Safe Share

During her Tuesday morning session with Mr. Ebberly, he inquires if she’s all right, and she knows as soon as he asks—what’s bugging you today, Sarge?—that she’s let her mind drift to them. Cody. Trent. Did something in her body language, her expression, give her away?

There’s no way around it. July 17th is and will always be the anniversary of the day Trent killed himself. Her ex-husband. Her son’s father. Two years ago today. When her alarm buzzed this morning, she pulled the pillow over her head and considered calling in sick, just to keep an eye on Cody, her son, just in case he remembers the significance of today’s date and it triggers him. It’s been three months since his last full-blown panic attack, which is something. At some point they have to move on, once and for all. She got up and dressed in her work clothes as usual: polyester-blend khakis, royal blue polo with the Harmony Village emblem on one breast.

But she couldn’t stop herself from checking on Cody before she left, even though he’s twenty. An adult. She quietly turned the handle of his bedroom door, peeked inside the open inch. He was sleeping in the posture of his boyhood: blankets kicked away, his body lined up along the side of the mattress, one arm on his stomach, the other dangling down. When he was a child, if she checked on him in the night, she’d nudge him toward the middle as he slept, smoothing the bedspread evenly around him, but in the morning when she went to wake him, he’d be right back on the edge.

Deena prides herself on her professionalism, and if there is one motto above all that guides her practice, it’s staying fully in the present moment. Even during an exercise that might appear routine, she focuses intently on her patients’ cues—the smallest responses of muscles, breathing, skin tone, emotional affect. She’s proud of her job, her good salary, her reputation at Harmony Village as one of the favorite physical therapists among the elderly residents like Mr. Ebberly.

He’s holding the bright turquoise medicine ball to his chest, leaving her empty hands waiting. “Spill the beans.” He winks at her.

“I’m fine, Mr. E. It’s all good.” She lightly claps her hands in front of her with extended arms, like a seal, beckoning for the ball.

But he clutches it to his chest, raising one of his thin white eyebrows.

Okay, you know what it is? It’s like in college when I got a 56 on my first Anatomy exam and the professor told me I would still be all right if I got above an 87 on every other test. I’d had my one failure and I couldn’t survive another one, so I lived with a knot in my gut till the semester ended, and I could breathe again.

Except now there’s no end point, so when can she breathe? She’s used up her life failure. Not the divorce; a lot of people are divorced. But a husband who killed himself is too big; there can’t be anything else. She can’t fail with Cody, too. She just can’t.

“Okay,” Deena says. “You know what it is? Cody’s band has a show tonight. I think I’m nervous for him, isn’t that silly? He’s twenty years old and I have vicarious stage fright.”

Mr. Ebberly smiles and nods slowly, spots of reflected fluorescent light shifting on his bald head. “A mother is a mother, at any age.”

He slowly straightens his long arms, biceps flexing beneath saggy skin. Deena reaches for the medicine ball, drawing it in, lifting it up, down, and passing it back to him.

“He takes it so seriously,” she tells him. “This whole band thing.”

“It’s only rock and roll.” Mr. Ebberly’s arms tremble as he hoists the ball overhead and brings it down again with a puff of air. “But I like it.”

He mimes an air guitar while she returns the medicine ball to the rack, then sets the timer for their two-minute break before quad lifts.

Of her fifteen years working at Harmony Village, she has known Mr. Ebberly for thirteen of them, first for his hip replacement PT, then a rotator cuff tear, and now for geriatric maintenance of muscle tone and balance. He pays out of pocket for what his Medicare and insurance won’t cover and never misses a session.

“Can you imagine when you were twenty worrying about how many people bought your band t-shirt or listened to your song online for free?”

He tilts his head, considering. At Cody’s age, Deena herself was earning her physical therapy degree at Quinnipiac, living on student loans and her job at university food services, sticking to her plan, while Trent’s mom babysat for Cody.

“You were overseas in the military,” Deena says. “Married, even, with a baby on the way.”

He waves that away with a pshaw. “I just did what I was told, that’s all, nothing more. I was drafted, so I went. My father advised me to marry my girlfriend before I left, for safe-keeping I suppose, so I did. Your boy Cody, now, he’s got the right idea. Play the music while you’re young.”

“Maybe . . .”

“The music being a, being a metaphor, of course.”

