The Bear Trail by Anna Villegas
Ex-alcoholic Faye has a contented but directionless life with her third husband Owen, until he starts having troubling "incidents".
Faye had no plan.
She had never intended to have a plan. The universe aligned his illness to define the path she found herself following, each footstep planted more firmly than the last, the way a bear's paws tread their way into eternity by wearing the earth through sheer force of repetition. If anyone were to ask her - her daughter Kayla from her first marriage or her neighbor Edie from their dappled cul-de-sac - Faye would not be capable, certainly, of putting words to her intent. As unreflective as Faye was by nature, some days she found herself singsonging the phrase fast becoming signage on the bear trail: Till death do you part.
She'd had one purpose when she'd found Owen again in their later years after Owen's beloved Sabra died and Faye's second husband reached his tipping point: It was only so much fun for him, after all, being married to a career alcoholic. Of course Faye had to stop drinking then. With bad teeth and little money and no home, she made marrying Owen her purpose. Soon, with her bright implants and her own checking account and her posh home, she didn't have to think about purposes or plans. There was travel. There was remodeling. There was church and book group and a potted pink geranium on the rebuilt redwood deck.
Faye did not ask herself if she loved Owen; Owen seemed to think she did.
And Owen's feelings for her?
He gave her everything she needed (the new teeth before the modest wedding, even). He welcomed Faye into his circle of friends and causes. He was amiable about Faye's church-going, though he was not himself a believer, and spoke fondly of Faye's "church ladies." In the early years of their late-in-life union, Owen did not ask much more of Faye's scheduling than they share each day's dinner - most often eating out, as Faye was not a cook. "I've had enough of lonely meals," Owen confessed early on, and Faye understood dinner to be one non-negotiable item in the shared design of their daily lives.
Owen was strong then. Each week, he spent three mornings in the gym lifting weights and doing squats. Once, without Faye, he hiked the Sunrise Lakes Trail at Yosemite with a thirty-two pound backpack. He was a husband who needed neither chaperone nor caregiver, a husband who sometimes surprised Faye with an acute, benign humor that made her faintly uneasy.
What Faye came to recall as the left-turn incident became the trailhead of her downhill journey. Owen was piloting the Volvo as they did errands, post office and library and groceries, nothing special or unforeseen. There at the intersection of Mill and Fourth, just past the Home Run Café where, on her own, Faye liked to stop in for coffee and lemon cake; Owen failed to brake and sailed through the red left-turn light, halting the car only when Faye screamed. Owen punched the brakes, sliding the Volvo to a stop. The library books shot off the back seat.
"That's a red light! You're not protected!"
The oncoming car, a white Mini Cooper, skated to just feet from the passenger-side door of the Volvo where Faye tensed, her arms braced against the dashboard.
"Didn't you see the arrow was red? Owen!"
Owen waved to the Mini Cooper's driver, a red-faced blonde waif who gave him the finger, her ringed hand held high through the car's sunroof.
"Don't scream at me." In the stalled car in the middle of the intersection Owen turned to Faye and asked, his voice dropping an octave, "Why are you screaming at me?"
"Get out of the intersection!"
Owen looked down at his lap, then at his hands ten and two on the steering wheel.
A shock of thick white hair fell forward against his cheek, veiling his face. Faye could not remember when he'd last come to her, scissors in hand, and demanded a haircut because he couldn't bear looking like Bozo the Clown.
"Owen! Drive!" Faye batted her hand toward the Mini's driver, who could not change lanes to pass the Volvo. The girl stuck out her tongue.
"But you could have killed me. Killed us both!" Faye was not letting it go, the error of judgment or lapse in control or whatever it was. She felt endangered; she felt abused. She opened the whole wheat bread of her half-eaten tuna sandwich. The golden light in their kitchen, remodeled with wrap-around windows to let in the sun, seemed to darken.
"I stopped the car because you were yelling. You should never yell at me when I'm driving." Owen's tone was prissy, professorial. He took a second, then a third bite of his sandwich. Mayonnaise lingered at the corner of his mouth.
"You didn't see the red light! We weren't protected! It's a left turn on -"
"You yelled, so I stopped the car."
"You weren't supposed to be in the intersection. My yelling didn't cause you to run a red light, did it?" Faye lobbed a cloth napkin at her husband, so tightly ironed and folded it didn't unfurl. Owen let it drop to the floor.
"Never yell at me when I'm driving." Owen stood, carried his plate to the dishwasher, and slid it cockeyed into the bottom rack. "You nearly caused an accident with your yelling."
Faye would, as soon as Owen left the kitchen, extract the plate, rinse it, and reposition it squarely into the rack.
So it was Owen's blame of her, the shifting of responsibility legitimately attached to him, that established the bear trail. She was only following Owen's lead, Faye might explain to herself. She was only matching someone else's footprints.
Faye had imagined it would be she who tumbled down the stairs one day. She had lobbied for a newer house, one without stories stacked atop each other, at most with a split-level living area for which she had hungered in the Seventies. She resented the constant up and down in the house which had been Owen's (and Sabra's too) for four decades. It was hard on her hips, she told Owen, who raised his eyebrows and suggested she come to the gym with him. They remodeled the kitchen and the downstairs half bath. They refinished the cherry floors. They replaced the swaybacked living room couch with a buttery leather sectional, though not without a squabble or two. It was, all the neighbors said, a classy house, so Faye learned to make her peace with the stairs.
Owen's fall did not happen at night, when one would expect such disasters. Faye had made the morning coffee and set the table, so pretty with its blue checkered cloth under the summer's morning sun and the vase of red and purple zinnias Edie had brought over earlier in the week. She put out wheat toast and butter and, splurging, two home-made jams and honey from the fruit trees and bees on Kayla's foothill homestead. How Kayla, a city girl born and bred, could choose to live twelve miles from the nearest store on a mountain destined to ignite in an infamous California wildfire was beyond Faye's understanding. Kayla lived with goats and chickens and more dogs than Faye could count. Most disturbing to Faye, Kayla lived with another woman, Lisa, whom Kayla called her "partner." When Faye spoke of Kayla - to Owen or to the ladies at church - she made a point of pronouncing clearly and with a lilt implying pride in her daughter's accomplishments - that "Lisa, Kayla's business partner" was a banker's daughter or a one-time high school homecoming queen or a biologist, all factual but details not quite persuasive enough, Faye suspected, to ease the suggestion from the word "partner."
On the morning of the stair incident, Faye poured Owen's coffee into his special mug, the white one with "Don't Shoot the Messenger" printed in bold black Courier type. Some weeks past, Faye had set the breakfast things on the table and put a black mug, a leftover from Sabra's tenure in the kitchen, at Owen's place. As a toddler Kayla, now well into her forties, would drink milk only from her yellow Tommee Tippee cup, which had to be washed immediately after use to be available to forestall the next tantrum. Calling Owen's reaction a tantrum was hyperbolic, even Faye could see that, but he replaced the black mug onto the shelf with so much force that the wineglasses jumped. Without a word to Faye, Owen found the favorite in the dishwasher and washed it himself. Then he sat down with his morning coffee and adjusted the Sentinel on the placemat in front of him.
Now Faye washed the mug by hand after breakfast each morning and placed it, text out, on the shelf where Owen could see it. She didn't ask her husband what another wife might have: "What's up with the cup, hon?" She didn't go to the internet and order a second cup, just to make things easier. She didn't tell Edie or Kayla. She invented her own workarounds and hoarded Owen's childish turns like pennies in a piggybank.
"Owen," Faye called from the landing at the front door. "Coffee's poured. Toast is ready."
Owen didn't answer. Just as Faye was about to call again, to repeat herself as she seemed to do day in and day out, her husband came sledding feet-first down the oak stairs, more quietly than Faye thought reasonable, to stop at her feet.
"Oh dear," she whispered, lowering herself to the first step so she could wrap her arms around Owen's shoulders. "Oh dear."
"My leg is not working," Owen said calmly and quite clearly when Faye managed to sit him up.
"Did you hit your head?"
"My leg. It's not working."
"What do you mean, honey? Did you hurt your leg?"
"It wasn't working up there." Owen tipped his head. "It wasn't working before I fell."
Faye called Edie, who insisted on calling 911, and soon Owen was trussed onto a gurney and wheeled into an ambulance. Jaime, the name tag on the shaggy paramedic's shirt pocket read. Holding Owen's ring hand between her palms, Faye sat beside her husband as he explained succinctly to the paramedics how he could not lift his leg. Edie, still in her leopard bathrobe and slippers, handed Faye's purse to Jaime, who set the bag into Faye's lap and closed the ambulance door.
Jaime squeezed Owen's shoulder and winked at Faye. "We'll tell the emergency room doctor," he promised. "They're going to fix you up."
"I'm not staying at the hospital," Owen told Faye as the ambulance pulled from the curb where Edie stood waving. "I won't sleep in the hospital."
"I'll shut the house," Faye heard Edie call. "I'll call Kayla."
The stair incident marked the first in a series of increasingly troublesome falls. Faye was present when, a few months later, Owen stood up from the kitchen table and promptly folded onto the floor, his only complaint a soft grunt. Weeks after the kitchen collapse, Owen had a harder fall onto the cold cement of the garage when exiting the Volvo after a trip to the hardware store for screw eyes. Again Faye was present. She raised Owen to his feet. No words spoken, they hobbled into the house and sat despondently on the leather couch, where Owen lifted his bum leg with his own hands to rest his foot on the ottoman and promptly fell asleep, leaving Faye to calculate that Owen's mobility was diminishing weekly, despite his daily insistence that he was fine, that the falling spells were over.
