Never Coming Back(21)

“I don’t know,” was what I said.

He nodded. So little, he was.

Did Blue Mountain feel alone in this world? Did he walk through it wondering where his place was? Why had he asked me that question, and why had he asked it when he knew that no one else would hear him ask it, he who returned when everyone else had left?

Unanswerable questions, all of them.

Children like Blue Mountain brought Asa back to me. Blue Mountain was the kind of child that Asa would look out for at the summer camp where he worked. Asa would watch over a child like Blue Mountain, protect and defend him by helping him learn how to do things he was afraid of. The monkey bars, maybe, or double Dutch. Or even the unicycle, his own unicycle, which he brought to camp and kept in reserve for the most tender children. The most fragile.

Asa had taught himself to ride the unicycle. Once, on the way to his house, I came upon him in the middle of a clearing off one of the trails through the woods. He turned slowly, around and around, with his hands off the handlebars and the sun glinting down through the pines onto his hair. When I thought about the way Asa looked on that afternoon when I watched from behind the birches on a nearby trail but never told him I was watching, how that day and that image and that memory was burned into my heart, sometimes it felt as if I might float off the edge of the world and never come back.

Too bad there wasn’t an early-warning system for moments like that, moments you could never forget even if you wanted to. Only after the fact did you realize that a certain time in your life was over, and you would never get it back. You once had been whole, and now you weren’t.

This was why the little, cute children were so hard to look at. The youngest ones were the ones most likely not to know that they were still whole. They walked around in their soft skins, with their backpacks and their messy hair and their clompy Velcro shoes. They scratched their mosquito bites or sucked a strand of hair, they gazed around the room with their enormous eyes. Moments like that, I wanted to put my arms around them, all of them, and tell them to watch out. A fifth grade bully or a nasty teacher or a bad priest, oh God the whole damn world was going to get them, one of these days, and they didn’t even know it.

They were nearly skinless, these tiny children.

The skinless walked among us.





* * *





On Tuesdays twice a month, Asa used to drive up to the Fairchild Continuing Care Center and sing to the residents, which was what the people who lived there were called. Never patients, never old people, never senior citizens. Residents. He took me with him a few times. The difference between Asa and me could be summarized in the way we entered the Fairchild. Asa bounded up the walkway and spread his arms wide, pushed both double doors open at the same time and was already past the reception desk before he turned to see where I was. Still by the car, usually. He would pinwheel his arms in a Come on, Clara! motion, and my feet would begin the trudge.

Once inside, I would be overwhelmed by the smell, the smell that only places like the Fairchild Continuing Care Center had. The smell of oldness, yes, and cleaning supplies, and cafeteria food, but so much else. Memories. Longings. So much stored up inside, never to be let out. I smelled it every time I walked into the place where my mother lived now, and every time, my heart beat faster. Let them out. Let them out. That was the feeling that filled me, and whether it was the wanting to leave or the wanting of all the stories trapped inside to be let out, I couldn’t say. I didn’t know. They were linked in my mind and in my heart.

Not so for Asa. Asa was light and I was not. Asa was there to sing to the residents, and sing he did. They lit up when he walked into the Fairchild community room. The music stand would already be set up for him, for the hymnal or sheet music he had brought with him or not brought with him. Asa didn’t need sheet music. Those songs came pouring out of him: “Amazing Grace,” “A Mighty Fortress Is Our God,” “I Danced in the Morning.”

How? Where had he learned all those hymns?

“Nobody learns those hymns, Clara. And nobody calls them hymns either. They’re just songs. They’re everywhere. You know them too.”

And he was right. I did. The day came, not long after I had stopped going to the Fairchild with him—I was not Asa, I could not bound in and bound out the way he did, I could not stand in front of the residents and fill them with light and music the way he could—when I heard myself singing “Amazing Grace.” Standing there at the kitchen sink, washing dishes, singing. The way Asa did, and the way my mother did.

Asa sang to me too. Songs from Oklahoma!, that old musical, when we were driving around. He would open all the windows and spread his arms wide, steering with his knees, and sing about a place where the wind came sweeping down the plain. He sang other times too, soft songs when my heart kicked into high gear and I had to lie down. He would curl himself around me and stroke my hair and sing to me, meandering songs that he made up as he went along because that was the kind of thing Asa could do. He could make up songs that were songs, real and true, and the sound of his singing voice would weave itself into my dreams.

It still did, sometimes.





* * *





There were only seven stages of Alzheimer’s and my mother was already in Stage 5 when she moved herself out of our house. Half a year later she had progressed to Stage 6b.

“How did she get that far without anyone noticing?”