People Who Knew Me Read online

  “We need to get you out of this,” I said, sitting with him on the couch, reaching my hand into his bag of chips, as if to say, I will join you in this misery because I love you. Bruce jumped up on the couch with us, climbing over our laps, tail wagging.

  “Bruce agrees with me,” I said.

  Drew just sighed his defeated sigh.

  “I have an idea,” I said. “Let’s do our California trip.”

  We’d never actually planned it. We kept putting it off, saying, “Let’s buy tickets after the restaurant opens,” then, “Let’s buy tickets after the restaurant gets a bit more stable,” then nothing.

  Drew took a sip of his whiskey.

  “What?” he said, his tone already discounting whatever visions I had in my head.

  “Our honeymoon. We should do it. Finally.” I put my hand on his leg. I was trying, so hard.

  “I don’t think it’s the best time to be going on a trip. We just lost all our money and I have no job.”

  “Right—you have no job. So you have free time. And I haven’t taken a vacation since I started at Mathers and James. We’ve got to do it while we can.”

  I’d always resented the cheerleaders in high school. Now I had become one.

  “It can be part honeymoon, part twenty-seventh birthday celebration.”

  “What’s so special about turning twenty-seven?” he said.

  “We’re going to find out really soon.”

  I played with the little hairs on the back of his neck. He fidgeted.

  “I don’t know,” he said, leaning his head back until it banged against the wall.

  “Drew, it’s all going to be okay,” I said. “We’ll look back on this and see it as a brief hard time when we were young. We have time to make back the money we lost. We have all kinds of opportunities.”

  As soon as I said that, I worried he’d ask me to specify those opportunities. Thankfully, he didn’t.

  “If you want to go to California, if that will make you happy, then we’ll go. But I can’t guarantee it’ll make me happy.”

  I kissed him on the lips, expecting no reciprocation of affection and getting none.

  “You don’t have to guarantee anything.”

  * * *

  I booked the tickets the next day, leaving five days later, on October 16. I would have preferred to go in summertime, but everyone at work said there were no seasons in California anyway, that fall was as good a time as any, maybe even better because there would be fewer tourists. The Saturday before, I found an antique ivory suitcase—one of those hard-sided ones—at a secondhand store in Williamsburg. It had rusted buckles and read, in black lettering, “Going to California” next to a peeling-off palm tree decal. I bought it, even though it wasn’t the most practical luggage choice. Not much would fit in it, but that was okay. We were only going for five days. I just needed one swimsuit, a few pairs of shorts, T-shirts, a couple nice dresses for hoped-for fancy dinners.

  “Can you help me with this thing?” I said to Drew. I’d managed to stuff everything into the suitcase, but was having trouble closing it and fastening the buckles. We were flying out of JFK the next morning.

  “Sure can,” he said. His attitude had improved since I’d booked the trip. He’d distracted himself with looking up activities for us to do while we were there. He wanted to see a taping of The Price Is Right. He wanted to go to Universal Studios. He wanted to get a map of where the celebrities live. It would have been fair to remind him that we only had five days, but I didn’t want to dampen his spirits, so I said nothing, let him think we could do it all.

  He sat on the suitcase, his weight closing it enough for me to snap the buckles shut. We high-fived.

  “Did you get Bruce’s food ready?”

  The plan was to drop off Bruce at Marni’s place, bring her dinner as a thank-you for taking care of him while we were gone.

  “All set. I’ve got his leash and some toys in a bag.”

  It was this, these preparations, that were getting Drew out of his funk. He was a person in need of a new daydream and this trip was it.

  “All right, get him in the car and I’ll meet you downstairs,” I said.

  He called to Bruce and teased him cruelly by saying, “Wanna go for a walk?” Whenever Bruce got really excited, he pranced all over the wood floors, his nails click-clacking with unbridled zeal. Drew closed the door behind them and I did a check of everything on my mental packing list. I went into the kitchen to grab a Ziploc bag for my toothbrush and that’s when the phone rang.

