Accidental Hope

Lisa winced as she slowly rose from the floor. She spent the last ten minutes on her hands and knees, scrubbing milk from the carpet. If it had been coffee, or even one of those faux-milk protein drinks, she might have considered leaving it for tomorrow. Milk, however, leaves a telltale odor that’s nearly impossible to eradicate after it sets. Despite her best efforts, she’s sure she’ll smell it when she walks in the house tomorrow.

She looked out the window. The late afternoon sun flooded the spacious yard with a pleasant glow. Beautiful though it was, Lisa only saw the lawn, which badly needed mowing. She jumped slightly as she stifled an abrupt sob. Months ago, she kept a running list of things to do, crossing them off with some degree of satisfaction. Now, she moved robotically from task to task, eternally chipping at a mountain that seemed to grow every time she looked away.

She looked in the bedroom. As he had in her earliest memories, her father slept on his right side, the covers pulled up to his neck. His breathing was slow, methodical. The oxygen machine hummed, and she felt the vibration through the old wooden floor. She quietly closed the door, looked at her phone, and walked to the kitchen.

“Twenty more minutes,” she thought, as she started loading the dishwasher. Angela, her younger sister slept over two nights a week, the only time she was freed from her childhood home. She would make the hour and a half long journey home, stand in the shower until long after the hot water ran out, then probably cry until she fell asleep.

Angela had been a “surprise,” or “change of life baby,” born when their mother was 45. Twenty years separated Angela and Lisa, and while Lisa was newly – and early – retired, Angela was still raising three young children. Her ability to stay at all with their father was somewhat remarkable, but Lisa only feigned the faintest protest when Angela offered, as she knew she was floundering.

Finished with the dishes, Lisa continued to pick up the house, cleaning in a haphazard fashion reflecting her distracted mind. A year ago, she was happily teaching third graders, and toying with the idea of going back to school for administrative classes. “It wouldn’t be a bad idea to end my career with five or six years as a principal,” she told Ellen, her co-teacher. The higher salary would reflect on her retirement pay, and she thought, as much as she enjoyed the classroom, that a change of pace would be good.

Lisa’s mother’s abrupt, though perhaps not premature, death and her father’s stroke quickly dashed her plans. At first, there was the worry, the hospital visits, the rehab visits, then a sudden dropping of the floor from beneath her feet the day he was discharged.

“He’s all ready to go home!” the nurse said as Lisa walked into the room. Lisa nodded. “So, what happens now?”

The nurse cocked her head slightly to one side. “Well, you take him home.”

“Yes, I mean, who takes care of him? Does someone come to the house?”

The nurse paused for an imperceptible beat. “Someone will need to bring him to PT, and I’m sure there will be other services involved. The doctor will explain all that. As far as who takes care of him at home, well…” the nurse trailed off.

Of course, it was up to her. Lisa felt her face flush, and realized how naïve she sounded. “Of course, we’ve got it,” she said with false bravado. “Ready to go, Dad?”

Her father slowly turned his head toward her, then looked back toward the television, which was off.

After that, Lisa’s world turned upside down abruptly. Cursing herself for lack of foresight, she found the doctor at the rehab facility, who, with great reluctance, agreed to keep her father for another week. “This breaks all the rules,” he said, as he scribbled indecipherably on a yellow pad.

“I know,” she said. She told him how grateful she was, though she was chiefly panicked, her hands cold and clammy as she heaped praise on the man who looked like he still belonged at a freshman year mixer.

After a quick goodbye to her motionless father, Lisa raced home to talk to her husband. Frank was comforting, understanding, and entirely without practical advice. Lisa talked for hours, wrote on paper, closed and reopened her laptop dozens of times as she searched for agencies, advice, help. Around 11:00 PM, well after Frank stopped trying to stifle his yawns, she arrived at what she felt was the only logical decision.

“I’ll retire early,” she said quietly. “Retire, then I can take care of him until we figure out help.”

