Part 20
Part 20 of 27 of Eleven Years of Thursdays by Helen Abbott
We had twenty nine days.
I want to lay out the actual options, because for years I had heard people say there was nothing they could do, and I had always privately believed those people had not tried hard enough, and I would like to correct the record on myself.
Option one was a group home. There were four in the county that took men his age at his level of function. Two had waiting lists measured in years. One I walked through on a Tuesday and it was clean and the staff were kind and there were eleven men in a common room and a television bolted to the wall and my brother would have lasted nine days in it. The fourth did not return three calls.
Option two was a place in Columbus that Dr. Feld described as excellent, which it was. It was four thousand two hundred dollars a month. He would qualify for a subsidy that brought it to two thousand six hundred. My take home is three thousand one hundred.
Option three was another apartment, another Ray Kozak, and the honest version of that, which Feld made me say out loud in her office: that it worked for eleven years because a woman with nothing else left in her life went every Thursday without fail, and that I have a husband and a daughter and a job and I am not that woman, and that when I missed three weeks in December my brother sat on a floor with all the lights on.
“He isn’t fragile,” Feld said. “He is dependent on a structure. Those are different. Build him a structure that doesn’t depend on one person being perfect, because you won’t be, and the last one wasn’t either. She just died before it caught up with her.”
Option four I did not say out loud for eleven days.
I said it in our kitchen on the fourth of January, after Nora was down, and Tom listened to the whole thing with his hands flat on the counter.
“The room over the garage,” he said.
“It has its own stairs. It has a bathroom. He’d have a door that locks from his side.”
“Claire.”
“Just say it.”
“I’m going to say it badly.”
“Say it badly.”
Tom looked at the ceiling for a second, at the floor above us where our daughter was asleep.
“I have met him twice,” he said. “I liked him both times. I think what happened to him is the worst thing I’ve ever heard and I think your mother did something to you that I’m not over yet.” He took a breath. “And when I picture him living forty feet from Nora, something in my chest does a thing, and I hate myself for it, and it still does it.”
The furnace came on.
“He’s not dangerous,” I said. “Feld says the numbers on that are”
“I know what the numbers are. I looked them up in October.” He said it quietly. “I’ve been looking things up since October, Claire. I know he’s more likely to be hurt than to hurt. I know all of it.”
“Then what.”
“Then knowing a number and being a father are two different rooms in a person,” Tom said, “and I’m standing in both of them, and I’m not saying no.”
He picked up the dish towel and put it down again.
“I’m saying I’m frightened,” he said, “and I need you to let me be that out loud instead of making me pretend, because if I have to pretend then in two years I’ll be your mother.”