It was the bedroom incident, happening as it did when Faye was in Ben Lomond at a church conference for Christian wives (Owen had chuckled at that, his atheism providing him joy) that signaled worse times had arrived.
"I woke up," Owen explained as he lay in the hospital bed where, his doctors had ordered, he was to remain until a myriad of neurological tests had been performed. "I woke up. And then I was down. I don't know if I ever stood up."
Faye patted his arm. She offered Owen a glass of water, which he declined.
"I don't remember exactly," Owen said.
"It doesn't matter, hon. You don't need to remember. What we need is to figure out what's -"
"I lay there for hours, waiting. I am now intimately acquainted with the underside of our bed."
"I'm sorry I was gone!"
Owen, never one to hold a grudge, surprised Faye. "And Christian wifedom is well and good?" Even in hospital garb, Owen had the presence of a man of the world. His shoulders were square, his posture upright, his eyes clear.
Faye studied him then, the quick-witted man who had been her husband for twelve years, and felt unease in her own bones. Her husband had lain on the bedroom floor for almost eight hours. What if she had been on an overnight at Kayla's farm? What if she had failed to check in with Owen between the buffet dinner and the evening program? What if Owen had died prone and alone on the plush carpeted floor of their conjugal bedroom? What would become of Faye's perfect life then?
Owen had been using the walker for several months when Faye had to begin paying the household bills. Always careful with money, Owen had not previously sought Faye's involvement with the electric and gas, the credit card and cell phone payments. It was most often Owen who retrieved the envelopes from the letter box at the edge of the curving lawn and, after deftly slicing them open with his Swiss Army knife, slotted them neatly into the antique silver toast rack on the kitchen counter where the bills awaited payment until the first of the month. The toast rack imitated the spires of Salisbury Cathedral; Owen had purchased it for Faye during the vacation they called their "honeymoon," although the trip came eighteen months after their marriage, its itinerary inspired by the date of Owen's retirement from Global Equities.
Through Canterbury and Bristol, through Bath and Stonehenge, Faye could not stop exclaiming over the charming rituals of the British breakfast. In Salisbury, she noted for the third time that the aluminum toast racks on the tables of their bed and breakfast were sorry cousins to the darling silver-spired rack she'd seen in a shop window, so Owen - despite his deep philosophical opposition to amassing tchotchkes and doodads--took it upon himself to revisit the shop and buy the rack. Now when morning visitors to their kitchen commented upon Faye's formal place settings made even more elegant by the Salisbury rack, Faye found a natural segue to recounting the details of their breathtaking trip to the United Kingdom, a practiced narrative whose climax was neither nave nor narthex but the presentation by Owen of the "sweetest gift ever," the toast rack.
Faye was tidying the house in preparation for the weekly visit by Lula, the cleaning lady without whom Faye simply could not survive, when she noticed the empty rack. It was late in the month; the customary envelopes were nowhere to be seen. While Owen slept on the living room couch (he was napping more and more frequently, a development Faye welcomed), Faye sorted through the stack of papers on the kitchen counter. After no luck in locating the missing bills, her search became more and more energetic until she found at the bottom of the kitchen garbage, unopened but ripped neatly in half and stained by avocado skin and a half-eaten piece of jellied toast, the most recent Visa bill.
It was not, Faye said to herself, truly spying when a wife examines the family Visa charges. Never mind that the charge cards were attached to Owen's credit; never mind that it was, technically, Owen's wealth making the cards possible. Faye wiped the halves of the bill and used a butter knife to unfold the torn pages. She lay them flat on the kitchen table. Then she stood up and tiptoed to the living room. Owen was fast asleep. He lay on his side, his knees bent, his arms clutching the multicolored handwoven throw pillow, an embryonic pose he never assumed in their bedroom. If it had been Faye sleeping the day away on the living room couch, she would have preferred a blanket, so she unfolded the travel rug from the arm of the couch (another overseas souvenir, this one in Black Watch tartan) and covered her husband. She repositioned the walker where Owen could reach it and tiptoed back into the kitchen.
Here and there throughout the month of dates were purchases and sums Faye did recognize: Trader Joe's and Nordstrom's, Zeke's Mechanic Shop, the dinners out they'd agreed to when Faye's church committees kept her busy late into the afternoons. The total bill was more than four thousand dollars. The previous month's total was not as much, but outstanding still.
As she studied the stained figures, Faye felt the same electric indignation she had felt for days after the red light incident. Owen was threatening their welfare. He was behaving in irresponsible and thoughtless ways. He was, Faye was forced to admit to herself, keeping important secrets from her. Did he decide on upgrading their laptop without consulting her? Where did his previously unrevealed fondness for elephants originate? Was the ammunition intended for the rusty shotgun he kept in the bottom of his military footlocker? What did he anticipate shooting?
On Tuesday afternoon when Owen would expect Faye to be at Edie's for book club, Faye arranged herself on the living room couch beneath the tartan blanket and announced herself headachy and sore.
"Seven Up?" Owen asked, parking the wheelchair that had lately usurped the walker.
"No, just sleep. If I can."
Owen touched Faye's shoulder beneath the tartan. "Warm enough?"
"Plenty warm, thank you."
"Ibuprofen?"
"Owen, just sleep." Faye shut her eyes and waited until she heard the wheelchair's receding whisper on the hardwood floor. "Thank you, honey," she called. And waited.
Faye hadn't meant to fall asleep. It was comfy under the tartan with Owen in the next room shuffling papers, sighing, rolling to the living room door to check on her. Faye gave in. She shut her eyes, snugged the blanket around her chin, and fell deeply asleep. It wasn't noise which woke her. She was dreaming, and then she wasn't. The dream's aura, what Kayla and Lisa would label its "affect," was cozy and safe, a sensation left over from childhood when Faye would cling to a half-sleep insured by her mother's constant presence, her parents' diligent care. As she sat up, the sensation of safety slipped from her shoulders with the tartan. Owen was hardly capable of caretaking. Faye stood up slowly, easing the stiffness in her hips. Owen could not, truth be told, take care of himself any longer.
Owen sat in his parked wheelchair at the kitchen counter. Faye passed behind him. She could see the logo of the Best Buy online store, some animated electronic item winking on the computer screen. She poured herself a glass of water and swung her left leg back and forth, a remedy to the stiff joint that chose the most peaceful moments to act up. Owen remained oblivious to her presence, clicking at the screen and, perplexing to Faye, chuckling. She stepped back from the sink and saw it then, hiding under Owen's tented left hand: the Visa card.
"You ordering something, hon?"
Owen startled. He looked up at Faye, surprised at the woman standing in his kitchen. "I am fascinated by this Meural device." He enlarged the screen so Faye could see a black frame surrounding pixelated flowers - some pastel landscape by Monet or Manet. Owen would know, though Faye was not interested in the distinction. He cursored through painting by painting. "It accesses thousands of pieces, classic and contemporary."
Faye was silent. She shifted her weight from foot to foot. She set down her water glass.
Her husband continued, "I'm going to put it there, next to the window. We'll be able to see great art whenever we want."
"How much does it cost?"
"Oh, I don't see that it matters."
"Next month's Visa bill doesn't matter?"
Owen frowned. He was finished, Faye could tell, with discussing the financial wisdom of purchasing a Meural Smart Frame. He lifted his hand from the Visa card and shifted the screen to checkout.
A better typist than Faye, Owen had entered half of the numbers from the card before Faye clapped her hand over it.
"We don't need this thing," she said firmly.
"I want this thing."
"No."
"I am buying this thing."
"Owen, you're not." Faye felt Owen's hand, big and warm and surprisingly strong, clamp her own. She tried to slide the card and her hand from under Owen's grip. He swiveled in the wheelchair and held on.
"Owen, give me the card."
A civilized, articulate man by nature, Owen seemed to growl at Faye as his hand tightened on hers.
"Give me the card," she whispered. Then, loudly, "Hon, we don't need this."
Owen tipped his head. It seemed he was going to acquiesce. Faye thought the episode was over when Owen lifted her hand and the card beneath it to his mouth. He bit down on the fleshy part at the base of Faye's thumb, just where her arthritis was worsening. His teeth, one of his most attractive features, did not break the skin, but the bruise remained, a cautionary half-moon, for a good two weeks.
Later, when she used the confiscated credit card to order a down comforter for Kayla's bed, Faye reconsidered the biting event and decided, in all fairness, that it was Owen who was unreasonable. A comforter for your daughter who has chosen to live on a snowy mountain top makes common sense; a flashy digitalized art collection does not. Just another frame for Lula's weekly dusting, Faye bolstered her reasoning. She had not signed on to be the comptroller to a fading man on wheels. Here she found herself alone monitoring their monthly income, managing the checkbook and the bills and the state of Owen's long-held Morgan Stanley portfolio in whose figures Owen had lost interest except for the friendly monthly calls from his financial advisor when their exchanges traveled from football to basketball and sometimes even ice hockey.
Faye did not, could not, clarify to herself why she remained secretive about the many incidents marking Owen's transformations like cairns on the bear trail. To neither Kayla nor Edie did she mention the biting. As much as she disliked the Volvo's stick shift, she had stopped concerning herself with Owen's historic driving mishaps when she became the permanent designated driver. And it did not seem fair to her that she delineate Owen's physical decline to others when he himself refused to talk about it. He had accepted the string of unproductive visits to specialists, then the walker, then the wheelchair, then the downstairs bed in the den with a mute stoicism. Either stoicism, Kayla had speculated to her mother, or denial, which seemed more likely.