After a sleepless night and hours more of conversation, that is what she did. It was July, so she was able to retire without an emotional parting from students and coworkers, though that almost felt worse. It was as though she erased the biggest part of herself without any symbolic gesture or totem to make it feel real. Frank remained supportive, but largely pragmatic; his role now was sole breadwinner, and he needed to continue to work, or work even more at his construction company if they were to continue to pay their children’s long-owed student loans, the mortgage, and everything else. Lisa’s early departure took a massive cut from her retirement, which she found almost laughingly ironic, since she so recently considered how much more she would make by advancing her career.

As weeks turned to months, Lisa embarked on what was now her existence. She was trying to keep her father in the home he built, the only home he knew, which meant she had to provide round-the-clock care, 70 miles from the life she built with Frank. Friends, neighbors, hobbies, pleasures were all ghosts of the past, so foreign to her now she couldn’t recognize herself in memories of those people and places. Her marriage was predictably deteriorating, and she was almost willfully doing nothing to prevent it, as she now felt that she deserved these things, that her new identity almost demanded it. She always returned to the conversation with the nurse in her mind, and felt the shame wash over her like a burning salve.

The front door opened quietly. Angela knew her father was likely asleep, and didn’t want to run the risk of waking him. Lisa slowly walked to the living room, grabbing her coat and purse as she went. “Any issues?” Angela asked. Lisa shook her head.

“The usual. He didn’t eat much, leftovers are in the fridge. You can try to get him to eat tomorrow, he likes the soup usually.”

Angela looked Lisa over silently. “You can’t go on like this. We can’t.”

Lisa shook her head and raised her hands in a sign that she didn’t want to talk. Angela nodded. “See you tomorrow?”

Lisa nodded and left without a word. As she drove down the long, gravel driveway, she almost thought of returning for a cup of coffee, as she was desperately tired, but couldn’t bring herself to do it. Her father lived in a remote part of the state, far from cities and businesses, and it would take her 30 minutes to reach a small gas station. Tired though she was, the prospect of delaying her brief respite and retracing the departure process was too much to bear. Angela would undoubtedly want to Talk more.

When she reached the county line, the roads abruptly improved, recently repaved in what was probably one of the last construction jobs of the fall before winter. She recalled days where the drive, already long, was 20 minutes longer as she waited for the construction worker to lazily spin his hand-held sign from “STOP” to “SLOW” so she could proceed on the temporarily one-lane road.

As the noise from the road lessened on the fresh blacktop, Lisa relaxed somewhat and cracked her window, letting in some chilly, fresh air. She smelled the always pleasant aroma of changing leaves and smoke from a woodstove in the distance. She slowed as she approached a four way stop, newly installed at what was once a two-way. A terrible accident several years ago forced the change, though it took, in typical legislative fashion, some time to enact.

Lisa stopped and looked carefully in both directions, always cognizant of the danger of the intersection. She saw a car coming down the hill, headed to their stop sign on her left, but felt safe in continuing through the intersection, since they too had to stop. By the time she realized the driver wasn’t going to stop, she was in the middle of the intersection, the headlights of the other car seemingly in her face.

She awoke with a start, as though she had nodded off while at the wheel. She immediately felt searing pain on her left side, and quickly saw that the door was smashed in, her airbag deployed, and her left arm most certainly dislocated, if not broken. She unbuckled her seatbelt and awkwardly tried to open her door with her right hand, but saw that it wouldn’t budge, and the movement was excruciating. She tried to keep her arm as immobile as possible as she slouched down to her right side, then used her legs against the door to kick herself over to the passenger’s side. After what seemed like an eternity, she swung her legs over the console, and opened the door.

As she slowly extricated herself from the car, she felt a strong pang of nausea and dizziness. She collapsed to the ground, crying out in pain. As she lay on her right side, she looked up and saw a man, or rather a boy of perhaps 18, bizarrely walking in a large circle, holding his hand above his head in a strange form of salute.

“Hey,” she said with a croak. She cleared her throat. “Hey!” she yelled, involuntarily gesturing as she did, bringing about an unbelievably spasm of pain.

The boy stopped his ritual, looked at her, and ran over. “You’re alive,” he said, tears streaming down his face.

In the growing darkness, she could barely make him out, but she knew he was even younger than she first guessed. “What are you doing?” she asked.

“Oh.” He looked embarrassed. “I don’t have a signal, I was trying to get a bar on my cell. Does yours work?”

