“She’s usually like this,” Izzy says as a means of reassurance, and yet it bothers me that Izzy knows my mother more than me. “She doesn’t say much.”
“I know,” I say. These days my mother doesn’t even remember that she has dementia. This is a blessing, I suppose, the perquisite of being in the advanced stages of a dreadful disease. The memory lapse is only part of it. There’s also her irascible nature, that quick-tempered tendency of hers to become mad and curse and cry, my mother who was once nonconfrontational to a fault. Now she sits propped up in a chair unquestioningly—her fifty-five years taking on the semblance of someone who is seventy-five—letting a woman comb through her hair while I sit on the edge of a sofa and behold the scene: the way that Izzy knows my mother’s mannerisms and oddities by heart, how she can predict my mother’s anomalous habits, like asking for tea and then refusing to drink it, reading the newspaper upside down. Izzy seems to know before my mother when she will stand up and how she will aimlessly pace, the irrational path she will take around the room, Izzy two steps ahead of her all the time, picking up fallen throw pillows so that my mother will not trip.
It’s then that, to my horror, my mother finally returns to her seat and peers toward Izzy reverently, saying to her, “Can you be a good little girl and get Mommy her slippers, Clara, dear? My feet are cold.”
And Izzy looks at my mother and at her feet, already clad in a pair of nonslip, suede slipper clogs, with the most luxurious-looking fur lining on the inside, and says, “You already have your slippers, dear,” as she reaches for her necklace with itsIzzycharm, her hand coming up empty. The necklace is there, but there is no charm. Like so many other things missing around the home, the charm is gone.
But Izzy doesn’t miss a beat. Instead, she says, “It’s Izzy,” to my mother, while stooping down to stare her in the eye. “Remember, Louisa? Izzy. Clara’s over there,” she says, motioning to me.
But whether or not my mother remembers is impossible to know.
“Don’t take it personally,” Izzy says to me then, smiling this uplifting sort of smile that’s meant to improve my mood, though of course I already have. I’ve taken it very personally, knowing how it must feel for my father when my mother looks at him, calling for help, saying there’s a stranger in her home, a burglar, meaning my father. How alone he must feel. Heartbroken and alone. “Most of the time she doesn’t know me, either,” Izzy says, and then she excuses herself to brew hot water for tea, my mother’s favorite elixir. She pauses once in the doorway and says to me, “She doesn’t even know me now. She thinks I’m you.” I know she means well, that this is supposed to make me feel better, and yet it’s a sorry consolation prize. I watch as she goes, seeing a weightlessness about her, though she’s not small by any means. And yet she’s airy, unhampered by the mishaps in her life—the untimely death of her own parents, the responsibility of caring for a younger sibling—while I’m weighted down by mine, feeling buried alive.
My mother is watching me. I know I shouldn’t cry, but I can’t help myself. Big, fat tears fall from my eyes while her eyebrows furrow and she rises from her chair. My first instinct is to call for Izzy, worried that my mother will do something unexpected or that she will trip over her own feet and fall. But that’s not what happens at all.
She takes a series of small steps toward me, and sits down on the sofa by my side. She takes my hand into hers, her movements steady and sure. She knows what she’s doing. Her pale green eyes fall on mine, and for this moment in time she knows who I am. I can see it in her eyes. A second hand skims the surface of my hair as she asks of me, her words lucid and clear, “What is it, Clara? What’s bothering you?” pulling me into her gentle embrace. Her arms feel light on mine, weak and anemic, and yet in them I feel undeniably safe. Like my father, she’s getting too thin, her body lost in the fabric of a soft sweat suit.
“Mom?” I ask, choking on the word, crying. I wipe my eyes on the sleeve of a shirt, and beg, “You know me? You know who I am?” Behind us, the window is open, a gentle breeze blowing in, a zephyr passing through the curtains so that they billow into the room. Motes of dust hover in a narrow beam of sunlight like glitter, suspended in the air above our heads.
She chuckles, her eyes filled with unassailable recognition. Sheknowsme, and whether it’s the four-year-old me or a twenty-eight-year-old me, I don’t know and I don’t care. She knows me. That’s all that matters.
