“I’ll meet you in the ER waiting room,” he said.
I asked at the front desk for Dad’s room number anyway, but Paul met me there in less than a minute. “Hey, brother,” he said. “Not much for answering your calls, are you?”
“You know I can’t take a cell phone inside. You should have called my work number.”
“I did. No answer there, either.”
“Mom’s on her way,” I said.
“Okay. Come on, I’ll show you his room.” We walked through the double doors and down a series of hallways. “He’s just down here on the left.”
There was something in Paul’s face. Fear and worry, but something else, too. Guilt. And just the hint of defiance. In an instant, I knew what had happened.
“You’ve got to be kidding me. You gave it to him. You did, didn’t you?”
“What?” His guilty look was all the confirmation I needed.
“That parasite! You intentionally infected him with it, gave him an injection, or else put it in his food or something. What did you think would happen? Did you expect you could cure Alzheimer’s with a fungus? The world’s leading neurodegenerative disease, and you were going to fix it with a home remedy?”
His expression turned to belligerence. “Just listen for a minute.”
“Listen? To your excuses and rationalizations? You performed human testing on our father. I don’t want to hear it.”
“Neil. Neil, wait…”
I pushed past him and walked into my father’s room. He lay on his back, his head lifted and straining, one arm tied to the side rail with a Velcro restraint. Two oxygen tubes looped around his ears and snaked into his nostrils, held in place with white tape. A nurse stood beside him, speaking calmly to him and trying to restrain his other arm.
“Get away from me!” He batted at her with his free hand, then tried to reach his IV and rip it out of his arm.
“What’s going on?” I asked.
“He keeps pulling out his IV,” she said. “Are you his family? Can you help?”
“It’s okay, Dad,” I said. “She’s here to help you. Calm down.” I caught his wrist and held it so she could fasten the strap around it.
“Who are you? What do you want with me?” he shouted.
“It’s me. It’s Neil, Dad. Your son. You’re sick. You need medicine.”
He rattled his hands against the side rails and strained against the straps. He wore a vest with strings that had been tied to the rails, preventing him from getting out of the bed.
“I don’t need medicine! What I need is to go to work. I’m late for work, and you’re keeping me here against my will.”
Paul stood in the doorway, not coming any closer. The IV beeped, but the nurse made no move to check it.
“You don’t need to go to work,” I said to my father. “You called in sick.”
That stopped him for a moment. “I did?”
“You did. They’re not expecting you. They’ve got it covered for today.”
I thought I had calmed him, but he gave a huge jerk, yanking his whole body to one side. The rails rattled, and the bed itself squeaked against the floor and shifted slightly to the right.
“We might have to sedate him if we can’t keep him calmer,” the nurse said. “Ten minutes ago, he managed to pull out his nasal cannula by rubbing his face against the side of the bed.”
“You can’t break me,” Dad growled. “I won’t tell you a thing. It doesn’t matter what you do to me. You can tell your boss that I’ll die first.”
I sat on a stool next to the bed and stroked his head, speaking softly. “You’re home now,” I said. “You made it. You didn’t tell. We’re going to take care of you.”
He calmed slightly, though his eyes still swung wildly back and forth. “Who are you?” he asked.
I whispered in his ear. “Neil Johns. I’m an NSA agent. I’m here to take care of you.”
“I didn’t tell,” Dad said. “I was strong.”
I stroked his hair, remembering times as a boy when I had been scared at night, and he had stroked my head until I fell asleep. “I know you were, Dad,” I said. “I know.”
The nurse left. Paul came into the room, then, but I glared at him. “No,” I said. “Get out.”
He ignored me. “I was trying to help him. Who are you to send me away? You’ve barely seen him since you started your job.”
“At least I didn’t try to kill him.”
“He’s been worse. A lot worse. He doesn’t even know who I am most of the time. Do you think that’s what he would want?”
I felt the muscles in my neck tighten painfully. I wanted to punch Paul, or else grab him by the hair and make him look, really look, at what he’d done. “Of course it’s not what he wanted. Nobody wants dementia. Then again, nobody wants a fungal infection, either. You could have killed him.”
“But if there was a chance! Even a small chance, that he might get better. Don’t you think he would want us to try? What does he have to lose?”
The IV pole kept beeping. “Did you even ask him first?”
Paul threw up his hands. “What good would that do? He wouldn’t understand.”
“You could have tried. You could have asked Mom. You could have asked me. We could have decided together.”
“Decided what? The choices were between a slow and horrible death, and a chance at something better. It wasn’t like he had a lot to lose.”
I stood up right into Paul’s face, the stool crashing to the floor behind me. My fist clenched, and only the awareness of our father lying next to me held me back from swinging it. “He had plenty to lose,” I said. “He had his life. He might have been sick, but his life was still worth something. It wasn’t yours to gamble away.”
Mom came into the room and saw us like that, facing each other down. “What are you doing?” she said. “Is he okay? You said you would call me!”
I stepped back. “I’m sorry, Mom.”
She saw Dad on the bed, restrained, oxygen tubes in his nose and a wild look in his eyes. She rushed to his side. “What happened?”
“He has a fungal infection,” I said flatly, with a dark look at Paul. “Looks like it’s the same one that Paul picked up in the Amazon.”
“How is he? Is he responding to the medication?”
I realized that with all of Dad’s agitated behavior and my anger at Paul, I hadn’t thought to ask. “They think his chances are good,” Paul said. “But he doesn’t know where he is or what’s happening to him. He keeps trying to get away.”
“You told them what it is?” I asked. “So they know how to treat it?”
Paul looked hurt. “Of course, I did.”
I righted the stool, and Mom sat down. She took his hand. “I’m here, Charles. It’s going to be all right.”
His violence seemed to have calmed, but he was still breathing hard, confused. “That’s not my name,” he said. “You’ve got the wrong person. I don’t know who you are.”
Mom’s eyes were wet, and she stroked his hair as I had done. “That’s okay,” she said. “I know who you are.”
As darkness fell, he became combative again, jerking at his straps and shouting at us. It was typical for Alzheimer’s patients to get worse when it grew dark outside. They called it sundowning, but no one really knew why it happened. At the end of visiting hours, the nurse told us that one of us could stay the night, if we wanted, to help keep him calm, but the others would have to return in the morning. Both Paul and I wanted to do it, but Mom insisted that she wouldn’t leave him.