“She’s usually like this,” Izzy says as a means of reassurance, and yet it bothers me that Izzy knows my mother more than me. “She doesn’t say much.”
“I know,” I say. These days my mother doesn’t even remember that she has dementia. This is a blessing, I suppose, the perquisite of being in the advanced stages of a dreadful disease. The memory lapse is only part of it. There’s also her irascible nature, that quick-tempered tendency of hers to become mad and curse and cry, my mother who was once nonconfrontational to a fault. Now she sits propped up in a chair unquestioningly—her fifty-five years taking on the semblance of someone who is seventy-five—letting a woman comb through her hair while I sit on the edge of a sofa and behold the scene: the way that Izzy knows my mother’s mannerisms and oddities by heart, how she can predict my mother’s anomalous habits, like asking for tea and then refusing to drink it, reading the newspaper upside down. Izzy seems to know before my mother when she will stand up and how she will aimlessly pace, the irrational path she will take around the room, Izzy two steps ahead of her all the time, picking up fallen throw pillows so that my mother will not trip.
It’s then that, to my horror, my mother finally returns to her seat and peers toward Izzy reverently, saying to her, “Can you be a good little girl and get Mommy her slippers, Clara, dear? My feet are cold.”
And Izzy looks at my mother and at her feet, already clad in a pair of nonslip, suede slipper clogs, with the most luxurious-looking fur lining on the inside, and says, “You already have your slippers, dear,” as she reaches for her necklace with its Izzy charm, her hand coming up empty. The necklace is there, but there is no charm. Like so many other things missing around the home, the charm is gone.
But Izzy doesn’t miss a beat. Instead, she says, “It’s Izzy,” to my mother, while stooping down to stare her in the eye. “Remember, Louisa? Izzy. Clara’s over there,” she says, motioning to me.
But whether or not my mother remembers is impossible to know.
“Don’t take it personally,” Izzy says to me then, smiling this uplifting sort of smile that’s meant to improve my mood, though of course I already have. I’ve taken it very personally, knowing how it must feel for my father when my mother looks at him, calling for help, saying there’s a stranger in her home, a burglar, meaning my father. How alone he must feel. Heartbroken and alone. “Most of the time she doesn’t know me, either,” Izzy says, and then she excuses herself to brew hot water for tea, my mother’s favorite elixir. She pauses once in the doorway and says to me, “She doesn’t even know me now. She thinks I’m you.” I know she means well, that this is supposed to make me feel better, and yet it’s a sorry consolation prize. I watch as she goes, seeing a weightlessness about her, though she’s not small by any means. And yet she’s airy, unhampered by the mishaps in her life—the untimely death of her own parents, the responsibility of caring for a younger sibling—while I’m weighted down by mine, feeling buried alive.
My mother is watching me. I know I shouldn’t cry, but I can’t help myself. Big, fat tears fall from my eyes while her eyebrows furrow and she rises from her chair. My first instinct is to call for Izzy, worried that my mother will do something unexpected or that she will trip over her own feet and fall. But that’s not what happens at all.
She takes a series of small steps toward me, and sits down on the sofa by my side. She takes my hand into hers, her movements steady and sure. She knows what she’s doing. Her pale green eyes fall on mine, and for this moment in time she knows who I am. I can see it in her eyes. A second hand skims the surface of my hair as she asks of me, her words lucid and clear, “What is it, Clara? What’s bothering you?” pulling me into her gentle embrace. Her arms feel light on mine, weak and anemic, and yet in them I feel undeniably safe. Like my father, she’s getting too thin, her body lost in the fabric of a soft sweat suit.
“Mom?” I ask, choking on the word, crying. I wipe my eyes on the sleeve of a shirt, and beg, “You know me? You know who I am?” Behind us, the window is open, a gentle breeze blowing in, a zephyr passing through the curtains so that they billow into the room. Motes of dust hover in a narrow beam of sunlight like glitter, suspended in the air above our heads.
She chuckles, her eyes filled with unassailable recognition. She knows me, and whether it’s the four-year-old me or a twenty-eight-year-old me, I don’t know and I don’t care. She knows me. That’s all that matters.
“Of course I do, you silly goose. I wouldn’t ever forget you. You’re my Clara,” she says, and then she asks, “What’s making you so sad, Clara, dear?” But I can’t bring myself to tell her, knowing how this moment is as reliable as tabloid magazines, and that chances are good her memories of me will disappear just as quickly as they appeared. And so I revel in it instead. I take pleasure in it, my mother’s hand on mine, her arm draped around my back, her eyes staring with cognizance rather than confusion.
“Nothing, Mom,” I tell her. “These are happy tears,” I say. “I’m happy,” though I’m not really happy, but rather a dangerous cocktail of happy, sad and scared.
Izzy appears in the doorway with tea in hand, but upon seeing my mother and me, she retreats, not wanting to steal this moment from my life.
NICK
BEFORE
I’m falling apart.
I can’t sleep.
In the morning I stumble down the stairs, disoriented and unsteady on my feet. My head aches. I’m delirious from lack of sleep, thinking already how I need to take something stronger than Halcion to get me through the night, how if I don’t sleep soon I’ll lose it completely.
Clara is at the breakfast nook when I come down, talking into the phone. It’s her father, I can tell from the worry lines on her face, as she drops her head into her hand and frowns.
“What is it?” I ask when she ends the call and sets the phone on the table, but my headache is so immense I can hardly see straight, much less think straight. The early-morning sun blazes through the window like little scalpels stabbing me in the eyes. I trip over my own two feet.