“Of course I do, you silly goose. I wouldn’t ever forget you. You’re my Clara,” she says, and then she asks, “What’s making you so sad, Clara, dear?” But I can’t bring myself to tell her, knowing how this moment is as reliable as tabloid magazines, and that chances are good her memories of me will disappear just as quickly as they appeared. And so I revel in it instead. I take pleasure in it, my mother’s hand on mine, her arm draped around my back, her eyes staring with cognizance rather than confusion.
“Nothing, Mom,” I tell her. “These are happy tears,” I say. “I’m happy,” though I’m not really happy, but rather a dangerous cocktail of happy, sad and scared.
Izzy appears in the doorway with tea in hand, but upon seeing my mother and me, she retreats, not wanting to steal this moment from my life.
NICK
BEFORE
I’m falling apart.
I can’t sleep.
In the morning I stumble down the stairs, disoriented and unsteady on my feet. My head aches. I’m delirious from lack of sleep, thinking already how I need to take something stronger than Halcion to get me through the night, how if I don’t sleep soon I’ll lose it completely.
Clara is at the breakfast nook when I come down, talking into the phone. It’s her father, I can tell from the worry lines on her face, as she drops her head into her hand and frowns.
“What is it?” I ask when she ends the call and sets the phone on the table, but my headache is so immense I can hardly see straight, much less think straight. The early-morning sun blazes through the window like little scalpels stabbing me in the eyes. I trip over my own two feet.
“My father,” she says, as if this is something I didn’t already know. “He’s misplaced a check from the tenants,” she tells me. “Their rent payment. He endorsed it and left it out to deposit, but now it’s gone.”
For years Tom has hung on to Clara’s childhood home, an old farmhouse that was fully renovated and rented out for an additional income for Tom and Louisa. It isn’t too far away from our own home, in an unincorporated part of town, one of the few areas left in the community that hasn’t yet been overrun by new construction and big-box stores. From the front porch of the farmhouse, you can see cornfields still, horses, the occasional John Deere driving down the middle of the road. But it became too much work for a man of Tom’s age and Louisa’s health. At Clara’s suggestion, Tom made the tough decision to lease it out and move to the retirement community where they now live, though Tom hates it, the kind of community with Bingo night and bunco games. Newlyweds rent the farmhouse now, a couple by the name of Kyle and Dawn, who I met once when I helped Tom with some electrical issues in the home. Tom used to handle the upkeep all on his own, but these days and at his age, there’s not much he can still do.
“Your mother?” I ask because this isn’t the first time we’ve heard of Louisa losing things. Louisa loses many, many things, and half of them they find later, hidden in strange places, and the other half they don’t find at all. My stomach churns, and I try to remember what I had last night to eat, or whether it’s all anxiety and nerves. I feel for Tom, knowing what it feels like to lose money. I’ve been losing my fair share of things, too.
“Seems so,” Clara says, and then she tells me how she plans to go there today, to comb through the house and see if she can find the check. It’s the least that she can do, she says, shaking her head, saying, “I just feel bad for them. What if they’re having money trouble, Nick?” she asks. “My father would never tell me. He’s too proud to ask for help,” she says.
“You want me to talk to him?” I ask, but she shakes her head and says no. We all know how Tom feels about me. The last thing any of us needs is me checking up on Tom’s finances. But I ask anyway in the hopes that Clara won’t think she’s in this alone.
And then, rising from the breakfast nook, Clara changes the subject and tells me how she’s gone ahead and hired someone to paint the baby’s room. They’re coming today. By the time I arrive home, the baby’s room will be gray. This is supposed to make me happy, but instead all the air gets sucked from the room and I snap.
“I told you I’d take care of it,” I say to her, more angrily than I wish I had, and she comes back with, “The baby is coming soon, Nick. We can’t wait anymore.”
The baby is coming soon. I can see it in Clara, in the way Baby Doe has moved inside her, dropping down into her pelvic area so that she’s in noticeably more pain. She waddles when she walks, the baby’s head shoved somewhere into her crotch. The heaviness of the baby is tangible, even to me. I can feel him vicariously through Clara’s trudging movements.
“Do you have any idea how much professional painters cost?” I say, my voice elevating as I move toward the coffee maker and reach instinctively for the fully caffeinated coffee grounds.
