The Stand-In(3)
But until I download a new, shinier list maker, it looks like I’m on my own.
I walk to the nearest subway stop and briefly hesitate on the platform. Without the restrictions of my app-planned day, I can either go home and wallow in self-pity or visit my mom. Actually, going home isn’t even a real option, because Mom takes priority over pretty much everything.
Thirty minutes later, I’ve reached my stop and am walking the three blocks to Glen Lake. It’s a muggy June afternoon and layers of nasty, sweaty stickiness form on my skin, perfectly mirroring my internal state (level: trash goblin). I take a moment to breathe in deeply and force the negative energy away. Seeing Mom is hard enough without going in already dejected.
“You can do this.” I give myself a mini pep talk before pressing the intercom button at the main entrance. After all, it’s not like I’m the one who has to live here. I only have two jobs: to pay for Agatha Wu Reed’s single room and to look cheerful when I visit.
The door opens, but I linger at the threshold like a vampire waiting for an invitation. An older woman walks out and I step out of her way with a quick apology, immediately regretting it because I did nothing to be sorry for. It’s a bad habit that has become an automatic reflex. She’s followed by an elderly gentleman who reaches for her hand and lovingly tucks it up against his chest. I try to suppress the hungry look I know comes into my eyes as I stare at their intertwined fingers, because no one wants to broadcast their loneliness to others.
It’s not like I’m lonesome all the time or pining for a Prince Charming, but sometimes there’s a part of me—maybe twenty percent—that wants that kind of connection so badly it hurts. The other eighty percent is more sensible. I have too much on my plate to be thinking about relationships right now, and it’s much easier to only have my mom to care about. Putting another person’s concerns and needs into the mix would only make things harder.
Covering my sigh, I catch the edge of the door before it closes and step inside.
The woman at the nurses’ station looks up as I approach. We’re both familiar with each other at this point.
“How is she?” I ask.
“Eating well,” she answers in a brisk tone.
I wait, but that’s all the information that seems to be forthcoming. “How about her mental state?” I nudge politely, not wanting to nag or ask too many questions.
“Any word on the new home?” The nurse’s neat sidestep is answer enough. The entire floor knows I’m trying to get Mom into the Xin Guang private care home on the other side of town.
I shake my head. “Nothing open yet.” It could take another year for a room to open, which would at least give me more time to save. Private care is expensive.
The nurse nods with practiced sympathy, a gesture I’ve become intimately familiar with since Mom entered Glen Lake. “Something will come up,” she assures me. “It always does.”
That something will come up I have no doubt, but it means I need to have the money to pay for it, which means I need my job, which means putting up with Todd and the hell he’s making of my life. I finish signing in and head down the hall.
Glen Lake is clean, reputable, close to my apartment, and the staff are kind. Logically, I know I’m lucky to have found Mom a room here. I don’t feel lucky. All I feel is hate. I hate the omnipresent sickly smell of bleach and soup that permeates the rooms, no matter what’s served for lunch. I hate the colors—a faded mix of salmon and seafoam I’m sure someone thought was a soothing combination but instead gives the impression of a 1970s bathroom in desperate need of renovation. While I’m hovering above my pit of hostility, let me also drop in the bland, silver-framed art prints on the walls. They’re all still-lifes of snapdragons and landscapes or cutesy animal posters. In fact, there’s one by my mother’s room of an adorable little white kitten sitting next to a pink carnation that I see each time before I go in, and you know what? I hate that, too.
Most of all, I hate the lost expression I see on Mom’s face whenever I open her door.
I pause and put all of it—work, Todd, money, the lawyer—out of my mind and arrange a pleasant smile before I push open the door and see Mom sitting on a beige vinyl chair near the window, staring at nothing as soft classical music plays from the television. I watch her for a moment, my jaw clenching so hard my teeth start to ache. She used to be a woman who knit and sewed and painted. She made her own yogurt and bread. She did aerobics back when people unironically wore leotards with little elastic belts and matching leg warmers. It hurts to see her so inactive.
She turns to me, the light from the window hiding her expression. “Ni hao?”
That Mandarin greeting means she’s not with me in the present but back in the past where I can’t follow her. I do my best to keep bright. I only know a few words but they’re enough to answer her. “Hen hao, ni ne?”
My mom has been in Canada for over thirty years but still speaks English with an accent. When I was younger, I didn’t notice—it was Mom’s voice, no more and no less—but how she speaks, the up and down of her tones, has become more pronounced over the last year. The doctor says it’s my imagination, but I think it’s because she’s back in China so often in her thoughts. Her earlier life there is a mystery to me. She rarely spoke of it, wanting always to look to the now and the future. She even refused to speak Mandarin to me at home, insisting it was better to fit in and accept where we are rather than where we’d been.