As long as Faye could shoulder Owen's standing weight when he pivoted onto the toilet or onto the bed, she kept the evolution of his infirmities secret, or somewhat secret. Kayla did remark that Owen no longer accompanied Faye on her monthly visits to the farm, what Owen had taken to calling The Land of the Burning Bush, an allusion coined for Faye's benefit. And Edie, denied the conversational opportunities afforded by Owen's habitual walks through their cul-de-sac, had begun visiting more frequently, always with a floral offering, daylilies or daisies or Faye's favorite black-eyed Susans, in hand.
Faye herself did not timestamp the date when, in Owen's presence, she began using the third-person to refer to her husband. In the first years of their marriage, she had playfully nicknamed Owen "Himself," as in, "Would Himself like a martini before Thai take-out arrives?" or upon answering the telephone, "Himself is sitting right here - let me get him for you." A needlessly literary affectation Owen did not seem to appreciate, the usage had faded until the bear trail deepened. Then "Himself" became "he," and soon Faye began redirecting her communications to an unseen overseer, a witness to the power shift in their tasteful and well-appointed household. So customary became Faye's diminution of her husband from proper noun to pronoun that Edie was compelled to call her out. Longtime residents of the cul-de-sac, Edie and her late husband Alfie had known Owen forever. Edie's tenure as family friend seemed to grant her the temerity to speak on his behalf, a partisanship Faye resented.
"Faye, friend," Edie said softly one afternoon after Owen backed himself from the kitchen where the three had shared cheddar and Triscuits and Kayla's Granny Smiths. "Faye," Edie combed crumbs from the table into her open palm and deliberated. "Faye, do you realize you have stopped talking to Owen? You talk about him and around him, but not to him."
"I most certainly do not."
"Yes, you do. You say 'he' instead of "Owen."
Faye resisted. "I do not."
"I'm trying to help. I don't think you're aware -"
"I am the compos mentis one here!"
"Of course you are." Edie sprinkled the crumbs onto her plate. "He has feelings, too, and he can hear you."
"Give me an example."
"Just now. When you poured my wine, you said, 'He cannot have beer tonight.'"
"Oh, that." Faye shook her head.
"He asked you directly. He asked you if he could have a beer with the crackers."
"I don't think so." Faye had discovered reserves of stubbornness to match Owen's. Stubbornness and denial, stubbornness and denial, step step step.
Faye had always imagined herself something of a public speaker, so Edie's accusation of her alleged grammar misdemeanors stung. But exploring its ramifications was not within her range. Faye and Owen moved through the weeks without dialogue. Faye stopped limiting Owen's cocktails. One night before dinner just days after Edie's criticism, she parked Owen at the dining room table to have his martini or two. Her husband had not asked permission, and she had not asked his preference. When one's husband remained uncommunicative from dawn to dusk, considering him a "he" instead of a "you" did not seem perverse.
After she planted the first martini gently on the table in front of Owen, Faye stood behind the wheelchair and placed her hands on her husband's shoulders. She massaged his neck and whispered, too softly for Owen to decode, "Himself may have his martini now."
That that night as Owen lay sleeping, his breathing as soft as a baby's, Faye rebutted Edie's criticism. After shouldering Owen from the bathroom to the bed, after lifting his legs and covering him with the spread, Faye said, as much to herself as to himself, "Good night, Owen. Good night, sweetheart."
Asleep as soon as his head hit the down pillow Faye had fluffed and refluffed for his comfort, her husband did not hear her. What does it matter, Faye thought with more than a dose of her own anger. What the hell does it matter.
"He doesn't acknowledge his depression," Faye asserted, recrossing her ankles to ease the twinges in her hip. At Kaiser since nine, Faye had missed choir practice and her morning walk through downtown Bakerville. She was, she was sure the expression fit, feeling put upon.
Dr. Caskill smiled and clasped his ropy hands and ignored Faye's words. "What do you say, Owen?"
Owen sat in his wheelchair, studying his lap.
"What do you say to some sessions with Dr. Noah? She's very good -"
"He says no. He always says no."
"Let's hear from Owen."
Owen raised his head. "Owen says no."
For a moment as he spoke, Faye detected a glimmer in Owen's eyes. Then he went silent, deadpan again.
"This decision is up to you," Dr. Caskill offered mildly. "Owen, you've been my patient for nearly thirty years." Dr. Caskill coughed. "Would you like to speak with me and Dr. Noah together?"
"What I think," Owen said slowly, raising his head and letting it fall again, "is that I'd like a martini."
So Faye gave up on surveilling Owen's depression, the number of martinis imbibed, his passivity. Cesar, the strapping physical assistant who began coming daily to the house to help Owen shower and dress and perform his physical therapy, tasks now beyond Faye's endurance or desire, sat with Owen to watch whatever sport event was being televised (even swimming, which, Faye complained to Kayla, she found less exciting than watching paint dry).
"You may be jealous of Cesar, Mother. You've never spoken a kind word about him."
"That isn't true." Faye dropped her stockinged feet from the table in Kayla's kitchen where she had been seeking a pose to ease the constant ache in her hip. It was futile, trying to establish a comfortable perch in Kayla's rustic kitchen - the slate floor was uneven, on purpose for God's sake - and Lisa seemed to have forbidden cushions of any type.
Irked that Kayla refused to support her as a good offspring should, Faye planted her stockinged feet against the cold slate and downshifted into dark disappointment.
"I always imagined you'd marry a doctor or a lawyer," she said to Kayla's back.
Kayla turned from the counter where she was tying bunches of dried weeds - they looked like weeds - into miniature haystacks ribboned by bows of hemp string. She swung her heavy braid from her shoulder to her back. Faye wished Kayla would ask her to cut it off. It was greying and horsey and not the cut to attract the doctor or lawyer Faye wished for Kayla. Just three snips of her sewing scissors, and the braid would be no more.
"It's like you've abandoned Owen to this sorry life of crippled isolation." Kayla was hardly taller than her mother, but looming over Faye as she was, she appeared forceful. "It's as if he already died."
Faye cringed then, remembering the Christmas note she'd written to an old friend back east, a long-ago school friend harkening back to her side of history. Unlikely to be found out, separated by nearly a continent, Faye elaborated excessively upon the joys of life in Bakerville. She may have neglected including mention of Owen, an oversight that provoked a response from the friend, who subject-lined her e-mail IS OWEN DEAD? Faye found the query tasteless and deleted first the e-mail, then the ex-friend's address from her Christmas card list. Kayla's remark shocked the unpleasant interaction into memory.
"I do everything I can to care for Owen."
Faye's words were monotone, the same lackluster timbre she used for speaking with Owen:
Cesar is here for your bath.
I'm cancelling the Home Depot card.
Edie brought over a chicken casserole.
Drink as much as you'd like.
It's no business of mine.
"He's taken care of you well enough, Mother." Kayla returned to her miniature haystacks or broomsticks or whatever they were, her brown hands deft and strong. Her defiant braid seemed alive, the tail-end of a malevolent rodent.
"The sun is ruining your skin," Faye complained. "Where are my shoes?"
That night when Owen rolled his chair to the wide living room window and stared out at the moon washed garden he could no longer tend, Kayla's words rankled. The only balm for the insult Faye felt was an unmitigated compulsion to exhibit extreme solicitousness toward the silent, immobile husband to whom she'd pledged for better or for worse. So she stood behind Owen and rubbed his shoulders. He had never been one for massages, and Faye had seen him resist Cesar's ministrations, but she persisted. Into Owen's tendons and muscles Faye pushed her thumbs.
"We should move," Faye said, her lips to Owen's ear. "We should be in senior living, a condo at Atria." Beneath her thumbs, Owen's muscles hardened. "Here, it's too much for me. You need more help than I can give."
Faye paused. She let Owen's silence stretch until it snapped.
"I'm putting the house on the market. We'll sell what we can't fit into a condo. You'll see it will be better. You won't be mooning over what you can't do. You'll see."
"God bless us every one," said Owen, shrugging Faye's hands from his shoulders. "God bless America."
Faye did not claim martyrdom for herself, but when Edie suggested the word, Faye felt rectified. Yes, it did make sense to give up the aging three-story and Owen's lush, feral gardens and the headache of lifting the wheelchair into the Volvo and the regime of medications and therapists and the necessary intrusion of Cesar morning and night. Once she'd made the decision to move, Faye could see her selfless sacrifice and devoted nursing inflating, like one of Owen's stocks in a bull market, and becoming apparent to others: to Kayla and Lisa, to Edie and the church ladies, to the mailman and the El Salvadoran mow-and-blower and the cute little waitress at the Home Run Café.
Elevated by a simple word, Faye said to Edie and repeated to Cesar within earshot of Owen that she hoped her husband would predecease her, that she couldn't imagine him getting on without her. At a memorial service for an aged neighbor from two houses beyond Edie's on the cul-de-sac, Faye repeated her wish more loudly than she intended: "We're hoping he's the next to go." Kayla, threading Owen's wheelchair through the mourners leaving the cemetery glowing in a verdant foothill spring, shot her mother a look, then bent to listen to Owen. Kayla's grey hair was coiled on top of her head. Owen reached up to comb his fingers through an escaped tress as though he were petting one of Kayla's countless dogs.
"Mother, Owen wants to visit Sabra's grave."
Faye walked on.
"We're going to Sabra's grave, Mother."
