Whisper Me This(7)

“My father is the kindest, most gentle soul on the face of the planet, and I can’t believe you are even—”

“What about dementia?”

“What?”

“Dementia. Alzheimer’s. Has he been having difficulty with memory? Sometimes there are mood swings, dramatic changes in personality—”

“No. He does not have dementia. There are no mood swings. She fell. That’s the most direct—”

“And he didn’t call an ambulance. Was there an advance directive, do you know? He claims these were her wishes, to not go to the hospital.”

“No, I don’t know. If she made a directive, she never told me.”

“And you’re sure he isn’t suffering from dementia?” Mendez persists.

“No! No, he’s fine. We talked last week. He was perfectly lucid.”

“Sometimes people with Alzheimer’s can hold it together for a while, at least for short stretches of time. When was the last time you were here, to observe him over an extended time period?”

The words pull out the lynchpin of a towering pile of accumulated guilt that crashes around me and buries me to the ears. How would I know? I haven’t visited home in three years. I talk to my parents every week, but the calls are brief and superficial. If my father’s been slipping, I didn’t notice, but then I’ve not discussed anything more difficult than the weather and the Seahawks with him. As for my mother, she’d never submit to something so demeaning as Alzheimer’s, or allow anybody she loved to suffer from it.

“You are the only immediate family member we have been able to locate. Is there another relative closer? You are in Kansas City, is that right?”

“Yes,” I tell him. “I’m in Kansas City. No, I have no siblings and Mom has no living relatives. Dad’s only sister died over a year ago.”

“So you don’t know of any terminal illness or advanced planning? Would she want to be on life support, if that’s required?”

“No. I don’t know. She might not have told me.”

An image flashes through my head: my mother lying senseless and helpless, stuck full of tubes like a semi-animate pincushion, my gentle father, suddenly red-eyed and hunchbacked, leaning over her with a bloody knife.

“I’ll be on the next plane.”

“Perfect. Please call the hospital. I can give you the number. Do you have something to write with?”

I can’t be this person. I can’t make decisions between wheat, rye, and sourdough. How the hell am I going to sort out what to do with my parents?

“Do you have a pen? Are you ready?” Officer Mendez is persistent.

“Elle, get a pen.”

She’s back in a heartbeat, writing down the numbers I repeat to her. Mendez hangs up.

My world takes on an air of unreality. This is someone else’s smoke-filled kitchen. The tile pattern on the floor sucks me in to a geometric tangle of blue and tan and a bile-colored, putrid green. There are scratches bitten in to it by the legs of chairs.

“Who puts tile like that on a floor?” I ask. “It’s beyond hideous.”

“Mom.” Elle’s voice, taut with anxiety and frustration, draws my eyes. Now that I’m sitting, she’s taller than me. It’s wrong to be looking up at her like this; it changes the angles of her face, makes her look older.

If I say any of the words out loud, it’s going to make what Mendez told me true. Just a few more minutes is all I want, a little more time to sit here in a comfy cocoon of denial, but Elle won’t give me that. So I tell her. Not all of it. Just part of it, the part I can manage to get my mind around.

“Grandma’s in the hospital. It’s serious. I need to go and help Grandpa.”

This is the reframe of the century, and Elle is too smart to buy my story. “You were talking to the police.”

“Grandpa’s a little . . . confused. They want to put him in the psychiatric ward. Or maybe jail.”

Irrational laughter bubbles up at the image of Dad in jail. I doubt very much that my father has ever incurred so much as a parking ticket.

“You’re scaring me,” Elle says.

Her voice sounds far away, but these words are the key to whatever strength lies at the core of me. I am the parent. I am the responsible one.

“I’m sorry. Don’t be scared.” I put my arms around her and rest my head against her chest. She grounds me, and I manage to get the deep breaths going, and with them my brain starts to function again in fits and starts of coherence, punctuated by long oceans of drifting memories and daydreamed fears.

“I need to book a flight. You’ll have to stay with your dad—”

“No way.”

“Elle.”

“I’m coming with you.”

“You are not. You have school.”

She shrugs that off. “I can make up a week of work in, like, a day. You know I can. I’m coming.”

“What about English?”

“I’ll write Mrs. Wilson her stupid vacation thing and send it to her. Come on, Mom. It’s not like she’s going to fail me.”

When Elle thinks she’s right, she’s as unshiftable as a block of granite, and I can tell by the particular firmness at the corners of her lips that this is one of those times.