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“Stop whining,” I tell myself. Because that’s a great way to cure myself of self-pity. George will be happy, though. He was right, about Lulu being my type, and that I need to make a change.
I just wish I knew how.
Pop was huge once. He fit into his size, filled rooms with his smile and his laughter, carried others’ worries on his shoulders. Mostly mine. I dwarf the man standing in front of the window now, his soft gray T-shirt swallowing him whole.
“Pop.” My voice sounds too loud in the quiet hush of his long-term care home. A lot of people complain about the smell. It’s not that the nursing home is unclean; there’s an astringent bleach smell that permeates every cell. The smell I can get past. Maybe because I’ve worked with a bunch of smelly firefighters or I’ve learned, in the many traumas I’ve been called to, that the human body produces a surprising number of odors.
It’s the quiet that’s the worst, especially at this time of day. I should have just visited tomorrow, but I wanted to be awake, present, and I knew I wouldn’t be after dinner with George, then an overnight shift guarding a construction site. So, I’m here now, my grandfather sundowning or not.
My voice breaks through whatever fog he’s lost in, but his anxiety looks high tonight, creasing his quivering lower lip.
“Have you seen your mother?” he asks, his voice raspy.
I’ve never met my mother, and I can remember only glimpses of my dad. They’re vague enough that I am never quite sure if they’re memories or if the many photos my grandparents showed me as a child imprinted on my mind. “I...no, Pop.”
His hands shake as he presses his fingers to the glass, the skin on the back of his hand pale and thin, his fingernails bitten short. “It’s been over an hour. I’m worried about this blizzard, Joey.”
I follow his gaze out the window. The sky is shot through with purple and pink and orange, still dramatic after last night’s storm. It brought down trees and blew over my neighbor’s trampoline, and it’s probably what’s got him worrying about the weather. Hearing my grandfather call me by my father’s name will never not rip me apart inside. It’s the combination of the reminder that Joseph Logan is dead and the hurt—even if it’s unintentional—of being invisible to my grandfather. I haven’t been Jesse since before my accident.
“She’ll be home soon, Pop.”
The doctors say that sometimes it’s best to go along with him rather than confuse him with a gentle course correction. He thinks I’m my father and he’s remembering a time my grandmother was out in a blizzard, but it feels like lying, and I’ve already spent so much of my life lying to him. Each new lie gets heavier than the last.
He mutters to himself, pacing slowly up and down the length of his room, his brows twitching in silent argument. I drop into the armchair by his window. My quad is sore, the bone aching, as if the plates the doctors screwed into me are rattling to get out. A common occurrence after rain.
“Have to put chains on the tires,” he whispers.
After the car accident that effectively ended my firefighting career, George visited Pop while I was recovering in the hospital. He warned me that Pop’s lucidity was coming in moments, in glimpses. He’d encouraged me to tell Pop before it was too late. “Now’s the time, Jess,” he’d said. “I know how badly you’ve wanted to do this. He’ll hear you and understand.”
I’d swung into this room a week after my surgery, still trying to navigate the world on crutches, but ready to speak the truth to the man who raised me.
“I’m bi, Pop,” I’d wanted to say. But Pop wasn’t there. My grandfather hasn’t had a lucid conversation since; a switch has flipped in his mind, and the man I knew is gone. At least the version of him I wanted, needed, was gone, ripped out of him by this invisible disease that could, at this very moment, be taking root in my own brain. I felt like, once again, I’d missed my chance at something important, life changing.
I could tell him like this. There’s nothing stopping me from saying the words now into this quiet room. His ears still register sound. He just doesn’t know who it’s coming from.
“There’s something I wanted to tell you,” I say, testing it out.
“The chains,” he whispers. I step in front of him, hoping to catch his attention, but he stares over my shoulder, his mouth working silently.
“Pop, I...” It feels like cheating. Like when he used to ask me where I was going on a Friday night and I’d tell him “the movies,” but not who with or why.
He grabs my arm, his grip surprisingly strong despite the near constant shake in his muscles. He looks up at me and his eyes seem so clear, focused in a way I haven’t seen in a while. My heartbeat kicks up. This might be it. He might behere. Finally.
“Get your coat. We’re going out to find her, Joey.”
It’s silly to be this disappointed. I should have expected it, and it’s not his fault anyway. But I’ve been hiding myself from him for so long, it’s starting to suffocate me.
“It’s Jesse.” I take his hand and press it to my chest. “I’m not Joey, I’m his son, Jesse. And I’m trying to tell you something important.”
His cracked lips part in a gasp. The sound of water trickling onto the floor interrupts the silence between us. I look down at the urine soaking into Pop’s pants and socks, pooling around his feet.
“Joey?” he asks. “What’s happening? I’m so tired.”
I close my eyes. Close up the rip in my heart with the reminder that none of this is his fault and the hope that one day he’ll see me again. Today’s just not his day.
“Let’s get you cleaned up,” I say, keeping the truth buried firmly inside my chest.
There are many voices coming from behind George’s apartment door. When he texted me this morning, demanding that if I’m not going to answer him about the date the least I can do is come over for dinner tonight before work, I stupidly assumed it would be just us.
