When the ambulance arrived my mother climbed into the back with my grandmother, and my father and I were to follow behind in our own car. One of the officers flashed the light in my father’s eyes, asked if he was okay to drive. My father said probably not and the officer left it at that, told him to be careful, and off we went.

7

Delirium. Seeing things move in the night. Lying on the floor watching the shadows dance up the wall. Thinking my thoughts and wondering how I was going to survive now that I was broke. And hungry. And cold. Payday still a week away. That would be a fast far greater than any I’d ever done during wrestling. Dapples of light filtered through the tree beyond the tracks and came in the untreated windows, spots of light that brought life to the shadows, glowing eyes and gnashing teeth. Wind and cold. The trains passing. The shrieks of metal on metal piercing the night. The trains forever passing.

8

This third stroke didn’t kill her, not instantly anyhow, though it plunged her into a lasting decline that would take her six months later. And although the damage to her brain was permanent, she sometimes had moments of clarity not unlike an Alzheimer’s patient.

Before I started school, my grandmother had spent so much time reading to me that I had actually learned to read myself. In the last months of her life, while she was at her worst, the roles were reversed and it was I who read to her. Most of the time she simply listened with her eyes closed, though at other times when I finished a story I’d find her looking at me and smiling, a smile that vanished only when she fell asleep.

A week before she died I read to her The Giving Tree. She beamed with pride while I read. When I finished she took me by the hand.

“Promise me you’ll take care of your mother,” she said. “Never trust your father too much. I know he’s great to you sometimes, but in the end we are who we are. Don’t ever forget that. In the end, we are who we are.”

“Okay, Grandma. I promise,” I said with the ease of a six-year-old willing to agree to anything to please a person he looks up to.

“And keep reading,” she said. “You’re a very smart boy, and books are like buried treasure waiting to be found. Don’t ever stop digging.”

“I won’t, Grandma.”

She died quietly, in her sleep. My mother was the one who found her. I can still remember the way she sobbed when they carried my grandmother out on a gurney, her bodied covered by a white sheet.