Watching you without me, p.10
Watching You Without Me, page 10
“Hi, Margot! I’m good, thanks. How are you?”
“I’m fine, dear,” Margot huffed. I think she had been hoping I wouldn’t bother to reciprocate the time-wasting inquiry into her well-being. “I’m just calling to check in with you about the workers we currently have coming out to see Kelli. How has everyone been working out?”
“The workers? Everyone’s been great.”
“You’re happy with them?”
“We’re really happy.”
“Miz Petrie I’d like you to know that you are welcome to request a worker be taken out of Kelli’s rotation at any time, for any reason.”
I hesitated.
“Ok,” I said. “That’s good to know.”
“If a worker,” continued Margot, “makes any requests or demands of you not relating to the care of your loved one, you should feel under no obligation whatsoever and you should feel free to call me to discuss these matters.”
I laughed a bit. “You sound like you’re reading off a form, Margot.”
“I assure you I am not reading off a form,” said Margot, sounding offended.
“No, I just mean,” I said, “what’s this all about?”
Margot sighed briefly. Even her sighs were clipped and efficient. “We encourage our workers to be friendly. And sometimes people come to think of them as friends.”
“I understand.”
“But we’ve occasionally had issues where — oh, say, for example, just recently. We have a client who’s an older gentleman. We send a worker out to administer his medication every day. But one day this gentleman decides he needs his gutters cleaned. So when his caregiver arrives, he offers him fifty dollars, maybe, to get up on a ladder and clean his gutters while he’s there.”
“I see,” I said.
“You’re new to all this, Miz Petrie.”
“Yes,” I said, “I am.”
“And god bless you, your mother dying was such a shock, I hope you are doing all right.”
“Oh,” I said, flustered by this abrupt, officious expression of sympathy. “Thank you. I’m ok.”
“And I am not saying that you are offering anybody fifty dollars to clean your gutters. I am just saying that it is inappropriate for a worker to be crossing those lines.”
“I get it,” I said.
“It’s because,” said Margot, “we come into your homes. We prepare your food. We give you medicine. We give you baths. We help you exercise. Sometimes we even go to the bathroom with you.”
“Yes,” I said. “You do.”
“Those lines are so easily blurred.”
“It’s the intimacy,” I suggested.
“Yes!” said Margot. “That’s exactly right. The care we give is intimate. It’s very personal. And so people start to feel they have a personal relationship with their caregivers. You see? But it’s a professional relationship, Miz Petrie, with parameters. That’s what we need to keep in mind.”
“Am I being scolded?”
“Dear god!” exclaimed Margot. “Oh my dear god, no!”
I started to laugh. It was the extremity of Margot’s reaction — I’d felt like I’d insulted her earlier, but now it was as if I’d slapped her with a glove.
Margot waited for me to finish laughing.
“Now Miz Petrie —”
“Please call me Karen.”
“Yes, ok. Now Karen? Do you have any concerns or questions for me at this time?”
Was I going to be the one to say the word Trevor, or would Margot? Did she want me to or not?
“I think you’re saying,” I began, “the workers shouldn’t overstep, no matter how much we might rely on them. Yes?”
“Yes.”
“And I guess,” I continued, “that we shouldn’t encourage them to overstep.”
“By asking them to clean out your gutters or whathaveyou.”
I decided to try something.
“Or say, you know . . . say we want to give one of the workers a key to the house so it’ll be easier for them to —”
“Good god!” Margot exclaimed again. “By no means should a worker ever be given a key to the house! Nor should he ever accept it. Or she. That would be a fire-able offence right there.”
“I see.”
Margot sounded shaken. “I hope that’s a hypothetical.”
“Yes,” I said, “that’s a hypothetical. Can I ask another question?”
“Of course,” said Margot, recovered and back to sounding impatient.
“Did my mother ever have any issues with any of the workers? Did she ever report any problems, or ask for someone to be taken out of rotation or anything like that?”
