Sometimes now I thought back on those calls. Listen to yourself, Clara. Listen to how you used to talk to your mother. You knew so much more than she did, didn’t you? You were so much more sophisticated, so much more world-weary, so much more advanced.
Had I been a child and still living with her, my mother would never have put up with the way I spoke to her in those phone calls. And I would never have spoken to her that way. That changed when I was seventeen, though, after Asa and I broke up. Words and scorn and distance became my weapons, and did I use them? I did. The young boxer danced around her middle-aged opponent, throwing words and phrases with precision. Lightning blows rained down upon the older woman and she retreated, thin and silent, to her corner.
* * *
The Life Care people and the AD and eFAD forum people were united in their advice on nearly all fronts. If you decided to get the genetic testing done, you had to confer with a genetic counselor pre-test. If you were the primary caregiver for someone with eFAD or AD, you had to take care of yourself as well as your loved one. It was called “self-care” and it was critical to the stability and health of all parties.
And they were right about everything, I supposed, the way that Sylvia was right when she warned me not to use the word remember. None of the advice went far enough, though. The word remember was a two-edged sword. There were things I wished I didn’t remember. Like the way I felt when I saw that look in my mother’s eyes, the night I machine-gunned those words at her in the darkness and she turned the lamp on. Like the feeling in me when Eli Chamberlain guided his son into his truck the day we broke up and then drove him away from me. Like the way my mother had spoken to me one winter break when I was home from college and she came upon me looking through Asa’s high school yearbook, turning by heart to all the pages where there was a photo of him.
“Clara, it’s over.”
We were sitting at the kitchen table. She must have seen a look on my face.
“But??—”
“No buts,” she said, and something in her voice made me shut up. “It’s been over for years now. Once a decision is made, you can move only forward. That’s what Asa did. You should too.”
She was done. She was a say-it-once sort of person. And she was right, which was something I now knew. But I began moving sideways instead, and I kept moving sideways for a long time. From New Hampshire to Boston to Florida, I moved sideways. If I started living in a different country the fall that Asa Chamberlain and I broke up, then I started living in a different universe the day that Tamar called to tell me he was dead. I could still hear her voice, the way she said my name when she called. I had quit reporting and was living in that house on stilts, working on what would become The Old Man and teaching GED classes to prisoners—you would not believe how many prisons there were on the Florida Panhandle—and eating a lot of shrimp.
I was sitting on a folding chair watching a pot of shrimp when the phone rang. You had to remove them from the boiling water as soon as they turned pink. Otherwise they were tough and flavorless. I didn’t want to answer the phone at all but it kept ringing. What’s the goddamn urgency? I thought, but then something in me shifted, something told me to pick up, and I did.
“Clara.”
“Ma?”
“Clara, Asa died this morning. He died in an explosion in Afghanistan. He was in a Humvee and it blew up.”
The shrimp, the folding chair, the ringing phone, my mother’s voice. All the hours after it, the days, the fact that Tamar arrived the next evening, having driven all night and all the next day too, to get to me, to haul me back north with her to Sterns, to watch over me until I could talk again, until I could breathe, I didn’t remember.
He died. I kept coming back to that, even now. Asa was in my heart and my body. I still woke from dreams in which he was walking toward me down a road made of sand, shifting sand, with his hands held out toward me, smiling.
* * *
You have to get that fixed.
But what if something happens to me?
Every time someone told me I should get my heart fixed—Sunshine, Brown, the cardiologist, my mother—that thought stole into my head. What if something happened to me? Who would take care of my mother? Who would visit her, go to the Life Care meetings, discuss her medication, follow her wheresoever she goeth?
Her index finger brushed my forearm, tracing the beginning of the inked wire.
“What’s that?” she said.
“A tattoo.”
She had seen it before, many times, unlike most people. My ink was a slender line that started high on one inner forearm, wound around my upper arm and then across my shoulder blades and down the other arm, ending just below the elbow. Invisible most of the time. But the thermostat was always set high in the place where she lived now, and I had pushed my sweater up above my elbows.
My mother turned my arm this way and that, her hand steady, examining again what she could see of the inked wire, and a night when I was four years old came washing over me. She had woken me up to bring me downstairs onto the cold porch because the aurora borealis was pulsing in the night sky. Look, Clara. It’s the northern lights. I was so tired. I leaned against a porch post. She held my hand to keep me upright.
“Why?” she said now, her head tilted, studying the thin line of wire.
“It holds me together,” I said. “If I go like this”—and I pushed my sleeves up and twined my arms around each other—“then I can’t come apart.”
She nodded, as if she understood. Did she, somehow? Brown’s voice came into my head: Ask her.
“Did you have anything like this, Ma? Anything to hold you together?”
“Yes.”
“What was it?”
“Work. Wood. Len.”
She said “Len” conversationally, as if he were someone she knew well, a husband or boyfriend or dog or cat—Len, who kept her steady. There had been no Lens in her life though, none that I knew. She was gone again. Gone into a parallel world where someone named Len was holding her hand on a freezing porch, pointing at the heavens alive with color. Sadness washed through me. Follow your mother wheresoever she goeth, Clara. Meet her where she is, not where you want her to be.
“What do you most like about Len, Ma?” Careful phrasing. No remembers, no corrections.
“His music,” she snapped. “You know that.”
We were sitting on the edge of her bed. She picked up her pillow and placed it on my lap with a firm push. A dunce cushion for a dunce. Which I was, because by Len, she must have meant Leonard Cohen. The man whose music she had loved as long as I could remember. Len, her good friend the musician. Len, her old buddy the singer-songwriter. Len, the baffled king composer. She was with me, my mother, right then and there. Ask her, came Brown’s voice again. There is no time, came Sunshine’s voice. What could I ask her about? I cast my eyes about the room. A copy of The Old Man was splayed open on her nightstand.
“Are you reading that book, Ma?”
It was a used library copy that had not come from me. Who had given it to her?
“Sylvia reads it to me.”
“Do you like it?”
“Like what?”