Extraordinary Adventures

  Bronfman could not imagine anyone so uncool as to be only half as cool as he was, but he appreciated the compliment and stayed. He thought it through like this: He had nothing else to steal. He knew who the bad guys were now. He was, in a completely counterintuitive way, safer at King’s Manor than he would be elsewhere. He trusted Thomas Edison not to kill him.

  At any rate, he didn’t have the wherewithal to sustain himself through the course of more than one crisis at a time. His mother was the crisis now. Her late-night phone calls were becoming increasingly weird and random. He’d pick up the phone, and it was as if she’d been talking to him for half an hour already but had only just decided to include him in the conversation. “… and without fresh pesto it tastes like the bottom of someone’s old shoe. You remember the Wilkersons. They moved to Alaska before there even was an Alaska. What a sweet family, and so open to new things. I think they bought the first thingamajig—you know what I mean, one of those things, whatever they were. It was the first of its kind I’d ever seen.”

  He visited her often. She was even-tempered and rational sometimes; at others she seemed untethered, floating far above him and the world, at the mercy of the prevailing winds. After she dug up Barney’s skull that day he’d buried it in a deeper hole, out of her reach in case she tried it again. And she had. She called him one night crying, “Where is he? Where is he, Edsel? What have you done with my dog?” The next day he brought her a roast chicken—she could eat off one of those for a week—and found a trail of dirt from the back door to her bedroom.

  He took her to see her doctor on Day Nineteen.

  His mother had been seeing Dr. Chelminski for only six months or so, having been assigned to him by the practice after her doctor of thirty years retired. “He’s not my kind of doctor,” she said.

  “I’m sure he’s fine.”

  “I despise him,” she told Bronfman.

  “You’ve only seen him twice!”

  “How many times would you visit someone you despise? For God’s sake, Edsel, sometimes I think I raised a rabbit.”

  But when he got her an appointment she went. They drove together, and sat side by side in the waiting room, just as they used to do when he was a boy, the roles so clearly reversed now that even he couldn’t fail to grasp it. She thumbed through the star-laden magazines, pausing at photographs of the actors with the big chins and bedroom eyes. “Yummy,” he heard her say. “Yummy, yummy, yummy.” After just a little while, they were called back.

  Dr. Chelminski was young, possibly even younger than Bronfman, but he was not despicable in any way that Bronfman could surmise. He was tall, with a long, friendly face and balding in a way that made him appear older than he was, even wiser.

  “Hello, Mrs. Bronfman,” he said. “I’ve been hoping you could come in.”

  “Really?”

  “We’ve been sending you all those pesky reminders,” he said. He winked at both of them. “They work eventually. They wear you down.”

  “Well, that’s not why I’m here,” she said.

  “No? Why, then?”

  She turned to Bronfman. “Ask my son.”

  Dr. Chelminski turned to him. “Okay, I will,” he said. He smiled, and winked, because it appeared that they were sharing an inside joke, Dr. Chelminski and Bronfman, an inside joke that was his mother. “Why is Mrs. Bronfman here today?”

  Bronfman opened his mouth to speak, but his mother interrupted. “He thinks I’m losing my mind,” she said.

  “I never said that,” Bronfman said.

  She turned away from him. “You didn’t have to,” she said. Her eyes wandered around the examination room. In a softer voice, she said, “I suspect you may be onto something.”

  “A checkup, then,” Dr. Chelminski said. “Easy peasy lemon squeezy. Mr. Bronfman, let’s leave the room so your mother can change into one of our lovely paper gowns.”

  They left her with a nurse and took a few steps down the hall, where the doctor placed a reassuring hand on Bronfman’s shoulder. “Take a seat in the waiting room,” he said. “We’ll come and get you when we’re done.”

