“That’s my Michelle,” he says proudly. “Thank you!” he calls to the nurse, who waves and disappears back inside. He walks closer to the screen, pressing his hand against it. “How’s my doll?” he asks, and the woman doesn’t respond. “You have a good week? I saw a cardinal yesterday, at home. First one this year.”
He doesn’t even seem to notice or care that I’m eavesdropping as he talks to her. His wife is motionless, expressionless. It makes my heart hurt.
As I am about to leave, he starts singing in a clear tenor the Beatles song with her name as the title. “Très bien ensemble,” he says, “très bien ensemble.”
Suddenly his wife sparks alive. “I love you, I love you, I love you,” she says.
“That’s right.” A grin splits his face. “That’s right, honey.”
I hurry away around the corner, toward my mother’s screened porch. I dial her phone number. A moment later, she answers. “Hi, it’s Diana!” I say brightly. “It’s so good to talk to you!”
Those sunny, bright inflections at the ends of my sentences, I know, are how she will figure out how to respond. It will have nothing to do with my name, or our relationship, which she doesn’t remember.
“Hi,” she says, tentative but upbeat. “How are you?”
“It’s such a beautiful day,” I say. “You should come out on the porch. I’m right here, enjoying the sunshine.”
She doesn’t respond, and to be honest, I don’t even know if she can manage the sliding door onto the porch. But a moment later, she steps out into the little space, looking around like she can’t remember why she went there.
I wave the hand that’s not holding the phone. I rip my mask off my face. “Hi!” I say, almost desperately. “Over here!”
She sees me and walks to the edge of the porch. I do the same, and the phone falls away from my ear. She looks healthy and steady and all the things she was not in my dream. Unexpectedly, my throat is so tight I can’t speak.
She flattens her hand to the screen and tilts her head. “Is it warm for this time of year?”
I know she has no idea what time of year it is, but this is her way of trying to pry open a conversation.
“It is warm,” I manage.
“Maybe they’ll let the fire hydrants run,” she says. “My daughter loves that.”
I am afraid to move, to speak, because I am afraid to ruin this moment. “She does,” I say.
I move closer and press my palm against hers. There’s a screen between us. Where are you? I wonder. The world that my mother inhabits, it’s not this one. But that’s not to say it isn’t real to her.
It might be the first thing we’ve had in common.
If you had asked me a few weeks ago, I would have said my mother was a burden, an albatross, a grudging responsibility. She was someone I owed a debt to. But now?
Now I know everyone has their own perception of reality. Now I’m thinking that when we’re in crisis, we go to a place that comforts us. For my mother, it’s her identity as a photographer.
And for me—right now—it’s here.
“You look good, Mom,” I whisper.
Her vision clouds; I can see the exact moment that she slips away from me. I pull my hand back from the screen and tuck it into the pocket of my jacket. “I think I might come visit you more often,” I say softly. “Would you like that?”
She doesn’t respond.
“Me, too,” I say.
When I get back to the parking lot, the old man is sitting in his car with the windows open, eating a sandwich. I order my Uber and awkwardly smile at him.
“Good visit?” he asks.
“Yes. You?”
He nods. “I’m Henry,” he says.
“Diana.”
“My wife, she’s got white matter disease,” he says. He taps his head, as if to underscore this is a brain thing. But then, everyone in the building has a brain thing. Alzheimer’s affects the gray matter, not the white, but the outcome is the same.
“She only has three words left,” he says. He takes a bite of his sandwich, swallows. Then he smiles. “But they’re the three words I need to hear.”
The sound of ambulance sirens is constant. It gets to the point where they become white noise.
In the middle of the night, I wake up and roll over to realize Finn is missing. I have to shake myself out of sleep to remember whether he’s pulling a night shift. It’s hard to tell time when every day is the same.
But no, we brushed our teeth together and climbed into bed. Frowning, I sit up and pad in the darkness to the living room, calling softly for him.
Finn sits on the couch, limned by moonlight. He is bent like Atlas, bearing the weight of the world. His eyes are closed and his hands are pressed tight against his ears.
He looks at me, his face bruised from his mask, shadows ringing his eyes. “Make it stop,” he whispers, and it’s only then I hear the whine of another ambulance, racing against time.