Never Coming Back(19)

“But Asa,” I said. “She said something to Asa back in high school. She must have, because he broke up with me the next day. No explanation. And then she sent me away, she banished me from Sterns. Goodbye and good riddance to the prodigal daughter.”

“Why does that still eat away at you all these years later?” Brown said, and Sunshine nodded, a nod of You need to weigh that one specific hurt against the entirety of your life together, everything she did for you.

Why, Brown? Because words. Words, the spoken and the unspoken, the real and the imagined conversations, pile up. Because I screamed at her, because I hurt her, because she hurt me. Words turn into walls. Walls turn into mazes. With the passage of time you find yourself deep in, winding and twisting and turning, and where is the way out?

“We never talked about it,” I said. “She would never talk about it. And now it’s too late.”

“It’s never too late,” Sunshine said. “You’re both still alive, right? Track her down, wherever she is right now, and talk.”





* * *





It was the end of a stage of life, that night I flung those raging words at my mother. It was the first time that I saw no clear way out of something I had done. Shame filled me, on top of the hurt of losing Asa, and they fused together and seeped into my bones. I walked around that winter, the winter of my senior year, with the images of Asa the day he broke up with me and my mother the night I screamed at her rising up before me like ghosts. His head, a back-and-forth metronome of no, and her hands, trembling, rising and falling at the sides of her head. That fathomless look in her eyes. Her parted lips.

“It’s strange that she would interfere with you and your boyfriend,” Brown said. “And strange that she was against you going to school close by. Tamar seems like a live-and-let-live type.”

“You would think,” I said. “But you would be wrong.”

The shame I felt at hurting my mother could be another Words by Winter assignment: Write a letter to your mother, apologizing for that dark night. What would I say and how would I say it? What would she say back to me? We had never talked about what happened. Parts of the story were missing.

Is it possible that parts of the whole story are always missing? Like when I was buying fudge for my mother at the Hogback Mountain gift shop and the cashier sat behind the fudge counter, crocheting something—from the round, small look of the thing it was a baby hat like the kind Sunshine made—and she refused to look up from her crocheting. Hello, hello, fudge lady, I’m here, can you see me?

I coughed. I jingled my keys. I coughed again, louder. I said, “Excuse me,” but did she look up? She did not.

“HI.”

Both letters uppercase, and in boldface. At that she looked up, startled. “Oh my goodness, dear girl,” she said. “Have you been standing there a long time?”

That was when I saw the hearing aids, big ones. The on-a-budget hearing aids instead of the expensive, barely noticeable ones. For God’s sake, Clara, she’s deaf. The fudge lady was a kind old lady who was deaf, and she carefully cut and weighed and packed my half-pound of peanut butter fudge and then counted out my change, which I fed into the Donate to Vermont Food Shelves jar on the counter, one coin at a time, in penance, for which she smiled and thanked me.

It was so hard to know the whole story. Nigh on impossible. Remember that, Clara, I told myself.





* * *





Changes in the ability to communicate are unique to each person with Alzheimer’s. In the early stages of dementia, the person’s communication may not seem very different or he or she might repeat stories or not be able to find a word. As the disease progresses, a caregiver may recognize other changes such as:



Using familiar words repeatedly

Inventing new words to describe familiar objects

Easily losing his or her train of thought

Reverting back to a native language

Having difficulty organizing words logically

Speaking less often.



The Life Care Committee had printed out some guidelines for me, taken from the Alzheimer’s Association website. In the beginning I used to read them over and over. They were mostly memorized now but I still went through them sometimes. A ritual. Familiar words and phrases used repeatedly. She was always a strange child. She was a word girl. Inventing new words to describe familiar objects. “The iron claw.” That was the term my mother used for the hammered-metal hands that cupped the single book on her windowsill.

“You mean the bookends, Ma?”

She shook her head, annoyed, and pointed at them. “No. Them. The iron claw.”

“Yeah. The bookends. That’s what they’re called.”

She picked up the pillow next to her and threw it at me point-blank, a distance of twelve inches, because I was sitting right next to her on the couch. I caught it and laughed, a laugh of how strange, how surprising: my mother, throwing a pillow right at my face.

This was only two days after our last visit, but she was different yet again. That too was something they’d told me early on to expect. She will come and she will go, they said, and you must learn to meet her where she is.

“So,” she said, nodding, when I walked in next time.

“So,” I said.