I find Maisie under the bed, a spare queen-size bed in a guest room where no one goes. “Maisie,” I say to her, dropping down to my hands and knees to try to meet her eyes, “please, come out,” but she buries her face into the carpet and cries. “Boppy is expecting us,” I say. “Please, Maisie. Please. Do it for Boppy.”
What I don’t do is ask her why she’s scared; I know. I don’t tell her that everything is going to be okay, because I’m not sure that it is. I raise my voice once and demand that she come out, and when she doesn’t, I beg. I offer treats; I issue threats. And when all that fails I lie on the floor at the edge of the bed, and reach a hand out to hers and pull, and my Maisie cries out this time, not in fear but in pain. That hurt. She bawls, saying how it hurt, how Mommy hurt her, and I tell her that I’m sorry, that Mommy is so sorry.
But it doesn’t matter; Maisie is still rooted firmly under the bed.
I want to tell her that she’s wrong about the car, that there was no bad man in a black car trailing her and Nick. Nick was the bad man, I believe, but as always I’m confused. Did Nick end his life, or did someone do it for him? I have to know, feeling that the uncertainty is slowly driving me mad.
Closure is what I need. I need closure.
More than thirty minutes later my father calls again, wondering where I am. I slip from the room to retrieve my cell and answer the call. “I thought you’d be here by now,” he tells me, and this time I confess that Maisie has cloistered herself beneath the bed and won’t come out. My voice is panicked as I say it, tired, frustrated, panting, with Felix serving as background noise, quietly lamenting. She is a smart girl, my Maisie, hiding under the bed because she knows I’ve mastered removing the hinge pins from the doors.
Nick would know what to do. Nick would slide his body under the metal bed frame and join Maisie beneath the bed, or he would lift up the mattress and box spring with a single hand, and the situation would resolve with laughter before they’d make a fort out of the blankets and sheets and pillows that were now cluttered around the guest bedroom.
But not me. I can only beg.
“Oh, Clarabelle,” my father says empathetically, and it’s decided that my father and I will swap places. He will come to cajole Maisie out from under the bed while I stare into the addled eyes of a woman I once knew.
I come into my parents’ home to find my mother shored up on an armchair, Izzy beside her, painting my mother’s fingernails a cherry red. Izzy gazes at me with her heavy-lidded eyes and a compassionate smile. She has a big bust and fullness around the middle, but the legs that emerge from beneath a denim skirt are disproportionately slim, like the legs of a giraffe.
My mother was born Louisa Berne, the only child of Irish parents who imparted to Maisie and me our green eyes and red hair, and a face full of freckles. She married my father over thirty years ago, he a former business exec and she a happy homemaker, the type of woman who could do most anything on an hour or two of sleep and a good cup of tea. Her dementia developed slowly at first, a few forgetful moments that spiraled into something more over the coming years.
Izzy smiles at me and says, “Look how lovely our Louisa is,” while my mother watches on, staring at me with a confused and yet hopeful look in her eye because she doesn’t know me from Eve, and yet she’s waiting for a response, for me to also say that she’s lovely.
“Beautiful,” I say, though she’s not. This woman is not my mother.
My mother is self-sufficient and adept; she doesn’t need some woman to paint her fingernails or to introduce me when I step inside.
“It’s Clara, Louisa,” Izzy prompts. “Clara’s come to see you. You remember Clara,” she adds while my mother decides pointblank, exhaling heavily like Izzy and I are both a bunch of idiots, that I am not Clara.
“This is not Clara,” my mother insists, and Izzy tells her, “Well, sure it is. This is Clara.” I stand pressed to a wall and awkwardly smile, an outcast in the home. My mother has no memories of me, not the twenty-eight-year-old me at least.
There are bruises on my mother’s arms, bluish bruises on the pale skin that lines her tender forearm, and as my eyes move to them in question, Izzy explains, “She’s been clumsy lately. Not so good on her feet anymore,” which of course is an effect of the dementia. My heart sinks. This is something the neurologist has been forewarning us about for a long time now, how my mother would need more and more help performing those everyday tasks she used to do on her own with ease, how her mobility would become stunted, how in time she might be bed-bound.
“She fell?” I ask, and Izzy nods her head.
“The doctor said it’s a problem with her depth perception,” Izzy tells me, though I wonder why I have to hear this from Izzy and not my father. Why didn’t my father tell me? Like Nick, has he been keeping things from me, too? “She runs into doorways, mistakes shadows on the floor for things, tripping over her own two feet.”
The expression on Izzy’s face is grim, and I wonder how in the world she’s able to deal with this, day in and day out. I couldn’t do it. And yet there’s a stoicism about her, the way Izzy feeds and clothes and cleans my mother without complaint, all the while being called names like idiot and imbecile, which are my mother’s preferred epithets these days. I think of a young Izzy, caring first for her ailing father and then her mother, and losing both in the end. I can’t imagine how hard that must have been. I can’t bear to think what will happen when my mother and father are one day gone. I smile at Izzy and say, “We’re lucky to have you,” knowing I don’t say it as often as I should.
“It’s me, Mom,” I say to my mother, forcing a smile on my face. “Clara.” But to my mother I’m an outsider, a pariah, a leper, and the expression on her face is one of cynicism and doubt. I am not Clara. I am persona non grata. I don’t exist.
I talk to my mother anyway. I tell her about Felix, the way he sleeps with his mouth open wide—a robin fledgling begging for food; the gentle whistle of air that flutes through his nose as he dreams. He hasn’t smiled yet, nothing intentional at least, but rather thanks to an unconscious reflex or the passage of gas, but when he does I’m certain it will be Maisie’s big, bright grin he smiles at first. “You remember Maisie?” I ask my mother, but she doesn’t reply, eyes lost on the curtain rod above my own head, and in time I give up.