The Things We Cannot Say(68)

The voice is robotic, of course, but that doesn’t mean it’s not accusatory. Mom and I both turn sharply toward the bed. Babcia looks pointedly at us—no words required to communicate her displeasure with our raised voices and Eddie’s reaction to them. I glance at my son, and he’s staring at me, visibly concerned and confused. I offer him a smile, trying to project a calmness that I don’t feel at all. Mom is in fine form today and apparently we’re going to dredge up every past disappointment I’ve ever managed to inflict upon her.

“Mom,” I say, drawing in a deep breath. “May I speak to you outside, please?”

Mom grunts her reply, then follows me into the hallway. We stand facing one another like fighters in a ring, our breathing ragged.

This conversation is not new to us, so we both know how it goes now. This is the part where I back down—maybe I go ahead and do what I want later anyway, but at this point in the conversation, I usually concede that she’s right just so I can end the tension. Even when she’s not being downright mean, like today, my mother can run rings around me in any argument. She was a prosecutor for forty years—she knows how to get her point across. In some ways, it’s actually easier to argue with this emotional version of my mother because she’s not quite as rational as she ordinarily would be. Maybe that’s why, today, I’m going to ignore my automatic inclination to acquiesce.

“She is not confused,” I say flatly. “She knows exactly what she wants. I don’t know why this is so important to her, but it clearly is.”

“So you’re just going to leave me here to deal with all of this?” Mom says. It’s hard to stop my eyes from widening in shock, because suddenly I understand what this little spat is really about. Mom doesn’t care that I’m going; she cares that I’m leaving.

The very idea of the formidable Judge Julita Slaski-Davis being afraid of anything—let alone something as pedestrian as being alone is jaw-dropping. I love my mom—I admire her—I resent her—I am intimidated by her—I’m so many things about and toward her, but one thing I’ve not often been is surprised by her, and I’m not sure I’ve ever felt sorry for her before.

“Maybe it’s time to call Dad—”

“I am not asking him to come home.”

“He’d understand, Mom. He’d come right away if you asked him to.”

“I am not you, Alice Slaski-Davis,” she hisses at me, predictably resorting to my full name as if I’m a child, also predictably refusing to acknowledge that I took Wade’s surname without so much as a hyphen! Mom is nothing if not consistent; she was horrified with that decision ten years ago, and apparently it still smarts today. “I do not and will not rely on a man to get me through this. It is—”

“Listen,” I interrupt her, because I know we’re about to start the whole Alice-is-a-bad-feminist argument again and it never ends well—or at all, actually. “I don’t want to argue with you about Dad.” Or Wade. Or my surname. Or my mind-boggling ability to survive without a career. “I just want you to understand why I want to do this for her. She’s given me real places, real names...” At least, I seriously hope so. “I’m just going to go to Poland and take some photos for her, maybe FaceTime her once or twice if the time zones line up okay. I don’t really understand why this matters so much to her, but clearly it does and God only knows how much time she has left.”

“What on earth do you think you’re going to achieve? Who travels halfway across the globe to take some photos? It’s a fool’s errand.”

“Well,” I say quietly, thinking of Callie’s comments about Wade in the car this morning. “Let me find that out the hard way.”

I pack Eddie up after that and kiss Babcia on the cheek.

Today is Saturday. I tell her, via the iPad. Alice home tomorrow. Alice plane Poland Monday. She looks at me, and her brow furrows with confusion.

“See?” Mom says bitterly. She’s sitting in the corner with her arms crossed over her chest. “I told you we need a translator.”

I look at the iPad, and for a moment or two I can’t figure out what’s confusing Babcia. She knows the symbols for today and Alice and home and plane and she had no trouble at all finding the flag that means Poland.

It’s the days. The titles are in English, so she can only use the icons she creates herself and the ones she already knows. A sudden thought strikes me and I hit the settings on the iPad.

Polski.

I change languages, and move back to the icon screen. Babcia looks again, and she grins at me and nods. She takes the iPad and I wait as she plays with the device for several minutes. She takes a selfie, grimaces, deletes it and repeats this process several times until she’s apparently happy with the result. Finally, the device reads me a string of robotic Polish. I look at the icons, and find she’s created a new icon and adorned it with a selfie of herself midsmile, and she’s wedged that around grinning clip art faces. I flick the iPad back to English and reread it.

Babcia happy. Babcia proud.

Five minutes later, Mom, the head nurse and Babcia all know how to use the AAC as an inelegant translator. I take Babcia’s precious letter and snap a series of photos, trying to catch it in just the right light so that Zofia-the-Polish-tour-guide has a chance of translating it.