Part 11
Part 11 of 27 of Eleven Years of Thursdays by Helen Abbott
The pharmacy printout from the hatbox had a doctor’s name on it.
N. Feld, MD. An address on Wayne Avenue, one of those practices in a converted house with a ramp built onto the side and four names on the door.
I called and said I was Eileen Renner’s daughter and that I needed to talk to someone about my brother, and the woman on the phone put me on hold for ninety seconds and came back and said Dr. Feld could see me Tuesday at eight fifteen, before her first patient, and something about how fast that happened told me a great deal.
Nadine Feld was in her sixties, short, with reading glasses pushed up into hair she had stopped coloring. She had a file on the desk that was two inches thick and she did not open it.
“I was sorry to hear about your mother,” she said. “She was one of the most reliable people I have ever dealt with in thirty years of this.”
“Doctor, I need you to understand something before you say anything else.” My hands were flat on my knees. “Until five weeks ago I believed my brother died in 2014.”
She looked at me over the top of the glasses she wasn’t wearing.
“Say that again,” she said.
So I said it again, and I watched a professional woman in her own office recalculate eleven years of her working life in about four seconds.
“She told me you knew,” Dr. Feld said. “Not in so many words. She said the family knew and the family had decided on privacy, and I want you to hear me, Claire, because you’re going to want somebody to be the villain and I am not going to volunteer. Your brother is thirty one years old. He is competent. He makes his own medical decisions. He has told me, in this office, more than once, in writing, that he does not consent to contact with extended family. That is not your mother’s doing. That is his.”
“In writing.”
“In writing.”
“Since when?”
“Since 2016.”
There was a clock in that office with a loud second hand, and somebody was running a vacuum in the hall.
“What is it,” I said. “What does he have.”
And she told me, in the plain unhurried way of a person who has told several thousand people, and I am not going to put all of it down here, because it belongs to him and not to me, and because I’ve come to believe that the name of it is the least interesting true thing about my brother.
What I will put down is this. It started when he was eighteen. It is the kind of thing that arrives in young men at exactly that age, when everyone around them has decided that moods and strangeness and staying up for three nights are what nineteen looks like. It is treatable in the sense that weather is survivable. He has been stable, more or less, for seven years, and stable does not mean what people think it means.
“He’s had a hard life,” she said, “and he has done better with it than almost anyone I have.”
“And she paid for this. All of this. Out of a dental receptionist’s salary.”
“She paid what the county didn’t.” Dr. Feld finally opened the file, not to read it, just to square it. “Your mother came to this office on the first Tuesday of every month for eleven years. Sometimes with him. Usually alone, to talk about him. She never missed one. Not one, Claire, in eleven years, and I have patients who can’t manage six months.”
She closed the file again.
“The last time I saw her was the seventh of July,” she said. “She asked me what would happen to him if she died first.”