Lisa looked at her car. “You can try to find it in there.”

The boy gingerly walked around her and leaned into the car. He emerged with her phone a moment later, then respectfully handed it to her. She shook her head, almost amused at his concern for her privacy. It was almost chivalrous, in a surreal 21^st century sort of way. “Go ahead,” she said.

His face lit up. “Two bars!” He quickly dialed 911, then paced in the intersection as he described the location to the dispatcher. A few moments later, he returned. “They’re on their way,” he said. “It could take up to 15 minutes she said, we’re kinda in the middle of nowhere.”

Lisa nodded. The boy crouched down, close enough for her to see the worried expression on her face. “I’m like, so, so sorry.” He said, shaking his head. “I didn’t see the sign, I guess I forgot about it.”

This seemed rather implausible to Lisa, though it also seemed implausible that he deliberately tried to hit her. She looked at his car, an old sedan probably handed down to him by from his parents. He looked sweet, innocent, and thoroughly freaked out.

“It’s ok,” she said, and meant it. “It’s an accident.”

“But your car,” he said, now openly weeping. “And your arm!” He said the last with a shout, then stood and started pacing again, but without the awkward salute.

“Hey,” she said. “Hey. Come back. It’s ok.”

He looked at her, then returned to her side. “It’s ok,” she repeated. “Stay by me until they come.”

He dutifully sat on the pavement, staring at her. The pain was intense, but she felt calm, and was able to handle it if she didn’t move. After a few beats of silence, the boy cleared his throat. “My name’s Ben. I was going to pick up my mom at work. She works at the voluntary action center.”

“Oh?” she said, distantly. “And what does she do there?”

Ben frowned. “I really don’t know. She doesn’t get paid much, I know that,” he said with a laugh. “We’re always telling her to do something else, but she likes it. She used to work in a hospital as a social worker, but she gave that up to do this. What do you do?”

“I’m retired,” she said. She felt cold. Her initial assessment of the pain seemed optimistic, and she closed her eyes, trying to will the intense throbbing down to a dull roar.

“Really?” Ben sounded calmer. “You seem young.”

Lisa snorted, then winced. “Yeah, well. I take care of my father.”

Ben was silent for a moment. “You’re a nurse?”

“In a manner of speaking.”

Another pause, this time longer. “You’re not going to take care of him now,” he said. “For a little while, at least,” he quickly added, seeing her face and recognizing the insensitivity of his remark. “I just mean, you know, your arm and all.”

Lisa frowned. There was no debating that Ben was on to something. Even if she wasn’t left-handed, she couldn’t manage her father with a broken arm, to say nothing of any other injuries she may have. Her realization quickly turned to panic, and suddenly the pain, the accident, and realization that she was laying on the road seemed minute in comparison. Her breathing quickened.

Ben’s eyes grew wide in alarm. “It’s ok,” he said, gingerly patting the side of her head. “The ambulance will be here soon.”

“It’s not that,” she said, her tears falling to the blacktop.

“Oh, your dad?” he said. Lisa nodded.

Ben smiled, which struck Lisa as surreal, though the entire experience had that quality. “That’s no problem, my mom can help with that. She does it all the time. Hooks people up with services and whatever. She just did it for our neighbor last month when her mom broke her hip. ‘People can’t do everything alone,’ ‘It takes a village,’ mom’s always saying stuff like that.” He broke off, seeing Lisa’s face.

“You don’t understand,” she started.

“Probably not,” he admitted, standing up and looking down the road. “Oh, I hear the ambulance.”

Lisa tilted her head and heard the siren in the distance, growing closer. Ben turned back toward her. “Probably not,” he repeated. “But you need help.”

The ambulance slowed at the intersection, then came to a stop. Ben ran over, pointing in Lisa’s direction and talking hurriedly. Lisa was no longer there, no longer worried about her arm, her father, her lost career, or any of it. There was no easy fix, no answer to her situation, but there could be another answer, a different approach.

She looked at Ben, who now stood a respectful distance as the EMTs approached, as to not impede their assistance. “Thank you,” she mouthed to him. Her car accident and brush with death was more than just a comfort when she needed it most, it saved her life.