Clara places a tender kiss on her mother’s cheek and says, “Hi there, Mom.” Maisie, scared as always, now clings to my leg, though Tom makes silly faces to conciliate her, and she giggles. How she loves Tom.
Visits as always start with a nonchalant medical report, such as, “Louisa’s having a great day today,” or, “Louisa didn’t sleep very well last night,” so we have an idea of how the day will go.
Today Tom says, “Louisa’s lost her glasses. We can’t find them anywhere,” and we all spin in half circles to see if we can spot them, the clear plastic frames loafing on top of the TV set or on an end table. We don’t. “She keeps misplacing her things,” says Tom. “Today her glasses, yesterday her mother’s wedding ring,” at which Clara’s eyes fall to Louisa’s right hand, where she always keeps her mother’s wedding ring, a silver antique with a wide band and intricate flowers that should one day be Clara’s. It’s not there; it’s gone.
Clara puts her hand on Tom’s arm in a comforting way, and says, “Don’t worry, Daddy. We’ll find them. They have to be around here somewhere.” This, too—losing things—is a side effect of the dementia.
We sit around the living room and force conversation. It’s awkward, all stilted and contrived. “How about those Cubs?” I ask of Tom, and someone mentions the weather. And then again there’s silence. Awkward and uncomfortable silence. I turn to Izzy for no other reason than to obliterate the silence, and ask how her sister is surviving college.
She smiles warmly and says, “She’s doing well. Thanks for asking.”
Izzy sits closely to Louisa’s side, her hand on the armrest of Louisa’s chair, ready and waiting to meet the woman’s every need. Louisa is in a daze, staring at some spot just beneath the curtain hem, her eyes bounding back and forth as if she’s got her eye on something, which she probably has. Something pretend.
“What’s she studying?” I ask, because the awkwardness of Tom and Louisa’s home is suffocating, and without some conversation to get us through the day, I might just choke and die. Also, it’s not that often that anyone talks to Izzy when we’re here. We tend to treat her as a home accessory or an appliance, maybe. It’s not intentional, and yet so many of our visits are gorged with updates on Louisa’s medical prognosis or whatever weird habit she’s recently picked up, that Izzy gets overlooked. She’s a pretty girl, a bit avant-garde, and if Connor were here, I’m guessing he’d have something offensive to say about the size of her hips. But I like her. Around her neck she wears a charm that bears her name, Izzy, which is genius if you ask me. Every time Louisa doesn’t know who she is, she just shows her the necklace.
Izzy smiles, clearly pleased that someone is talking to her. Her face softens, her eyes perk up. The silence must be painful for her as well, and while Clara, Maisie and I get to make a break for it soon, Izzy is stuck here all day, earning money to pay for someone else’s keep. “She just changed her major,” she says to me, “from chemistry to food science and nutrition. She wants to be a dietitian.”
“What does a dietitian do?” I ask, more for conversation’s sake than because I really care. She tells me how they work with people who want to lose weight, or those with food allergies, teenage girls with eating disorders, among other things. “Sounds like a worthwhile career. Helping people,” I tell her, “must run in the family,” and Izzy smiles sadly this time and says that they learned it from their mother, who was an active volunteer at a crisis hotline before she died, taking calls and talking people off the literal and proverbial edge. A suicide hotline, which is one of those things I’m only beginning to grasp—suicide—realizing how desperate a person would have to be to take their own life. There were recent times, as the dental practice drifted closer and closer to complete bankruptcy, that I paused to consider how better off Clara would be without me in her world. I’m not one of those grisly types consumed with death, but more of a realist. Without me weighing her down, Clara could find another husband in an instant, one who wouldn’t test her on the whole richer-or-poorer part of the wedding vows.
“She had a way with people,” Izzy confides, and the room turns quiet as a moment of silence passes for Izzy’s mother. “One conversation with her could change a person’s whole outlook on life,” she says, and I wonder what her mother looked like. I have half a mind to ask more—about her mother, her mother’s death, how difficult it would have been to have custody of a child when she was still a teenager herself—but Clara flashes me a dirty look, and I quickly change my mind.
Clara, nearly the entire time we’re here, doesn’t say a word. She’s silent, eyes moving back and forth between Tom and me or Izzy and me, landing occasionally on her mom, who also sits unspeaking. Not until later does Clara finally speak, when her father calls the two of us aside for a private conversation. I follow Clara to the kitchen, my hand on the small of her back.
“What is it, Daddy?” asks Clara, finally coming to life. She touches her father’s thin arm and asks if everything’s all right. Being an only child has its downsides. The fact that all issues concerning her parents—financial, medical and otherwise—fall in Clara’s lap is a heavy burden to bear.
“It’s your mother,” he says, which doesn’t surprise me in the least bit because it seems nearly every conversation with Tom involves some detail of what Louisa’s done since we’ve last seen her. There are the odd facets, the calling for a cat that no longer exists, the screaming in public, the purposeless walking around the house. Sometimes they have to do with Louisa’s medications or the details of an appointment with the neurologist or GP.
“What about her?” she asks Tom.