Envy the Night

12

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It was long past visiting hours, but they let her in anyhow. Nora was well known by now at the Northwoods Nursing Center. The woman who staffed the front desk gave her a disapproving look but didn’t ask questions or attempt to stop her, just offered a single curt nod, and then Nora turned the corner and walked to her father’s room.

“Dad?” She spoke as she opened the door and stepped inside, and Bud Stafford twisted his head to see her, a smile crossing his face. It was this moment that broke her heart—that immediate smile. He was always so damn glad to see her. Other patients in the center weren’t able to recognize their loved ones. With Bud it was just the opposite; he couldn’t follow conversation well, couldn’t process simple details, but he absolutely recognized his daughter. Somehow, on a night like this, that made it harder.

“How you doing?” She leaned over and kissed his forehead. He struggled with the covers, made it clear he was trying to sit up, and she helped him get upright before sitting in the chair beside the bed.

Nora had heard the phrase wasting away a million times in her life, never stopped to give it any real thought until her father’s stroke. That was exactly what was happening, though. He just . . . faded. The strength had gone first, then the size, leaving a frail man where a powerful one had existed.

“Hello.” The single-word greeting came a full minute after she’d come into the room. It took his brain that long to catch up to the events, then search for the proper reaction to them. When you kept the conversation slow and simple, he could develop a bit of a rhythm, and the sense of truly communicating with him was better. Get too much going on at once, though, or going too fast, and he became helplessly lost, often resorting to repeating the same word or phrase over and over. It reminded Nora of the ancient computer she’d used in college. You’d ask the thing to run new software and get nothing but that silly hourglass symbol, a promise that it was processing, but you knew it would never yield results.

“Hello,” she said. She thought it was important to always go back and match his place in the conversation, make him feel less overwhelmed by it. “What was dinner?”

“Yes.” He smiled at her again.

She waited for a few seconds and saw there would be no response tonight. Sometimes he followed the questions, the simple ones at least. More often he did not. The stroke had affected his cognitive and motor skills. On the right day, he could move around just fine, albeit a little slowly. The problem was, you never knew when the right day would be, or the wrong day. His balance could be fine for a while and then completely disappear. He’d be crossing a room under his own power and then suddenly look as if he were on the deck of a pitching ship. This was the reason a return home was impossible, at least right now. He needed twenty-four-hour care, and they couldn’t afford that.

“Good day?” she said, emphasizing the question. The more you did that, the more likely he was to understand that he was expected to provide an answer.

“Good day. We had the birds.”

That meant they’d taken him outside, to a patio surrounded with bird feeders. That was a highlight of his existence now.

“Do you have cars?” he said. This joined the smile as the two constants of every visit. Sometimes he’d be unusually adept at following a conversation; other days he struggled with the simplest exchanges. The one question he always managed was: Do you have cars? He didn’t remember that he’d owned a body shop, or at least he was incapable of expressing that he did. When she tried to explain anything about work to him, he tended to get hopelessly confused. But he asked that question about the cars because somewhere in his fog- shrouded brain he knew it was important, critical, that without cars there would be serious problems.

“I have cars,” she said. “We have cars.”

He nodded, his face grave. Hearing that answer always reassured him. She looked down at him and felt his love even through the veil of confusion. It was a sensation she could remember so well from those visits when she was a girl, one of unusual staying power. There were few things that caught your breath more than looking at another person and feeling the intensity of his love for you. Seeing it in all of its layers, the depth of the adoration, of the pride, of the fear. Always the fear. You looked at the ones you loved and in that moment you were terrified for them, for all of the things that could go wrong in the world, the car accidents and the illnesses and the random violence that could reach out from the darkness without a note of warning and claim the ones you cared about most. It wasn’t until the stroke, until the first time she saw the shell that had been left behind where her father belonged, that Nora truly understood just how unbreakable was that link between love and fear. They belonged together.

There was a notepad on the table beside her, filled with scrawled attempts at his name. That meant it had been a therapist day. Three times a week, an occupational therapist named Jennifer came to work with him. She’d made remarkable progress, too—he tied his shoes slowly but competently now, and a few months ago, when he was still in acute care at the hospital, Nora would never have believed that would be possible. The fine motor skills were more difficult. Anything requiring dexterity was a challenge.

“You want to try your name for me, Dad?” She passed him the notepad and the pen, which he took carefully, his face set in a frown of concentration. The expression remained as he carefully laid pen to paper. The first three letters of his first name—Ronald—came easily enough. Then he hung up on the A. She watched him hesitate, write the letter, hesitate, write it again. And again. R . . . o . . . n . . . a . . . a . . . a . . . a

She stopped him after the fourth repetition. “You’re stuck, Dad. You already wrote that one. Try the L.”

He stopped writing to listen to her, head cocked slightly, then went back to the paper and wrote the A again. Perseveration, that’s what the therapist called it. When the patient would get stuck on a word or an action. It was a frequent problem with her father. For months, he’d been unable to switch from brushing his teeth to combing his hair. Something about the action with the toothbrush dominated his brain; he’d take the comb in his hand and stare at it in bewilderment, mime the motion he’d used with the toothbrush, never get the comb anywhere near his hair. He was over that now, at least with the comb. Jennifer had solved that problem by changing the order of his bathroom procedures, putting the toothbrush last.

“Let me help.” Nora leaned across the bed and took her father’s rough hand in her own, guided him through his name. It was a regular part of her visits, but for some reason on this night it cut through her with a sort of fresh agony she hadn’t felt since the early days with him in the hospital. He was her father, a strong man who was supposed to care for her. Today, a day on which she’d been attacked, when she needed his support the most, she was helping him write his own name.

The realization brought a stinging to her eyes and a thickness to her throat, and for a moment she just sat there, leaning on the bed and holding his hand and fighting tears.

“Done?” he said.

That brought her out of it. She sniffed and got a laugh out and shook her head.

“No, Dad. Not done. Let’s try again.”

They went back to the writing, with her guiding his hand and naming each letter as they wrote it.

Driving home in the dark, hours after she’d expected to be there, her thoughts turned to Frank Temple. Excuse me, Frank Temple the Third. There were stories behind Mr. Temple, she was sure. He was a little too calm in the situation they’d encountered today, a little too . . . familiar. If he were older, she’d suspect he was a cop, or maybe a soldier. Had the right haircut for a soldier. But he couldn’t be any older than she was, and if forced to guess she’d actually say he was a few years younger. So where did that odd poise come from?

He’d been attractive at first, charming and funny in a low-key way, but then there was that strange outburst at the cabin. He’d practically shouted at her when she went for the door, made it seem as if he couldn’t get rid of her fast enough. What was he so worried about? Afraid she’d throw him onto the bed, force herself on him in some