My Bob

My Bob is crazy.  Not REDRUM, eat your own crap, serial killer crazy.  Just old lady crazy. 

That thought kept worming its way through my brain as I was taking the path from the parking garage into the hospital.  Through the double glass doors into the elevator vestibule -- crazy, crazy, crazy.  I had never visited a lock-down ward before. 

The UP arrow on the outside of the elevator doors was rubbed off almost completely, leaving just a black dot on the blank glowing square.  I could hear the whooshing of the elevator coming for me and my mother, coming to take us to the looney bin.  The ring of the bell and the elevator opened its smooth, black jaws and we stepped right on in.  Level three, please -- where the bon bons play.

The hallway to the ward was ice cold.  The ghosts of nutcases past loitering at the front doors, still trying to break free, I suppose. 

"Have you got the code?", I asked my mother.

"In my purse," she said, fumbling through her bag for the torn slip of paper. 

Push the button, state your name.  We had the magic number and the lady behind the desk buzzed us in.  The air smelled like heavy, greasy hospital food -- cheap tater tots and salisbury steak (always salisbury steak) and the coldness from the outer hallway had disappeared.  It was not hot, not cold -- tepid.  No air was moving at all.  It felt like old people.

The glass wall in front of the nurse's station was littered with notices.  People were milling around behind that wall, making copies, eating (how could they eat here?) and talking on phones.  The receptionist lady pushed a clipboard towards me and said to sign it.  Date, name, room number, please. 

There it was, two doors down to the right, my Bob's room.  The down-deep, dark part of my stomach was twitching.  Oh, don't make me go, Mommy.  I HATE old people. 

The first bed was occupied by a white-haired, watery-eyed lady.  She was all covered up with sheets and thin, white blankets.  The only things showing were her head and wrinkly hands holding onto the tops of the covers for dear life.  She looked like a Q-tip.

"We must be in the wrong room," I thought.  "Never fails."

But my mother kept walking in, further and further in.  Ah, Bed Number Two.  And we have a winner. 

There in the bed by the window was my Bob.  My 79-year-old grandmother, forced into this Geriatric Assessment Program -- wink, wink -- by my uncle, her only surviving offspring.  He, convinced she was addicted to pain-killers and prescribed narcotics, had driven her here, Power of Attorney in hand, and left her to be saved.  She had been here four days with no visitors and, by the looks of her, no bath. 

Her wiry salt and pepper (mostly salt now) hair was flat on her right side, curly on the left and standing at attention everywhere else.  Her once incomparable blue eyes were now watery like her roommate's,  frantic and tear-filled when she spotted us and recognition sparked.  Her hands, always so big and hearty to me, were reaching out to take mine and they were now only thin, emaciated claws at the end of her arms.  Her fingernails were long and unkempt and there were deep blue spots on her hands and arms, her unforgiving skin leaving reminders from past stumbles and bumps. 

"You have to get me out of here.  We've got trouble," she whispered, glancing furtively at the lady in the next bed.

"What kind of trouble?", I said, ready to draw my sword and fight the bad men that were mistreating her in this God-forsaken place.

"The social worker lady, your uncle is having an affair with her.  It's a conspiracy."

At that moment, my heart exploded into a kaleidoscope of tiny pieces.  I knew then that my Bob was crazy just as sure as if she had pulled an ax from under her plastic bed liner and hacked my mother's head off in front of my eyes.  I knew it because my uncle, married to the evilest woman I have ever known, would never, EVER have an affair -- not because he is that moral, but because his wife, my aunt, would kill him without a moment's hesitation if he ever even dreamed of it.  I don't mean take all his money, cut him off kill him.  I mean SHE WOULD KILL HIM and then go back to her stamping room and make a scrapbook page about it. 

So in that moment, I knew.  I knew that all my childhood memories were toast.  This crazy lady had eaten up my Bob and she was gone.