“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.
“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.
“My father,” she says, as if this is something I didn’t already know. “He’s misplaced a check from the tenants,” she tells me. “Their rent payment.
He endorsed it and left it out to deposit, but now it’s gone.”
For years Tom has hung on to Clara’s childhood home, an old farmhouse that was fully renovated and rented out for an additional income for Tom and Louisa. It isn’t too far away from our own home, in an unincorporated part of town, one of the few areas left in the community that hasn’t yet been overrun by new construction and big-box stores. From the front porch of the farmhouse, you can see cornfields still, horses, the occasional John Deere driving down the middle of the road. But it became too much work for a man of Tom’s age and Louisa’s health. At Clara’s suggestion, Tom made the tough decision to lease it out and move to the retirement community where they now live, though Tom hates it, the kind of community with Bingo night and bunco games. Newlyweds rent the farmhouse now, a couple by the name of Kyle and Dawn, who I met once when I helped Tom with some electrical issues in the home. Tom used to handle the upkeep all on his own, but these days and at his age, there’s not much he can still do.
“Your mother?” I ask because this isn’t the first time we’ve heard of Louisa losing things. Louisa loses many, many things, and half of them they find later, hidden in strange places, and the other half they don’t find at all. My stomach churns, and I try to remember what I had last night to eat, or whether it’s all anxiety and nerves. I feel for Tom, knowing what it feels like to lose money. I’ve been losing my fair share of things, too.
“Seems so,” Clara says, and then she tells me how she plans to go there today, to comb through the house and see if she can find the check. It’s the least that she can do, she says, shaking her head, saying, “I just feel bad for them. What if they’re having money trouble, Nick?” she asks. “My father would never tell me. He’s too proud to ask for help,” she says.
“You want me to talk to him?” I ask, but she shakes her head and says no. We all know how Tom feels about me. The last thing any of us needs is me checking up on Tom’s finances. But I ask anyway in the hopes that Clara won’t think she’s in this alone.
And then, rising from the breakfast nook, Clara changes the subject and tells me how she’s gone ahead and hired someone to paint the baby’s room. They’re coming today. By the time I arrive home, the baby’s room will be gray. This is supposed to make me happy, but instead all the air gets sucked from the room and I snap.
“I told you I’d take care of it,” I say to her, more angrily than I wish I had, and she comes back with, “The baby is coming soon, Nick. We can’t wait anymore.”
The baby is coming soon. I can see it in Clara, in the way Baby Doe has moved inside her, dropping down into her pelvic area so that she’s in noticeably more pain. She waddles when she walks, the baby’s head shoved somewhere into her crotch. The heaviness of the baby is tangible, even to me. I can feel him vicariously through Clara’s trudging movements.
“Do you have any idea how much professional painters cost?” I say, my voice elevating as I move toward the coffee maker and reach instinctively for the fully caffeinated coffee grounds.
“We have money,” she asserts. “It’s not like we don’t have money.” And then, “I thought we weren’t drinking caffeine,” she says, standing before me in her nightgown, her belly as fully extended as it can possibly get. She looks tired, hand pressed to the small of her back as if she can carry this baby weight no longer. Across the taut nightgown I spy ripples of movement, our baby reaching his hands and toes to get out, alien-like. He’s ready. I look down at the bag of coffee grounds in my hand. Dark roast, it says; not the decaf. “Have you been drinking caffeine all this time?” she asks, and I almost laugh at the inanity of it, how I have an illegitimate son, my practice is in shambles, I’m being sued and I almost plowed down a neighborhood kid, but what Clara is concerned about is my caffeine intake. But I haven’t even been drinking caffeine. Of all the things I’ve done wrong, this is the one thing I’ve done right. I stayed true to our vow. I didn’t drink caffeine.
And then I do laugh, this odd, manic laugh that doesn’t sound like me, tossing the coffee to the floor so that the bag cracks open and grounds spill out everywhere. “What has gotten into you?” Clara asks, her face shrouded in worry and disgust.
“Into me?” I demand. “Into me? What has gotten into you?” I ask, using some sort of defensive tactic of spinning the conversation in my favor. “I told you I was going to paint the bedroom. Why in the hell would you hire someone else to do what I can clearly do?” I grab a dustpan and broom from the pantry wall. I drop down onto all fours to clean the mess.
“Stop being an asshole, Nick,” Clara growls, holding Harriet back as she tries to get at the coffee grounds, to lick them up off the floor as she licks everything up off the floor.
“Oh, I’m being an asshole?” I ask. “I’m the one being an asshole?”
“Yes, Nick. You’re being an asshole,” Clara asserts before she gathers Harriet and leaves the room.
