When Mark entered college, Imogen went back to school and got a degree in library science. If she had had everything to do all over again, she would have studied astronomy, she had such fond memories of those nights watching the sky in Park Forest. (Dear, silly Sarge, where are you now?) But Imogen was fifty, it was too late for that. She started by volunteering at Harvard’s medical library, then after she got her degree she worked in their interlibrary loan department for fifteen years. She loved it. A regular job! A paycheck. A pension. A commute. A parking permit. In a way, her work was similar to Skywatch, since it depended on orderliness and consistency. The library’s filing system was a stack of contradictory layers dating from different periods going back more than a hundred years, and her job was to navigate them quickly, find that one obscure requested item, sometimes misfiled, among the millions of items, send it on its way, record the transaction correctly. They told her she was the best employee they’d ever had, and she believed it, because she saw every day the sloppy work that had preceded her. She became a supervisor. She loved her bosses and her coworkers and her underlings. Maybe libraries attract collegial people. Or maybe it was because nearly all of them were female.
Of course there were frustrations. But if she ever complained about work, or said she was tired, Vernon would wonder aloud why she bothered, since they didn’t need the money. His cluelessness, as always, was stunning. No thought of the satisfaction she might get from doing a job well. No thought that perhaps the library and its patrons actually needed her, for fuck’s sake. No, anything she did was merely to satisfy a whim, and therefore if it wasn’t fun for her all the time, it wasn’t worth doing.
Then he got sick. By the time he retired, it was clear she had better retire as well.
Of course Imogen pitied him, or had compassion, or whatever. But her resentment toward him was his fault. He had always wanted to keep her at home, and as an invalid he got his wish in spades.
Parkinson’s is like a glacier. It nibbles away relentlessly over months and years. Vernon hung on for a decade after his retirement. The last five years were the most awful thing Imogen could have imagined. Each morning after her coffee and cigarette she would check to see if he was awake. He might have been lying in bed waiting for her, silent and motionless. He would apologize. She would remove the foam block from his left foot that kept his toes from pointing during the night and giving him a leg cramp. His toenails were thick and yellow, and she hated trimming them. They looked diseased. She would help him make the transition to his wheelchair, although she could only steady him, she wasn’t strong enough to hold him up. She would wheel him into the bathroom, help him remove the night’s diaper, help him shift to the toilet. Wipe him. Wheel him to the top of the stairs, help him transfer to the chair lift. Precede him down the stairs, help him into the downstairs wheelchair, wheel him into the kitchen, try to figure out what he wanted to eat. He was often too depressed to have an appetite. She would park him in the living room in front of the television and try to pretend he wasn’t there. A woman from social services came three times a week to engage him in conversation, as the doctor had recommended. He would say he didn’t need it, and that he didn’t like the woman, but occasionally he would liven up in her presence. Imogen should have sat with him more, but she couldn’t stand to. He would begin a sentence, stop. He would worry about things and want her to check on things and half the time she couldn’t even tell what he was talking about. When she lost her patience he would look at her apologetically with his ghostly gray eyes. Sometimes he would say, “I know I’m a burden.”
With every one of his apologies, she could feel the millstone around her neck get heavier. She wanted to say to him, I don’t want your goddamn apologies, I want you to not need me. She was so furious at him, she was sometimes sick with rage, first for all those years of him being his fucking unchanging self, and then for changing, for coming down with this horrible disease. But of course she could never say this, no one would understand, everyone would rightly condemn her, she felt guilty even to be feeling it.
In other words, he had finally really won.
She told him never to try to get out of bed on his own, yet sometimes he did, and fell. He’d lost weight but he had a big frame, and when he fell the whole house shook. He lay there, eyes wide and puzzled, limbs floating up and down like a creature underwater. She couldn’t lift him, so she would call Jim and Alice next door, and if Jim was home he could lift Vernon on his own, otherwise, Imogen and Alice would struggle to do it together. Three times she had to call an ambulance just to get the EMTs in the house so they could lift him. Each time cost $300.
She hadn’t wanted to put him in a nursing home, but finally admitted to herself that it was too much. She found an open spot in a place five miles away. She felt terribly guilty. She visited him every day. His depression deepened. He sometimes seemed almost catatonic with
