Open Your Heart (Kings Grove #4) - Delancey Stewart Page 0,55
a version of myself I didn’t recognize. As much as I wanted Harper, I wasn’t sure I could let myself be sucked under like that again.
Dad was sitting outside on his small patio when I arrived to see him.
“He’s had a pretty good day,” the nurse told me, walking me to his room. “Mr. Turner, your son is here to say hello.”
Dad turned his head, and I watched his eyes scan me without recognition, but with interest. “Hello,” he said, the way you would greet a stranger you thought you’d probably met before.
“Hi Dad.” I approached the chair next to him. “Okay if I sit down with you for a while?”
He nodded. “Sure, I like to have company.” His forehead wrinkled as he watched me sit, and I knew he was scanning whatever memory he had left, looking for some marker that would lead him to me, to an understanding of who I was. Instead, I saw the frustration, the knowledge of what he might be missing. “I’m sorry,” he said, shaking his head. “I… I know I’ve met you, but…”
“It’s okay,” I said, careful not to call him Dad again. I didn’t want to make it harder for him.
Dementia was an unfair illness, and while I was thankful to still have my dad here, to sit beside him, I knew I was being selfish in that gratitude. Dad wouldn’t have wanted this—Mom would surely not have wanted this for him. But he still remembered Maddie, I reminded myself. Even if he did think she was in high school. It was hard not to wonder how I’d been erased so completely from his mind while my sister remained, but I had enough things to worry about—I tried not to fixate on that.
“Maddie mentioned she’d stopped by,” I said, and that earned me a smile.
“She’s a good girl,” he said. Then he turned to me, eyeing me with suspicion. “How do you know my daughter?”
I sighed. I didn’t want to upset him. “I’ve met her once or twice is all. Just happened to see her out running errands today.” It wasn’t quite a lie.
He nodded. “I miss her,” he said, and I wondered what logic was at work in that mind of his, how he categorized having a daughter he believed to be a teenager while he stayed here, in this place. None of it made sense, and the degradation of what remained of his active memory was heartbreaking.
I sat with him for a while after that, talking about the weather, the food he’d had today, and the cat who prowled through the common space between the little fenced patios. We stayed on the surface, and that’s where Dad was still able to participate. When I left, he thanked me for coming, and I said goodbye, both to the quiet man sitting on the patio, and to the idea of a father I knew I’d never really see again.
Loss felt like a theme in my life, and I drove back up the mountainside wondering how much more loss I could survive.
I arrived home to find a lamp knocked over, a work boot in pieces in the middle of the living room floor, and the house a general state of destruction.
“Matilda, you’re supposed to be watching these guys,” I told the big dog, who had the grace to look sheepish about the havoc her crew of tiny mutts was causing now that they were mobile and curious.
The dogs were almost four weeks old and they were becoming way too much for me to handle. I’d tried to puppy-proof the living room, taking out the rug and laying out newspaper in one corner, removing the pillows from the couch and the television remotes from the coffee table (I’d learned that one the hard way). Still, they were getting bigger, they were very curious, and they were bored being in the house while I was at work.
I’d fenced a part of the area between the two houses so I could take them all out and let them play, but I couldn’t leave them there during the day. The mountain lion was still camped out on the hillside beyond, and the rangers were jumping through hoops trying to trap it. A few puppies would probably be too much temptation for it to resist, and I thought the dogs might even be the reason the cat hadn’t moved on.
“Come on, guys.” I herded the dogs outside into the pen to relieve themselves and play, and sat