I try to follow her, to reach for her, but instead feel the cotton of her nightgown slip through my hands as she disappears.
CLARA
“What’s going on?” begs my father hours later as I step into the kitchen to see him standing before the stove, pouring a box of uncooked pasta into boiling water. I notice how loosely his pants fit, hanging on to near nothingness, merely skin and bones. He’s becoming too thin. His eyes look tired, his skin aging quickly, getting covered in liver spots and wrinkles. His hair thins with each visit, the fatigue weighing heavily on him. My mother no longer sleeps, which means my father no longer sleeps, and they’re both aging far more quickly than I’d like them to. I’ve told him before, Your health is important, too, but my father rejoined with, This is what people do when they love each other. Self-sacrifice, he said, telling me how there was nothing for my mother he wouldn’t do.
In the next room, Maisie watches TV. I’m not sure how, but somehow or other she’s no longer stashed under the guest bed. Now she’s out, her face radiated by synthetic light, and on her lips is a smile—not for me, but for the characters on TV. She clings to her scruffy teddy bear, one of its decrepit ears stuffed inside her mouth, wet with saliva. She doesn’t see me as I pass by. I pat her head; I say hello. On the floor, spread across a hand-knit blanket, Felix is asleep.
“What do you mean?” I ask my father now, standing in the kitchen, though I know exactly what he means. When my father arrived to take my place, taking on the task of wheedling Maisie out from under the guest bed, I didn’t tell him why she was there or what had triggered her meltdown. I simply said that she was under the bed and that she wouldn’t come out, and he arrived under the pretense that Maisie was being insubordinate rather than what she really was: scared.
“Are you in some kind of trouble that I don’t know about?” he asks as he sets the empty pasta box down on the countertop and looks me in the eye before I quickly avert my gaze. I can’t meet my father’s eye. Not now. “You can tell me, Clarabelle,” he says. “You can tell me anything,” and I wonder instantly what Maisie has said to my father to make him believe that I’m in trouble, that we’re in trouble. I reach into the cupboards and begin pulling bowls and plates from the inside, vessels for the pasta my father is cooking us for dinner. The cupboard is a refurbished thing, one that came to us from Nick’s grandparents. It was old when it arrived, but we stripped and sanded it and painted it brand-new. A second chance, a new lease on life.
“I’m not in trouble,” I mutter, but in truth I wonder if I am.
My father is staring at me, waiting for an answer, and I discover that my first response didn’t suffice. He needs more than a halfhearted no. In his hand is a wooden spoon, and he stirs the pasta sluggishly. “What did Maisie tell you?” I ask, and he confesses that Maisie didn’t tell him much, but her quiet twaddle did, as she sniveled beneath that bed, crying about a bad man, calling again and again for Nick. The only way she came out from under the bed was with the promise of popcorn and SpongeBob, and so Maisie crawled out, and my father and Maisie and Felix curled t
ogether on the living room chair and watched TV. She didn’t say a word more, and my father didn’t ask, certain that broaching the topic would only send her straight under the bed again.
“What bad man?” he asks me point-blank, and I force a smile and tell him there is no bad man. It’s only make-believe.
“You still haven’t told her about Nick?” he asks, and I shake my head and say no. “Oh, Clarabelle,” he says. “Why?”
I want to tell my father. I want to tell him all of it, about Maisie’s nightmares, and Detective Kaufman, and the implication that maybe Nick was being trailed, that he was killed, that his death was actually a murder. I want to tell him about Melinda Grey and Kat; I want to tell him about Connor. I want to tell my father all of this. To curl into a ball on his lap like I did when I was a child and confess to him that I’m sad and scared and confused. But I think of Emily backing away from my admission and the disbelieving gleam in her eye and know I can’t do it. I don’t know what it would do to me if my father repudiated me, too.
“You can tell me anything,” he says again, trying hard to convince me, but I shrug my shoulders and say that there’s nothing to tell.
“You know Maisie,” I say. “Such a flair for the dramatic,” and I force a smile so that maybe, just maybe, my father will believe.
I change the subject. “She remembered me,” I tell my father, and he asks, “Your mother?”
I nod wistfully, knowing it may never happen again. “She knew that I was Clara. She was sensible, clearheaded. She knew who I was,” and he says that he’s happy I got the chance to experience this moment with my mother. These days, he says, they’re few and far between.
“I’m sure it meant the world to her that you came,” he says, but as the lines of his forehead start to crease, I ask him what’s wrong. Something is bothering him. “These moments of lucidity,” he tells me, “they come and they go. One minute she knows me, the next she doesn’t. One minute Izzy is Izzy, and the next she’s not. Three times now your mother has tried to call the police on me because she thought I was a robber.