Never Coming Back(33)

“Am I doing everything I can do?” I said. “I don’t know.”

Brown’s hands were keeping my one cold hand not-cold, and I pushed my other hand into his cupped palms too. Brown was always warm.

“Tell us what you’re doing,” Brown said. “Start with that.”

“Spending time with her is what I’m doing. I go down there a few days a week and we walk around the halls. I bring her a book. We watch Jeopardy! together.”

“Can she”—and then he stopped, but I knew what he was going to ask and so did Sunshine, because she finished the question for him—“follow along? Does she know what’s going on?”

“It depends. Sometimes it’s like she’s not really there and other times she’s weirdly good at it.”

“I don’t remember her being good at Jeopardy! back in the day,” Sunshine said. “I don’t remember her ever calling out any answers.”

“Me either,” Brown said.

“Maybe she was, though. Maybe she knew all the answers all that time and she never said anything because we were always yelling them out. See, that’s part of what makes me nuts. Like, did I even know my mother?”

“What kid does?” Sunshine said. “Show me a kid who recognizes their parents as people and not just parents, and I’ll show you a weirdo.”

“I was a weirdo, though. Kind of.”

“And you still are!” Brown said, in his exclamation-mark voice. “Kind of!”

“Did they tell you to do anything?” Sunshine said. “Anything more than visit, be there?”

“They told me to follow her.”

“Like, literally? Down the hall or whatever?”

“Like metaphorically. Wherever she goes in her mind, it’s my job to follow her there. Which could be any number of places. The other night she was on her way to choir practice.”

That made them smile. It made me smile too. The kind of smile that you tried to hold back because it seemed wrong to find it funny, to find a woman with early-onset Alzheimer’s funny, but somehow it was.

“Sometimes I talk to Dog about it,” I said. “I look at his ashes and I talk it over with him. Is that weird?”

“Yes,” Brown said, “but you’re weird. As you just pointed out.”

“I talk to Dog because he knew her,” I said. “He was the only other living creature who was there with me and Tamar, living in our house, listening to us talk. He was the thing we both loved.”

“Besides each other,” Sunshine said. “You both loved each other.”

“Love. You both love each other,” Brown said. “Present tense.”





* * *





“So what’s the goal now?” Sunshine said. “What is within your power to do, for your mother or for yourself?”

“Good question, wife,” Brown said. “Given that it’s apparently a one-way street.”

We were sitting on the porch now, all three of us, lined up on the edge with our legs hanging off, me in the middle. I was a human book and they were human bookends. The fairy lights glimmered on in their silent way, and the air was cold and crisp and tinged with smoke from the embers glowing in the fire pit. Brown and Sunshine were no strangers to good questions. Long ago they had asked themselves what was within their power to do about Sunshine’s cancer and their lives in the face of it, and they had decided to think of it as a chronic illness. Like diabetes. Something to be neither encouraged nor denied, but managed.

“I don’t know,” I said.

“Not good enough,” Sunshine said. “The phrase ‘I don’t know’ is a filler phrase, used as an excuse when someone wants to avoid answering.”

“A ‘filler phrase’? What are you, the urban dictionary? I mean the rural dictionary?”

She would not be distracted. She butted up against me, and so did Brown on the other side. The human book was being mushed between its human bookends.

“Come on,” she said. “Talk to us.”

“What I want is not within my power,” I said. “What I want is her, the way she was.”

Her, the simple fact of her. Her in her lumber jacket chopping up firewood and tossing it onto the porch in that haphazard way. Her leaning up against the counter eating her goddamn artichoke hearts. Her walking me down the aisle at my wedding. Her as a grandmother. Jesus! Did I want a wedding? Did I want a baby? Neither of those things did I think about—my one and only boyfriend had been dead for seven years now—but there they were, images as fully formed as photos, hanging right there inside my head. Everything I didn’t know, everything I now wanted, came crushing down inside me and squeezed my heart.

“But I can’t go back in time, even though I wish I could,” I said. “Get some answers, maybe. Figure things out.”

“Dissolve the wedge between you?” Sunshine said, she who had been there for all the impatient phone calls, all the rolling eyes, all the brushing-off of my mother.

“We messed up,” I said. “And now I’m losing her and she’s losing me. I feel as if I don’t know anything that went on inside her, back then.”

“All the more reason to try,” Sunshine said.