“Oh, Miz Petrie,” said Margot, relaxing at the mention of my mother and forgetting to use my first name. “Your dear mother, god love her. Your mother never gave us any trouble at all. Your mother was just a dream.”
Of course. Of course my mother was.
* * *
I decided, in that moment, that it was time to get this phase of things over with. For Kelli and I to move forward with our lives.
Really I’d been imagining this all along, from the moment I decided to stay — the moving forward, that is. Once we sold the house, I imagined, once Kelli was enrolled in the Gorsebrook day program, we’d both be free — or free-ish. We’d rid ourselves of this place and its stifling routines — the tedium of Kelli and I stuck together, eating every meal beneath the fluorescent kitchen glare day in and day out. Not just the house but this whole winding rabbit warren of suburbs my mother had inexplicably chosen to settle into after my father died, for no reason other than, as she said, it was “close to a hospital,” which struck me as not a very optimistic motivation but maybe understandable following her husband’s untimely death at the breakfast table from cardiac arrest (an arrest so sudden, so absolute, the paramedics said he had likely died in the millisecond between putting his coffee down with a startled look and slumping face-first onto the linoleum). So Kelli and I spent the second part of our childhoods, the post-father part, in this neighbourhood, if it could be called that, a neighbourhood surrounded by glittering traffic and glassy car dealerships and squatting strip malls.
But soon we would leave that behind. A fantasy I’d been only half-conscious of in the past few days blossomed full-blown in my mind as I sat there on the phone with Margot. Kelli and I in a sleek, bright condo on the fashionable side of the bridge, maybe overlooking the harbour, but still within walking distance of Gorsebrook. We would walk there together in the mornings; there’d be no more driving just to get to the grocery store or buy a cup of coffee, no more negotiating four lanes of traffic just to get across the street to the stupid Starbucks. We’d find somewhere leafy, with amenities and parks and small, local shops and friendly, waving neighbours. We’d go for strolls. Kelli’s bad knee would get the exercise she could never get enough of here, especially with an aging, cancer-ridden mother unable to take her anywhere, not even in a car at the end.
Would we even require home care in this new life? Not for walks, clearly. Kelli would be getting all the exercise she needed once we established ourselves in our new neighbourhood. And what about baths? Surely I could handle baths! My mother had managed them herself for years, right up until the cancer kept her from being able to stand for long stretches of time. I, on the other hand, was perfectly healthy. Why hadn’t it occurred to me before that I could handle baths? It struck me all at once that the standard of care Kelli was receiving, the daily comings and goings of the workers, had been tailored to assist a woman who’d been old, sick, and growing weaker every day.
All these thoughts went through my head, it seemed, during an intake of breath — not even a particularly long or measured one. And that was when I told Margot I wanted to cut back. I said we would only need someone to come by twice a week, for Kelli’s baths. And that I would like to assist with those baths, to learn the ropes as it were. And after a couple more weeks, perhaps we’d cut it back again.
“So no more walks?” asked Margot lightly.
“I think I can manage the walks,” I assured her.
“Whatever you need, dear,” she murmured, and Margot’s voice faded out briefly, as if she had tilted her head away from the phone. Even more distantly, I could hear the sound of a pen-tip dragging itself in a long, deliberate line across a page.
13
Kelli’s random bout of diarrhea didn’t return, didn’t turn out to be a bellwether for some subsequent, more serious ailment, to my relief. But just to be on the safe side, I was extra-careful about her diet in the following days, plying her with yogurt and probiotics and turning the kitchen into an assembly line of various muffins and cakes held together with nothing but psyllium husks and flax — my mother, I recalled, had always sworn by both, and it was easier to get Kelli to eat a muffin than swallow a pill.
The diapers were now tucked away under the downstairs bathroom sink, ready to be deployed for future emergencies, and I was feeling pretty good about getting Kelli’s intestinal trains running on time, when an entirely different issue arose.
She started getting up at night.