"I have always wanted a personal assistant," Faye repeated to Edie and Kayla and Ramiro the mail carrier and the troops of professional movers she had hired to box what was not headed to Hospice Thrift or Goodwill. The new condo at Atria was one third the size of their storied house in the cul-de-sac. Faye imagined the condo's sleek, bald rooms occupied by as few of Owen's books and papers as possible, and said as much to Edie. She set the personal assistant, a college girl whose mother shared church duties with Faye, to work culling Owen's meticulous filing system, housed in a matched pair of oak file cabinets. Faye stepped around the boxes of tossed manila folders and deflated garbage bags to press stickers onto the file cabinets she believed had belonged to Sabra, who had favored antiques over anything contemporary. "Goodwill," the sticker read. Four other pieces of furniture had been so marked.
Owen rolled through the living room. Silently, he had pulled Faye's stickers from the living room furniture. He wadded them into spitball size and lined them up like bullets on the dining room table. Faye scooped the spit wads into the garbage and fashioned new stickers. She placed them as high as she could on the furniture surfaces, higher than a wheelchair-bound arm could reach.
Throughout the purchase of the condo, the bridge loan, and the sale of the house, Owen had remained silent. Not unexpressive, Faye thought, but purposefully absent, as though nothing but the televised sports that made up the soundtrack to their exodus any longer held interest. She allowed Owen his deep silences and his spit wad rebellion. When he failed to decide what should stay or go, when he didn't peep about Faye's decisions, she empowered the personal assistant to use her own discretion. The garbage bags inflated wantonly; Cesar was enlisted to haul them down to the mountain of cast-offs in the garage.
Two days before the official move-in date when Faye was feeling especially accomplished, Robin, the personal assistant, came to Faye in the dismantled kitchen.
"What about the gun?" Robin asked, wrinkling her nose. "The gun in the bottom drawer of his desk?"
Faye set down the cut glass vase she had long used for Edie's floral offerings. She would miss them, Edie's home grown flowers, but the white walls of the condo lured her beyond regret.
"The gun?" For a moment, Faye was lost.
"The gun, like a pistol?"
"In the desk drawer?"
"The bottom drawer. With enough ammo for a safari."
"Let me think." Faye picked up the vase and ran her fingers across the edged glass. "Let's box it up and put it... high?"
"Do you want me to ask Owen?" Robin took the heel of banana bread that had been sitting on the kitchen table since Kayla had brought it by the night before. Too mealy and dry for Faye's palate, the bread had been offered to Cesar and the moving men. Now Robin was finishing it, the less to throw out.
"No. Owen doesn't need to know... to -"
Robin cocked her head as her namesake bird might do. Faye sensed disapproval.
"He's probably forgotten he owns any guns," Faye explained, words meant to cover her tracks. "No need to remind him of what he's forgotten."
Robin brushed her crumbs. "Whatever you say."
"That's what I say, then."
The emptied house quieted. Faye and Owen ate leftover pizza on paper plates for dinner. Faye had abandoned all loyalty to the food pyramid during the weeks of packing and moving. At Atria, she would not have to cook at all. There would be three formal meals daily in the dining room and a coffee café with croissants around the clock. There would be walking groups and bridge games, a heated pool for aqua zumba and a staff of cleaners to replace Lula, who had cried nonstop for ten minutes after learning of the move. Faye found the crying excessive. Owen held Lula's hand for the duration and refused to respond to Faye's mutterings about maudlin sentiments.
Cesar returned at eight to ready Owen for sleep in the hospital bed which now sat like a throne in the center of the bare den. Tomorrow the movers would load the boxes and the chosen furniture, and Owen's home on the cul-de-sac would be reduced to memory. Cesar busied himself with Owen. Owen would still speak to Cesar, at least, about sports and cars and Cesar's newborn daughter Celina. Faye listened to the murmurs of her husband's voice, its tones sympathetic, attentive. When had Owen last spoken to her in anything but monosyllables? Faye could not remember. She sat in the stripped kitchen and continued to eavesdrop on the conversation in which she coveted inclusion precisely because she had not been invited to join.
The breakfast picnic Edie brought the next morning was spread on a packing box draped with a red-checkered table cloth: grapes and muffins and hard-boiled eggs and a pot of real coffee.
"Owen can stay with me for the day," Edie insisted.
"He's just underfoot," Faye complained.
"He's actually right here." Edie pointed to Owen, who had found his parking space facing the windows overlooking the garden. "We'll take a walk around the neighborhood. We'll have drinks and dinner. We'll make a flower arrangement for the condo."
"Would you?" Faye felt obligated to describe to the moving men where each box and chair should be placed in the condo. She could not police Owen's wheelchair peregrinations. "It would be a great help to me."
"It would be a kindness to Owen, wouldn't it, Owen?" Edie arranged the flowing paisley scarf around her shoulders. It was a scarf with which Faye was familiar, a scarf which hinted at sisterhood with Sabra, who had favored the bohemian and the eccentric in dress as well as furnishings. There would be nothing of Sabra's in the new condo, just blank walls and straight lines.
That night, after the movers left the condo, Faye allowed herself to walk from room to room. The silence, the whiteness, the absence of Sabra's bits and pieces - all of this Faye found not exactly comforting, not quite promising, but deserved, like a breakfast of French pastry after a long month of dry toast. Yes, she had shouldered Owen's decline with grace, all of her church friends would agree. She had fulfilled her obligations, she was sure. At Atria Owen's care would no longer be hers alone. The unfailingly compassionate cast of characters described in the long term residential agreement would take over. Faye would be untethered. Faye could put her own feet up.
Faye parked the Volvo at the curb on the cul-de-sac. She would sell the car, she'd decided. She would Lyft and Uber herself into a future of little responsibility. Owen no longer showed interest in excursions, and Faye was surely not intent on cajoling her husband into a wheelchair accessible van so she could enjoy his taciturnity on outings. It had taken more years than she'd have liked, but she was leaving Owen's house and all its signs and symbols at last.
The kitchen lights did not illuminate the lawn. But a deeper glow hinted at the track lights in the living room, installed to highlight Owen's cherished collection of folk art, now dispersed to the high seas. Owen had been returned from Edie's day care.
"Owen?" Faye's voice echoed against the cave of the empty house. "Owen?"
Owen sat in the softened light of the living room. Surprisingly, he was slumped into the rickety Windsor chair, the mateless one with the broken spindle, a chair Faye had bequeathed to Edie. Perhaps Edie had helped her husband into the chair for one last evening communing with his garden. Edie's pledged bouquet, a tall vase of orange coreopsis, sat on the floor at Owen's feet, the empty wheelchair an arm's length away.
"Owen, we're moved! Almost moved, anyway -"
Owen turned his head toward the plate glass, the garden beyond.
"Your bed in the condo is waiting for you. So we just need to board up and get going."
Owen reached toward the wheelchair. Faye pushed it beside the Windsor chair. As she shouldered Owen's arm to swing him into the wheelchair, she realized it might well be the last time she would have to bear Owen's weight. At Atria, the doorman would lift Owen from the Volvo. One attendant would help Owen to bed. Another attendant would help him to rise.
Faye strained to lift Owen to the standing position from which he could swivel to the wheelchair. As Owen straightened, from his lap spilled a handful of shotgun shells, thudding against the floor and scattering at their feet. They lay brightly where they had fallen, their plastic casings the color of distress flares on a forest floor.
Not a word was spoken. Owen's face was shuttered. Faye shifted Owen to the wheelchair, which skittered backward with his weight. How Owen might have found and gathered the shells, hidden them in his clothing or the backpack on his wheelchair, did not interest Faye. She herself had phoned the Bakerville Police and arranged to surrender the old handgun and the shotgun. Heirlooms, the tow-headed officer who came to collect them had said. Real beauties.
Owen's shells had become obsolete.
And Owen could hibernate, or Owen would not.
Faye, Faye would move through the dark, foot following foot.
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| Image generated with OpenAI |
She had never intended to have a plan. The universe aligned his illness to define the path she found herself following, each footstep planted more firmly than the last, the way a bear's paws tread their way into eternity by wearing the earth through sheer force of repetition. If anyone were to ask her - her daughter Kayla from her first marriage or her neighbor Edie from their dappled cul-de-sac - Faye would not be capable, certainly, of putting words to her intent. As unreflective as Faye was by nature, some days she found herself singsonging the phrase fast becoming signage on the bear trail: Till death do you part.
She'd had one purpose when she'd found Owen again in their later years after Owen's beloved Sabra died and Faye's second husband reached his tipping point: It was only so much fun for him, after all, being married to a career alcoholic. Of course Faye had to stop drinking then. With bad teeth and little money and no home, she made marrying Owen her purpose. Soon, with her bright implants and her own checking account and her posh home, she didn't have to think about purposes or plans. There was travel. There was remodeling. There was church and book group and a potted pink geranium on the rebuilt redwood deck.
Faye did not ask herself if she loved Owen; Owen seemed to think she did.
And Owen's feelings for her?
He gave her everything she needed (the new teeth before the modest wedding, even). He welcomed Faye into his circle of friends and causes. He was amiable about Faye's church-going, though he was not himself a believer, and spoke fondly of Faye's "church ladies." In the early years of their late-in-life union, Owen did not ask much more of Faye's scheduling than they share each day's dinner - most often eating out, as Faye was not a cook. "I've had enough of lonely meals," Owen confessed early on, and Faye understood dinner to be one non-negotiable item in the shared design of their daily lives.
Owen was strong then. Each week, he spent three mornings in the gym lifting weights and doing squats. Once, without Faye, he hiked the Sunrise Lakes Trail at Yosemite with a thirty-two pound backpack. He was a husband who needed neither chaperone nor caregiver, a husband who sometimes surprised Faye with an acute, benign humor that made her faintly uneasy.
