Mirage(8)

Cacti are creepy. Joe and I joke that they are aliens waiting for a command from the mother ship. If this happens, my family is toast. We’re completely surrounded.

I admit a few are strangely beautiful, with improbable flowers that seep out of them like colorful dew. But most are otherworldly petri-dish experiments magnified by a million. Some are tall and arty, while others look like pissed-off cucumbers.

Mom is obsessed with these beautiful, strange, and prickly creatures. Maybe that’s why she’s attracted to my father. She doesn’t say it, but I think she resents that we have to live in this barren wasteland because Dad can’t take the high stimulus of cities and people.

The thought of him and our fight makes me feel like my heart tripped and fell on a cactus.

The sound of Gran’s piano welcomes me on the steps. I walk in, quiet enough not to distract her but loud enough not to startle. She’s bent reverently over the keys. Her eyes are closed, hiding the clouds of her blindness. She’s intent, her head cocked to the side like she’s listening to someone else play. Her fingers are the most youthful thing about her, still nimble and straight, and I wonder if the rest of her body would be if she used it as much as she does her hands.

The music is a strange, mesmeric tune I’ve never heard before. “What is that you’re playing?” I ask, gently placing my car keys on the glass kitchen table and walking over.

“My song. I want to give you my song.”

My grandmother can be all kinds of perplexing sometimes. “Your song?”

“Of course,” she says, not bothering to mask her impatience. Gran’s moods have become pretty unpredictable as her dementia amps up. “Every person has a secret song only they can hear,” she explains, digging deeper into the keys so that I hear the light tap of her too-long nails on the ivory. I’ll need to cut them for her soon. “I’m playing my soul’s song. Mine alone. But if I don’t share it with you, then when I die, it’ll die with me.”

I sit down on the bench next to her warm body and hope that blind people can’t smell tears. “Why does it have to die with you?” I ask softly.

“Because you are a stubborn cur who won’t learn to play the piano.”

I smile. “Mean old lady.”

She starts her song over. I have to admit, it sounds like her. This is the only time I’ve ever felt bad for having no inclination to play. “Can it be sung?” I ask, wanting her to know I’d keep her song alive if I could, even if I had to hum it.

“No. You don’t get to say how it comes through,” she scolds. “You get your song the way you get it,” she adds in that you’ll eat it and like it tone, as if we’re talking roast chicken.

No song has ever come through for me. “Maybe not everyone gets a song, Gran. I don’t have one.”

“Nonsense. You aren’t listening, child. The blazing wildfire can’t hear the soft wings of birds. Quiet yourself and you’ll hear it. I warn you, don’t die without sharing your song.”

Gran and her voodoo warnings.

I don’t like this topic. It strums the spooked chords I’ve already felt vibrate twice today. I glance behind me, daring myself to scan the long, straight shadows of the house. A quiver starts at my feet and hands and rises up my body. I wonder if a person freezing to death or dying does so from the outside in, like an ice cube. Is the middle?—?the house of your heart?—?the last to freeze? I shake my head to clear the random, strange thought. What the hell’s the matter with me?

I concentrate on the piano and its lilting music. My eyes slowly find focus, and then I see a rippling movement within the polished veneer of the piano. Looking harder, I could swear the whites of eyes stare at me from the shiny black surface. I spin around again to check if someone’s behind me. When I turn back, the eyes are gone.

Gran stops playing abruptly. She cocks her head and says, “Oh! Who have you brought home with you?”

The shiver reaches my neck and lies there like a cold hand. “No one, Gran. I’m alone.”

Gran and her talk of death has made me edgier than I already was. I take her hand, grateful for its warmth. “C’mon, time for your bath.”

It’s not that my grandma needs everything done for her, but she’s a little rickety lately. The first time I had to help her bathe, I apologized all over myself. “Nonsense.” She laughed. “I had to pick boogers out of your nose and wipe the filth out of your little brown biscuits. This is payback.”

Bath time has become our new normal. I love the waves of her hair when it’s wet and I scrub her scalp gently with the pads of my fingers. I’m less shocked by the glimpse into my body’s future than I was the first time I saw her naked. She can’t see my eyes on her, and I try not to take advantage of that, but still I look. I make myself do it because I can’t stand to let a mongrel like fear back me down. I’m not afraid of much, but I am afraid of getting old. I fear my back crooking like a bent finger. I fear clouds covering my sight. I fear my mind will start to slip in puddles of thoughts like hers does.

I fear I’m seeing things.

After I’m done with her hair, Grandma washes her girl bits, and then I help her out of the tub to dry off, wrapping a huge white towel over her skin. She reminds me of an overripe banana: soft, brown, and spotted. Grandma shrugs me off and says, “Go on. That’ll be Joe on the phone.”