Chapter 9

The emergency text had come while Sandesh had been making his way to the airport. His gut was still clenched with worry.

The driveway leading onto the Mason Center grounds wound through pristine lawns and aged oaks. It reminded Sandesh of driving onto the grounds of a cemetery. He shuddered. So much of his mother had been lost already. Five years ago, at fifty-three, she’d developed early-onset Alzheimer’s. Sandesh had been stunned. Angered.

The woman had worked hard her entire life, never took a sick day, and rarely complained. She didn’t deserve this fate.

He pulled up to the main building and parked in his designated spot. His father had paid extra for the spot, and though it galled, it had come in handy. More than once.

He jammed his F-150 into park, flung open the door, and shut it backhanded as his feet had already begun to stride forward.

He raced up the nursing home’s front steps, and the security guard buzzed him through with a nod. No formalities. No checking of ID. It must be bad.

He heard her before he saw her. Her voice, shrill and bitter, echoed through the hall like smoke from a raging fire. “You bitch! You bitch!”

He pushed back the ache, the simultaneous loss and anger and fear. He rounded the corner. The woman who had soothed his cuts, taken him to football practice, and told him he had a “lovely” singing voice when he couldn’t carry a tune stood trembling in front of the doorway to her suite. Her thin, blue shift showed a frail and wiry form. They had a hard time getting Ella to eat these days. Her hands shook as she brandished a worn teddy bear. She held the matted brown bear, which normally she’d coo and sing to as if a child, as a shield of sorts.

She screeched at two women and one man—the nurses alongside the twenty-four-hour personal caregiver his father had hired. Paying for her caregivers and for her to be in this premiere facility was his father’s last-ditch effort to make up for his emotional abuse.

The staff spoke in soothing tones, tried to break through the fog of delusion by playing into the delusion.

Today, as with most freak-outs, his mother played dueling roles on the drama loop. Both the tormentor and the tormented. The screeching bitch comments were a memory of his father. His father had never been a violent man, just a cunning manipulator and an aggressive, demeaning prick.

A deadly combination.

If he’d always been loud and angry, she would’ve dismissed him, but his father would alternate between faint praise, openly criticizing, and carefully constructed manipulations meant to destroy her confidence and wheedle at her independence.

Even after his father had divorced his mother—claiming she was a drag on his success—she had never recovered her sense of self. Mostly because just as she’d begun to accurately assess what he’d done to her, what she’d continued to do to herself long after he’d divorced her, she’d gotten sick.

For a long time, Sandesh had hated his father. Not just for abandoning them and living in Hong Kong for twenty years, but for always seeking the aggressive way forward, even in conversation with those he should’ve cared for.

The only reason he had any contact with his father now was because he’d recognized the same angry tendencies in himself. It was hard to hate someone when you understood them.

Sandesh neared with his hands out. “Ella, that’s a fine baby you have there.”

The male nurse cleared his throat, almost apologetically. “We already tried that.”

Sandesh ignored him. “He reminds me of you. Your son.”

His mother jolted, as if she’d physically slammed from some other place back into her body, into awareness. She looked down, clearly realizing she held the teddy bear—her baby—as a shield.

She began to shake. Her eyes cleared, then misted with the slow buildup of tears as she clutched the bear to her chest. Her blue, watery eyes flew to his face. “Is it okay? Is it okay?”

His heart buckled under. “It’s okay, dear. It’s always okay between us.”

Her face twitched as tremors, aftershocks of awareness, pinched the muscles beneath her too-pale skin. He understood.

She’d been trapped beneath the cold ground of her disease, pressed beneath its weight, and now surfaced from that crushing depth to reacquaint herself with the bright world above. It must hurt.

He reached her, wrapped a protective and sturdy arm around her delicate and thin shoulders. He drew her to him, like a tiny bird in need of great care.

He looked back at the nurse. “Please get her something to drink. Apple juice.”

The male nurse gave him an appreciative nod and left.

The first female attendant, the one personally paid to sit with his mother, looked abashed. “Would you like me to contact her private physician, Mr. Ross?”

He nodded. “Yes. And I believe the first visitor coming in my absence, my buddy Victor, will be stopping in tonight. Make sure the guards know.”

“Oh. Yeah. I already have.”

Good. That was something. Oh so gently, he led his mother’s trembling and broken body back into her suite. She clung to him, pressed the ragged, stuffed bear between them. He led her past the last nurse—a twentysomething female who worked at the facility. The woman smiled at him, then checked out his ass with a wink.

What an idiot.