Here to End You

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Prologue

My name is Carmen Rivera, and I’m a companion for the elderly.

The short version is, you don’t let a person be alone. You make sure he eats something hot, gets outside, says hello to the neighbors. That he has someone he can tell the same story to for the fourth time, and that someone listens to it for the fourth time. And cares, every single time. People pay for that.

But doing it for the pleasure of it? That I do at home. Like when the kids go to their father with homework or with a question about where something is, Hector doesn’t take his eyes off the TV. He says: go to 411, four-eleven knows everything. Meaning me. Four-eleven is how tall I am, and Hector thinks it’s the best joke he’s ever come up with in his life.

It comes easy to me, because I think being a companion for the elderly is one of the best jobs there is. An old person has the right to live out their old age in peace, instead of dying in an accident no one noticed.

That’s what I thought until that March.

Then I went up three steps onto a stranger’s porch, looked at the railing, and knocked on the door.

And two months later I stood in the kitchen of that same house, setting out an old man’s pills in front of him. Ready to send him where no one comes back from.

1

I walk into every new house with the same thought: here come the eyes.

Mine don’t match. The right one is brown, like everyone else in my family. The left is lighter, kind of greenish, like it came from a different batch. Doctors say it just happens. Clients say nothing. They look half a second longer than they should, and from that half second I already know how it’s going to go. Some pretend not to notice. With those it’s polite and boring. Others ask straight out. With those it’s easy. Still others start to suspect I’ve slipped something into their soup.

And then there’s my height. Four-eleven. I look at the top shelf in a store like it’s a foreign country. One client’s son opened the door for me once, looked me up and down, and said, “We were actually expecting someone... bigger.” I had his mother out of her chair and into the car faster than he could find his keys. In ten years I’ve learned that size is for hauling furniture, and you don’t haul old people, you coax them. I’m good at coaxing.

This one had written through the site. Short, no mistakes, no smiley faces, already a good sign. Father, sixty-four, dementia, mid-stage, walks on his own, lives at home. Needs someone twice a week, mornings. I wrote back that I’d take it if there was no bedridden care and no overnights. “No bedridden care, and none on the horizon,” he wrote.

Then he called. His voice was even, and he never once interrupted me, which is so rare I checked whether the call had dropped. “Come out and take a look at us, and we’ll take a look at you.” That “take a look at us” is what sold me on the job. The way a man talks about his old man on the phone is how he lives with him. I’ve tested that twenty times and I’ve never been wrong.

Drexel Hill, forty minutes from Fairhill, fifty-five if you hit traffic. I hit it. Early March, everything bare and wet, lawns the color of old cardboard, the wire skeletons of the winter lights still sticking up in the neighbors’ yards. The house on Burlington Avenue turned out to be two stories, gray, with an enclosed porch. Three steps, railings on both sides, decent ones, actually bolted down.

I always look at the railings first, then at the people. Railings lie less often. Too bad these couldn’t tell me the truth in time.

The son opened the door. Tall, about thirty-five, buzz cut, small features, phone in his hand. But the first thing I saw wasn’t his face. It was the badge on his belt and the holster under his unzipped jacket. I just tilted my head a little to one side. Everybody says it makes me look cuter.

“Carmen Rivera?”

“Just Carmen is fine.”

“Keith Dolan.”

He stepped aside and let me go in first, instead of barging ahead like the host of a tour.

The house was overheated and smelled like coffee and burnt dust off the radiators. In the kitchen, the father sat at the table. Raymond. Big, broad-shouldered, gray-haired, in a plaid shirt buttoned all the way up. Which, by the way, is a diagnosis in reverse. A man who dresses himself and buttons up to the collar still has a grip on his day. He stood to meet me and shook my hand. His was dry and strong, a pilot’s hand. He asked how the drive was.

“Traffic.”

“That’s a woman, Keith,” he said, looking at me like I was a schoolgirl. “A smart one.”

