AllFreeNovel
Share Us
Chapter Two
“What do youknow about Parkinson’s disease?”
It was always the first question I asked. I wanted to make sure that whoever I hired knew exactly what they were signing up for.
Elyse Woodley sat across from me in one of two matching ivory-colored tub chairs facing the lime-green velvet sofa in our rarely used living room to the left of the front door. She was wearing a yellow, short-sleeved blouse, navy cotton pants, and open-toed sandals. Small gold-and-pearl earrings peeked out from under the neat waves of her chin-length blond hair, the earrings and a plain gold watch the only jewelry she wore. I noticed the lack of a wedding ring and was grateful. One less complication, I remember thinking.
I’d chosen the living room to conduct my interviews, not because it was the most formal of the downstairs rooms but because it was the least cluttered. All the other rooms—the small dining room with its perpetually smudged glass tabletop, the modern open-concept kitchen with its large granite-topped center island, the adjoining family room overlooking a vertical sliver of backyard—were overrun with my children’s toys. It was hard to take a step without tripping over a Super Mario figurineor stray piece of Lego. (And don’t get me started on the stubborn and seemingly indestructible globs of Play-Doh that clung to virtually every surface.)
“I know that it’s a disorder of the nervous system that primarily affects bodily movement,” she replied. “That it gets progressively worse. And that there is no cure,” she added softly.
I had to bite my tongue to keep from yelling “You’re hired!” right then and there. Most of the women I’d interviewed up to that point—six in total—had simply shaken their heads and uttered variations of “Not much.”
“Do you think you could handle looking after someone in its late stages?”
“I think so. My mother suffered from MS for years, and my last employer had cancer and was pretty much bedridden during the final year of his life, so I have a lot of experience dealing with degenerative diseases.” She produced a sympathetic smile. Dimples, like large commas, appeared at the sides of her mouth. “Plus, I’m a lot tougher than I look.”
I explained my mother’s situation in greater, excruciating detail: that she’d been diagnosed approximately ten years earlier, her symptoms following along the normal, prescribed path, starting innocuously enough with the trembling of her baby fingers—what the doctors called “resting tremors”—followed by slowed movement and increasing muscle weakness leading to rigidity, and a change in her once-perfect posture that ultimately resulted in a frozen gait.
My mother had been a dancer all her life, and now it seemed as if her feet were glued to the ground. She lunged instead of walked. What’s more, her handwriting had shrunk until it became so small as to be illegible, due to changes in those parts of the brain that affect motor skills, and made it difficult, if not impossible, to control the movement of her fingers and hands.
She had difficulty sleeping, perspired excessively, and suffered from frequent bouts of constipation. “It’s a lot to deal with,” I was forced to admit, reluctant to leave anything out and risk herquitting when the extent of my mother’s illness became too obvious to ignore, “even though my father will insist on being her primary caregiver. So the job would probably involve more housekeeping and cooking,” I said hopefully, “and being around in case…”
“…they need me,” Elyse said, finishing the sentence for me. “You might want to breathe,” she advised, dark eyes widening as the dimples returned to tease the sides of her lips.
I realized I’d been holding my breath, and I laughed, although the sound that emerged was more of someone gasping for air. I pictured an old tree, gnarled and twisted in on itself, and wondered if that’s how she saw me. “Do you have any questions?” I asked, bracing myself for queries about salary and vacations, the first questions out of the mouths of all six previous applicants.
“When would you like me to start?” she asked instead, then quickly, “Oh, my goodness. How presumptuous of me! I’m so sorry. I didn’t mean to assume. My son warns me about that all the time. He says I make assumptions…”
“You have a son?”
“Yes. Andrew. He’s about your age. Lives in California. Los Angeles. That’s where I’m from originally.”
“How long have you lived in Toronto? If you don’t mind my asking…” I added, having read somewhere that would-be employers aren’t permitted to ask too many personal questions of prospective employees, although I wasn’t sure if that applied to this type of position. It seemed to me that if you were inviting someone to live in your home, you should be entitled to know at least some basic things about them.
“I don’t mind at all,” she answered easily. “I came here nine years ago, soon after my mother died. I needed a holiday, so I bought a ticket on one of those train trips across Canada, and just fell in love with both the country and its people. One man in particular, if I’m being honest.” She raised a hand to her face to hide her blush. “I met this lovely man soon after arriving inToronto, and three months later, we were married. Everything was perfect. Until it wasn’t.” She sighed, one of those giant exhales that involve one’s whole body. “We were watching TV one night—it’ll be four years this September—and Charlie said he was feeling a little dizzy, and next thing I knew…he was dead. A brain aneurysm, the doctors said.” She paused, her gaze following her words into the past, lingering. “So I was widowed a second time. My first husband, Andrew’s father,” she continued, unprompted, “he died as well. Massive heart attack when he was barely older than Andrew is now.”
“I’m so sorry,” I began, not sure what else to say. What I was thinking was that, in some perverse way, they were lucky. Brain aneurysms and massive heart attacks seemed a preferable way to die than the slow, merciless progression of Parkinson’s disease.
“Yes, well. Not much one can do except go on. We’d been living in an apartment near St. Clair and Yonge when Charlie died, and I started helping one of my elderly neighbors with her grocery shopping. Soon I was bringing over homemade cookies—I love to bake—and eventually her family hired me to prepare meals, look after the apartment, and keep her company. My son, of course, was horrified that his mother would stoop to doing such menial work. He’s a bit of a snob that way. But the truth is that I enjoy looking after people. I’m used to it. And I’m good at it. Besides, I didn’t want to move back to L.A. and be a burden to Andrew. He has his own life to live.” She leaned forward conspiratorially. “To be completely honest…I’m not overly fond of his wife.”
I suppressed a smile. “Do you have grandchildren?”
“No.” She shook her head. An obvious sore point.
As if on cue, the house erupted with the sound of loud squabbling from upstairs—“Mom, Daphne’s taking my things!” “Mommy, Sam’s being mean!”
“Daphne,” I called back, “stop taking Sam’s things. Sam, stop being mean to your sister.”
“She won’t give me back my Nintendo Switch!”
“He said I could play with it.”
“No, I didn’t! Give it back.”
“Mommy, he’s being mean!”
“What’s a Nintendo Switch?” Elyse asked.
