worked out all right.”
“Cute?” I thought for a moment, searching for the right thing to say. “Cute” wasn’t a word I’d use about Mrs. J. Never. For a moment I debated between “gross” and “sweet” then decided against both words. “Whatever. I suppose it’s companionship for them both.”
“That’s what Dad said after they’d been going out for few months.”
“Really?” I couldn’t think of anything else to add, so just listened while Robin chatted more about his plans for next year. Eventually he grew silent, too, and we were both quiet until we reached my place.
“Anything wrong?” he asked as he dropped me off.
“No,” I lied. “I’ve just been thinking.” About glasses.
“Okay, maybe we’ll see each other again?”
“Sure, let me know if your grandmother needs help with another tea party.”
“Oh . . . Goodbye, Darrah. It was nice meeting you.”
“You too, Robin.”
Mom was hanging around the front door, waiting for me, but I ignored her barrage of questions. “Got homework, Mom. Talk later.”
In my room, I threw myself on my bed and tried to think. Glasses. Glasses and magnifiers. Lots and lots of them. All in the same drawer, right in the kitchen. She said she couldn’t find them. But she knew where everything in her kitchen was, right down to which refrigerator shelf the lard was kept on; she must have known where her glasses were. Why did she lie?
“Darrah!” That was Andrew yelling from his room.
“What? I’m busy.”
“Won’t take a minute.” Reluctantly I pushed off my bed and went down the hall.
He was sitting on the chair by his desk. “You’re good at math, right?”
“No.”
“Seriously?”
“Yes.” I turned to leave the room.
“Darrah, what’s the matter with you?”
“Nothing.”
“Liar. I can see trouble on your face. Did that guy blow you off?”
“Who? Oh, Robin. No, actually he . . .” What had he said, something about seeing each other again? I’d been so wrapped up thinking about Mrs. J., I hadn’t even noticed. If anything, I’d rejected him, not the other way around.
“Do you like him?”
“I don’t know.” I honestly hadn’t thought about it. “All we talked about was TV shows and school. At her place, the old people did most of the talking. Anyway, it’s none of your business. Why don’t you ask Dad your question? I don’t feel like facing math right now.”
His face fell. “I hate asking Dad. He gives me a long lecture when I ask a simple question. All I want to know is—”
“Andrew, I don’t want to think about math right now.” Again, I turned to leave his room.
“You are in a bad mood.”
I turned back. “I’m not.”
“You are, too. What happened?”
So, I told him. I needed to talk to someone, and Andrew was there. I sat down on his bed and he straddled his chair, leaning over the back, facing me. Listening. Really listening, without interrupting. I told him how Mrs. J. wanted me to read newspapers to her, check recipes in cookbooks, measure and cook stuff. I told him how she kept saying she couldn’t find her glasses and how I’d found them easily, not just glasses but magnifiers, lots of them.
“I know she exaggerates,” I said, thinking about the way she let everyone think her arm was sprained when it wasn’t. “But why would she lie? She’s honest about everything else, or at least everything she’s told me.”
“You think?” Andrew said. “How do you know she isn’t lying about everything?”
“She did lie at the circle, and that was serious, with the police there and everything.”
“Really? What did she lie about?”
There was no way I was going to tell Andrew the true story of what happened at the hospital. “Nothing important, forget it.”
“You want Super Geek to help figure this out? Why she hid her glasses and lied about them being lost?”
“Who?”
“Super Geek. That’s me. I’ve been spending a lot of time on the internet, no, not those places Mom and Dad are always going on about, just finding out stuff, like all the actors in Star Trek and what happened to them and—”
“Isn’t that ‘Trekkie’ stuff, not ‘geeky’ stuff?”
“If you don’t want me to help, I won’t.”
“How can you help?”
“Lack of computer time has fried your brain. Give me a few minutes.” He turned back to the computer, keyed a few words into a search engine. “Does she throw up a lot?”
“What?”
“Vomiting, nausea, pain?”
“Of course she’s in pain. Leg pain. She takes pills for it. I’ve never seen her throw up.”
“Okay, that rules that out. Her eyes aren’t pink and watery, are they?”
“No.”
“How about headaches?”
“How am I supposed to know if she gets headaches? She never mentions them.”
He went back to the search engine, reading, shaking his head, trying another site. I got up and went to look over his shoulder. I wasn’t supposed to be using a computer except for school work, but I wasn’t actually using it, Andrew was. I had figured out what he was doing.
“Change your keywords for the search.” Andrew had typed in ‘eye problems’ and had come up with millions of hits. “Try ‘loss of eyesight in the elderly’ and search again.”
“Elderly? You mean old?”
“Try elderly first. Or seniors. Or aging.”
