My smile falters. “I didn’t break lockdown,” I tell him. “We’re allowed to go out for food.” I look down at the bottle in my hands. “This counts, right?”
“Diana, you shouldn’t have gone out by yourself,” Finn says. He sits next to me, looking me over like he’s expecting to find a bleeding head wound or a broken bone. “You just got out of the goddamn hospital.”
“I got out of rehab,” I say gently, “and I’m supposed to be challenging myself. Besides, I had to do it sometime. The toilet paper isn’t going to buy itself.”
This is not going the way it is supposed to. Finn should be pleased that I’m getting stronger, that I was brave enough to venture out alone. But at the same time, I realize that when Finn kisses me now, he always presses his lips to my forehead, too, like he’s checking for a temperature. He watches me when I get up to go to the bathroom or into the kitchen, in case I fall.
I nestle closer until he’s holding me. “I’m fine,” I whisper. I wonder when he is going to stop treating me like a patient, rather than a partner.
“Promise me you’ll wait for me if you need to leave the apartment?” he murmurs.
I hold my breath for a moment, because I can’t take that oath. I’m heading to The Greens tomorrow, no matter what. “One day,” I say gently, “you’re going to have to let me go.”
There is a theory of dementia called retrogenesis, meaning that we lose life skills in the reverse of the order in which we gained them. A doctor told me this when my mother was first diagnosed at age fifty-seven with early-onset Alzheimer’s. A person with dementia, he said, starts out like a ten-year-old. She can be trusted to follow directions on a note that you leave behind. Eventually, the patient will suffer mental decline until she’s at the stage of a toddler—she can’t be expected to remember to get dressed or to feed herself. The next skills that are lost are continence, speech. The very first things we master as an infant are the last things we lose: the ability to lift one’s head from a pillow. The ability to smile.
What I remember from that initial visit was asking the doctor how long my mother’s life expectancy would be. Most people with Alzheimer’s survive from three to eleven years, he told me. But some have been known to live for twenty.
And I had thought, at the time: My God. What am I going to do with her for all that time?
All of this was before I lost her/didn’t lose her in a dream.
Although there is a lockdown in the city, I can easily argue why seeing my mother face-to-face is necessary. I know the trains are running, but decide to splurge on an Uber.
I haven’t told Finn I’m going. I haven’t told anyone.
When my ride arrives, the driver looks at me in my sunflower mask and I look at him in his KN95 mask, as if we are assessing each other for risk. He glances at my quad cane and I think about telling him that I actually just got over Covid, but that would be counterproductive.
At The Greens, to my surprise, the front door is locked.
I ring the bell, and knock a few times. After a moment, the door opens, revealing a nurse in a surgical mask. “I’m sorry,” she says, “we’re not open.”
“But these are visiting hours,” I reply. “I’m here for Hannah O’Toole.”
The woman blinks at me. “We’re closed by order of the governor.” She says this with judgment, like I should know better.
Which, I mean, I do.
“I’ve been away for a while,” I tell her, which isn’t a lie. “Look, I don’t have to stay long. It’s kind of a crazy thing—I was under the impression that my mother had passed away but—”
“I’m really sorry,” the nurse interrupts. “But this policy is meant to keep your mother safe. Maybe you could … ?just call her?”
She closes the door in my face. I stand in the chilly breeze, leaning on my quad cane, thinking about her words. Normally, every few weeks, that’s exactly what I do.
I am about to dial my mother’s number when a car pulls into the parking lot. An elderly man gets out with a bag of birdseed. Instead of going to the front door, however, he walks around the side of the building. Near one of the patient’s screened porches there is a bird feeder. He pours a little of the seed into it and then notices me watching. “I’ve been with her for fifty-two years,” he says. “I’m not going to let a virus ruin a perfect record.”
“You’re visiting your wife?”
He nods.
“How?”
He jerks his chin in the direction of the porch. Like my mother’s, it’s a sealed box without an entrance—no one can enter the apartment from out here, but the resident can be outside in a safe way. A door slides open from inside the apartment, and an aide wheels out a woman. She has white cotton-candy hair piled on her head, and a blanket over her narrow shoulders. She is staring vacantly past the man.