The number was the easy part. It took four minutes.
A 419 landline, and it came up as a residential care facility outside Findlay, Ohio — a real place, with a website that had clearly been made in about 2009, and photographs of a garden and a day room and a woman in a cardigan holding a cup.
I looked at that day room photograph for a long time. There’s a phone in it. On a table by the window, an old push-button phone, beige, with a long cord.
That’s the phone. I’m certain of it, and I have never had it confirmed, and I don’t need it confirmed.
Bernadette took longer, and I found her on a Tuesday night, and it was an obituary.
FAHEY, Bernadette Anne, 51, of Lima, passed away suddenly at home on 3 April.
Eleven years before that Tuesday.
Beloved daughter of Eileen and the late Martin Fahey. Devoted mother of Kieran.
And then the line that I read about nine times:
In lieu of flowers, the family asks that donations be made to the Alzheimer’s Association.
Which is a thing families do when they’ve been in that fight, and Bernadette was fifty-one, so it was not for Bernadette.
She had been looking after her mother. And then she died, suddenly, at home, at fifty-one, and left a mother with dementia and a son called Kieran.
I did not call for a while after that.
I mean I did — I answered on the Sunday, and the Sunday after, and they were perfectly ordinary calls with Marjorie in them. But something had changed in me and not in her, which is the specific loneliness of the whole arrangement, and I could not get through a call that month without my chest going tight at some point.
Because here’s what I now knew, and could not un-know.
Eileen Fahey was in a care home outside Findlay. Every Sunday at six she went to a phone in a day room and dialled a number she had known by heart since some point before 2013, and that number had belonged to her daughter, and her daughter had been dead for eleven years, and at some point in those eleven years the number had been recycled by a carrier and given to a stranger in a different part of the state.
She had been dialling it that whole time.
That’s the part I could not get past, and I still can’t. Not the eleven years. The question of what happened on all those Sundays before March, when she dialled and got a stranger who said wrong number, or a disconnection tone, or a man who swore at her, or nothing at all.
She kept dialling. For eleven years, through however many wrong people, at six o’clock on Sunday, because that is when you call your daughter.
I want to say something here about the ethics, because I have had this argument with four people and with myself for two years, and I have landed somewhere I can defend.
There is a thing people say about dementia care, and it’s real and it has a name — that you don’t correct someone into the present, because all correcting does is make them experience the loss again, fresh, with no memory of having already survived it. If a woman asks for her husband, you don’t tell her he’s been dead nineteen years. You ask her about him.
That is not the same as what I was doing, and I refuse to pretend it is. A care worker who doesn’t correct her is a trained professional making a clinical judgment inside a care plan. I was a twenty-nine-year-old warehouse worker who had picked up a wrong number and said “No, Mum.”
I was not doing therapeutic anything. I was doing something much more ordinary and harder to justify, which is that a lonely woman rang me every Sunday and I liked her, and I could not work out a way to stop that did not involve taking something away from someone who had almost nothing.
That’s the whole defence. It isn’t a good one. It’s just true.
Here’s the practical problem I actually had, and it took me until January to solve.
I could not call the care home.
I thought about it constantly. And every time I got as far as the phone I ran into the same wall: what exactly am I reporting?
Hello, one of your residents rings my mobile every Sunday and I let her think I’m her dead daughter.
There is no version of that sentence that ends well. Best case, a manager is extremely kind to me and then quietly stops it, because of course they would, and they would be right to — you cannot have residents making unsupervised calls to an unknown adult who has been playing a role for fourteen months. I would stop it. If you handed me that situation about someone else’s grandmother I would stop it in an afternoon.
Worst case somebody thinks I’m exploiting an old woman with dementia, and honestly the worst case is not unreasonable either.
Either way, the calls end. And the calls ending doesn’t mean Eileen Fahey stops being lonely at six o’clock on Sunday. It means she goes to the beige phone in the day room and dials the number she has known for thirty years and gets nothing, and does not remember why, and does it again the next week.
So I did nothing for two months, which is not a decision, and I knew it wasn’t.
And then in January she told me about the boy.