What Faye came to recall as the left-turn incident became the trailhead of her downhill journey. Owen was piloting the Volvo as they did errands, post office and library and groceries, nothing special or unforeseen. There at the intersection of Mill and Fourth, just past the Home Run Café where, on her own, Faye liked to stop in for coffee and lemon cake; Owen failed to brake and sailed through the red left-turn light, halting the car only when Faye screamed. Owen punched the brakes, sliding the Volvo to a stop. The library books shot off the back seat.
"That's a red light! You're not protected!"
The oncoming car, a white Mini Cooper, skated to just feet from the passenger-side door of the Volvo where Faye tensed, her arms braced against the dashboard.
"Didn't you see the arrow was red? Owen!"
Owen waved to the Mini Cooper's driver, a red-faced blonde waif who gave him the finger, her ringed hand held high through the car's sunroof.
"Don't scream at me." In the stalled car in the middle of the intersection Owen turned to Faye and asked, his voice dropping an octave, "Why are you screaming at me?"
"Get out of the intersection!"
Owen looked down at his lap, then at his hands ten and two on the steering wheel.
A shock of thick white hair fell forward against his cheek, veiling his face. Faye could not remember when he'd last come to her, scissors in hand, and demanded a haircut because he couldn't bear looking like Bozo the Clown.
"Owen! Drive!" Faye batted her hand toward the Mini's driver, who could not change lanes to pass the Volvo. The girl stuck out her tongue.
"But you could have killed me. Killed us both!" Faye was not letting it go, the error of judgment or lapse in control or whatever it was. She felt endangered; she felt abused. She opened the whole wheat bread of her half-eaten tuna sandwich. The golden light in their kitchen, remodeled with wrap-around windows to let in the sun, seemed to darken.
"I stopped the car because you were yelling. You should never yell at me when I'm driving." Owen's tone was prissy, professorial. He took a second, then a third bite of his sandwich. Mayonnaise lingered at the corner of his mouth.
"You didn't see the red light! We weren't protected! It's a left turn on -"
"You yelled, so I stopped the car."
"You weren't supposed to be in the intersection. My yelling didn't cause you to run a red light, did it?" Faye lobbed a cloth napkin at her husband, so tightly ironed and folded it didn't unfurl. Owen let it drop to the floor.
"Never yell at me when I'm driving." Owen stood, carried his plate to the dishwasher, and slid it cockeyed into the bottom rack. "You nearly caused an accident with your yelling."
Faye would, as soon as Owen left the kitchen, extract the plate, rinse it, and reposition it squarely into the rack.
So it was Owen's blame of her, the shifting of responsibility legitimately attached to him, that established the bear trail. She was only following Owen's lead, Faye might explain to herself. She was only matching someone else's footprints.
Faye had imagined it would be she who tumbled down the stairs one day. She had lobbied for a newer house, one without stories stacked atop each other, at most with a split-level living area for which she had hungered in the Seventies. She resented the constant up and down in the house which had been Owen's (and Sabra's too) for four decades. It was hard on her hips, she told Owen, who raised his eyebrows and suggested she come to the gym with him. They remodeled the kitchen and the downstairs half bath. They refinished the cherry floors. They replaced the swaybacked living room couch with a buttery leather sectional, though not without a squabble or two. It was, all the neighbors said, a classy house, so Faye learned to make her peace with the stairs.
Owen's fall did not happen at night, when one would expect such disasters. Faye had made the morning coffee and set the table, so pretty with its blue checkered cloth under the summer's morning sun and the vase of red and purple zinnias Edie had brought over earlier in the week. She put out wheat toast and butter and, splurging, two home-made jams and honey from the fruit trees and bees on Kayla's foothill homestead. How Kayla, a city girl born and bred, could choose to live twelve miles from the nearest store on a mountain destined to ignite in an infamous California wildfire was beyond Faye's understanding. Kayla lived with goats and chickens and more dogs than Faye could count. Most disturbing to Faye, Kayla lived with another woman, Lisa, whom Kayla called her "partner." When Faye spoke of Kayla - to Owen or to the ladies at church - she made a point of pronouncing clearly and with a lilt implying pride in her daughter's accomplishments - that "Lisa, Kayla's business partner" was a banker's daughter or a one-time high school homecoming queen or a biologist, all factual but details not quite persuasive enough, Faye suspected, to ease the suggestion from the word "partner."
On the morning of the stair incident, Faye poured Owen's coffee into his special mug, the white one with "Don't Shoot the Messenger" printed in bold black Courier type. Some weeks past, Faye had set the breakfast things on the table and put a black mug, a leftover from Sabra's tenure in the kitchen, at Owen's place. As a toddler Kayla, now well into her forties, would drink milk only from her yellow Tommee Tippee cup, which had to be washed immediately after use to be available to forestall the next tantrum. Calling Owen's reaction a tantrum was hyperbolic, even Faye could see that, but he replaced the black mug onto the shelf with so much force that the wineglasses jumped. Without a word to Faye, Owen found the favorite in the dishwasher and washed it himself. Then he sat down with his morning coffee and adjusted the Sentinel on the placemat in front of him.
Now Faye washed the mug by hand after breakfast each morning and placed it, text out, on the shelf where Owen could see it. She didn't ask her husband what another wife might have: "What's up with the cup, hon?" She didn't go to the internet and order a second cup, just to make things easier. She didn't tell Edie or Kayla. She invented her own workarounds and hoarded Owen's childish turns like pennies in a piggybank.
"Owen," Faye called from the landing at the front door. "Coffee's poured. Toast is ready."
Owen didn't answer. Just as Faye was about to call again, to repeat herself as she seemed to do day in and day out, her husband came sledding feet-first down the oak stairs, more quietly than Faye thought reasonable, to stop at her feet.
"Oh dear," she whispered, lowering herself to the first step so she could wrap her arms around Owen's shoulders. "Oh dear."
"My leg is not working," Owen said calmly and quite clearly when Faye managed to sit him up.
"Did you hit your head?"
"My leg. It's not working."
"What do you mean, honey? Did you hurt your leg?"
"It wasn't working up there." Owen tipped his head. "It wasn't working before I fell."
Faye called Edie, who insisted on calling 911, and soon Owen was trussed onto a gurney and wheeled into an ambulance. Jaime, the name tag on the shaggy paramedic's shirt pocket read. Holding Owen's ring hand between her palms, Faye sat beside her husband as he explained succinctly to the paramedics how he could not lift his leg. Edie, still in her leopard bathrobe and slippers, handed Faye's purse to Jaime, who set the bag into Faye's lap and closed the ambulance door.
Jaime squeezed Owen's shoulder and winked at Faye. "We'll tell the emergency room doctor," he promised. "They're going to fix you up."
"I'm not staying at the hospital," Owen told Faye as the ambulance pulled from the curb where Edie stood waving. "I won't sleep in the hospital."
"I'll shut the house," Faye heard Edie call. "I'll call Kayla."
The stair incident marked the first in a series of increasingly troublesome falls. Faye was present when, a few months later, Owen stood up from the kitchen table and promptly folded onto the floor, his only complaint a soft grunt. Weeks after the kitchen collapse, Owen had a harder fall onto the cold cement of the garage when exiting the Volvo after a trip to the hardware store for screw eyes. Again Faye was present. She raised Owen to his feet. No words spoken, they hobbled into the house and sat despondently on the leather couch, where Owen lifted his bum leg with his own hands to rest his foot on the ottoman and promptly fell asleep, leaving Faye to calculate that Owen's mobility was diminishing weekly, despite his daily insistence that he was fine, that the falling spells were over.
It was the bedroom incident, happening as it did when Faye was in Ben Lomond at a church conference for Christian wives (Owen had chuckled at that, his atheism providing him joy) that signaled worse times had arrived.
"I woke up," Owen explained as he lay in the hospital bed where, his doctors had ordered, he was to remain until a myriad of neurological tests had been performed. "I woke up. And then I was down. I don't know if I ever stood up."
Faye patted his arm. She offered Owen a glass of water, which he declined.
"I don't remember exactly," Owen said.
"It doesn't matter, hon. You don't need to remember. What we need is to figure out what's -"
"I lay there for hours, waiting. I am now intimately acquainted with the underside of our bed."
"I'm sorry I was gone!"
Owen, never one to hold a grudge, surprised Faye. "And Christian wifedom is well and good?" Even in hospital garb, Owen had the presence of a man of the world. His shoulders were square, his posture upright, his eyes clear.
Faye studied him then, the quick-witted man who had been her husband for twelve years, and felt unease in her own bones. Her husband had lain on the bedroom floor for almost eight hours. What if she had been on an overnight at Kayla's farm? What if she had failed to check in with Owen between the buffet dinner and the evening program? What if Owen had died prone and alone on the plush carpeted floor of their conjugal bedroom? What would become of Faye's perfect life then?
Owen had been using the walker for several months when Faye had to begin paying the household bills. Always careful with money, Owen had not previously sought Faye's involvement with the electric and gas, the credit card and cell phone payments. It was most often Owen who retrieved the envelopes from the letter box at the edge of the curving lawn and, after deftly slicing them open with his Swiss Army knife, slotted them neatly into the antique silver toast rack on the kitchen counter where the bills awaited payment until the first of the month. The toast rack imitated the spires of Salisbury Cathedral; Owen had purchased it for Faye during the vacation they called their "honeymoon," although the trip came eighteen months after their marriage, its itinerary inspired by the date of Owen's retirement from Global Equities.
