We Are Not Ourselves(169)

He raised his eyebrows dramatically and took the rest of the meal with little protest. The doctor came around and they discussed how he’d been admitted for altered physical status, an acute sudden change in his condition. The goal would be to rehab him. They agreed on benchmarks: if he could stand on his own and walk to the bathroom, they would release him. Judging from his condition, that seemed sufficiently far off to give her time to adjust to her new circumstances. She needed Ed to do poorly enough for long enough to allow her to figure out what came next.

? ? ?

The next day, she stayed late with Ed. She was famished when she left, and on the drive home, as she contemplated the empty shelves of the fridge, she realized she’d have to order something, though she barely had the energy to make the phone call, let alone figure out what she wanted. She’d never again be able to turn to Ed and say, “What should we eat?” She didn’t want to heat up anything in the freezer. The thought of those frozen carcasses disgusted her. It felt like they were food from a lifetime ago, and indeed they were: they were from her life with Ed.

When she walked into the kitchen and saw a smock draped over the island and a pot on the stove, she was so relieved that she almost exclaimed her joy.

Sergei rose from the couch and insisted that she sit. He warmed up the pot and brought a glass of water. He ladled out a healthy portion and presented her with it, then stood watching to see her reaction. It was delicious, a beef stew of some sort.

“Give me the receipt,” she said. “I’ll reimburse you.”

He did his habitual hand waving. It would always be like this with him: he was stubborn as a molar. He had cleaned up the evidence of his preparation, so that only the stewpot was left on a clean stove. The sink was empty, the dish drainer clean. Maybe he’d made it for himself; maybe he’d tired of eating cold-cut sandwiches. She had the sensation that this was probably how Ed experienced his meals now: they appeared before him as if by magic.

She grew uncomfortable at the sight of Sergei gazing down on her. “Please sit,” she said, and he did. He drummed his fingers on the tabletop until his hand latched onto a mail-order catalogue, which he rolled up and used to gently beat the time against the table’s edge as he watched her eat.

? ? ?

In the morning, she woke early to take Connell to the airport. When she was stuck in traffic, she looked at his sleeping form in the passenger seat. Everyone said he looked like Ed, but she didn’t see it.

He woke up right before they reached the terminal. The need to remove the bags from the trunk promised to make the good-bye mercifully brief. She got out of the car and stood there with him in that scant minute of grace allowed to a person unloading.

“If you need me to come back—” he said, looking past her through the doors.

“Not before Thanksgiving. I can’t afford it.”

“I’m sorry I won’t be here to help.”

“I have Sergei,” she said. “I’ll be fine.”

He nodded slowly. He seemed on the verge of speaking, and then he dropped his eyes and looked away before meeting her gaze again, warmly.

“You’re going to miss your plane,” she said.

He hugged her and picked up his bags. “Call me back if you need to,” he said. She could tell he intended an air of gravity, but the way he squinted at the sunlight reminded her of when he was a small boy on her lap reaching for the curtains behind her head. How could the years have brought both of them here?

“Go,” she said, and he turned and went through the sliding doors. She watched him disappear around a corner. A cop pulled up beside the car and told her to move along. She watched the planes out the window and in the rearview mirror until she couldn’t see them anymore.

? ? ?

She hadn’t been at work long when she received a call from the hospital saying they were going to discharge Ed. The woman said they’d be sending him home around two o’clock.

“That’s unacceptable,” Eileen said. “I’m not home to receive him. This is too sudden.”

“It says here you have help with you at home.”

“Yes.”

“Then he will be delivered to your home aide. He’s not eligible to stay any longer. He’s stable, his blood pressure is down, he can eat. We have to send him home.”

“Is he standing?”

“He can stand with assistance.”

“Tell me, was he standing on his own when he went in there?”

“I wasn’t here when he was admitted.”

“I’ll tell you, then. He was. He walked in from the ambulance. So he is not stable, if you ask me.”

“I am telling you that he is ready to be dismissed.”

“We agreed that he had to be able to walk. He has to be able to go up and down stairs.”

“He can walk with assistance.”

“I’m going to appeal. I do not agree with the discharge. Medicare gives me two days, no?”

“That’s correct.”

“Keep him there, then.”

She slammed the phone down. Once he was back within her walls, she would have to keep him there until the end. It would be almost impossible, emotionally, for her to deliver him personally to a nursing home, without some event like this interceding to take the guilt away from her. And then she would just be waiting, possibly even hoping in some dark part of her unconscious mind, for something bad to happen to him. She didn’t want to live like that. And the hardest truth was that—no matter how good a nurse she thought she was; no matter that she’d proved, during staffing crises, or strikes, or untimely bouts of mass absence, that she could do the work of three nurses; no matter that she wanted to believe she could give him better care than anyone else could—she wasn’t sure anymore that a nursing home wouldn’t be better for him. This might have been the time for her to summon up the courage to take Ed back into her home, but she couldn’t do it. She had run up against her limit. If this was her only chance to get him out of her hands—and she saw that it was—then she had to take it and live with the guilt later, maybe for the rest of her life.