Mickie drove us home, guiding me upstairs to my room. I felt utterly exhausted, unable to perform even the simplest tasks. My graduation already seemed like months ago. I sat on the bed. Mickie disappeared into the bathroom and emerged wearing one of my T-shirts.
“What am I going to do?” I asked. “What are we going to do without him?”
Mickie untied my shoes and slipped them from my feet. I stood, and she helped unbuckle my belt and the button of my jeans. When I sat, she slipped them from my legs, and I fell back onto the pillow. She slid under the covers beside me, pulling my head to her chest.
“She’ll be lost,” I said.
“Shh,” Mickie said, running her fingers through my hair. “Go to sleep, Sam.”
20
Dr. Laurence’s words would prove prophetic. My father remained in the hospital for four days before they moved him to the rehab facility to begin physical therapy. My mother attended every session, getting to the hospital after attending 6:00 a.m. daily Mass. She stayed until late at night, hoping, as I was, that my father would recover enough that she would be able to take him home. As the weeks passed, however, I began to suspect that my prayers would not be answered. Dr. Laurence confirmed it one day in the hospital.
“Your mother needs to begin considering a long-term care facility,” he said.
“She wants to take him home and care for him,” I said, though I could tell from my father’s current condition that would never happen.
He shook his head. “Your father is going to need constant care, Sam. She couldn’t even leave him home alone to go shopping or run an errand. Even if she brought in outside help, the insurance would run out before . . .”
“Before he dies,” I said, the realization dawning. “So he isn’t going to get better?”
“His condition will improve, but we’re talking about minute increments, not leaps and bounds.”
“Never as he was,” I said.
“Never as he was,” he agreed.
I’d had these conversations, or some semblance of them, at home with Mickie and with Ernie, when my mother was at the hospital, but those had just been esoteric speculation of what might happen and usually ended with Mickie telling me not to get ahead of myself, to wait until the doctors knew more. Dr. Laurence’s words were not speculation. They were reality.
We had closed the pharmacy during my father’s illness, but we couldn’t keep it closed forever, not if my mother was going to survive. My mother, though, was in no condition to get the store reopened, to run the house, pay the bills, and take care of everything else. It dawned on me then that I wouldn’t be leaving in the fall to attend Stanford. That couldn’t happen. No matter how much my mother tried to convince me, and I knew she would, I could not leave. It was more than just the finances. My father needed me, as did my mother, even if she would never admit it. My acceptance had been nothing but a false hope, yet again.
That night I brought my mother home from the hospital, but I left again, telling her that I had an errand to run. I parked at the curb in front of OLM and climbed those wide concrete steps. This time the tall wooden doors were unlocked. I stepped through them and made my way down the aisle to where the candles burned, where I had lit a candle for my father. I couldn’t recall the exact candle—not that it would have mattered, since that candle had certainly burned down. It didn’t matter, I told myself. The prayers flickering here were not going to be answered. Licking my thumb and index finger, I reached inside one of the bloodred glass jars and pinched out the flame.
21
The following week, my mother and I drove a winding two-lane blacktop through the northern Santa Cruz Mountains. Though we were just half an hour from our home in Burlingame, the brown grass, scrub brush, and two-hundred-year-old oak trees that pockmarked the open hills made it feel as though we were far removed from the city.