The Rom-Commers

Chapter Three

ONE WEEK LATER,I was on a plane.

I could easily have taken a month to pack up my stuff, and organize my dad’s medications, and label the supply shelves, and color-code daily to-do lists, and cover every surface with sticky-note reminders.

Taking care of my dad wasn’t an art—it was a science, and it sure as hell wasn’t for amateurs. Sylvie was a smart girl, sure, but she’d never had any training for this, and I felt like an astronaut handing over the keys to the space shuttle to a chimpanzee.

“He has to drink a minimum of forty ounces of water every single day,” I told Sylvie as I marked water bottles in the cabinet with Sharpies. “And he won’t remember, so you have to follow him around and nag him.”

“Do I really have to nag him?” Sylvie asked, like a person who had never done any caretaking.

“If you don’t nag him, then he won’t drink enough water, and then sodium levels in his body will spike, fluid will build up in his inner ear, and he’ll lose his balance, hit his head, and wind up in the ER all night.”

“Ah,” Sylvie said. “Nag him. Got it.”

“It helps to keep a color-coded chart,” I said, opening up one of the kitchen cabinets to show her where the last three months were taped up. “The blue boxes are for water. Yellow is for multivitamins. Red, purple, orange, and green are all for medications. And the unicorn puffy stickers are for sodium.”

“Dad doesn’t seem like he’d be motivated by unicorn puffy stickers.”

“They’re not for him. They’re for me.”

Sylvie squinted at the chart. “And how does the sodium thing work?”

Was it possible she didn’t know this? Had I really sheltered her that much? “Milligrams of sodium” had been the organizing principle of my life for the past decade. “We have to keep Dad’s sodium intake under a thousand milligrams a day,” I said. “Which is not easy. One slice of deli meat has two hundred.”

“But how do I even track that?”

I pulled out my frayed, dog-eared sodium guidebook. “You memorize it. Like a champion.” I tapped the book with pride. “Learn it. Live it. I can tell you exactly how much sodium is in any food you ever name.”

Sylvie looked at the book uncertainly.

“Seriously,” I said, “that’s true. Try me.”

“Strawberries?” Sylvie asked.

“Two milligrams per cup.”

“White rice,” she tried next.

“Nine milligrams per cup.”

“French fries!”

“Sixty-eight milligrams for a small bag.”

Sylvie nodded in approval.

“Try to stump me,” I said. “I dare you. I can go all day. Truffles. Pineapple juice. Beets. Mollusks.”

“Sounds like you really know your shit.”

I nodded, like You know it. “I will crush you.”

The obsession with sodium, of course, was about trying to control the Ménière’s disease.

Nobody knows exactly what causes it. But they do know it’s an inner-ear disorder that throws off your balance. My dad’s clearly started in the wake of his brain injury, and he had a particularly bad case that hasn’t resolved over time. He would’ve been unsteady on his feet anyway, from the partial paralysis on his left side, but the Ménière’s made it a hundred times worse.

More than just unsteadiness, though, he had a thing called “drop attacks” where he felt—suddenly—like he just got shoved to the ground. Or even sometimes like the room itself flipped upside down in one swift heave. And nobody ever saw it coming—least of all him. No warning at all. He could be sitting at dinner and just catapult out of his chair.

That’s why we had carpet everywhere, and industrial pads on the kitchen floor, and foam bumpers on sharp corners. That’s why he didn’t drive anymore, or take stairs, if he could help it. That’s why we were on a first-name basis with several nurses at the closest ER.

That’s why I did not trust Sylvie to take over.

I wasn’t sure I trusted her to run things for six days—much less six weeks.

And that’s why, now, I couldn’t sleep on the plane.

What was I doing? This was lunacy. I couldn’t just leave my dad with a twenty-two-year-old. Even a college graduate with a Phi Beta Kappa key needed more than one week to prepare for this. Our widowed next-door neighbor Mrs. Otsuka had agreed to check in on them after she saw me burst into tears in the laundry room, but that would hardly be enough. Leaving—actually packing up and getting on my first flight anywhere in almost a decade—felt so astonishingly irresponsible, I couldn’t believe I was letting it happen.

Sitting on that plane, wedged into a middle seat in the last row, listening to toilet flush after toilet flush, I realized I was shaking.

Like genuinely shaking. A lot.

Not just my hands, the way you might on a cold day if you’d forgotten your mittens. My whole body. From the core. And my heart was just thumping like a kettledrum—so big and so hard that when I looked down, I could see the fabric of my shirt vibrating.

Was it fear?

Was I afraid to fly? Afraid to leave my dad? Afraid of changing my narrow little life?

Sure. Yes. All of the above.

But more than that: I was going to miss him.

My dad wasn’t just a dad. He was my favorite person.

He was everybody’s favorite person.

He was a delight.

Sometimes a TBI will cause personality changes in people—you hear a lot about anger and depression in the wake of brain injuries like his, and reasonably so. But if it changed him, and I’m not sure this is even medically possible… it made him sweeter.

My dad was always the dad everybody wanted. If there were a dad store, he’d be a bestseller. They’d have rows and rows of him for sale, right up front. He was always warm and encouraging and connected and goofy—even before.

But now, in the wake of it all, he was something even more astonishing.

He was cheerful.

He lost everything in that rockfall—and he found a way to keep going. And not only that. He found a way to laugh. And sing goofy little ditties. And close his eyes and turn his face to the sun.

And he got me to do all those things, too.

How did he do it? How did he stand beside a personal Grand Canyon of suffering and manage to feel… grateful?

And how on earth would I cope out in the heartless world without him?

Who even was I on my own?

Before the rockfall, my dad was a cellist.

After the rockfall, he taught himself every instrument you can play with one hand—mastering the harmonica, the bones, the zither, the tambourine, the tin whistle, and the slide trombone. He also learned one-handed crochet, and potting on a wheel, and beading. “You pick the colors,” he said, “I’ll make the magic.” He got so good at beading necklaces that he opened a jewelry shop on Etsy.

Which actually added a fair bit of cash to our monthly budget.

I would really miss him, is what I’m saying. And I found myself wondering, as we hit some turbulence and I white-knuckled the armrest, if maybe dreams were better off never trying to become reality.