Dream Girl(43)

Had a clear conscience. He had a clear conscience. Now he has a hole in the center of his memory, a lost sequence of events in which he did something horrible, yet he has not even a whisper of recollection. Must he feel guilty for that?

And what did Margot think she knew about him? Had her threats not been so empty, after all? What if she had told someone else whatever she thinks she knows?

Thought.

The service bell, the one on the lower level, rings. “Delivery!” Aileen says. He has never seen her so animated. She goes downstairs and there is the sound of something large-ish being moved around. “Try here,” she instructs someone, who mumbles back in a low, masculine voice. “I know it’s an odd place for a freezer,” Aileen replies. “It’s temporary. My father decided to buy an entire cow on the Internet, lord help him. He read something about climate change and thought ordering a side of beef from a small farmer would reduce his carbon footprint. He thought a side was like, I don’t know, four steaks and some ribs.”

What is going on? Better not to know.

He dozes, only to wake later to another ring of the bell. Aileen comes up and gives him an afternoon dose of Ambien, which he takes without protest. He drifts in and out of sleep, aware of a loud buzzing sound, which reminds him of something. And now the leg. Aileen comes in with his dinner, more pills. She seems so much more energetic, flush with purpose. Perhaps babysitting a sixty-one-year-old man has not been the most stimulating of activities. She needed actual problems to solve.

“Isn’t it amazing,” she says, “what you can find on YouTube. They have a how-to video for everything.”





2017




HIS MOTHER ASKED to go to Al Pacino Pizza after the meeting with the neurologist and how could he say no? He certainly didn’t want to remind her that the Al Pacino’s they had loved had been over at Belvedere Square and that they had stopped going there years ago because the quality declined, and then it closed. For now, when possible, he was trying to avoid reminding his mother at any lapse of her memory.

It was a dull November day. Would Gerry write it that way, in a novel? Or was the weather too on the nose? What kind of weather would work for a scene in which a mother and son eat pizza together after receiving her death sentence?

“I’ll have the Monzase,” she said. “That was always my favorite.”

She was right about that, at least, but her syntax made him want to cry. Last week, she’d had a brief moment of confusion in which she thought he was his father, which had fucked with his head on so many levels. For one thing, he never wanted to be confused with Gerald Andersen Sr. Worse still, he did not want his mother, in her confusion, to say urgently: “I still love you, Gerald, and I’m so glad you realized you love me, too. But what will Gerry do when he finds out?” His father had been dead for sixteen years and his mother hadn’t seen him for almost forty years.

But today had been a good day. It would not be the last good day, the doctor had said. Soon, however, the bad days would outnumber the good. They needed to act quickly, have a plan in place for when she could no longer care for herself. They did not have the luxury of a “normal” meal. There was no more normal.

He plunged in.

“Mom—money is no object, not for me. I can afford to give you the best, not one of those grim, overlit places. More like a hotel than—well, like a five-star hotel.”

“I want to stay in my house, Gerry, until it’s time for hospice. You heard the doctors. It’s not as if it’s going to be a long time.”

“But the quality of your life—they said in a relatively short time—”

“I know, I’ll need care. But, Gerry, all I want is to stay in our house for as long as possible. Can’t you move down here? As you said, it’s a relatively short time.”

Probably shorter than his mother realized. Gerry had to give her credit. Eleanor Andersen didn’t settle for ordinary Alzheimer’s, oh no, she had to go Creutzfeldt-Jakob.

He supposed he should feel lucky, having only her to care for. Other people his age complained of being the sandwich generation, pressed on either side, scorched paninis crushed by such differing demands. But, although he had been looking after his mother in his own way since he was barely a teenager, he felt he would be more prepared to step up here if he had been a parent at some point. He was missing a basic skill set. He could not imagine caring for his mother’s physical needs, which meant a nurse, 24/7. Nurses. The house on Berwick Road would feel suffocatingly small with even one more person there.

“You know the doctor who received a Nobel for some of the initial research into this, the proteins—he had a Maryland connection, I think. But then he was arrested for child sexual abuse. He died in Norway.”

His mother looked at him strangely. He deserved that look. But what was there to say? Only—yes. He had to say yes. He could put it off for a while, but he would have to move to Baltimore and help care for her. And once she was in hospice, he would have to stay to the truly bitter end.

He had no desire to do this and he hated himself for his reluctance. Baltimore was a kind of death for him now. It didn’t matter that he had conceived and written the book that had changed his life here. Whenever he returned, he felt as if he were touring the history of his failures. Baltimore had tried to make Gerry small.