  He did as he was told. The waiting room was almost full by then, but he found a seat beside a mother and her ten-year-old boy. Mother and son both were focused on screens, the boy on some gaming device, his mother on her phone. She was texting. Bronfman had texted before but not enough to feel at ease with it. He wondered if his detachment from this world—the world of instant everything—meant that there was something wrong with him beyond the ways he already knew things were wrong with him. It wasn’t a conscious decision on his part not to have a smartphone, or a computer at home. He wasn’t afraid of technology, because if that were the case he would be frightened twenty-four hours a day. And, in fact, technology that came in handy he used handily. Google, for instance. He used Google all the time. The other day he Googled the name Sheila McNabb, and the search engine came back with 5,580 matches, which was unhelpful. Facebook turned up nothing. He would have better luck finding her with a bloodhound than with Google. But the little boy and his mother seemed happy enough. Bronfman wondered what the world would be like when the little boy grew up, his mother got old, and he had to bring her back for a visit with some other doctor to see if she was losing her mind. But perhaps it was more likely, as the maintenance men had it, that we would all be robots by then, if indeed we weren’t already.

  “Mr. Bronfman?” It was the receptionist, calling to him from her little window. “They’re asking for you.”

  He followed the hallway back to where he remembered his mother’s room was, but Dr. Chelminski intercepted him before he opened the door. He brought out the reassuring hand again, and the sympathetic smile of understanding. If he had learned these things in medical school, he must have graduated at the top of his class.

  “So, Mr. Bronfman,” he said. “Wanted to let you know, your mother is fine.”

  “Fine? Really? That’s great!”

  “But I wouldn’t necessarily say fine.”

  “That’s exactly what you just did say.”

  “I mean that, for the condition she’s in, she’s doing well. She’s healthy. Strong heart, good lungs. Blood work, what we’ve seen of it, looks good.”

  Bronfman nodded.

  “But she has dementia,” Dr. Chelminski said. “I think you know that. Not a big surprise, I’m sure. The question is where to go from here, isn’t it? It’s one of those things that’s impossible to predict—how well or how badly she’ll do, and for how long. During the checkup, she had moments of perfect clarity and others where she appeared confused, a bit muddled. Occasionally, she seemed to believe I was trying to seduce her.” The doctor laughed and then, just as quickly, stopped. “In all seriousness, I can’t tell you what to expect, Mr. Bronfman, other than to expect her to get worse. It might be over the course of years or it could happen much more quickly. She might wake up tomorrow and not remember your name. I’ve seen it happen before, sadly. The bottom line is, she won’t be able to live alone much longer. She needs a sitter. A few hours a day, at least, and then more later, probably. Mrs. Bronfman is only seventy, and I realize that seems young for something like this these days. But she could live for a very long time. So just take it a day at a time and count your blessings. Appreciate the good you have. I’m prescribing a couple of things. And bring her back to see me in two months, unless you note something radical happening before that. Sound good?”

  “Great,” Bronfman said, even though it sounded terrible, in the worst possible terrible way. “It sounds great.”

  “Okay, then.”

  And Dr. Chelminski was gone. The nurse opened the door to his mother’s room and there she was, dressed, sitting on the edge of the examination table, legs dangling, purse in her lap, no worse for the wear.

  “Hey, Mom,” he said. He felt oddly afraid of her now—not as if she might hurt him but as if, having only just learned how fragile she was, he might hurt her. He walked toward her, hand extended,
in case she needed help getting down from the table.

  “I like Dr. Chelminski,” she said.

  “I’m glad,” Bronfman said.

  “And he liked me, too.”

  “He said as much to me.”

  “But,” she said, hopping down on her own like a woman half her age, “I told him we should keep our relationship completely and totally one hundred percent professional. Because, you know.” And she pointed to her head as if it were a new hat she’d just bought. “He has to take care of my brain.” She looked at her son. “Oh, sweetie. Don’t cry. There’s nothing to cry about.”

  “I’m not crying,” he said.

  “Then what is that tear doing running down your cheek?”

