The woman on our doorstep was small and white haired, in a faded blue cardigan buttoned wrong, and she leaned on the arm of a heavyset younger woman in a nurse aide uniform. Her eyes were bright and unfocused. She looked at me, then at Jake, then past us both into the hallway, searching. “Mike?” she said, in a high cracked voice. “Is Mike here? He called me. He said he would come.” Behind me Mike made a sound I will never forget. “Mom,” he said. “Oh, Mom.” Jake turned and stared at his father, and I felt the whole world tilt a few degrees to the left, and settle in a strange new place.
Her name was Dorothy Kessler, and she was seventy nine years old. The aide, whose name was Cheryl, had driven her up from Dayton that morning at the request of Mike. “I am sorry,” Cheryl said, as we helped Dorothy to a chair by the window. “She has good hours and bad hours. This is a good one. She asked for the car three times. Mr. Kessler said Sunday, but she got upset.” Mike dropped to his knees in front of the chair, and took the thin hands of his mother in his, and he did not answer. He was crying so hard he could not breathe.
When he could speak, Mike told us. “I told you my mother died when I was a boy,” he said. “It was a lie. She left. When I was eight. She walked out one morning for a man in Cincinnati, and she never called, never wrote, never came back. My father raised me. He told me never to speak of her.” He wiped his face with the heel of his hand. “For forty seven years I hated her. And then last spring, a social worker called me from Dayton. She had been found wandering in the street, in her nightgown. Dementia. No family. Only my name in her purse.”
A frail woman in a mismatched cardigan on the porch explained every midnight call and ended forty seven years of silence.
“I went to see her out of spite,” Mike said. “I wanted to look her in the face and tell her what she had done. And she looked up at me from the bed, with those eyes, and said, Mike? Is that you, honey? She thought I was my father.” He gave a ragged laugh. “She asked me when I was coming home. She asked if I had eaten. So I said yes, I was home, and I had eaten.” Patty, I thought, you fool. I had not said it aloud, but I felt it. For fourteen months my husband had been telephoning a woman every night at eleven because she woke at that hour in terror, and the only voice that could calm her was his.
“Why did you not tell me?” I asked. It came out gentler than I expected. Mike rubbed his forehead. “Because I was ashamed of the love,” he said. “I was supposed to hate her. I told you she was dead. I told our son she was dead. How do I explain that I was paying five hundred dollars a month to a woman who abandoned me, and carrying her down the stairs like a bride?” He looked at Jake. “I was afraid you would think I was weak.” Jake came across the room and crouched beside his father. His voice was thick. “Dad, I followed you to Dayton and watched you carry her. I thought you were cheating.”
“I know,” Mike said. “I am sorry.” “No, Dad,” said Jake. “I am sorry. I should have known. You have never cheated at anything in your life.” He put his arm around the shoulders of his father, and the two of them knelt there, side by side, on either side of an old woman in a cardigan buttoned wrong. Dorothy looked from one to the other with a vague, sweet smile. Then she reached out and touched the face of Jake, with the tips of her fingers. “Oh,” she said clearly. “You have his hands.” Jake went very still. “Whose hands, Grandma?” “Michael,” she said. “My Michael. Such a good little boy.”
I thought my heart would break in two. I knelt beside the three of them and put one arm around Mike and one around Jake, and I put my hand over the hand of Dorothy. It was cool and dry and light as a leaf. “Dorothy,” I said, “I am Patty. I am your daughter in law. We are so glad you came.” She patted my hand. “You are pretty,” she said. “You look like someone I knew.”
We kept her that night. Jake gave up his bedroom, and slept on the couch, which he claimed to prefer. In the morning, she sat at the kitchen table with a bowl of oatmeal and asked me three times where she was, and each time I told her, gently, that she was home. Mike sat beside her all through breakfast with his chin on his fist, watching her eat, not saying a word. At one point she looked up and said, with perfect lucidity, “Michael. I am sorry.” He closed his eyes. “I know, Mom,” he said. “I forgive you.” It was the clearest moment of her day. It was also the last.
We found a memory care home in Fort Wayne, ten minutes from our house, with a garden and a staff who sing. Dorothy moved in at the end of the month. Mike visits every evening, now in person, and he brings her a chocolate pudding and sits with her through the sunset. Jake goes on Saturdays and builds a model rocket on her tray table, and she watches him with solemn delight, sometimes asking what it is for. “It goes to the moon, Grandma,” he says. “That is nice,” she answers, every time. “Will you take me?” He promised that he would. He is working on a very small one.
The late night calls are over. Mike reads her the same bedtime story now, in her room, from a worn copy of Make Way for Ducklings that he found in a box in her old house. I sometimes stand in the doorway to listen. His voice is low and steady, the voice of a man who has found the thing he was missing, even if it comes to him in pieces. When the last page is turned and the nurse dims the lights, Dorothy closes her eyes and murmurs, “Good night, Michael.” And my husband kisses her forehead and says, “Good night, Mom,” and I think, there is more than one way to come home.
