The Burning Side(35)
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The day comes when Leo sits down beside me and says he has good news. Asks if I want to go back to work. A new opportunity has come up.
The stages of infancy are obscure—I’m never quite sure if they’ve ended. So I don’t know if Otto is still a newborn or not. Either way, I wonder how I could possibly manage to work when I don’t even have time to brush my teeth. But the sharp cry of our baby grates on me, and tiredness ceases to matter. Anything will be less tiring than being alone in the house like this. “Yes,” I tell him. “I’m ready.”
This is how I come to work for Cody Blanchard as a reading tutor. We work my schedule around the kids’ needs. Leo is gone so much at this point that even his bedtime tuck-ins with Sadie start to dwindle.
And into his absence, Cody enters. I find much-needed energy in this new friendship. We talk about literacy over faculty lounge lunches of sub sandwiches and grocery store cookies. He has a dyslexia specialist certificate, and he too likes to entrust students with classic tomes. He respects how I’ve handled my own dyslexia, how I invest in my students. I do so much for them in addition to my own family, Cody tells me. A force for good, he says with admiration in his eyes. And suddenly I’m more than a mother. I’m a teacher, employee, friend, woman. Cody thinks I’m brilliant. A good mom and a beautiful soul. And he is here. He is sturdy and close and paying me scintillating compliments for which I lean in as if to say, Convince me.
APRIL
June 12–July 6, 2022
CAMERON ASKS IF IT COULD be a misdiagnosis. Dad has always been absentminded. The year he turned forty-two, he swore up and down that he was turning forty-three. But, Cameron says, that type of thing is “hardly Alzheimer’s.”
We’re all gathered in the living room, even Sadie and Otto, who munch on crackers and a cheese ball Mom made. She and Dad look at each other. They shake their heads no, they’re sorry but it’s not a misdiagnosis. Cameron doesn’t know about Waco or the broken bowl. He doesn’t know about the many months of signs or the spread of tests they’ve had done. He rests his chin on folded hands, unsure what else to say.
I get elected to call Josie, who is eating lo mein with Zazu and Pumbaa. I assure her that the situation isn’t urgent and she should enjoy Chicago. Dad is still dominating the grill, tinkering in the garage, and sneaking gingersnaps to Sadie under the table. For every one thing forgotten, there are dozens remembered.
The truth is that I don’t know whether it’s urgent or not. Dad remembers song lyrics from 1976, but then he puts his car keys on the back of the toilet or a cereal box in the microwave.
Over the next weeks, a veil falls over the house as we exist in that liminal space between naming an illness and experiencing it. We attune ourselves to Dad, jumping up like Whack-A-Moles to help him until he eventually mutters for us to stop it, saying that he can walk to his own dadgum mailbox.
He continues to get up in the night and wander. To Mom’s relief, he agrees to stop driving and also to expedite his retirement. Mostly though, he’s his usual self. He plays with his grandchildren, uses his new jeweler’s hammer, and gives an impromptu but reverent mini-lecture on the steady eruption of Otto’s teeth—the timing of canines and molars and how it all corresponds with when the body is ready for different foods. He quotes lines verbatim from textbooks he hasn’t opened in thirty years.
Most mornings, Leo and I work in Argyle ahead of the heat of the day with the small crew we now have. The kids stay with Mom, and then we all reconvene for dinner, Rachel sometimes joining us. Rachel is as she appears: warm, flowery, and perfect for Cameron. She will finish her last two summer classes and earn a hospitality management degree just before the wedding, which is set for late August. I would have expected Cameron to book a swanky Dallas venue, but Rachel’s parents live on five acres, and she wants something homespun. She’s the kind of girl I admire but don’t relate to, in that she genuinely enjoys crafts. Their wedding is a strange relief because instead of discussing the fire or forgettings, we can discuss flowers, centerpieces, desserts, and reception music.
Following the news of Dad’s diagnosis, Leo and I enter an unspoken truce. I would never call it that, the concept sounding juvenile, like when Josie, Cameron, and I paused a feud the time Dad had a car accident, only to resume it three days later when he was feeling better. Either way, Leo and I work mechanically to prioritize our kids—swim lessons and nap schedules and evening read-alouds. We spend more time together than we have in years. We oversee thank-you cards for the firefighters, per Sadie’s demand to let them know they saved Bear Bear. We answer Dad whenever he stops mid-sentence and asks, “What do you call it?” And then in late June, progress on our house comes to a grinding standstill while we wait for an engineering report.
When that momentum slows, it’s like it needs somewhere to go. Like without a hundred things demanding our attention, we will have to revisit the thing we haven’t talked about in weeks. Divorce is a riptide looming just below the surface. We’ve looked away from one pain to survive another, but that was always going to be temporary. This house is a bubbled existence where meals are cooked, jazz is played on the stereo, and a sunrise couple makes wedding plans while a sunset couple makes funneled memories. Love flanks us, and the whole family is teetering on a precipice.