“Right.”

He pauses and touches the collar of his polo shirt, and Deena makes a mental note of his slight stammer and repeated words. He clears his throat and adjusts his posture on the padded exercise chair. “My point being, Cody is trying out his own choices these days, I suppose, which isn’t too shabby. Not shabby at all.”

“He still misses his dad,” Deena says, and immediately regrets it.

They know about each other’s lives, she and Mr. Ebberly. He’s been divorced once and widowed once, lost an adult son to a heart attack ten years ago, and has a lovely daughter living across the country in Sacramento who visits three times a year. And Deena tells him, when he asks, about her own life as well.

But her remark comes too close to the edge of what Harmony Village calls a safe share, and Deena agrees: the exchange of personal stories over time between staff and residents can be positive for empathetic bonding and interpersonal connection, but care must be taken to avoid emotional burden, dependency, and the crossing of boundaries.

So Mr. Ebberly knows that she and Trent divorced five years ago, but not about his addiction. He knows Trent died, but not from suicide. He knows that Cody dropped out of college and moved back home, but not his diagnosis of Delayed Complicated Bereavement Disorder.

“It can take time,” says Mr. Ebberly, as Deena fastens the Velcro strap of a two- pound sandbag around his right calf. “Grief can be tricky that way.”

Okay, but when does the trick end, Mr. Ebberly? Because Cody was fine. We all cried together at the funeral, cocooned at home for a while, and then he packed his bags for college. We bought Twin Extra-Long sheets and a shower caddy at Target, and he was on his way. He got solid B’s and signed up for a music video club. He took summer school. He was fine. And then I get a call the first week of October his sophomore year from the student infirmary. Complete nervous breakdown. So what kind of trick is that?

“Here we go, champ.” She lifts his leg slowly up and down, then holds it parallel to the floor and lets go, placing her fingertips lightly on the flexed muscle of his right thigh. “Four, three, two, one. Okay.”

During the third rep she sees the trace of tears in his eyes. Quickly she cups his calf, lowers his sneaker back to the ground.

“I still miss my Duane,” says Mr. Ebberly. “Sometimes I forget he’s really gone, and then I remember.”

She puts her palm lightly on top of his right hand, the bulbous knuckles, and he lets her keep it there. Having lost the reflexes to fight back tears, he lets himself cry.

Deena’s own eyelids tighten with the fury of unshed tears. She hates him, still. Trent. Though hate is a word she’s never allowed herself to utter to Cody or Trent’s mother or any of the doctors or counselors they’ve met with over the last two years. For doing this to them. To her. To her son. His own son! How could you? He could at least have chosen a way that looked like an accident. That would have made it easier. Then that nice social worker with the double chin could have said there was a terrible accident. That would have been so much better than something very sad has happened. The reality of his body found hanging in the woods of Valley Falls Park.

According to their family therapist, they all had to practice stepping away from the idea that Trent’s suicide was something he did to them. In Trent’s mind-state in those moments, it wasn’t about them at all, said the therapist in his deeply calm voice that drove Deena crazy. Step away! As if she could leave her anger on the curb like a panting dog—stay, boy—and skip down the block and around a corner.

Deena asks, “Do you want to stop?”

Mr. Ebberly slaps at his left thigh. “Even me out, Sarge.”

Deena wraps the sandbag around his other leg, lifts it in the air and holds on, supporting it, lightly massaging the calf muscle, thinking . . . heal . . . sending that message from her head, to her heart, down her arms, and through her fingertips. This is part of her practice, and even though it isn’t anything scientific, she figures, why not? It couldn’t hurt, and sometimes she lets herself believe that her attempt at telepathy is part of what gives her patients an unusually high success rate. Her own secret power.

Gently she pulls her hands away, giving the count down with her fingers as he grimaces. This is his weak side, and he tenses, holding on, dropping his foot with a thud when her fingers reach a fist. The flaps of skin on his neck have reddened. “This, my dear, is not easy,” he declares, as usual.

During her lunch break, she’s thinking, she’ll let herself call Cody. If he doesn’t answer, she’ll text. If he doesn’t respond, she can drive home and back again. Just to check. She can’t help herself. She holds up her hand for Mr. Ebberly’s shaky high five, answering him as usual: “We’re not here for easy.”