  Bronfman suddenly embraced her—sudden to him, sudden to her. Before today, every hug in his life had been pre-planned. He hugged her when she gave him a birthday present, for instance, or as he boarded the bus on the first day of school. But this one happened all on its own, and it was almost violent in its love. He wrapped the little woman who was still his mother in his arms, and it didn’t appear that he had any intention of letting her go.

  DAY

  TWENTY-TWO

  ONE

  He found her name on a sheet of paper on the bulletin board in the break room, advertising her availability and services.

  Bettina.

  They met at a coffee shop for the interview.

  In a world where almost nothing corresponded to Bronfman’s preconceptions, Bettina, the sitter he hired to take care of his mother, could not have been more perfect. It was as if she had jumped out of his head. She was old, older than Bronfman ever thought it was possible to become, an age beyond numbers. She was small and thin and black, with a fine blanket of snowy hair on her head and a mouth full of the best teeth he’d ever seen. Bettina meant “God’s promise,” she told him. She had no license; she didn’t work for a company. She had worked as a housekeeper for a co-worker of Bronfman’s and had left his family’s service when all the children she raised had grown up and left home. Her eyes were tired and rested deep in her face. She looked as if she had learned what the Great Mystery was and was a bit disappointed by it. She mostly said very little. But she could sit with his mother, and she was clearly kind—that was all that was required. He hired her on the spot.

  He considered the irony. It had been so easy to find Bettina, this woman who might, in theory, be saving his mother’s life, while twenty-two days had passed and he had yet to secure a companion for a weekend at the beach. He’d had that one promising nibble on his line, but now his little boat had sunk and he was treading water, hoping for another woman to float by.

  DAY

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  ONE

  Bronfman liked Bettina. He liked to watch her watch TV. She cooked and cleaned and sorted out his mother’s meds, led her to the bathroom if she needed to be led. But most of her time was spent in a chair beside his mother’s bed, watching her stories, the soaps. Sometimes she’d talk back to the television. “Oh, Lord,” he heard her say once. “You’re stupid, Barbara. He doesn’t want anything from you but your money.” Bronfman started watching the show with her and discovered that she was right: he didn’t want anything from Barbara but money. It would have been obvious to anyone. Why didn’t Barbara see that?

  His mother pretended to hate Bettina, or hated whatever imaginary thing she had made her out to be.

  “She tortures me,” Muriel said. “She’s like the CIA. Waterboarding would be a vacation for me now. She grabs my arm so hard—that’s why I have these bruises. I met a few like her at the office, the hard-bitten criminals with nothing in their future but the inside of a cell. Mean as a snake. She sits there and stares at me sometimes like the Devil.”

  “Bettina?”

  “Yes, Bettina. She’s got you snowed, I can see.” She sighed and shook her head, as if her son were no more perceptive than a pine tree. Bettina was right there in the room with them when Muriel said these things, but it was hard to tell if she was listening or if she cared. They were in the living room. His mother was sitting in her big, overstuffed red chair, all dressed up in an ivory blouse and her old swanky designer jeans, but she wasn’t going anywhere. Bettina was watching the portable television they’d set up on the coffee table.

  “I wish I had a man here,” Muriel said. “That’s why people get together, you know, pair up, so that when they’re old one can take of the other. Why else? A child is just the backup plan. You’re the backup plan, Edsel, methinks.”

  “Do you want me to move in, Mother? Because I will.”

  “Kill me first,” she said. She nailed him with her stare. “I mean it, Edsel. Life is out there, waiting for you.” She pointed toward some indefinite spot behind her, beyond the walls of her home. “Not here. Go thou, son, and fall face-first into the smorgasbord of life. It’s not too late, according to your father. All you’ll find here is two old ladies getting ready to die.”

  “Speak for yourself,” Bettina said without turning away from the television. So she was listening.

  “Seriously,” Bronfman said. “I’ll move in.”

  “And, as I said, seriously, kill me first.”

  “I’ll kill her,” Bettina said. “Sure enough I will.”

  “Oh, Bettina, stop it,” Muriel said.

  Bettina and his mother laughed. It sounded like an inside joke to Bronfman.