I watched as he keyed the words in. “Okay, got it, lots of medical sites about old people’s eyes. ‘The most common forms of eye disease in the elderly are cataracts and—’”
“Nope, cataracts can be fixed, Grandma had hers done. Mrs. J. would have had the surgery.”
“Glauco . . . glaucoma. That’s the one that sometimes has throwing up as a side effect. People have to use special drops in their eyes all the time.”
“I haven’t ever seen her barf or use drops.”
“Maybe it’s macu—”
“Macular degeneration,” I read over his shoulder. “What’s that? Move over, let me look.” I half pulled him out of his chair, and scrolled down to the section on symptoms. “‘Patients may complain of blurred or distorted vision, difficulty reading or driving, or increased reliance on brighter light, stronger glasses or magnifying lenses
to perform tasks requiring fine visual acuity.’ I bet that’s it! She doesn’t drive anymore, she has night lights everywhere and she leaves them on in the daytime, she cancelled all her newspapers, and there are all those magnifying glasses in the drawer.”
“Is she going to go blind?”
I scanned down the page. “There are two kinds of macular degeneration, dry and wet.”
“Yuck!”
I agreed with the “yuck” but that information didn’t answer Andrew’s question. Or mine. “Doesn’t matter. One kind messes up your eyes faster than the other. Listen to this: ‘People with this disease have trouble discerning colors; specifically dark ones from dark ones and light ones from light ones.’ Her pumpkin stairs! Orange edged in green. She can’t see the edge of the steps. That’s why they are painted in different colours! Here’s something else that fits: ‘Macular degeneration causes dark, blurred, or white areas in the centre of vision, so those afflicted with this disease use their side (peripheral) vision to see more clearly. Sometimes they appear not to be looking at the person they are speaking to, as they turn their head and use their peripheral vision to see better.’” I thought about Mrs. J. at the end of the circle, looking over my shoulder but talking to me. She was looking at me, the best way she could.
“Can I have my computer back now?” Andrew was bored, but I wasn’t ready to quit.
“One minute more, okay?” I scrolled down until I found what I was looking for. He was hovering over my shoulder; I could feel his impatience growing. “Just a sec, I’ll be done soon, promise.”
I found what I was looking for and read it aloud. “Age-related macular degeneration (AMD) is a major cause of blindness in the elderly.”
“So she is going to go blind? That’s tough. Can I have my computer now?”
I read a bit more, then stopped. “Sure, thanks, Andy.”
“Hey, it was fun.”
Fun? Not for Mrs. J.
Back in my room I flopped on my bed, pulled my old teddy bear, Dixon, to my chest and hugged him hard. Suddenly, everything made sense. Even her comment to me at the end of the circle, “You’ll figure it out,” she had said.
I had figured out why she needed my help, and now I was depressed. She had been good to me, in her own way. She could be cranky, but she’d taught me about cooking and baking, which was fun although I hadn’t expected it to be. I didn’t want her to go blind. No one should ever be blind. It would be horrible not to be able to read, or watch TV, or see what you were eating, or how your hair looked, or if you had lettuce stuck in your teeth.
The last thing I read before surrendering Andrew’s computer was about cures for the disease. “Today there is no known cure for macular degeneration, but scientists have hopes of finding a cure in the future.”
That wouldn’t help Mrs. J. She was old; she didn’t have much future left.
For her, there would be no cure.
Chapter Ten
I SPENT MONDAY worrying about what I was going to say to Mrs. Johnson when I saw her after school. Or if I was going to say anything. Should I pretend I hadn’t found her cache of glasses? What was the point in telling her I knew? I still had to spend more than thirty hours helping her before I’d finished my sanctions, and she could make those hours miserable. Sure, the potatoes had been dug up, so I wouldn’t be freezing my fingers in the garden, but what if she decided I had to scrub the toilet or wash the kitchen floor? So far I’d escaped doing any housework except washing up the cooking dishes, and I wanted to keep it that way.
I took the bus. Mom had decided it was cheaper for me to use my student bus pass than for her to drive me to Mrs. J.’s twice a week. She’d whined about the price of gas, then hopped in the car to drive a few blocks to her gym! Typical Mom action.
I was on the bus when I came to a conclusion: I wouldn’t mention the hidden glasses, or that I knew that Mrs. Johnson was going blind. There was no point.
So it was a bit of a shock when the first thing out of my mouth after “Hi, I’m here,” was “I figured it out.”
She didn’t even ask me what I’d figured out. “I thought you might have,” she said. “Looking for the tea strainer, you opened the wrong drawer, right?” She gestured at the teapot. “Help yourself, it’s blueberry.”
“Blueberries are supposed to be good for macular degeneration.” I’d read that yesterday.
“Oh, you’ve even decided what’s wrong with my eyes. How’d you do that?”
I poured myself some tea and slid onto the bench beside the table. “I asked Doctor Google.”
“Of course. The computer.”