  “Hello,” an old woman said, her voice shaky with age. “My name is Gladys.”

  Drew’s grandmothers had passed away before I met him; my mom insisted I never meet my grandmother (for reasons never divulged to me). I had no idea who this Gladys woman was. I walked the phone into the kitchen with me, stretching the cord as far as it would go, and grabbed a plastic baggie out of a drawer. All I had to do was put my toothbrush in it, throw it in my carry-on, and I’d be done packing, ready to go.

  “I think you have the wrong number,” I said.

  “Wait,” she said. “Is Andrew there?”

  “He’s not here at the moment. Can I ask who this is?”

  “I’m Janet’s neighbor.”

  Janet. Drew’s mother. I didn’t want to ask the next question because I feared where it would lead: “Is everything okay?”

  “I’m afraid she’s taken a fall,” the woman said. “I saw it. She was going out to get her mail and she fell right there on the cement.”

  I sat on the couch, feeling my excitement fizzle.

  “Is she all right?”

  “I couldn’t say, dear,” she said. “Hit her head pretty bad—got a goose egg on it. And it seems she broke her wrist. She’s asking for Andrew. I found the number on the bulletin board in her kitchen.”

  At that moment, I heard Drew in the stairwell, taking the steps two at a time, still possessing the enthusiasm I’d lost so suddenly. He opened the door and, not realizing I was on the phone, said, “Bruce’s in the car. Ready to go!” Then he saw the look on my face and he knew.

  “Gladys,” I said into the phone. “We’ll be right there.”

  We didn’t speak until we turned onto the 280 West.

  “What time does our flight leave in the morning?” Drew asked.

  “Eight o’clock,” I said. “We should be at the airport no later than seven.”

  It felt good to talk like this, as if we were still going. It also felt pointless.

  * * *

  Drew’s mom still lived in the same house where Drew grew up—a three-bed, one-bath in a bad enough neighborhood that the front door and all the windows had wrought-iron bars on them. When we got close enough, we saw his mom sitting on the front lawn—or what used to be the lawn. The grass had gone brown and strawlike. The last time we saw it—in spring—it was still green. Summer had taken a toll.

  She was holding her arm close to her, cradling it against her chest, her face contorted into a look of perplexing pain. The goose egg Gladys mentioned was, in fact, there, right smack in the middle of her forehead. An old woman—Gladys, most likely—was sitting beside her, looking up and down the street for help to arrive. My heart palpitated when I realized it was us, Drew and me, who were the help.

  Drew parked in front and we got out hurriedly. He went right to his mom.

  “What happened?” He squatted down and made a motion to take her arm in his hands for inspection. She held her arm closer to her, like a feral animal protecting its offspring.

  I didn’t know my role in all this, so I thanked Gladys for calling us. She reached at me with her wrinkly hand, asking me for help up. She was as frail as any old person, but her weight was heavy. I almost fell backward pulling her to her feet. She took a moment to balance herself, then began a slow walk back to her house, shaking her head and muttering, “Someone’s got to look out for people in this neighborhood.”

  When I turned back to Drew and his mom, he was st
ill trying to coax her into showing him her arm. I crouched down next to them.

  “It’s the stupid cracks in the cement that made me fall,” she said bitterly. Her voice was faint. I could only hear her if I was within a one-foot radius. “They haven’t repaired the sidewalks in decades.”

  I glanced out toward the mailbox, along the path she would take from her front door to retrieve her mail, trying to find the alleged cracks. I didn’t see any capable of tripping up someone.

  “Ma, I’ve got to take a look,” Drew said, with the authority and sternness of a professional. I fancied him a doctor in that moment, wanting the diagnosis to be a bad bruise, requiring ice and nothing more.

  Reluctantly, she released the tense hold on her arm and let Drew look at it. The moment he touched it, she clenched her teeth fiercely and a tear started a diagonal journey from her eye to the crease of her nose. It wasn’t just a bruise. Drew looked at me, regret and apology in his eyes.

