Fresh Complaint

Once, years ago, when Della and Dick had the sailboat, Della almost drowned. The boat was moored at the time and Della slipped trying to climb aboard, sinking down into the murky green water of the marina. “I never learned to swim, you know,” she told Cathy. “But I wasn’t scared. It was sort of peaceful down there. Somehow I managed to claw my way to the surface. Dick was hollering for the dock boy and finally he came and grabbed hold of me.”

Della’s face looks the way Cathy imagined it then, under the water. Mildly astonished. Serene. As though forces beyond her control have taken charge and there’s no sense resisting.

This time, wonderment fails to save her. Della falls sideways, into the shelving. The metal edge shaves the skin off her arm with a rasping sound like a meat slicer. Della’s temple strikes the shelf next. Cathy shouts. Glass shatters.

They keep Della at the hospital overnight. Perform an MRI to check for bleeding in the brain, X-ray her hip, apply a damp chamois bandage over her abraded arm, which will have to stay on for a week before they remove it to see if the skin will heal or not. At her age, it’s fifty-fifty.

All this is related to them by a Dr. Mehta, a young woman of such absurd glamour that she might play a doctor in a medical drama on TV. Two strands of pearls twine around her fluted throat. Her gray knit dress falls loosely over a curvaceous figure. Her only defect is her spindly calves, but she camouflages these with a pair of daring diamond-patterned stockings, and gray high heels that match her dress exactly. Dr. Mehta represents something Cathy isn’t quite prepared for, a younger generation of women surpassing her own not only in professional achievement but in the formerly retrograde department of self-beautification. Dr. Mehta has an engagement ring, too, with a sizeable diamond. Marrying some other doctor, probably, combining fat salaries.

“What if the skin doesn’t heal?” Cathy asks.

“Then she’ll have to keep the bandage on.”

“Forever?”

“Let’s just wait and see how it looks in a week,” Dr. Mehta says.

All this has taken hours. It’s seven in the evening. Aside from the arm bandage, Della has the beginning of a black eye.

At eight thirty, the decision is made to keep Della overnight for observation.

“You mean I can’t go home?” Della asks Dr. Mehta. She sounds forlorn.

“Not yet. We need to keep an eye on you.”

Cathy elects to stay in the room with Della through the night. The lime-green couch converts into a bed. The nurse promises to bring her a sheet and blanket.

Cathy is in the cafeteria, soothing herself with chocolate pudding, when Della’s sons appear.

Years ago, her son Mike got Cathy to watch a sci-fi movie about assassins who return to Earth from the future. It was the usual mayhem and preposterousness, but Mike, who was in college at the time, claimed that the movie’s acrobatic fight scenes were infused with profound philosophical meaning. Cartesian was the word he used.

Cathy didn’t get it. Nevertheless, it’s of that movie she thinks, now, as Bennett and Robbie enter the room. Their pale, unsmiling faces and dark suits make them look inconspicuous and ominous at once, like agents of a universal conspiracy.

Targeting her.

“It was all my fault,” Cathy says as they reach her table. “I wasn’t watching her.”

“Don’t blame yourself,” Bennett says.

This seems a mark of kindness, until he adds, “She’s old. She falls. It’s just part of the whole deal.”

“It’s a result of the ataxia,” Robbie says.

Cathy isn’t interested in what ataxia means. Another diagnosis. “She was doing fine right up until she fell,” she says. “We were having a good time. Then I turned my back for a second and—wham.”

“That’s all it takes,” Bennett said. “It’s impossible to prevent it.”

“The medicine she’s taking, the Aricept?” Robbie says. “It’s not much more than a palliative treatment. The benefits, if any, taper off after a year or two.”

“Your mom’s eighty-eight. Two years might be enough.”

The implication of this hangs in the air until Bennett says, “Except she keeps falling. And ending up in the hospital.”

“We’re going to have to move her,” Robbie says in a slightly louder, strained tone. “Wyndham’s not safe for her. She needs more supervision.”

Robbie and Bennett are not Cathy’s children. They’re older, and not as attractive. She feels no connection to them, no maternal warmth or love. And yet they remind her of her sons in ways she’d rather not think about.

Neither of them has offered to have Della come live with him. Robbie travels too much, he says. Bennett’s house has too many stairs. But it isn’t their selfishness that bothers Cathy the most. It’s how they stand before her now, infused—bloated—with rationality. They want to get this problem solved quickly and decisively, with minimum effort. By taking emotion out of the equation they’ve convinced themselves that they’re acting prudently, even though their wish to settle the situation arises from nothing but emotions—fear, mainly, but also guilt, and irritation.

And who is Cathy to them? Their mom’s old friend. The one who worked in the bookstore. The one who got her stoned.

Cathy turns away to look across the cafeteria, filling up now with medical staff coming in on their dinner break. She feels tired.

“OK,” she says. “But don’t tell her now. Let’s wait.”

The machines click and whir through the night. Every so often an alarm sounds on the monitors, waking Cathy up. Each time a nurse appears, never the same one, and presses a button to silence it. The alarm means nothing, apparently.

It’s freezing in the room. The ventilation system blows straight down on her. The blanket she’s been given is as thin as paper toweling.

A friend of Cathy’s in Detroit, a woman who has seen a therapist regularly for the past thirty years, recently passed on advice the therapist had given her. Pay no attention to the terrors that visit you in the night. The psyche is at its lowest ebb then, unable to defend itself. The desolation that envelops you feels like truth, but isn’t. It’s just mental fatigue masquerading as insight.

Cathy reminds herself of this as she lies sleepless on the slab of mattress. Her impotence in helping Della has filled her mind with nihilistic thoughts. Cold, clear recognitions, lacerating in their strictness. She has never known who Clark is. Theirs is a marriage devoid of intimacy. If Mike, John, Chris, and Palmer weren’t her children, they would be people of whom she disapproves. She has spent her life catering to people who disappear, like the bookstore she used to work in.

Sleep finally comes. When Cathy wakes the next morning, feeling stiff, she is relieved to see that the therapist was right. The sun is up and the universe isn’t so bleak. Yet some darkness must remain. Because she’s made her decision. The idea of it burns inside her. It’s neither nice nor kind. Such a novel feeling that she doesn’t know what to call it.

Cathy is sitting next to Della’s bed when Della opens her eyes. She doesn’t tell her about the nursing home. She only says, “Good morning, Della. Hey, guess what time it is?”

Della blinks, still groggy from sleep. And Cathy answers, “It’s hatchet time.”

It begins snowing as they cross the Massachusetts state line. They’re about two hours from Contoocook, the GPS a beacon in the sudden loss of visibility.

Clark will see this on the Weather Channel. He’ll call or text her, concerned about her flight being canceled.

Poor guy has no idea.

Now that they’re in the car, with the wipers and the defroster going, it appears that Della doesn’t quite grasp the situation. She keeps asking Cathy the same questions.

“So how will we get in the house?”

“You said Gertie has a key.”

“Oh, right. I forgot. So we can get the key from Gertie and get into the house. It’ll be cold as the dickens in there. We were keeping it at about fifty to save on oil. Just warm enough to keep the pipes from freezing.”

“We’ll warm it up when we get there.”

“And then I’m going to stay there?”

“We both will. Until we get things sorted out. We can get one of those home health aides. And Meals on Wheels.”