I nodded, and didn’t say anything for a while. “Why’d you lie about losing your glasses?” I finally blurted out.
She reached for the teapot and refilled her cup. This time I noticed how she looped a finger over the brim of her mug so she knew when the tea had reached the top, and she could stop pouring before it overflowed. We both sipped in silence. “Glasses aren’t doing me any good anymore,” she said at last. “My eyes are getting worse.”
“But I don’t understand why you lied instead of just telling people you are going . . .” I caught myself before I finished the sentence.
She sighed. “I’ve lived in this house for nearly fifty years. My husband and I bought it before our children came, fixed it up, got the garden going. The house wasn’t finished when we moved in; it needed a lot of work. We had tarpaper siding and windows made of plastic for the first while. But we finally got everything done and paid for.” She ran a hand over the counter beside her. “My husband installed this new counter-top just before he got sick. One of the last things he did. Oh, how he missed being able to putter in the garden or down in the basement. But he got ill and . . .” She stopped and sighed again. “There are a lot of memories in this house. I don’t want to leave them.”
“Why would you have to leave?”
“Think, girl! A blind old lady living alone? Who’s going to allow that? My sons would move me out of here and into one of those awful places faster than I could blink while their wives squabbled over who got grandma’s hand-painted china.”
“What places?”
“Those warehouses for old people. ‘Care homes’ they call them, but actually they are just places to store old folk until they die. Families call it ‘doing the right thing.’ I’ve seen it happen too many times, lost too many friends to those ‘homes.’ People move into a small room, away from their homes and gardens and the places they love. They sit down and start talking about how tired they are, then they grow quiet and then they die.”
“But . . .” I stopped, not sure how to say what I wanted to say. That was the kind of place my Gran had gone to. But that really was the right thing to do. She couldn’t remember to turn off the stove or the taps, and she kept running away. It was dangerous for her in her own home, even with a caregiver staying with her all the time.
“Spit it out, girl.”
“It’s not safe for you to be here alone.”
“What’s not safe? I know every inch of this house, every squeak in the floorboards, know where I have to be careful or I’ll bump into the sideboard, know where the glasses are when I need water in the middle of the night. My brain is working well. I don’t forget to eat or go to bed or flush the toilet.”
“But . . .”
“No more discussion. This house is part of me. I’m not leaving it except in a pine box.”
“Box?”
She glared at me, and I got it, a bit late. Box. Coffin. She was talking about dying here, right here in her home. I shivered. Someone must be walking over my grave, that’s what my dad says when you get shivers and you aren’t cold.
“Karen comes over every day, she does the laundry, the cleaning, helps me with meals. My family thinks she’s just a friend, and she is, but I pay her well for her time. I need her. They don’t know how much.”
“You need me, too,” I said softly.
“Piffle. I can manage fine without yo
u, girl. But when I found out that you could act, I thought hearing you read to me would be entertaining. David reads in a monotone, and Karen doesn’t like reading aloud.”
“You don’t have papers anymore.” I looked down at the bench which used to hold a stack of newspapers.
“Wasn’t getting through them, so I cancelled my subscriptions. Told you that. Get my news on the radio.”
I sat for a moment, thinking. “Who knows?” I asked.
“I’m pretty sure you don’t mean who knows that I cancelled my newspaper subscriptions?”
I shook my head. “No.”
“Karen, David. And now you. No one else except my doctor.”
I thought for a moment. I could bargain with her, promise not to tell anyone about her going blind if she’d cancel the rest of my sanction hours.
“I will, if that’s what you want.”
“I didn’t say anything!”
“Your silence spoke for you. You were thinking of blackmailing me.”
“No, I wasn’t.”
“Yes, you were.”
“No, I . . . Okay, I did think that, but just for a minute. I want to finish my sanctions. Besides, my parents would make me.”
“I am sure they would.”
“I won’t tell anyone, Mrs. J., I promise.”
She laughed, a deeper laugh than the one I’d heard yesterday. “I know you won’t, girl. You’re too honest, in spite of not wanting to be. I’ll wager you would have turned yourself in for pulling that fire alarm if they hadn’t caught you first.”
“I would not—”
“Yes, you would have. You have a kind heart, even though you fight it.”
“Kind heart?” No one had ever said that about me. I wasn’t sure I liked being thought of as a marshmallow.
The phone rang and she grabbed it without looking. She was right. She knew exactly where everything in the house was. “Call me later,” she said into the phone, not even saying “hello” first. I could hear a man’s voice crackling over the receiver, but couldn’t make out the words. Mrs. J. turned her head away from me. “That test outcome is no surprise,” she said, her voice lower, then listened again. “All right, all right, I promise. I’ll come in tomorrow. You can talk all you want, but I refuse to . . .” She replaced the phone in its base, without finishing her sentence or saying goodbye.