Through Canterbury and Bristol, through Bath and Stonehenge, Faye could not stop exclaiming over the charming rituals of the British breakfast. In Salisbury, she noted for the third time that the aluminum toast racks on the tables of their bed and breakfast were sorry cousins to the darling silver-spired rack she'd seen in a shop window, so Owen - despite his deep philosophical opposition to amassing tchotchkes and doodads--took it upon himself to revisit the shop and buy the rack. Now when morning visitors to their kitchen commented upon Faye's formal place settings made even more elegant by the Salisbury rack, Faye found a natural segue to recounting the details of their breathtaking trip to the United Kingdom, a practiced narrative whose climax was neither nave nor narthex but the presentation by Owen of the "sweetest gift ever," the toast rack.
Faye was tidying the house in preparation for the weekly visit by Lula, the cleaning lady without whom Faye simply could not survive, when she noticed the empty rack. It was late in the month; the customary envelopes were nowhere to be seen. While Owen slept on the living room couch (he was napping more and more frequently, a development Faye welcomed), Faye sorted through the stack of papers on the kitchen counter. After no luck in locating the missing bills, her search became more and more energetic until she found at the bottom of the kitchen garbage, unopened but ripped neatly in half and stained by avocado skin and a half-eaten piece of jellied toast, the most recent Visa bill.
It was not, Faye said to herself, truly spying when a wife examines the family Visa charges. Never mind that the charge cards were attached to Owen's credit; never mind that it was, technically, Owen's wealth making the cards possible. Faye wiped the halves of the bill and used a butter knife to unfold the torn pages. She lay them flat on the kitchen table. Then she stood up and tiptoed to the living room. Owen was fast asleep. He lay on his side, his knees bent, his arms clutching the multicolored handwoven throw pillow, an embryonic pose he never assumed in their bedroom. If it had been Faye sleeping the day away on the living room couch, she would have preferred a blanket, so she unfolded the travel rug from the arm of the couch (another overseas souvenir, this one in Black Watch tartan) and covered her husband. She repositioned the walker where Owen could reach it and tiptoed back into the kitchen.
- $1649.77 to the Apple Store
- $250.00 to Save the Elephants
- $128.25 to Ammo.com
- $1000.00 to the DNC
- $39.99 to Hulu
- $183.42 to Eddie Bauer
Here and there throughout the month of dates were purchases and sums Faye did recognize: Trader Joe's and Nordstrom's, Zeke's Mechanic Shop, the dinners out they'd agreed to when Faye's church committees kept her busy late into the afternoons. The total bill was more than four thousand dollars. The previous month's total was not as much, but outstanding still.
As she studied the stained figures, Faye felt the same electric indignation she had felt for days after the red light incident. Owen was threatening their welfare. He was behaving in irresponsible and thoughtless ways. He was, Faye was forced to admit to herself, keeping important secrets from her. Did he decide on upgrading their laptop without consulting her? Where did his previously unrevealed fondness for elephants originate? Was the ammunition intended for the rusty shotgun he kept in the bottom of his military footlocker? What did he anticipate shooting?
On Tuesday afternoon when Owen would expect Faye to be at Edie's for book club, Faye arranged herself on the living room couch beneath the tartan blanket and announced herself headachy and sore.
"Seven Up?" Owen asked, parking the wheelchair that had lately usurped the walker.
"No, just sleep. If I can."
Owen touched Faye's shoulder beneath the tartan. "Warm enough?"
"Plenty warm, thank you."
"Ibuprofen?"
"Owen, just sleep." Faye shut her eyes and waited until she heard the wheelchair's receding whisper on the hardwood floor. "Thank you, honey," she called. And waited.
Faye hadn't meant to fall asleep. It was comfy under the tartan with Owen in the next room shuffling papers, sighing, rolling to the living room door to check on her. Faye gave in. She shut her eyes, snugged the blanket around her chin, and fell deeply asleep. It wasn't noise which woke her. She was dreaming, and then she wasn't. The dream's aura, what Kayla and Lisa would label its "affect," was cozy and safe, a sensation left over from childhood when Faye would cling to a half-sleep insured by her mother's constant presence, her parents' diligent care. As she sat up, the sensation of safety slipped from her shoulders with the tartan. Owen was hardly capable of caretaking. Faye stood up slowly, easing the stiffness in her hips. Owen could not, truth be told, take care of himself any longer.
Owen sat in his parked wheelchair at the kitchen counter. Faye passed behind him. She could see the logo of the Best Buy online store, some animated electronic item winking on the computer screen. She poured herself a glass of water and swung her left leg back and forth, a remedy to the stiff joint that chose the most peaceful moments to act up. Owen remained oblivious to her presence, clicking at the screen and, perplexing to Faye, chuckling. She stepped back from the sink and saw it then, hiding under Owen's tented left hand: the Visa card.
"You ordering something, hon?"
Owen startled. He looked up at Faye, surprised at the woman standing in his kitchen. "I am fascinated by this Meural device." He enlarged the screen so Faye could see a black frame surrounding pixelated flowers - some pastel landscape by Monet or Manet. Owen would know, though Faye was not interested in the distinction. He cursored through painting by painting. "It accesses thousands of pieces, classic and contemporary."
Faye was silent. She shifted her weight from foot to foot. She set down her water glass.
Her husband continued, "I'm going to put it there, next to the window. We'll be able to see great art whenever we want."
"How much does it cost?"
"Oh, I don't see that it matters."
"Next month's Visa bill doesn't matter?"
Owen frowned. He was finished, Faye could tell, with discussing the financial wisdom of purchasing a Meural Smart Frame. He lifted his hand from the Visa card and shifted the screen to checkout.
A better typist than Faye, Owen had entered half of the numbers from the card before Faye clapped her hand over it.
"We don't need this thing," she said firmly.
"I want this thing."
"No."
"I am buying this thing."
"Owen, you're not." Faye felt Owen's hand, big and warm and surprisingly strong, clamp her own. She tried to slide the card and her hand from under Owen's grip. He swiveled in the wheelchair and held on.
"Owen, give me the card."
A civilized, articulate man by nature, Owen seemed to growl at Faye as his hand tightened on hers.
"Give me the card," she whispered. Then, loudly, "Hon, we don't need this."
Owen tipped his head. It seemed he was going to acquiesce. Faye thought the episode was over when Owen lifted her hand and the card beneath it to his mouth. He bit down on the fleshy part at the base of Faye's thumb, just where her arthritis was worsening. His teeth, one of his most attractive features, did not break the skin, but the bruise remained, a cautionary half-moon, for a good two weeks.
Later, when she used the confiscated credit card to order a down comforter for Kayla's bed, Faye reconsidered the biting event and decided, in all fairness, that it was Owen who was unreasonable. A comforter for your daughter who has chosen to live on a snowy mountain top makes common sense; a flashy digitalized art collection does not. Just another frame for Lula's weekly dusting, Faye bolstered her reasoning. She had not signed on to be the comptroller to a fading man on wheels. Here she found herself alone monitoring their monthly income, managing the checkbook and the bills and the state of Owen's long-held Morgan Stanley portfolio in whose figures Owen had lost interest except for the friendly monthly calls from his financial advisor when their exchanges traveled from football to basketball and sometimes even ice hockey.
Faye did not, could not, clarify to herself why she remained secretive about the many incidents marking Owen's transformations like cairns on the bear trail. To neither Kayla nor Edie did she mention the biting. As much as she disliked the Volvo's stick shift, she had stopped concerning herself with Owen's historic driving mishaps when she became the permanent designated driver. And it did not seem fair to her that she delineate Owen's physical decline to others when he himself refused to talk about it. He had accepted the string of unproductive visits to specialists, then the walker, then the wheelchair, then the downstairs bed in the den with a mute stoicism. Either stoicism, Kayla had speculated to her mother, or denial, which seemed more likely.
As long as Faye could shoulder Owen's standing weight when he pivoted onto the toilet or onto the bed, she kept the evolution of his infirmities secret, or somewhat secret. Kayla did remark that Owen no longer accompanied Faye on her monthly visits to the farm, what Owen had taken to calling The Land of the Burning Bush, an allusion coined for Faye's benefit. And Edie, denied the conversational opportunities afforded by Owen's habitual walks through their cul-de-sac, had begun visiting more frequently, always with a floral offering, daylilies or daisies or Faye's favorite black-eyed Susans, in hand.
Faye herself did not timestamp the date when, in Owen's presence, she began using the third-person to refer to her husband. In the first years of their marriage, she had playfully nicknamed Owen "Himself," as in, "Would Himself like a martini before Thai take-out arrives?" or upon answering the telephone, "Himself is sitting right here - let me get him for you." A needlessly literary affectation Owen did not seem to appreciate, the usage had faded until the bear trail deepened. Then "Himself" became "he," and soon Faye began redirecting her communications to an unseen overseer, a witness to the power shift in their tasteful and well-appointed household. So customary became Faye's diminution of her husband from proper noun to pronoun that Edie was compelled to call her out. Longtime residents of the cul-de-sac, Edie and her late husband Alfie had known Owen forever. Edie's tenure as family friend seemed to grant her the temerity to speak on his behalf, a partisanship Faye resented.
"Faye, friend," Edie said softly one afternoon after Owen backed himself from the kitchen where the three had shared cheddar and Triscuits and Kayla's Granny Smiths. "Faye," Edie combed crumbs from the table into her open palm and deliberated. "Faye, do you realize you have stopped talking to Owen? You talk about him and around him, but not to him."
"I most certainly do not."
"Yes, you do. You say 'he' instead of "Owen."
Faye resisted. "I do not."
"I'm trying to help. I don't think you're aware -"
"I am the compos mentis one here!"
"Of course you are." Edie sprinkled the crumbs onto her plate. "He has feelings, too, and he can hear you."
"Give me an example."
"Just now. When you poured my wine, you said, 'He cannot have beer tonight.'"
"Oh, that." Faye shook her head.
