The woman in Room 14 of Willow Brook Senior Living in Dayton had white hair braided like a girl and a face that looked out the window at nothing, and when I said her name softly from the doorway, she turned her whole head. I am Joyce Albright, seventy five years old, of Indianapolis, and I had driven two hours on a Saturday morning with my daughter Beth beside me, my purse in my lap and my heart in my throat. “Joyce,” said Margaret Albright slowly. She held out a thin hand. “You came. You said you would come.”
Pat Keller, the director, closed the door behind us and sat in the second chair. She told me what the records said. Margaret was the older sister of my husband Dennis, eighty two years old. In the summer of 1971, a young woman named Joyce Brandt had driven a borrowed car off a county road near Greenville, Ohio, and Margaret, who was twenty seven, had been in the passenger seat. The young driver recovered in six weeks and remembered nothing. Margaret did not recover. And a young man named Dennis Albright had come to the hospital every day to visit his sister and had met the girl in the next bed.
It took me a long minute to understand. All my life I had thought that Dennis loved me in spite of a sad accident that had come between my youth and my marriage. He had loved me, I believe, with all his heart. But he had also carried, for fifty five years, the knowledge that the girl he married had been the driver. He had never told me, because I could not remember, and because he did not want me to spend my life in guilt. So he went to Dayton on second Saturdays, and he paid, and he read his sister the newspaper.
A phone call about a Mrs. Albright in Room 14 gave one widow the length of a two hour drive to bring her son back to the truth in Dayton.
I gave my terms there in Room 14, holding the thin hand of Margaret in both of mine, with my daughter Beth weeping behind me. “Pat, I will pay for this room, every month, for as long as I live. I have the checkbook of Dennis. I have the accounts. But my son Mark has been running the company since September, and I think he has already seen these bills. Please telephone him and tell him his mother is at Willow Brook. I would like to see his face when he comes through that door.”
Mark arrived at noon, in a hurry, with a folder under his arm and two men from a medical transport company behind him. He is forty nine years old, a stout, anxious man with a loosened tie, and he stopped when he saw me by the bed. “Mom,” he said. “What are you doing here?” I asked him what he was doing here. He sat on the edge of the empty bed, and the folder slid from his knees. “The company is in trouble,” he whispered. “The bank wants its money. I found the payments in the books last spring and thought, who is this woman? I arranged a transfer to a state facility on Monday. I did not know she was family.”
But one of the men from the transport company had already started to wheel a chair toward the bed, and Mark, seeing the look on my face, panicked. He grabbed the signed transfer order and the discharge papers from the folder, snatched my checkbook from the table where Beth had set it, and rushed into the hallway, meaning to reach the parking lot and drive away before anyone could read what he had signed. The chair rattled. Pat cried out. And in the corridor ahead of him, side by side, rolled a dozen residents of Willow Brook in wheelchairs.
Mark stopped in the corridor with the papers crushed in his fist, because the whole hallway was filled with residents in wheelchairs and walkers, white haired men and women in cardigans, lined up wall to wall, and behind them the nurses stood with their arms folded. An old man in a Navy cap, Mr. Beasley, rapped his cane on the floor. “Young man, that lady in Room 14 has been our friend for thirty years. Nobody moves her anywhere.” Mark looked at the dozen faces. He looked at the mother who had followed him into the hall. He let the papers fall, and he sat down on a bench with his head in his hands.
The consequences were firm, and they were kind. Mark tore up the transfer order himself, and he went to the bank with me the next Monday to restructure the debt of the company, selling the old warehouse to meet it. He paid the November bill out of his own savings. Margaret stayed in Room 14, where she had a view of the garden, and Beth, who is a nurse, took the second Saturdays when I could not drive. Mark came along every month after that, and he read her the baseball scores, which she appeared to enjoy very much.
In the name of my husband Dennis, who passed in September, I started the Dennis Albright Fund. It pays for long term care costs for survivors of brain injuries and for respite for the families who care for them, in Marion, Hamilton and Hendricks counties. In the first year we paid for the care of forty one residents and gave respite to ninety two families. One was a sixty year old man from Carmel who had read the newspaper aloud to his sister every Saturday for twenty years and was able, for the first time, to take a weekend away.
On the second Saturday of December, I sat in Room 14 at Willow Brook in Dayton with a thermos of cocoa and the Sunday newspaper folded in my lap. Margaret sat in her chair by the window, her white braid over her shoulder, her face lifted to the winter light. I read to her about the weather, and the Colts, and a lost dog that had been found. When I paused, she reached over and patted my hand. “Joyce,” she said, “you came.” And I said, as I will say every second Saturday as long as I can drive, “I did. I always will.”
