Prologue
Firestarter
Two a.m., no lights, no sound, except for a kitchen floor that creaks where joists underneath aren’t just right, so I maneuver my way with care into the hallway toward our bedroom. The door is open. I stand still. No snoring. That means he could be awake, maybe not. I slink into the closet, drop my clothes and fumble around in the dark for a nightshirt. Skip the sink rituals, too much noise. For once I wish he were snoring; then I’d know he’s asleep. I crawl into bed beside him on the new motion control mattress so a restless sleep doesn’t keep the spouse awake, and I hope it works tonight. Now I’m lying in bed where I should have been hours ago.
“Billie,” he whispers, but he doesn’t need to whisper because I’m wide awake and so is he. “What happened?”
I hear a whine that worries me-maybe just wind. I prop myself on one elbow and think, Of course he’s awake. It’s two in the morning and his wife just came home. “Mum’s in a semi-coma. There isn’t much time left. You don’t have to whisper.” I feel like I’m buzzing, like sleep will not come tonight. I want to cry, but no energy.
He says, “I tried to call you on your cell, but you left it here. Were you with her all this time?” It is completely dark but my eyes are adjusting now.
There is that sad and distant drone like a train whistle. I fear it’s a siren. Someone saw me?
“What’s the matter, Billie?”
“That siren. It’s getting louder. Oh, I hate alarms.”
He leans toward me, “You’re exhausted.” And I’m a desperado, I think. “Do you want to sit up and have a glass of wine?” he asks.
I stiffen at the escalating volume of the emergency vehicle’s siren, and I am sure it is for me and that I’m in a lot of trouble. My husband is watching my face in the dark. I can’t see him but I feel his breathing quicken.
“Billie? What is it? Tell me.”
“That siren is fading now.”
I hesitate for another moment until there is just silence of the night, no siren, no police, and I feel safe. Now I’ll tell him.
“Dr. Lanley said Mum isn’t going to bounce back this time. I asked him about pain relief, palliative care, morphine. I thanked him, for ordering the morphine drip, I think. Then a nurse came. I was using her cell phone and she wanted it back. I handed it to her, thanked her too. All composed… then I lost it, couldn’t look at anyone; I ran out of the room, down the hall. That alarmed the nurse so she rounded up a chaplain to talk to me. I was sobbing.
“I didn’t call you because I left my cell somewhere, here I guess; I don’t even know where, plus it was so late and I was crying. Anyway, the chaplain said, ‘It happens to everyone.’ I don’t know what he meant. What happens? Everyone’s mother dies? He was a chaplain. Aren’t they professional about making people feel better? Well, I wasn’t crying then at least, so I went back to Mum’s room and sat with her and listened to her breathing. She was in a semi-coma the nurse said, but her lips were moving under her oxygen mask, chomping like her dentures were loose, but they weren’t there. I thought she wanted her dentures. She wouldn’t be caught dead without her teeth, you know. I knew they were back at the nursing home, so I went to get them.”
Now he sits upright. “You drove over to the nursing home? In the middle of the night? ”
“It was the only thing I could think of to do for her.” I am exhausted but I’ve opened a floodgate and here it comes.
“It was way after midnight when I got to the home. I knew the code for entering the building. The code changes every few days. Getting in shouldn’t be so easy, but…anyway, I took the elevator up to her floor. Three residents were hunched over their wheelchairs around a table in the dining room which is in full view of the nurse’s station, looked like they’d been playing cards. One of them said. ‘Hi, Billie.’ He asked me how my mother was. He’s one of the sweet ones. The two others were dozing in their chairs. I thought they should be in their rooms, in bed. There were no nurses at the nurses’ station.
“You’ve been there; you know how the two hallways stretch from the nurses’ station to dead ends so staff at the nurses’ station can see everything in the hallways including call lights. There was a call light on at the end of Mum’s hallway. But no staff. Usually doors to residents’ rooms are open. If aides go into a room to care for a resident, they’re supposed to close the door for resident privacy. Mum’s door was closed. That seemed strange because Mum wasn’t in the room, and her roommate was one of the three residents in the dining room.
“So I opened the door. A nurse’s aide, a CNA, was in Mum’s bed sleeping. Do you want to hear all of this?”
“Urgh,” he clears his throat. “Damn it…but how could that… go on.”
“And I forgot all about the dentures. Still no one at the nurses’ station. There had to be an RN in the building somewhere. I wanted to report the sleeping CNA but who did I report her to? The phone was ringing at the nurses’ station. It rang for a long time. Still no staff.
“I pulled the door shut and walked to the end of the hallway, to the room with the call light on. Myrtle, she’s bedridden, was lying on her bed clutching a telephone, the old fashioned kind with a cord. I asked her if she needed help. She said her bed was wet and she had turned on her call light but no one came. So she called the nursing home to ask whoever answered to get some help for her on her wing.” The ringing phone.