  “Ma, it’s broken. It’s definitely broken,” he said. “We’ve got to get you to the hospital.”

  She said something neither of us heard. We both leaned closer.

  “I don’t have health insurance,” she said. She bit her lip—either a response to the pain or an attempt to hold back tears. She seemed ashamed, embarrassed. She couldn’t look at us directly.

  “Don’t worry about that now,” I said, though I was worried about it. I could see the bills in the mail, having to pay them.

  “Come on,” Drew said, taking her good arm, her right arm, trying to pull her up. In the excruciating time it took him to help her stand, I realized how incapacitated she was. Drew’s biceps were flexing, straining to lift her. She had no strength left. Neither did Gladys, really, but Gladys must have been close to ninety. Drew’s mom was fifty-three. Her body had gone flaccid. When she was upright, I saw her for all she was—emaciated, sick.

  “Emmy, can you get my purse?” she said in a whisper. I imagined her vocal cords had gone limp just like her muscles. Whatever was plaguing her was siphoning all her strength, one day at a time.

  “Of course,” I said, relieved to have a task.

  I slid past them, went to the front door, undid the latch. What I found inside was astonishing. I gasped, audibly. We hadn’t visited in a while and that was even more apparent when I was inside, in a living room that contradicted its name. It smelled like death: gone-bad food, mold, layers of damp dust, mouse droppings. And, if I wasn’t mistaken, there was the faint, slightly sweet smell of urine. How often was she not making it to the bathroom in time?

  The coffee table was covered with mail—some opened, some unopened—and protein bar wrappers. That must have been what she was subsisting on; cooking anything would require too much effort. A fallen stack of newspapers occupied half the couch. It was like she hadn’t had time to clean, but she had all the time in the world; she’d been on disability from work for months. Time wasn’t the issue. She couldn’t take care of herself, plain and simple. That realization, in that moment, changed me, changed what I’d assumed for the future, our future. I grabbed her purse off the kitchen table and disregarded the mess—figurative and literal—knowing it would be waiting for me later.

  When I came outside, Drew was helping her into the passenger’s seat. He strapped her in, closed the door, and jogged to the other side of the car. On his way, he gave me another look, this one terrified, telling me, I didn’t know it was this bad. I took a breath deep enough for him to see my chest rise and twisted my mouth to one side. I didn’t know it was that bad, either. It wasn’t just the broken wrist, but all of it, the totality of her life, a life that had led to this broken wrist. We just didn’t know.

  The ten-minute drive to East Orange General was another mostly silent one. I sat in the back, but I could see his mom in the side mirror. Her lip was trembling. She was terrified, too. It was like even though she’d been living this, even though it was her body, and her life, under siege, she didn’t know it was that bad, either.

  * * *

  The ER was crowded for a Wednesday night. Drew went up to the registration desk while I walked his mom to one of the few available plastic chairs in the waiting area. There were all types: a feverish Hispanic woman with sweat beads on her forehead; a tired-looking white woman with a toddler sprawled out next to her, taking up two seats; a college student holding a bloody washcloth around one finger; an Indian family, the women in saris, with so much calm in their faces that I didn’t know if any of them had an actual emergency.

  “It shouldn’t be too long,” Drew said, coming back and sitting beside his mom. I was on her other side. He put his arm around the back of her seat, reaching over to massage my shoulder. I gave him a small smile to show my appreciation, but I didn’t want to look at him. I knew he’d want to start the conversation about canceling our trip and I wanted nothing to do with that conversation.

  The nurse didn’t call us back until ten o’ clock, two hours after we’d arrived. Drew’s mom was rocking back and forth slowly in her chair, still clutching her arm. It had swollen up noticeably. We didn’t need an X-ray to confirm anything.

  The nurse showed us to one of the examination areas. She pulled the curtain shut for an illusion of privacy, though we were well within earshot of all the other patients and their ailments. She took his mom’s vitals, needing the child-sized cuff to get the blood pressure reading. She said a doctor would be right with us and then disappeared beyond the curtain.

