Hope and Other Punch Lines(27)

I run straight to the guest room, anxious and eager to get a glimpse of my recently arrived grandmother. She’s lying on the bed, the one with the new hospital-like guardrails you can pull up if necessary. Her arms are crossed and her hazel eyes are wide open. Still as a picture. She doesn’t look any different from the last time I saw her, which was a couple of months ago over spring break. She has her long gray hair tied into her signature side braid, like a sister wife, and wears a faded black T-shirt with her lucky blue jeans.

“What are you doing?” I ask, because that’s how it’s always been between us. No need for formalities, the hellos and the goodbyes and the see you laters of life. We’ve always jumped right in.

“Playing dead,” my grandmother says, her voice warm and friendly and clear and one hundred percent alive. I feel a rush of relief. With only two words, I can tell she knows exactly who I am.

“Umm, why?” I step farther into the room and catalog some more. Maybe there are a few extra strands of white in her hair. A few new lines on her forehead. Her hands, which used to be soft and playful, now look ancient and gnarled, hardened at the tips of her long fingers.

But the rest, the vast majority of her: same.

Or at the very least: familiar, recognizable.

“Just practicing,” she says.

“Doesn’t seem like the sort of thing you need to practice for.”

“It’s good to be prepared.”

“No one has said anything about you dying,” I say.

“Everyone dies, Abbi Hope. You of all people should know that.” My heart clenches for a minute and I think: She knows. Of course she knows. I feel a burden blissfully unravel. And then I realize she’s talking about 9/11, about the baby me. Of course she doesn’t know about the cough.

“True. Seems silly to practice, though.” I move closer. I want to hug her, to scoop her up like she’s four years old and toddler-sized. I’ve never before felt that impulse with my grandmother. I used to crawl into her lap and sit on her like she was a comfy chair. I used to slip my snot-covered hand into her hand whenever I could reach, like Livi does to me.

I used to look up at her. Not down. Never down.

“Come over here and tell me everything,” she says, and she starts to rise, slow and steady, a multistep process involving her elbows, then her wrists, and then her gnarled hands. Once she’s up, she grabs me in a tight hug.

“You smell the same,” she says, and it occurs to me that she’s looking at me much the way I’m looking at her. Cataloging my changes.

“So do you,” I say.

“I wish I could bottle up your smell. Weird to think that will go. Even my sensory memories are going to escape me.” My grandmother’s voice is resolute. She’s the one who gave my mom her stoicism. In my mother it takes on a cheery perversion, but my grandma is all strong, clean lines when it comes to the difficult stuff. She’s stating a fact, true words without any sentimentality. The day after my grandfather, her husband for over four decades, died, my grandmother climbed out of bed, brushed her teeth, walked downstairs and brewed a pot of coffee for the rest of us. Sliced bagels and set out the cream cheese and lox. Once we had all eaten and caffeinated, she clapped her hands and said, “Okay, where do we start?”

“Listen, I want to prepare you. Today is a good day. Tomorrow might be bad. That’s how it seems to go with this thing,” she says, and she’s so much the same, so much my grandmother—she’s taking care of me, again making everyone else coffee, when she’s the one in pain—that I ache. “Your mom says I went out without pants. That’s why I’m here.”

“Apparently you gave the entire state of Maine a pretty good show,” I say, and we sit side by side. I’m cross-legged, like my campers, ankle on knee. “But whatever. You have great legs.”

“Totally,” she says, stretching them out as if to admire them. Then she takes my hands in hers and stares at my palms. Traces the lines like there’s something to be deciphered, like she’s trying to make my details stay still. “I don’t remember. It’s like it happened to someone else. I asked your mom for a photo for proof. She showed me the police report. Fortunately, there were no actual pictures.”

“I’m so sorry, Grandma.” I try to imagine what that must feel like. To have whole patches of your memory vanish. Something empty that should be full. I try to imagine having to look at a photo to prove something happened to you, and then I realize that of course I’ve been doing that for forever.

“Don’t be. Life with a capital L. So, tell me about you.”

“Nothing to tell,” I say. “You know. Status quo.”

“I heard Cat dropped you.” Despite myself, I laugh. With my grandma’s martyrdom comes bluntness. When puberty first hit and my face erupted in acne, she’d looked at me and said, “Well, the good news is that awkward phases help with long-term personality development.”

“People outgrow each other sometimes,” I say, and though I don’t mean it physically, I can’t help but look down at my body. I could easily pass for twelve years old. I wonder if it’s that simple. Not that I’m short, but that I didn’t even try to keep pace with my friends. That they were moving faster toward adulthood—or at least one version of it—than I was. Which is ironic, considering what has happened since. All the ways time has now changed for me and zoomed forward.