Kieran told the home, in March, a year after the first call. We agreed he should be the one; it’s a different conversation coming from family.
I was braced for it to end. I had actually prepared for it — I had a whole speech ready for the last call, which is an absurd thing to prepare for a woman who wouldn’t have known it was the last one.
The manager’s name is Denise and she has run that place for nineteen years, and what she said, according to Kieran, was:
“Oh, is that who she’s calling?”
They had known about the Sunday calls the entire time. Of course they had. It’s a phone in a day room; residents use it; staff walk past.
What they had not known was who was on the other end, and Denise told Kieran that this had been an ongoing low-level worry for years, and that the reason it had stayed low-level was that Eileen came off those calls happy, every single time, for years, and a resident who is reliably happy for an hour every Sunday is not a problem you go looking to solve.
Denise’s actual position — and I’ve since spoken to her myself, more than once — was this, and I’m going to reproduce it as closely as I can because it settled something in me that eight months of arguing with myself hadn’t.
She said: it isn’t ideal. It isn’t what anyone would design. In an ideal world Eileen’s daughter is alive and answers the phone.
But the alternative on the table is not the ideal world. The alternative is that Eileen dials the number anyway, because that behaviour is thirty years old and it is not going anywhere, and gets a stranger who is confused, or a disconnection tone, or somebody unkind. And then she is upset, and in twenty minutes she does not remember why she is upset, but she is still upset, because the feeling outlasts the reason. Denise said that’s the thing families never quite believe: the feeling always outlasts the reason.
And then she said the thing I think about most.
She said, “You’re not deceiving her about anything she’d otherwise know. She’s going to believe she’s talking to Bernadette whoever picks up that phone.”
So we made it official, in the small way these things get made official.
There’s a note in her care plan now. It says a family friend has a standing Sunday call, that the family are aware and have consented, and it has Kieran’s number on it and mine.
Two things changed, and both of them were Denise’s conditions, and both were right.
The first: if Eileen is distressed, or if a call goes somewhere difficult, I call the home afterwards. Not to report her. So that whoever’s on the evening shift knows the mood she’s walking back into the day room with. That has happened maybe nine times in two years and every single time it turned out to matter — twice they found something bothering her that she couldn’t have raised herself.
The second: I don’t offer anything. This one was firm, and Denise was firm about it, and she was completely right. I don’t say I’ll come and see you. I don’t say I’ll bring the thing. Because if I offer, then she is a woman waiting for something that never arrives, and that is a cruelty, and it’s the exact cruelty the whole arrangement exists to avoid.
So I answer. I ask about the roof. I say love you back. And I never promise anything.
That’s it. That’s the entire arrangement, and it has run for two years.
Kieran and I text now. Not constantly. He sends me a photo after every other Saturday — never of her, he asked me once whether I wanted that and I said no and he understood immediately — but of the garden, or a cake somebody made, or once a truly outrageous jigsaw puzzle Marjorie was doing.
Marjorie is real, by the way. That was the strangest confirmation of my life. I had constructed an entire mental image of a woman I assumed was half-invented, and Kieran said, “Marjorie’s ninety-one and she absolutely is a menace,” and I laughed until I couldn’t breathe.
He asked me, that first spring, what I got out of it. Directly, not unkindly — he said, “I have to ask, because everyone’s going to ask you eventually.”
And I gave him the honest answer, which is that I had moved to a city where I knew nobody, for a job that ran ten-hour nights, and I had gone about four months without a conversation that wasn’t a transaction. And then a woman started calling me every Sunday to be rude about Marjorie.
I did not rescue Eileen Fahey. I want that on the record, because the shape of this story keeps trying to make me the person who did something nice.
She called me. Every week. Into a life that did not have very much in it. And she asked me if they were working me into the ground, and told me I ought to say something, and knew I wouldn’t.
Whatever that is, it went both ways, and the direction it mostly went was not the one people assume.