Face the Winter Naked (36 page)
Read Face the Winter Naked Online
Authors: Bonnie Turner
Down the Memory Hole
Summer
vacation sucks when 12-year-old Buzz shares his room with a grandpa who has
Alzheimer’s disease and his parents forbid him to associate with his best
friend. The idea of giving up Mitch is bad enough. But how can he relate to an
old man who wears adult diapers and thinks dog biscuits are people cookies?
Someone who could die in the night and scare Buzz right out of puberty! (Ages
12 & up)
Chapter 1
I
learned the hard way that life doesn’t always turn out the way we plan. For
example, when my folks told me on my twelfth birthday I had to share my room
with Grandpa Collins, my great plans for summer vacation fell apart.
It
all started when the doctor told us Grandpa had Alzheimer’s disease. I knew
there wasn’t any cure, and the last thing I needed was watching my favorite
grandpa die in my own room.
“Why
should I get stuck with him?” I asked my mother. “Why not Sara?”
Mom
laid a stack of waterproof sheets on the bare mattress of the hospital bed. She
hadn’t said much about the situation after the first shock, but she knew she’d
get most of Grandpa’s care whether she wanted it or not. Now she sighed and
shook her head.
“Think
about it, Buzz. Your sister’s almost fifteen. Sara can’t share her room with a
man. And even if she did, we couldn’t expect Grandpa to climb those stairs. My
goodness, he’s so wobbly he could fall and break a hip.”
She
opened my closet and peered inside.
“Now
stop whining and bring me those boxes. I’ll put them in here for now.”
“My
closet isn’t big enough for both our stuff.”
“Sure
it is, honey. Just move your things over.”
A
stack of cartons sat on the floor at the foot of the bed. I picked up the
biggest one and carried it over.
“What’s
in here?” I placed the heavy box on the floor, then pushed some shoes and other
stuff to one side of the closet.
“Books,”
she said. “Odds and ends.”
“Junk.”
Mom
smiled. “Maybe not junk to Grandpa, Buzz.”
The
box smelled mousy, like it came out of a damp cellar. I pushed it into the back
of the closet, then went for another box.
“So,
when’s he coming?”
She
glanced at my clock. “Soon. He’ll be here to watch you blow out your candles.”
“Some
birthday, getting stuck with Grandpa.”
“I
wish you wouldn’t think of it as getting stuck,” Mom said. “We can’t turn him
away—he’s your dad’s father, after all. And it’s only temporary.”
“But—”
“No
buts.” A slight frown crossed her face, but she brushed it away and tried to
smile. “We’ll work it out. There’s no other way.”
I
picked up a big box of Depends and stashed it in the closet with the other
boxes. If any of my friends came over and saw those things, I’d never live it
down.
“Nobody
cares how I feel.”
“Oh
Buzz, yes we do. We care very much. And if he had a choice, your grandfather
wouldn’t intrude in your life.” She came over and hugged me. “Grandpa can’t
make decisions anymore, so we’ll make them for him.”
An
invisible wall ran through the middle of my room, with Grandpa’s furniture on
one side and mine on the other. It didn’t even look like my room anymore.
......
When
Grandpa came an hour later, he stood in the middle of the room looking confused
and helpless. Mom set a vase of fresh daisies on his dresser, then turned to
Grandpa with a smile.
“I
think you’ll be comfortable in here,” she said.
When
he didn’t reply, Dad gave Mom a little pat on the back. “The room looks nice,
Ellen. I’m sure Pop’s grateful for your help.”
I
went up to Grandpa, wanting to say something, knowing I should. But when he
looked right through me like I wasn’t even there, the words wouldn’t come.
Instead, I put on my baseball cap, grabbed the ball, and went outdoors.
When
I came back inside a little while later, I found him asleep on the bed with his
clothes on, and for the first time I got a real good look at him without being
accused of staring.
He
looked awful. His eyeballs rolled sideways under the lids, like he was watching
a movie, and his wrinkled skin reminded me of an empty lunch bag someone had
carried for weeks in a back pocket. The veins on the back of his hands were fat
blue night crawlers. I watched his Adam’s apple slide up and down when he
gulped, and wondered how my folks expected me to handle this crazy situation.