  “Are you taking your meds?”

  Muriel waved the question away. “Ask Bettina,” she said. “She’s in charge of everything.”

  “Where do you live?” Bettina asked Bronfman.

  It was the first thing she’d said to him since he hired her. He felt as though he were being called on in class.

  “King’s Manor,” he said. “Over the mountain. It’s—”

  “Oh, I know King’s Manor,” she said, nodding. “Um-hum. I know King’s Manor.”

  A commercial came on. Bettina leaned back, nodded at some thought she was having. “Watch yourself,” she said. “Lock up. That place is full of dope dealers and layabouts, my nephew tells me.”

  “Bettina knows all,” his mother said. “She’s a fount of wisdom.”

  “You don’t have to warn me about King’s Manor,” Bronfman said. “I’ve been robbed once already.”

  “Robbed?” his mother said.

  “Yes,” Bronfman said. “But they didn’t take much. I mean, I didn’t have much to take. I’ve replaced a lot of it.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me this had happened?”

  “You told me,” he said. “Remember?”

  She shook her head and waved his words away with her hand, and, just like that, moved on to another subject.

  “You should work out, Edsel,” she said. “That’s something you’re interested in, isn’t it? I think you mentioned that to me once. Don’t you think he should work out, Bettina?”

  Bettina shrugged. “I don’t think it matters one way or another, in the long run.” But she gave Bronfman a long look. “You got a girl?”

  “Not yet,” he said. “But I’m working on it!” He had spent some time coming up with this, what he thought of as a rejoinder, in case anyone asked. It sounded so much better than “No.”

  “I think it’s clear he does need to work out. Or take steroids. Something. My son’s a little puffball of mush, a marshmallow man.” She laughed. “I’m just kidding, Edsel!”—what she always said after saying something particularly wicked. I’m just kidding ha-ha.

  “Hush,” Bettina said. “The both of you. My story is back on.”

  Muriel rolled her eyes and laughed and laughed, and Bettina laughed a little, too.

  “See?” Muriel said. “See?”

  “See what?” Bronfman said. “What?”

  “Popsicle, please,” Muriel said, her Ping-Pong-ball thoughts bouncing all over the place. “The cherry kind, per favore. Miss Bettina, helloooooo?”

  The next night, hours after Bettina had left, his mother wandered of
f into the woods behind their house and took off almost all of her clothes, and hung them on the branch of a tree. Over the next three days, she called the police a dozen times. There were prowlers, apparently, rapists and other characters who were knocking at her bedroom window at all hours of the day and night. The police said the calls had to stop. So later that week Bettina moved into Bronfman’s old room, completely took it over and made it her own. It all happened so quickly. One day he was with his mother, celebrating her birthday full of pointless whimsy, and now she was in the round-the-clock care of a sweet old woman. It was as if his mother had jumped on a sled at the tip-top of a tall mountain, and he was watching her whiz by swiftly, gaining speed on her way to the end of her life, while he was just trying, late out of the starting gate, to begin his own.

  DAY

  TWENTY-NINE

  ONE

  If tomorrow Bronfman was kidnapped and blindfolded and thrown from a plane without a parachute but then somehow landed softly and mostly unharmed in a grain silo full of money, that would still be the second most surprising thing to happen to him after what would happen today.

  Today he became a member of the YMCA.

  For the first time in his life, he had a gym card and a locker. He had the YMCA pen. It was like having a second home. Almost an entire month had passed since he received the call from Extraordinary Adventures, and though Bronfman could not be said to have a plan—he had never had a plan in his life, and wouldn’t know what to do with one if he did—he did at least have a goal, and he was moving in that general direction. Yes, Sheila McNabb had disappeared into the ether, and Serena Stanton was an officer of the law, and Coco—well, she was just Coco, the friend of Thomas Edison, drug dealer. But Bronfman had never had so many conversations with so many women in so short a time in his entire life. That was progress. And so he felt obliged to continue, to get out of his comfort zone, to see what else could happen.