  The doctor looked younger than Drew and me. He was an Indian man, small-boned, with receding hair. He could have been one of those unfortunates whose hair started disappearing in high school. That tragedy probably drove him to his books and success in academia. He mentioned his name quickly, but I didn’t catch it. His accent was still heavy. He couldn’t have been in America more than a few years.

  “Let’s see what we have here,” he said, sitting on a stool with wheels and rolling up to Drew’s mom. He was gentle and compassionate, confirming his newness to the profession. In time, he was sure to become the prototypical seasoned doctor—gruff, blunt, tired of people and their injuries. He peeked at her arm, careful not to hurt her any more than she already was.

  “I’m going to have someone take you to get an X-ray, okay?” he said, talking to Drew’s mom like she was a child, which she was, essentially.

  She nodded sheepishly.

  “This is what happens when you try to shoot the basketball too much,” he said. He laughed at his own terrible joke and we smiled politely.

  An X-ray tech with tattoos visible underneath the sleeves of his scrubs and earrings in both ears came to escort Janet. She looked scared to go with him, and I didn’t blame her. The three of us—the doctor, Drew, and I—watched her walk away. It was a shuffle more than a walk. She couldn’t risk raising a foot completely, so she just slid across the floor.

  After she disappeared around a corner, the doctor said, “How long has she had Parkinson’s?”

  He was looking at his clipboard, making notes. It was like he thought he was talking to colleagues, not family members.

  Drew cleared his throat. “We’re not totally sure that’s what it is.”

  That got the doctor’s attention. He looked up, confused.

  “Well,” he said, squinting his eyes, thinking, giving his words careful thought, “whatever it is, she is having a great deal of difficulty walking. She has fairly extreme rigidity. She can barely stand without aid.”

  Drew nodded. I could feel the guilt emanating off of him. We should have known it had gotten so bad.

  “I’m guessing she’s struggling with day-to-day tasks,” the doctor said cautiously. “Is that correct?”

  “She fell getting the mail, so…” Drew trailed off. He looked away and, as he did, I could see the glassiness of his welled-up eyes in the fluorescent overhead lights.

  “I’m sure she takes falls on a daily basis,” the doctor said. “You should be grateful that she only broke her wrist this time. It could have
been her hip, which would require a surgery that would be very hard on her body.”

  I resented this little Indian man for telling us what we should and shouldn’t be grateful for. I wanted to tell him about our vacation, about how we just wanted him to lie to us and tell us she would be fine and we could go.

  “The tremors—the shaking in her hands—that’s gotten better, though,” Drew said. His tone was defensive.

  “That can happen in later stages of Parkinson’s.”

  We nodded as if we understood, but we didn’t.

  “Stages?” I asked, my voice quiet. I wasn’t sure I wanted to be heard or answered.

  “There are five stages,” the doctor said. “She is probably stage four.”

  “What happens at stage five?” I asked, still quiet.

  “Increased difficulty with movement—standing, walking. Most stage five patients have nursing care.”

  He was too direct, too much to the point. We wanted to dance—twirl and spin—around the point, for at least a little while longer.

  “It’s not terminal,” he said. He blurted it, like it was the one piece of good news he had to give us and he couldn’t wait to share it. I knew, even then, well before I’d see the worst of it, that it might not be good news that Parkinson’s wasn’t terminal. In the support group I’d join months later, the other relatives and caretakers would all admit that, in the darkest hours, they wished it was terminal, that it would all end. As it was, it could go on for years, decades even.

  “What do we do?” Drew asked, with a helplessness that made me grab his hand and squeeze it.

  The doctor reached in his pocket for his pager. Whatever it said startled him.

  “You should start talking to her about caregiving options,” he said. Then he excused himself, said he would be right back. And we stood there, clueless as to what was ahead, but knowing that we wouldn’t have “options.” She didn’t have insurance and we didn’t have a stash of money for a live-in nurse. We were the option.

  * * *