“I wish I could say yes,” the director says. “But we aren’t letting visitors in.”
My heart is pounding so hard that I can barely hear my own voice thanking her, and asking her to keep me updated.
I start walking as fast as I can back home, trying to remember where Finn put the toolbox we use for emergencies in the apartment.
They may not be letting visitors in. But I don’t plan to ask permission.
I ask the Uber to drop me off at the end of the driveway, so that I can detour across the lawn away from anyone who might see my approach. For once, Henry’s car is not at The Greens, and the bird feeder outside his wife’s porch is empty. I can think of only one reason.
I push that thought out of my mind. The only silver lining is that there will be no witnesses for what I’m about to do.
Although I have wire cutters, I don’t really need them. One of the lower corners of my mother’s screened porch is peeling at the base, and all I have to do is hook my fingers underneath and tug hard for the screen to rip away from its moorings. I create just enough space to wriggle through and step around the wicker chair and table where my mother usually sits when I come for my visits. I peer into her apartment, but she isn’t on the couch.
I don’t even know, really, if she’s here. For all I know, they’ve moved all the Covid-positive residents to a completely different place.
I pull on the door of the slider that opens into the porch. Thank God my mother never remembers to lock it.
I tiptoe into the apartment. “Mom?” I say softly. “Hannah?”
The lights are all turned off, the television is a blind, blank eye. The bathroom door is open and the space is empty. I hear voices and follow them down the short hallway toward her bedroom.
My mother is lying in bed with a quilt thrown down to her waist. The radio is chattering beside her, some program on NPR about polar bears and the shrinking ice caps. When I stand in the doorway, her head turns toward me. Her eyes are feverish and glassy, her skin flushed.
“Who are you?” she says, panic in her words.
I realize that I am still wearing the mask I wore in the Uber, and that all the times I have visited her, I have stood in the fresh air not wearing one. She may not know me as her daughter, but she recognizes my face as a visitor she has had before. Right now, though, she is sick and scared and I am a stranger whose face is half-obscured by a piece of cloth.
She has Covid.
Finn has drummed into me, daily, how little we know about this virus, but I’m counting on the fact that I still have antibodies. I reach up and unhook one side of my mask. I let it dangle from my ear.
“Hi,” I say softly. “It’s just me.”
She reaches toward her nightstand for her glasses, and has a coughing fit. Her hair is matted down in the back and through pale strands I can see the pink of her scalp. There’s something so tender and childlike about that it makes my throat hurt.
She settles her glasses on her face and looks at me again and says, “Diana. I’m sorry, baby … ?I don’t feel so good today.”
I fall against the frame of the door. She hasn’t called me by name in years. Before Covid, she referred to me as “the lady” to staff, when they talked about my visits. She has never given me any indication that she knows we are related.
“Mom?” I whisper.
She pats the bed beside her. “Come sit.”
I sink down on the edge of the mattress. “Can I get you anything?”
She shakes her head. “It’s really you?”
“Yeah.” I remember what Eric Genovese said about terminal lucidity. Terminal. Whatever is causing this clarity from her dementia—whether it’s fever, or Covid, or just sheer luck—is it worth it? If the trade-off is knowing that it means she’s probably going to die? “I’ve been here before,” I tell her.
“But sometimes I’m not,” she says. “At least not mentally.” She hesitates, frowning, like she’s probing her own mind. “It’s different, today. Sometimes I’m back in other places. And sometimes … ?I like it better there.”
I understand that viscerally.
She looks at me. “Your father was so much better at everything than I was.”
“He would have argued about that. He thought your work was brilliant. Everyone does.”
“We tried to have a baby for seven years,” my mother says.
This is news to me.
“I tried fertility treatments. Traditional Chinese medicine. I ate bee propolis and pomegranates and vitamin D. I wanted you so badly. I was going to be the kind of mother who took so many photos of my baby that we had a whole closet full of albums. I was going to chronicle every step of your life.”
This is so far from the Hannah O’Toole I know—that everyone knows. An intrepid photographer of human tragedy, who didn’t realize the shambles she’d made of her own deserted family. “What happened?”
“I forgot to take you to the pediatrician when you were a week old,” she says.
“I know. I’ve heard the story.”