This was extremely bad news. When Kelli started getting up at night, you never knew why and you never knew how to stop it and you never knew how long it would go on. All you knew was that Kelli had murdered sleep — not just her own, but yours. Because Kelli didn’t like to be up alone.
“Oh god, it’s just like when you were babies,” I remember my mother moaning at the breakfast table, the two of us peering red-eyed at each other over our tea as Kelli snoozed into the afternoon. She never had any trouble getting back to sleep after the sun came up, unlike my mother and me. “It’s exactly like having a newborn. They wake up, they cry, you don’t know what they want, all you can do is pace and sing, give them something to eat, but it just goes on and on night after night until you turn into a zombie.”
That’s how Kelli’s bouts of sleeplessness went — they were cycles, you knew they would abate eventually, but after a couple of weeks you felt like you’d been dipped into a vortex of blurring days and nights, of clocks without meaning. You stopped believing it would ever end.
I felt the hot, chubby knuckles dabbing at my forehead. Kelli produced heat unlike anyone I’d ever met; her knuckles felt like two warm little pixie feet tiptoeing across my brow.
“Karie sleepin?”
“Oh, Kelli!”
I exclaimed Oh, Kelli! as opposed to What’s wrong? because the experience was so viscerally familiar — it took me right back to the last time this had happened, when I was about sixteen and I felt those chubby knuckles dabbing at my head every night for two weeks straight, sometimes multiple times a night — and my sleep-deprived instinct after a certain point was to leap out of my bed and fasten my hands around her throat.
I sat up and tried to pull myself back to the present. I wasn’t sixteen. This hadn’t been going on for days on end. I didn’t want to kill my sister.
“What’s up, Kell?”
“Sleepin.”
“No, I’m not sleeping anymore. Are you ok?”
“Gettin up.”
I rubbed my hands across my face.
“Yeah, I’m up. You’re up. We’re both up.”
“Who up, Karie, who up?”
I flung the covers off and sat on the side of the bed. I wasn’t sure, but I interpreted this question to mean that Kelli wanted clearer proof I was indeed “up.”
“Karie’s up,” I assured her. “Now what’s the problem?”
Kelli hummed and whispered to herself briefly, looking at the floor. I waited.
“Baffroom,” said Kelli.
“Kelli, you know how to go to the bathroom yourself!”
“Baffroom self,” Kelli agreed, turning to go.
I wanted to flop back into bed in exasperation, but I made myself get up and follow her, just to ensure she wasn’t sick again, that there would be no repeats of the previous week’s disaster.
And there wasn’t. Kelli peed. She emerged. She announced, in her way of announcing these things, that she was going back to bed.
“Good stuff,” I said, as if sarcasm would ever get me anywhere with Kelli. “Thanks for keeping me in the loop there, Kell.”
“No one up,” Kelli remarked as she shuffled back into her room.
Instead of feeling annoyed, I knew I should be grateful. This seemed like it could be just a blip — it hadn’t been anything like when we were teenagers. There had been no getting Kelli back to bed in those days. She wanted something to eat, wanted to linger interminably, humming and whispering, on the second step of the foyer, she wanted to sit on her threadbare stool and gaze out the window as if she could see anything out there but her own reflection. It struck my mother and me that she simply wanted the night to be as day during those strange periods — she wanted to defy the natural order of things and she wanted us to keep her company on this obstinate ride.
* * *
It kept happening, though. Not the way it used to, in endless stretches between midnight and dawn, but quick, random dabbings at my forehead followed by Karie sleepin? and the insistence I get up. I started to acclimate to this new pattern, eventually understanding that all I had to do was basically open my eyes and say hi, and Kelli would shuffle around, ask a few questions about who was up, and whether or not we were up, then hit the bathroom before heading back to bed.