"He asked you directly. He asked you if he could have a beer with the crackers."
"I don't think so." Faye had discovered reserves of stubbornness to match Owen's. Stubbornness and denial, stubbornness and denial, step step step.
Faye had always imagined herself something of a public speaker, so Edie's accusation of her alleged grammar misdemeanors stung. But exploring its ramifications was not within her range. Faye and Owen moved through the weeks without dialogue. Faye stopped limiting Owen's cocktails. One night before dinner just days after Edie's criticism, she parked Owen at the dining room table to have his martini or two. Her husband had not asked permission, and she had not asked his preference. When one's husband remained uncommunicative from dawn to dusk, considering him a "he" instead of a "you" did not seem perverse.
After she planted the first martini gently on the table in front of Owen, Faye stood behind the wheelchair and placed her hands on her husband's shoulders. She massaged his neck and whispered, too softly for Owen to decode, "Himself may have his martini now."
That that night as Owen lay sleeping, his breathing as soft as a baby's, Faye rebutted Edie's criticism. After shouldering Owen from the bathroom to the bed, after lifting his legs and covering him with the spread, Faye said, as much to herself as to himself, "Good night, Owen. Good night, sweetheart."
Asleep as soon as his head hit the down pillow Faye had fluffed and refluffed for his comfort, her husband did not hear her. What does it matter, Faye thought with more than a dose of her own anger. What the hell does it matter.
"He doesn't acknowledge his depression," Faye asserted, recrossing her ankles to ease the twinges in her hip. At Kaiser since nine, Faye had missed choir practice and her morning walk through downtown Bakerville. She was, she was sure the expression fit, feeling put upon.
Dr. Caskill smiled and clasped his ropy hands and ignored Faye's words. "What do you say, Owen?"
Owen sat in his wheelchair, studying his lap.
"What do you say to some sessions with Dr. Noah? She's very good -"
"He says no. He always says no."
"Let's hear from Owen."
Owen raised his head. "Owen says no."
For a moment as he spoke, Faye detected a glimmer in Owen's eyes. Then he went silent, deadpan again.
"This decision is up to you," Dr. Caskill offered mildly. "Owen, you've been my patient for nearly thirty years." Dr. Caskill coughed. "Would you like to speak with me and Dr. Noah together?"
"What I think," Owen said slowly, raising his head and letting it fall again, "is that I'd like a martini."
So Faye gave up on surveilling Owen's depression, the number of martinis imbibed, his passivity. Cesar, the strapping physical assistant who began coming daily to the house to help Owen shower and dress and perform his physical therapy, tasks now beyond Faye's endurance or desire, sat with Owen to watch whatever sport event was being televised (even swimming, which, Faye complained to Kayla, she found less exciting than watching paint dry).
"You may be jealous of Cesar, Mother. You've never spoken a kind word about him."
"That isn't true." Faye dropped her stockinged feet from the table in Kayla's kitchen where she had been seeking a pose to ease the constant ache in her hip. It was futile, trying to establish a comfortable perch in Kayla's rustic kitchen - the slate floor was uneven, on purpose for God's sake - and Lisa seemed to have forbidden cushions of any type.
Irked that Kayla refused to support her as a good offspring should, Faye planted her stockinged feet against the cold slate and downshifted into dark disappointment.
"I always imagined you'd marry a doctor or a lawyer," she said to Kayla's back.
Kayla turned from the counter where she was tying bunches of dried weeds - they looked like weeds - into miniature haystacks ribboned by bows of hemp string. She swung her heavy braid from her shoulder to her back. Faye wished Kayla would ask her to cut it off. It was greying and horsey and not the cut to attract the doctor or lawyer Faye wished for Kayla. Just three snips of her sewing scissors, and the braid would be no more.
"It's like you've abandoned Owen to this sorry life of crippled isolation." Kayla was hardly taller than her mother, but looming over Faye as she was, she appeared forceful. "It's as if he already died."
Faye cringed then, remembering the Christmas note she'd written to an old friend back east, a long-ago school friend harkening back to her side of history. Unlikely to be found out, separated by nearly a continent, Faye elaborated excessively upon the joys of life in Bakerville. She may have neglected including mention of Owen, an oversight that provoked a response from the friend, who subject-lined her e-mail IS OWEN DEAD? Faye found the query tasteless and deleted first the e-mail, then the ex-friend's address from her Christmas card list. Kayla's remark shocked the unpleasant interaction into memory.
"I do everything I can to care for Owen."
Faye's words were monotone, the same lackluster timbre she used for speaking with Owen:
Cesar is here for your bath.
I'm cancelling the Home Depot card.
Edie brought over a chicken casserole.
Drink as much as you'd like.
It's no business of mine.
"He's taken care of you well enough, Mother." Kayla returned to her miniature haystacks or broomsticks or whatever they were, her brown hands deft and strong. Her defiant braid seemed alive, the tail-end of a malevolent rodent.
"The sun is ruining your skin," Faye complained. "Where are my shoes?"
That night when Owen rolled his chair to the wide living room window and stared out at the moon washed garden he could no longer tend, Kayla's words rankled. The only balm for the insult Faye felt was an unmitigated compulsion to exhibit extreme solicitousness toward the silent, immobile husband to whom she'd pledged for better or for worse. So she stood behind Owen and rubbed his shoulders. He had never been one for massages, and Faye had seen him resist Cesar's ministrations, but she persisted. Into Owen's tendons and muscles Faye pushed her thumbs.
"We should move," Faye said, her lips to Owen's ear. "We should be in senior living, a condo at Atria." Beneath her thumbs, Owen's muscles hardened. "Here, it's too much for me. You need more help than I can give."
Faye paused. She let Owen's silence stretch until it snapped.
"I'm putting the house on the market. We'll sell what we can't fit into a condo. You'll see it will be better. You won't be mooning over what you can't do. You'll see."
"God bless us every one," said Owen, shrugging Faye's hands from his shoulders. "God bless America."
Faye did not claim martyrdom for herself, but when Edie suggested the word, Faye felt rectified. Yes, it did make sense to give up the aging three-story and Owen's lush, feral gardens and the headache of lifting the wheelchair into the Volvo and the regime of medications and therapists and the necessary intrusion of Cesar morning and night. Once she'd made the decision to move, Faye could see her selfless sacrifice and devoted nursing inflating, like one of Owen's stocks in a bull market, and becoming apparent to others: to Kayla and Lisa, to Edie and the church ladies, to the mailman and the El Salvadoran mow-and-blower and the cute little waitress at the Home Run Café.
Elevated by a simple word, Faye said to Edie and repeated to Cesar within earshot of Owen that she hoped her husband would predecease her, that she couldn't imagine him getting on without her. At a memorial service for an aged neighbor from two houses beyond Edie's on the cul-de-sac, Faye repeated her wish more loudly than she intended: "We're hoping he's the next to go." Kayla, threading Owen's wheelchair through the mourners leaving the cemetery glowing in a verdant foothill spring, shot her mother a look, then bent to listen to Owen. Kayla's grey hair was coiled on top of her head. Owen reached up to comb his fingers through an escaped tress as though he were petting one of Kayla's countless dogs.
"Mother, Owen wants to visit Sabra's grave."
Faye walked on.
"We're going to Sabra's grave, Mother."
"I have always wanted a personal assistant," Faye repeated to Edie and Kayla and Ramiro the mail carrier and the troops of professional movers she had hired to box what was not headed to Hospice Thrift or Goodwill. The new condo at Atria was one third the size of their storied house in the cul-de-sac. Faye imagined the condo's sleek, bald rooms occupied by as few of Owen's books and papers as possible, and said as much to Edie. She set the personal assistant, a college girl whose mother shared church duties with Faye, to work culling Owen's meticulous filing system, housed in a matched pair of oak file cabinets. Faye stepped around the boxes of tossed manila folders and deflated garbage bags to press stickers onto the file cabinets she believed had belonged to Sabra, who had favored antiques over anything contemporary. "Goodwill," the sticker read. Four other pieces of furniture had been so marked.
Owen rolled through the living room. Silently, he had pulled Faye's stickers from the living room furniture. He wadded them into spitball size and lined them up like bullets on the dining room table. Faye scooped the spit wads into the garbage and fashioned new stickers. She placed them as high as she could on the furniture surfaces, higher than a wheelchair-bound arm could reach.
Throughout the purchase of the condo, the bridge loan, and the sale of the house, Owen had remained silent. Not unexpressive, Faye thought, but purposefully absent, as though nothing but the televised sports that made up the soundtrack to their exodus any longer held interest. She allowed Owen his deep silences and his spit wad rebellion. When he failed to decide what should stay or go, when he didn't peep about Faye's decisions, she empowered the personal assistant to use her own discretion. The garbage bags inflated wantonly; Cesar was enlisted to haul them down to the mountain of cast-offs in the garage.
Two days before the official move-in date when Faye was feeling especially accomplished, Robin, the personal assistant, came to Faye in the dismantled kitchen.
"What about the gun?" Robin asked, wrinkling her nose. "The gun in the bottom drawer of his desk?"
Faye set down the cut glass vase she had long used for Edie's floral offerings. She would miss them, Edie's home grown flowers, but the white walls of the condo lured her beyond regret.
"The gun?" For a moment, Faye was lost.
"The gun, like a pistol?"
"In the desk drawer?"
"The bottom drawer. With enough ammo for a safari."
"Let me think." Faye picked up the vase and ran her fingers across the edged glass. "Let's box it up and put it... high?"
