your time, it says. Another cancellation. Wilsons flew the coop. —N
Morning. A stay of execution for those who are grieving. The first few marks of sunlight appear in the darkened sky, bringing oxygen back to the stifled world and making it easier to breathe.
I wake on the floor beside the bathroom door, Felix spread lengthwise on my extended legs. The door to the bathroom, as I jiggle the glass knob for the eighteenth time, is locked. It’s an antique, a 1920s fluted crystal glass knob; we no longer have the key. Perhaps we never had the key, but this didn’t matter, not until Maisie took to locking herself on the wrong side of the door as she did last night when she cried out, The bad man is after us. He’s going to get us, before scurrying from bed.
She won’t come out.
There is glass everywhere, lying unprotected on the floor.
For four hours now, she’s been on the other side of the bathroom door and I’ve listened as her frenzied cry died down to a quiet drone, her requests for Daddy lessening as she sobbed herself to sleep. And now the sunlight appears, chasing the shadows away from the walls.
For hours I’ve replayed Maisie’s words over and over and over again in my mind: The bad man is after us. He’s going to get us. “Please, Maisie,” I beg for the forty-seventh time. “Please, come out.”
But Maisie won’t come out.
* * *
Maisie sits at the breakfast nook staring vacantly at three microwave pancakes set before her on a plate. There was only one squirt of syrup remaining in the bottle, and so her pancakes are mostly dry. But that’s not the reason she won’t eat. On the table before me, there is nothing, no food. I, too, won’t eat. Not until someone makes me, which will be soon. My father fills a mug of coffee for me and brings it to the nook, setting it on the wooden slab before me.
He pats my head. He tells me to drink. He tells Maisie to eat her pancakes.
In my bedroom upstairs, the bathroom door lies flat, the hinge pins tapped out of place with a nail and a hammer. My father talked me through it on the phone. He didn’t need to come, I told him. We were fine. Maisie was fine, Felix was fine, I was fine. But my father didn’t believe for one split second that any of us were fine. Maybe it was the panic in my voice, or the fact that Maisie had locked herself in the bathroom overnight and, on the mosaic tile floor, cried herself to sleep. I don’t know. Or maybe it was Felix, thrown into a state of hysteria once again, his tummy empty, and me too busy removing hinge pins from a raised panel door to feed him, after sixty-seven unsuccessful attempts to lure Maisie out on her own devices.
I can’t be in two places at one time.
“It’s okay to ask for help,” my father tells me now as Maisie stabs at those pancakes with a kid fork, some sort of adorable cow printed on its grippy, teal shank. But she doesn’t eat the pancakes. She mangles and dismembers them. She mutilates the pancakes. “You don’t have to do this alone, you know.”
But I am already alone, aren’t I? No matter how many people are here in this house with me, I am still alone.
My father has yet to go upstairs, to see the bathroom door lying listlessly on its back, the picture frame’s shards of glass sloshed across the floor, the stash of rumpled tissues into which I cried a small lake, my eyes now so red and puffy they’re practically swollen shut.
“I did ask for help,” I tell my father as he hands me my own plate of microwave pancakes sans syrup, with instructions to eat. “That’s why you’re here.” He fills his coffee mug with soapy water at the kitchen sink and swirls it around before plunging a dishrag into the ceramic. He won’t leave that mug for me to clean. He is a lean man, too lean, the hair on his own head reminiscent of that on Felix’s head. He dresses like an older man with the waistlines too high and the patterns of his collared shirts no longer in style but now considered vintage. On his wiry frame, his clothes droop and sag, his body getting swallowed by the fabric. He’s aging far too quickly for me.
“Did you find the check?” I ask him, remembering only then the missing check from my father’s tenants, a two thousand dollar rent payment that he endorsed but never deposited into the account. My mother is to thank for this, to be sure, my mother who is ever wandering about, misplacing things. The missing check was an exigent matter in the days before Felix’s birth and Nick’s death, somehow forgotten in the upheaval of the last few days, though it was less than a week ago that Izzy and I sat together, combing through my parents’ belongings for it, and coming up with nothing. Izzy, the paid babysitter, who watches over my mother when my father and I aren’t there. Izzy’s own parents died when she was eighteen and then nineteen—heart failure for one, followed by stage-four leukemia for the other—leaving her to care for an eight-year-old sister. Now, ten years later, she’s working hard to earn money to put the sister through college.
Izzy has been with my mother since the dementia began, or rather since we knew she had dementia and was not simply distracted and absentminded. She works for one of those home health agencies and, as my father says, is a godsend. Her hair is a short cropped cut—somehow decidedly masculine and feminine all at the same time—bleached white, and often adorned with flowers, her body decked out in an odd bricolage of things: skirts and tights, gimmicky jewelry, ornate socks pulled clear up to the knees. She has a silver pendant on a rolo chain, one that bears her name on a charm in an easy-to-read typeface, large enough for the elderly and disabled to see. Large enough for my mother to see, and when she gazes at her disoriented as she often does, Izzy plucks that trinket from around her neck and holds it out for my mother to see. Izzy, it reads.
Izzy cooks, she cleans, she micromanages my mother in the bathtub with reminders to wash this and to scrub that. She’s a babysitter to a degree, there whenever my father can’t be and sometimes when he is, to assure that my mother doesn’t hop in the car and decide to take it for a spin, or serve herself a bowl of cat litter and eat it with milk and a spoon, both of which she’s done before. More than once. Why do you even have cat litter when there is no cat? I’d asked my father at the time, and he shrugged his shoulders and said my mother insisted on it. Of course she did. Because to her there is still a cat, poor Oliver who was run over by a truck years ago.
She still sees him sometimes, hiding behind the curtain panels.
But the incident that takes the cake is the time she decided to give Maisie’s hair a trim, disappearing stealth-like into the kitchen and coming back moments later with a pair of scissors in hand. When we asked her why she did it, she said, Clara’s hair smells pungent, as Izzy drew her from the room that day while Maisie plummeted to the floor, crying. Like a dirty old sponge. That’s why. I can’t even get a comb through it anymore. It needed to be trimmed. It’s disgusting.
Clara’s hair.
My hair.
My mother has needed more and more assistance of late, no longer sleeping through the night, becoming nocturnal and spending her nights pacing the home, oftentimes crying for no apparent reason at all. Her brain no longer receives messages from the bladder that she needs to pee, and as a result she wets herself almost every day. She fought the illness tooth and nail once, using memory games, crossword puzzles, reams of sudoku. She memorized nursery rhymes to prove to herself that she could do it, and then waltzed around reciting the words to Simple Simon without a clue as to why. She read the newspaper; she exercised more and as often as she could, remembered to take her vitamins. She discovered that eating salmon helps
