I was the one who stopped returning calls, not my friends. I chose not to go back to work, even though about a year ago they offered me flexible, part-time hours. I go to the hospital every day and choose not to make more than chitchat with the other devastated parents in that unit, even though I see their pale faces and haunted eyes, just like mine.
Why have I cut myself off so much? Is it because it was easier; I knew I couldn’t handle anything more than Emily? Or was it because, as James said, I was making it into some sort of competition? Whose cross is bigger to bear? Who is suffering the most? Me. It has to be me.
I don’t like the thought. It makes me sound so petty, so, well, unhealthy. Unhinged, even. Surely I don’t really think like that? It’s not about me; it never has been. Now more than ever I want to think of Emily, and I want to think of her with something other than fear or sorrow. But I can’t ignore the fact that I’ve cut myself off deliberately, for whatever reason. I was the one who did it.
“Penny for your thoughts?” Andrew asks lightly and I let out a little laugh.
“Oh, nothing. Just random stuff.” I hardly want to blurt out all the things I’ve been thinking. “This is nice,” I tell him. “I know I don’t get out enough.”
“You’ve been busy.”
“Yes.” At least Andrew understands that. I know most people would wonder why I go to the hospital, day after day after endless day, when Emily doesn’t even seem to recognize me. But I do, and I will keep doing it, because stopping feels far worse, and now for once I have something to look forward to, to aim for. I wonder if James could at least understand that.
The clouds that were skirting on the edge of the horizon an hour ago are now rising up in a dark, menacing bank. The air feels humid, with the promise of rain. Jake has left the sandbox and is trying to climb a slide.
Andrew goes to help him, and I watch as he patiently guides him up the rungs, and then waits at the bottom, arms outstretched, to catch him as he comes down. I watch, smiling a little, as Jake does it again and
again. Emily was scared of the slide. She was definitely more of a swing girl—is more of a swing girl. Could be again.
By the fifth time Jake heads down the slide, it is starting to rain—at first just a spattering of drops but as we gather our things and head for the car, it becomes a downpour, the rain coming so hard and fast we are soaked in seconds.
We clamber into the car, dripping and laughing, and lightning forks the sky as we head back home. For a second it almost feels like this could be my family—it could be James in the driver’s seat, raking his wet hair back from his face, and if I twist around I’ll see Emily in her car seat, her thumb in her mouth as she kicks her legs happily.
All right there, Em?
I blink and it all disappears; Andrew is frowning as he navigates the unfamiliar road in the driving rain, and Jake is asking if he can have his iPad. I turn to look out the window, at the rain streaking steadily down it like tears.
* * *
That evening, after saying goodbye to both Andrew and Jake, and spending the rest of the afternoon doing housework and checking my phone—nineteen views! —I head over to my mother’s.
I haven’t seen her since she told me about her diagnosis, and as I pull into the driveway, I realize that is at least somewhat intentional. Yes, I’ve been distracted, but more so, I’ve been lost. I’m not ready to think about letting go of my mom, not even in part. I’m not ready to start living with the knowledge of what she has, what is going to kill her eventually, and yet I know as I step out of the car that I am already seeing the signs everywhere.
They are there in the weeds in the flower beds lining the front walk, that I know my mom wouldn’t normally countenance. I see them in the dirty dishes piled in the sink, and the notice scribbled on the calendar for a Memory Clinic on Monday, the handwriting far more of a scrawl than I recall it being.
“Mom?” I call out, a note of trepidation striking my soul. Is she sleeping again? Or what if she’s fallen and hurt herself, and can’t get up? Surely we’re not at that stage yet.
“Up here,” my mom calls, sounding cheerful, and with relief I head upstairs. No, of course we’re not there yet. I walk down the upstairs hallway, following the sound of her voice, to the fourth bedroom, which has been the junk room of the house for as long as I can remember, filled with crates of clothes and boxes of photos, stacks of books and papers no one has bothered to file.
My mother is on her knees, riffling through a box of sweaters. I stop in the doorway, staring.
“What are you doing?”
“I thought I’d have a bit of a clear out.”
“Is this to do with…?” I can’t not ask. Neither can I finish the sentence.
My mother sits back, her hands on her thighs. Her hair is a bit ruffled, the sleeves of her pin-striped button-down shirt rolled up to the elbows. “Well, yes,” she says. “Everything is to do with that, Rachel, unfortunately.” She gives me a brisk smile. “I’m trying to be practical, not maudlin. And I don’t want you to have to do it. Nearly fifty years of stuff in here… you can’t be bothered with all that.”
The remnants of the afternoon in the sunshine, the hope I was starting to feel, fall about me in tatters. “I want to do it, Mom.” After James and I divorced, and we had to sell our house, my mother asked if I wanted to move in with her.
I thought about it seriously, because she certainly had the space and I knew I could use the company. Yet I didn’t, in part because my mother was working full-time and I didn’t want to burden her with worry over and care of me, and also because my life already felt as if it were falling apart; moving in with my mother at almost forty years old felt like a step too far.
Now I wonder if I should, even as I recognize my mother will resist. She’ll think I’m doing it to keep an eye on her, and maybe I will be. Besides, I realize with a jolt, I don’t want to leave my little house, sad as it is. I don’t want to leave Andrew and Jake, and the friendship we’re only just beginning to form.
“There will be enough for you to do, Rachel,” my mom says. “Trust me on that. I’m just going through some boxes of old clothes.” She reaches for a sweater. “Would you like a cashmere cardigan, circa 1985?”
I eye the bright pink cardigan with the sewn-in shoulder pads, not my sort of thing at all. “Maybe.”