"Do you want me to ask Owen?" Robin took the heel of banana bread that had been sitting on the kitchen table since Kayla had brought it by the night before. Too mealy and dry for Faye's palate, the bread had been offered to Cesar and the moving men. Now Robin was finishing it, the less to throw out.
"No. Owen doesn't need to know... to -"
Robin cocked her head as her namesake bird might do. Faye sensed disapproval.
"He's probably forgotten he owns any guns," Faye explained, words meant to cover her tracks. "No need to remind him of what he's forgotten."
Robin brushed her crumbs. "Whatever you say."
"That's what I say, then."
The emptied house quieted. Faye and Owen ate leftover pizza on paper plates for dinner. Faye had abandoned all loyalty to the food pyramid during the weeks of packing and moving. At Atria, she would not have to cook at all. There would be three formal meals daily in the dining room and a coffee café with croissants around the clock. There would be walking groups and bridge games, a heated pool for aqua zumba and a staff of cleaners to replace Lula, who had cried nonstop for ten minutes after learning of the move. Faye found the crying excessive. Owen held Lula's hand for the duration and refused to respond to Faye's mutterings about maudlin sentiments.
Cesar returned at eight to ready Owen for sleep in the hospital bed which now sat like a throne in the center of the bare den. Tomorrow the movers would load the boxes and the chosen furniture, and Owen's home on the cul-de-sac would be reduced to memory. Cesar busied himself with Owen. Owen would still speak to Cesar, at least, about sports and cars and Cesar's newborn daughter Celina. Faye listened to the murmurs of her husband's voice, its tones sympathetic, attentive. When had Owen last spoken to her in anything but monosyllables? Faye could not remember. She sat in the stripped kitchen and continued to eavesdrop on the conversation in which she coveted inclusion precisely because she had not been invited to join.
The breakfast picnic Edie brought the next morning was spread on a packing box draped with a red-checkered table cloth: grapes and muffins and hard-boiled eggs and a pot of real coffee.
"Owen can stay with me for the day," Edie insisted.
"He's just underfoot," Faye complained.
"He's actually right here." Edie pointed to Owen, who had found his parking space facing the windows overlooking the garden. "We'll take a walk around the neighborhood. We'll have drinks and dinner. We'll make a flower arrangement for the condo."
"Would you?" Faye felt obligated to describe to the moving men where each box and chair should be placed in the condo. She could not police Owen's wheelchair peregrinations. "It would be a great help to me."
"It would be a kindness to Owen, wouldn't it, Owen?" Edie arranged the flowing paisley scarf around her shoulders. It was a scarf with which Faye was familiar, a scarf which hinted at sisterhood with Sabra, who had favored the bohemian and the eccentric in dress as well as furnishings. There would be nothing of Sabra's in the new condo, just blank walls and straight lines.
That night, after the movers left the condo, Faye allowed herself to walk from room to room. The silence, the whiteness, the absence of Sabra's bits and pieces - all of this Faye found not exactly comforting, not quite promising, but deserved, like a breakfast of French pastry after a long month of dry toast. Yes, she had shouldered Owen's decline with grace, all of her church friends would agree. She had fulfilled her obligations, she was sure. At Atria Owen's care would no longer be hers alone. The unfailingly compassionate cast of characters described in the long term residential agreement would take over. Faye would be untethered. Faye could put her own feet up.
Faye parked the Volvo at the curb on the cul-de-sac. She would sell the car, she'd decided. She would Lyft and Uber herself into a future of little responsibility. Owen no longer showed interest in excursions, and Faye was surely not intent on cajoling her husband into a wheelchair accessible van so she could enjoy his taciturnity on outings. It had taken more years than she'd have liked, but she was leaving Owen's house and all its signs and symbols at last.
The kitchen lights did not illuminate the lawn. But a deeper glow hinted at the track lights in the living room, installed to highlight Owen's cherished collection of folk art, now dispersed to the high seas. Owen had been returned from Edie's day care.
"Owen?" Faye's voice echoed against the cave of the empty house. "Owen?"
Owen sat in the softened light of the living room. Surprisingly, he was slumped into the rickety Windsor chair, the mateless one with the broken spindle, a chair Faye had bequeathed to Edie. Perhaps Edie had helped her husband into the chair for one last evening communing with his garden. Edie's pledged bouquet, a tall vase of orange coreopsis, sat on the floor at Owen's feet, the empty wheelchair an arm's length away.
"Owen, we're moved! Almost moved, anyway -"
Owen turned his head toward the plate glass, the garden beyond.
"Your bed in the condo is waiting for you. So we just need to board up and get going."
Owen reached toward the wheelchair. Faye pushed it beside the Windsor chair. As she shouldered Owen's arm to swing him into the wheelchair, she realized it might well be the last time she would have to bear Owen's weight. At Atria, the doorman would lift Owen from the Volvo. One attendant would help Owen to bed. Another attendant would help him to rise.
Faye strained to lift Owen to the standing position from which he could swivel to the wheelchair. As Owen straightened, from his lap spilled a handful of shotgun shells, thudding against the floor and scattering at their feet. They lay brightly where they had fallen, their plastic casings the color of distress flares on a forest floor.
Not a word was spoken. Owen's face was shuttered. Faye shifted Owen to the wheelchair, which skittered backward with his weight. How Owen might have found and gathered the shells, hidden them in his clothing or the backpack on his wheelchair, did not interest Faye. She herself had phoned the Bakerville Police and arranged to surrender the old handgun and the shotgun. Heirlooms, the tow-headed officer who came to collect them had said. Real beauties.
Owen's shells had become obsolete.
And Owen could hibernate, or Owen would not.
Faye, Faye would move through the dark, foot following foot.
The following step by step, like bear paws, is what this story felt like. It is a reflection of so many lives that seek ease and security but lack interpersonal sincere love. It is a very real reflection of so many lives. Thank you, Anna.
ReplyDeleteJune, thank you. What readers think and feel is what is most important. I really appreciate your taking the time to respond to my story.
DeleteThis is a hell of a story and a good reminder that writing—while not explicitly therapy—is still therapeutic. I have two ageing parents and while I'm grateful to still have them, the worry is intense, and there are other, more ambivalent feelings mixed in there. Some of those feelings leave one feeling ashamed, and while it takes a certain amount of guts to admit that even to oneself, it takes especial fortitude to put it in a story. Sorry to divulge those personal details, but this is a very personal story, and it can't help but elicit personal takes. It's also a complicated story with no easy morals to impart, no heroes, or villains. Just the cold facts of the human condition, something we all try to face at certain times and avoid at other times. But they're ultimately inescapable.
ReplyDeleteJoseph, I think writers want readers to respond to their work with their own personal details, so no apologies. Myself, I always look to the fiction I read for the existential truths. Thank you.
DeleteI'm back.
ReplyDeleteAnna's poignant story shows the reality of our end game. I hope I am able-bodied and able-minded in my final years, but one never knows. For me, both characters seemed imprisoned, Owen physically, Faye emotionally. They moved through the motions of life taking solace only in martinis. Two things hit me, "Till death do us part" she uses to describe the bear trail, obviously taken from wedding vows. I'm thrilled she is honoring them. I didn't expect her to with two failed marriages under her belt, but Faye stuck it out, but it is obvious she is miserable. I mean they stop talking to one another, and others notice it. Instead of saying "Till death do us part" she should have described the bear trail as "For better for worse" and the couple is stuck in the worse. It's realistic, poignant, and, as I am in my senior years, horrifying. This could be me one day, but I hope I stay active and mentally acute. Time will tell.
Having said that, there are some great writing moments in this story. I loved the use of "sledding" down the stairs. I love when we take a common word and use it descriptively in a new way. "The bear trail" is an apt metaphor of the slow lumbering of life in the final years of life. It becomes an extended metaphor as we see the slow demise of Owen, the marriage, and ultimately Faye.
Well done, Anna!
Thank you, Mr. [not] Boring! We're all headed for the same destination; I just hope I can make the journey gracefully.
DeleteAn unflinchingly honest, emotionally resonant story that reminds me a bit of Alice Munro's "The Bear Came Over the Mountain." Fine work!
ReplyDeleteThank you so much, Gilbert.
DeleteThis was an intensely gripping fiction. I read it clear through, despite the length, because it so held my attention. I began to genuinely loathe Faye and her self-styled boorishness and vanity. Very well done, Anna. You made Owen a rounded character, rather than strictly pitiable. Excellent job!
ReplyDeleteBill (and all): I just discovered how not to be anonymous! I appreciate your time and your focus on character. For me, character is always the heart of the short story, so your comment resounds. Thank you so much.
DeleteAt the beginning of the story, I thought that Faye might have narcissistic traits. She was marrying Owen for convenience and shelter. She did not love Owen, but she did her best to take care of him. I get the impression that she will wait for him to die inside the Atria, then try to snare another man in there. There will be so much competition from the other ladies, church goers and atheists alike. Well done, Anna.
ReplyDeleteI agree!
DeleteWhat an incredibly well written story. Though Faye might not be our favorite person, you can see how her husband’s slow, but steady deterioration impacted her life as well. It is hard to be a caretaker, and I think your story is a reminder of how we must have sympathy not just for the ill person, but for their caretaker as well.
ReplyDeletePeggy, I agree.
DeleteA well done tale about the reality of aging and how having someone to rely on can make the process easier. Owen still has value, Faye has forgotten that. I know that my husband would be there for me like I am for him and I realize how very fortunate I am to have this 40 year marriage. I am grateful not to be married to Faye. Unfortunately, I have met her several times over the years.
ReplyDeleteI didn't mean to publish this anonymously. :-)
DeleteWow. This was both scary and heartbreaking to read. And also very relatable.
ReplyDelete