Still, it was infuriating to be woken from a deep sleep with such regularity. It made me tense and moody because it brought me back to the end-times of my marriage, the beginning of the end, when he wanted to leave but could not bring himself to say it, when neither of us could really bring ourselves to say much of anything. So instead he would stay up drinking, feeling resentful of my oblivious slumber in the next room — even though I was far from oblivious, I was merely escaping into unconsciousness at the first possible opportunity — until at last he roused himself to fling open the bedroom door and poke me awake with incoherent, hostile questions and demands. Once, when I wouldn’t wake up, he slipped one of his earbuds into my ear and started blasting a band we’d both been listening to a lot around that time — a gleeful, screamy band with a name like Total Annihilation or Massive Carnage or something.
There’s something about knowing you are not safe in sleep that gives a person bad dreams. The expectation of being woken every night — that feeling of insecurity and dread I remembered carrying around with me as my marriage was drawing to a close, like a rotting smell I couldn’t find the source of, shit I didn’t know I’d stepped in. The subconscious starts sending messages: Be vigilant. Don’t relax. Here’s a boogeyman or two to keep your nerves on edge.
I started dreaming about my mother a lot as a result of Kelli’s nightly up-and-down. They weren’t sad dreams — that is, I knew she had died, in the dreams, but somehow it was incidental, it wasn’t a big deal. My reaction when I saw her was strangely casual. I thought: Oh, there she is.
So it wasn’t my mother’s presence itself that made the dreams bad. It was more the activities I found her engaged in, and even then, I couldn’t necessarily tell you why. In one, she was barbecuing a whole pig on a spit on the back balcony. She wasn’t using the barbecue, she had constructed an actual fire pit somehow. I didn’t know how the wooden boards beneath it could be standing up to the heat, but I figured my mother must know what she was doing. I asked her, Who’s going to eat all that? And she said, Kelli will eat whatever’s left over. Somehow I knew she was talking about the gross parts, the ears and brain and snout and feet. But I knew if I argued, my mother would insist that these parts were actually considered delicacies in certain culinary circles. So I stood there mute, as my mother slathered the pig in sauce, feeling paralyzed, muzzled by logic that she hadn’t even articulated.
In another dream, I knew my mother wasn’t dead, she was just living downstairs in the laundry room. I was impatient with her about this dumb, irrational decision; I could hear her bumping around down there and got up to confront her about being stubborn and not just coming back upstairs to resume her normal life. In the dream, my mother being noisy in the laundry room was the reason Kelli kept getting up in the middle of the night — I suppose I had gone to bed knowing I would be knuckle-dabbed awake in only a few hours and drifted off in a state of consternation, turning over the puzzle of Kelli’s wakefulness in my mind, and this was the funhouse mirror of an explanation my subconscious came up with.
I explained to her with what I felt was more patience than she deserved: Mom, it’s great you’re not dead, but for christ’s sake, come upstairs. You can’t have it both ways. Either die or come upstairs.
My mother said, All right, I’ll come up in a minute. And then I watched as she put a load of laundry in. And I realized she was full of shit. She was stalling me. She would never do what I wanted — she’d just agree to whatever I said and then do as she pleased.
Maybe these don’t sound like particularly bad dreams. All I can say is that they made my heart pound in such a way as I could hear it in my ears and I always woke up from them, with this sound like a washing machine in the spin cycle thumping in my head — I never simply drifted into other dreams.
In fact, the morning of the laundry dream, I couldn’t help myself — I climbed out of bed and went down to the laundry room. I flicked on the overhead light — the stark, sudden glare of it in contrast to the soft morning light coming in from the window made me flinch. The overhead — another long, fluorescent rectangle, like the one in Irene’s kitchen — gave out a steady humming noise, a sound that made my eyes water whenever I noticed it upstairs, but which I found sort of companionable and soothing down here. Maybe it was the mundanity of it — a humming overhead light precisely as you’d find in all of the most boring places in the world. Waiting rooms. School hallways. Queues at government offices. Nothing strange or uncanny could take place in a room lit like this. It was neat, certainly, and well organized in accordance with Irene’s usual standards, but except for some eyelet curtains she’d installed on the lone window, it was the one room in the house she hadn’t bothered to make cozy.