I liked that way more than I should have.

Keith talked about his father in front of his father, and that’s when I listen hard. There are families that talk about an old man like he’s furniture. I don’t work for those. Keith talked differently: forty years in the cockpit, started out on regional routes, then twenty years flying people around in small planes out of the airfield in Blue Bell. Good guy, but stubborn. If he decides the garage door gets fixed today, it gets fixed today.

“I did fix it, though,” Raymond said, half asking.

“You did,” Keith agreed. “In January.”

The old man laughed, easily, willingly, and there was nothing sick in that laugh. I thought I’d gotten lucky. Then, about twenty minutes later, he picked a pair of glasses up off the table, turned them over, and said they weren’t his, somebody must have left them. They were his. He’d just used them to read the label on a jar. He didn’t argue. He just set them down and never touched them again, as if the glasses had changed hands right there, to somebody else, for good.

That’s when I stopped thinking I was lucky and started thinking I had work to do.

Keith told me the rest on the porch. It gets worse toward evening. When he’s home, the door to the yard stays on the latch, keys out of sight, because his father might go out just to go out. He loses things and looks for them in the wrong places. The blood pressure pills and the heart pills are sorted by day, and you have to check with your own eyes, not take his word for it.

“Why?” I asked.

“In January he took out all the bottles and swallowed as many as he could fit in his hand,” Keith said. “I found him that evening in the chair. He wasn’t responding.” He paused. “A day in the hospital, and then home. It had never happened before.”

He didn’t add any details, and I didn’t ask. People tell this kind of thing in pieces, each piece at the right moment.

“Where do you keep them now?” I asked. “The bottles.”

“They were in the bathroom. It never crossed my mind he’d go through every one in there.” He shrugged. “So I moved them to the kitchen, the cabinet by the fridge, behind the napkins. He doesn’t go poking around in kitchen cabinets, I know that much about him. I fill the organizer when he’s out of the room.”

“You need a lockbox. The kind with a code. Any pharmacy has them.”

“I know. I told the social worker I’d get one.” He glanced at his phone. “I just haven’t gotten around to it.”

And there always has to be milk. He’ll pay for it.

“Usually half a gallon a week. A gallon at most.”

“I had a client who’d buy a gallon and not drink a drop. He hid it in the cabinets. By summer the kitchen smelled so bad the neighbors thought somebody had died. So I’ll ask up front: do we drink the milk or hide it?”

Keith looked at me for a second and smirked.

“We drink it.”

I don’t take bedridden clients. Officially it’s because of my back. Really, it’s just not my thing. But when a person’s memory gets tangled, that’s different. You have to figure out what year he woke up in today and go where he is, instead of dragging him to where you are. On those days I like myself. Not a cleaning lady, but a translator from a language only I learned.

And one more thing they don’t put in the listings. A strong man, a house, and nobody there but the two of you. In ten years there’d been three like that. The first held my wrist when I got up. The second undressed the minute the door closed behind his daughter, and played innocent. The third said something to me so ugly that I packed my bag before I’d worked an hour. And don’t tell me it’s the disease. The disease is half to blame. The other half is who the man was for the sixty years before it. So from day one I watch how he looks at me, where he sits, and what he says when the relative has left the room.

Raymond didn’t say anything like that. He asked where my family was from. I said Fairhill, but originally the island, Mami sewed her whole life, Abuela still runs the block. He nodded and said he’d flown into San Juan, and that coming in there was beautiful. That was all.

We settled on Tuesday and Friday, nine to one, twenty-five an hour. Keith walked me to my car, though he didn’t have to.

That evening I stopped by Mami’s and told her I’d taken on a new house. A good house, good people, an old pilot and his son.

“What does the son do?”

“He’s a police officer. A detective.”

It went quiet.

Mami got up, walked over to the chair by the window, and wiped the back of it with her palm, though there was no dust on it. No one had sat in that chair for seven years.