It wasn’t Grandpa’s fault, but my summer was ruined.
I
looked at the ball still in my hand, saw myself playing catch with him five
years ago. He used to pitch a mean ball, and he taught me how to catch what he
threw. Now I saw how wasted he looked.
Don’t die, Grandpa
. I shut my
eyes real tight, and felt some tears squeeze out. Not only was my vacation
ruined, but Grandpa’s whole life was, too.
......
A
few days after Grandpa Collins moved in, Dad explained there was no money for a
nursing home. His snobby sister, my aunt Gladys, could help, but she wouldn’t
take in their father for a million bucks. My room on the first floor was the
only one big enough for two beds.
“We’ll
all have to make adjustments,” Dad said, “especially your grandfather.
Alzheimer’s disease is a brain-cell disorder. It affects the memory.”
“How
long will he be here, Dad? I don’t know what to expect. What am I going to do?”
He
shook his head and shrugged. “Nobody knows how long he has, Buzz. Some people
go on for years, but—”
“I
don’t want him snooping in my stuff.”
“Suppose
you had a brother in there?”
“That’s
different.”
“Your
grandpa was a kid once, Buzz. He’d know how you feel.”
Dad
leaned over and tugged at his sock, like when he got emotional at a sad scene
in a movie. Getting mad and hitting the ceiling would be better than trying to
hide his feelings. But he never did until the pressure built up so much he had
to explode.
......
For
sure, Grandpa’s brain really was screwed up. Sometimes he forgot to wake up for
two or three days in a row. Sharing my room with him was awful, especially at
night when his snoring kept me awake, or when he started counting for no
reason, or grunted like a bullfrog. One night he even used my closet for the
bathroom—just opened the door and peed in my laundry basket. I was lucky my new
skates didn’t get sprayed, too.
“The
poor man didn’t know what he was doing,” Mom said while cleaning up the mess
the next day.
She
would have to put the Depends on Grandpa, and he’d take them off when nobody
was looking. No matter what day or year his mind went back to, he sure as heck
knew when he was wearing diapers.
Alzheimer’s
sounded like a German car. Grandpa was in the gray Alzheimer’s auto, but he
couldn’t drive it. He ran stop signs and drove on the wrong side of the road.
He couldn’t find the brake, and kept going till he ran out of gas, or crashed.
His
memory was so bad he couldn’t remember my real name, which is Baxter Eugene
Collins. To him I was
Barkley
, his brother who died in a train accident
at age ten.
Dad
told me a freight train hit the kid after his bike’s front wheel got caught in
the railroad ties. His foot got stuck under a pedal, and Grandpa, hearing Bark
scream, was running to help when a train came roaring down the tracks.
I
think somewhere in the back of his mind, Grandpa still saw the freight train
crushing the life out of his little brother. Somewhere in his mind, he was
screaming his brains out.
I
wondered if Alzheimer’s disease could be a mind running from a bad memory. If
so, no wonder they couldn’t cure it.
“With
my luck, he’ll live to be a hundred,” I said to my best friend, Mitch Kenney.
“I gotta get him out of my room, Mitch. Suppose he dies in there? Suppose I get
up to go pee and trip over his corpse?”
Mitch
chuckled. “Then you’d get Alzheimer’s to block out the memory of seeing him
dead.”
“Yeah,
right. You’re no help at all. But suppose he falls or something?”
“Then
you help him up.”
“Well
yes.”
I knew
I could. I hadn’t inherited the Collins’ giant genes for nothing. Not only was
I bigger than most boys my age, but I could see my old baby fat turning to
muscle. By the time I turned sixteen, I’d probably look like a weightlifter.
I
sat with Mitch on the bank of the mill pond after a June thunderstorm had
crashed its way through Cedarville. A heavy rain had settled the dust. The sun
shone again. The fresh air smelled like spring water tasted. Far to the east, a
bolt of lightning split the sky. I counted the seconds between flash and
thunderclap.
“Five
miles!” Mitch and I yelled together, then laughed because our minds were in
tune.
He
pulled off his muddy shoes and stuck his feet into the cool water, then offered
me a cigarette from a pack he swiped from his dad.