“Oh, Billie…”
“I’m not finished. I told the woman I would get help. I walked back to the vacated nurses’ station, took a wastebasket off the floor and propped it on top of the nurse’s desk, the one with the unanswered telephone. I searched in my purse until I found a matchbook and lit the loose papers in the basket. Then I picked up the phone, got an outside line and called 911. I said, ‘There’s a fire on the third floor of Riversite and no staff is here.’ Then I hung up. The three people around the table were all dozing now, so they didn’t see me or hear me when I said, ‘Help is coming.’”
“Then you left?”
“Then I left and came straight here. Are you mad?”
My eyes have adjusted completely to the dark. I can see his face now. He doesn’t look mad like when I got ticketed for speeding last week, but he’s wide-eyed and his mouth is hanging open.
“You might have been arrested.”
“I know. And the CNA wouldn’t have been. I guess you see the irony. I hope you’re on my side.”
“The CNA, yes, dereliction of duty. But you started a fire. People get hurt in fires, Billie. What did you do that for?”
“I didn’t hurt anyone,” I insist.
Things have to add up for my retired accountant husband, so he begins his computations. “You’d just found out your mother is going to die soon, and then you go to her nursing home. You’ve been either baking chocolate chip cookies for staff there or setting up meetings with administrators over care issues for 6 plus years, and then you see a certified nursing assistant sleeping in Joan’s bed and no other staff around. I think you probably wanted to burn down the whole place. But actually doing it? Why start a fire? If you wanted staff to come out of hiding, why didn’t you just pull the fire alarm?”
“That didn’t even occur to me. Maybe I didn’t want to alarm the residents. There are already too many alarms going off. ”
“You could have called 911 without actually starting a fire.”
“Then I would have been lying. I don’t know. I don’t know what I’m doing.” And finally the tears come again, and I’m glad I’m not at the hospital with the chaplain who thinks this happens to everyone.
Now he puts both hands over his face and has thoughts he doesn’t share with me-I think I’m grateful-before he begins again. “Okay, nobody got hurt. That’s good,” and he puts an arm around me and that feels better than good. “But now you can’t report what you saw, no opportunity to register a complaint without incriminating yourself.”
He pauses to think before he adds, “I had this picture of our golden years, retirement nest egg, becoming snowbirds, not hiring lawyers to defend my vigilante wife in a court of law, Billie.” He gives me a firm squeeze; I think I’m forgiven.
Now he’s out of bed and putting on his robe. He takes a deep breath, and I know he’s made a decision or come to some kind of conclusion. “Billie, just one request, please. Actually two.”
“Yes?”
“One, don’t ever go back to the nursing home.”
“Okay, I won’t have any reason to anymore. What’s two?”
“When this is over with, when Joan has gone and you have got your bearings, there’s going to be a void…I mean, you spent a lot of time, daily, with Joan. What now?”
“I don’t know. I thought she might be around for another 20 years, her number’s up now. Maybe I’ll sue Riversite during my new spare time.”
He sighs, lets go of me and stands up. “I was thinking of something else, something healthful for you.”
“Like you think I need a therapist?”
“I think you need a big distraction. Do you remember the one we talked about?”
“I’m not ready to move to Florida or anything major like that.”
“No, not that. We used to take your mother to Fox Brook Park. She loved it. The two of you walked around the lake on the path. Then when she couldn’t do the walking, you wheeled her in her chair and one day she saw a female park ranger there. That was magical for her, Billie.”
“You want me, a woman in my fifties, to get a ranger job.”
“Now, just think back. That job was your idea. Your mother got excited about ranger. She started to remember things, the old Lone Ranger television series, and we talked about the ranger’s sidekick and what was his name and she remembered, Tonto. And you and called out, ‘Lone ranger awwwwaaaayyyy.’ And then your mother corrected us.’”
“I do remember. It’s a good memory.” And it does make me smile.
“The horse was Old Silver, and your mother could remember all the details including the lone ranger calling out ‘Old Silver away.’ Except you’d be driving a Silverado pickup instead of Old Silver the horse.”
“And nabbing garlic mustard from the woods instead of bandits from the plains.”
“And working outside, meeting new people, beautiful distractions, Billie. Even your mother in her dementia saw the joy of it. Think about it?”
Analytical, rational, certified public accountant and good man. He’s right although I’m not feeling the strength of reason now. Just desolation, loss. It happens to everybody, I remind myself.
“And, Ranger Billie, I’d like to have my wife back. You know, the one who used to smile, like this,” and he takes his arms from around my shoulders, stands up, twirls like a ballerina, and forces his lips into a circus-comic grin. And I get another hug which I need before he flicks the switch on the wall. Now my eyes have to get used to light again. The kitchen floor is creaking, and I hear the cork pop out of the bottle. He’s setting two glasses on the table, one for red and one for white, so I will drink my glass of Merlot and even though I can’t think beyond the next 48 hours which is what the doctor says my mother has left in this world, I will say yes to what he asks.