placing him in a treatment facility. “We’re a family,” she reminded me. “Not a bunch of Polynesians who drop their unwanted into a volcano.” That was around the time his wandering began. In the early morning hours Mother would get a call from a neighbor saying, “Don’t worry, Willie’s over here with us eating toast.” Once a patrolman picked him up, the moon still out and Willie still dressed in pajamas, walking up the street away from the house. He claimed he was on his way to the airport. After that, Mother—in clear violation of local fire codes—had a key-operated deadbolt installed on the inside of the front door. She hid the key in the pocket of her terrycloth robe, which she religiously hung from a hook on their bedroom door.
Dementia Z.Z. BOONE
She tells me to come right away, that my father has “finally come unwired.” I’ve gotten calls like this from Mother before— some coming in the middle of the night, many following my father’s ability to find his way into the locked liquor cabinet—but none where she seemed this frantic. “I’m afraid he could hurt himself,” she’d say, or “He’s on another bender.” Now she says, “Please! I think he might kill me!” It’s two-thirty in the afternoon and I’m in my office at the university preparing to administer a final examination in forty-five minutes. The course: “British Folk Figures: Real and Imagined.” I can leave afterward, at 4:30, but something tells me I need to go now. I get Justine, the department secretary, to cover for me, get in my car and drive the forty minutes toward their house in Brampton. It’s April, 1976. Darryl Sittler has recently scored an NHL record of ten goals for our Maple Leafs, people are abuzz about the coming summer Olympics in Montreal, and in the U.S. folks are preparing for the 200th birthday of their nation. Virtually no one owns a mobile phone, contact lenses aren’t disposable, and most people have to actually leave their lounge chairs to change television channels. My father—who has always insisted that everyone, his only son included, call him “Willie”—began losing touch a few years earlier. Little things. Has anybody seen my slippers? and he’d be wearing them. Gradually it got more serious. He’d be driving and forget where he was going or even where he was. I suggested to Mother that maybe we needed to consider the possibility of 134
Z.Z. Boone
When I get to the house, she’s sitting on the porch swing waiting. It’s mild, but she’s wearing a pea-green, ankle-length winter coat that looks like it swallowed her whole. I park by the curb, but the woman is apparently in no mood to waste time. Before I’ve even taken the keys from the ignition, she’s standing outside my car, hands plunged in her deep coat pockets, lips already moving as if she’s warming them up. “How is he?” I ask. “Who knows?” she shrugs. “He’s off somewhere.” By “off somewhere,” she means his mind is in a different place. He’s currently not among the living. In fact, my father has almost never been “off somewhere,” not in the literal sense, unless you count going to work or maybe driving down to Florida for two endless weeks every summer when we had the money. We sit on the porch swing, its red cushions worn and faded, while a TV laugh- track blasts from inside. “He’s starting to become violent,” she tells me. It seems the story is this: Mother, fifteen years younger than Willie, had just made them both tea. He was sitting in the living room watching the television when she brought in the tray. “You know who’d get a kick out of this?” he said, pointing Berkeley Fiction Review
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