I
shook my head no. “You’re gonna get cancer.”
“Gimmie
a break, Buzz. Better than Alzheimer’s.”
Mitch
thought smoking was cool. I didn’t. But when you like somebody, it’s easy to
ignore their faults. Except for the smoking, he was smart. I guessed his IQ was
about a thousand, and hoped by hanging out with him, some of his brains would
rub off on me. Mom and Dad said I was smart, too, because I could read before I
went to kindergarten, and was always trying to figure things out. But Mitch was
smarter. He didn’t even have to think, but just popped the answers off the top
of his head.
Already
thirteen, Mitch was skinny and fidgety. His dark hair was too long. But it was
summer, and his folks wouldn’t pay for a haircut till school started again. The
pond was our favorite meeting place.
The
rain had stirred up the mud in the pond, and we poked around the bank looking
for frogs for Mitch’s basement “zoo.” His three-pound Crisco can already
held four small frogs, but we were searching for the big bullfrog we saw a few
days ago. The zoo would be complete with him.
It
was a neat zoo, with salamanders, toads, a fox snake, and a box turtle. A
mummy
rat—a dead mouse wrapped in white tape—was our prize feature. While it lasted,
before it rotted and stank up Mitch’s house, the mummy was great for freaking
out his neighbor, Becky Roberts.
......
I
awoke one Saturday morning in June to the chirping of robins feeding their
babies in the nest on my window ledge. I never knew how fast birds grew till I
got a close-up look at these. Last week they were just three blue eggs, and
this week, naked babies with scrawny necks and buggy eyes. All day long they
hunched down in the nest staring at nothing. Then, a parent would land on the
edge of the nest and those bugged eyes would disappear and they were all big
open beaks. In another couple of weeks, they’d leave the nest and fly away.
This
time, I stayed in bed with my eyes shut, drifting in and out of sleep, watching
my thoughts swirl like stinky socks in a washer. From behind our house came the
warning whistle of the early train heading out of Cedarville.
Grandpa
stirred in the hospital bed on the other side of the room. Then he sat up and
slid his bony legs off the side of the bed and leaned over to find his
slippers. My Irish setter, Rusty, went over and sniffed his feet.
“Git
lost, you dumb old mutt.”
It
was the same every morning when Grandpa was in the current year.
I
called the dog over, and Rusty jumped onto my bed and started biting my toes
through the sheet. Then he crawled up next to my face and lay down. He was
shedding like crazy, and I spent the next half hour picking red dog hairs off
my nose and tongue.
Grandpa
left the room, and when I heard the back door open, I knew he went outside to
stand on the porch. I never worried about him leaving the yard, which was
fenced to keep Rusty from chasing the neighbors’ cows. But I sometimes wished
the door would lock behind him, he’d drive the Alzheimer’s to a cliff and roll
over the edge.
Rusty
licked my chin when Grandpa came back inside and went to the kitchen before
returning to my room. In the dim light, I couldn’t see what he was doing. But I
heard him crunching something. A cookie? I asked Mom about it once, but she
said I was dreaming; Grandpa had no cookies.
Still,
I heard him eating something almost every morning he was awake, and there were
often crumbs in his bed. Once I even tailed him to see where he went, but he
turned around suddenly and saw me. Pinning his hawk eyes on me he yelled loud
enough to crack a sidewalk: “Sneaking around on me, Bark?”
Before
I could answer, Dad came downstairs to put the coffeepot on. When he bawled me
out for pestering Grandpa, I couldn’t say I was trying to find Grandpa’s
cookies so I could steal some. Instead, I faked a yawn, rubbed my eyes, and
mumbled, “Can’t a kid even walk in his sleep?”
When
I finally decided to get up, I found Grandpa already in his easy chair, staring
at an upside down
Sports Illustrated
. But I didn’t mind him being out,
because it gave me privacy to inspect the things on top of his dresser: a
snapshot of Barkley Collins at age four; a block of balsa wood with Grandpa’s
initials carved into it; a photo of my great-great grandparents looking
starched and sober on their wedding day. A cigar box with a broken lid held
odds and ends of washers, screws, nails, coins, and tie-tacks.
