Never Coming Back(4)

“Ms. Winter,” the doctor said. “I wish I had better news.”

He looked straight at her when he said that. Some people looked anywhere but straight at you when they had bad news, like when you had failed the exam and now you were being expelled, like when two roads diverged in a yellow wood and you, you took the third road, the unpaved road, the unplowed-in-winter road. This doctor? He looked my mother in the eye and didn’t sugarcoat his words. I had to give him that.

“What about my daughter?” she said, tilting her head in my direction.

“Your daughter? Well, there are resources available to her. Websites and forums that??—”

“No. What about her chances?”

He nodded. Ah. Okay. I see what you’re wondering about. “The chances that your daughter,” he said, not looking at me, as if I weren’t sitting right there, “carries a PSEN1 gene mutation, which is the most common of the gene mutations that cause eFAD—early-onset familial Alzheimer’s disease—are fifty-fifty.”

Fifty-fifty. Five-oh five-oh. Half of one hundred. Every molecule of the twisted strands that made me me simmered and pulsed with fifty-fifty-ness. I pushed the thought away. I did not let fear bubble and rise inside me. Yet.

She was quiet on the way back to Sterns. Quiet and thin and straight in the passenger seat. She gazed out the window at the Utica floodplain, passing on the left, passing on the right. It wasn’t until we had crested and were coasting down the longest hill of Glass Factory Road—that huge and irresistibly steep downslope—that she spoke.

“When are you going back to Florida?”

“On Wednesday,” I said. “But here’s the plan, Ma. I’m going to move back up here. We can figure things out together.”

She nodded. Unlike her. My mother was not an acquiescent sort.

“I can supervise the wood stacking,” I said. “Make sure there’s enough of it for the winter. Make sure it’s not tossed in a big random pile, à la the way you would do it.”

My voice sounded false, in that fake, trying-to-sound-light way. Trying to act as if the only reason for me to move back to Sterns was to make sure there was enough wood for the winter and that said wood was correctly stacked. Ignoring the fact of her illness. Ignoring the fact of the distance between us, all that was hidden, all that had gone unspoken, all that was unresolved.

She nodded again.

“I figure I can be back in about a week,” I said. “Give notice on the Treehouse, load up the Subaru.” The Treehouse was my name for that little house, built into the limbs of an ancient live oak down on the Florida Panhandle, the forgotten coast of the Sunshine State. “It’s a month-to-month rental anyway, so that’s no big deal. Then zip up Ninety-five and be right back in Sterns. Poof!”

The poof did not come out the way I intended it. It was supposed to be light, a balloon tugging at its string, an interrobang of a word. But it fell flat. Tamar, straight and thin and quiet Tamar, nodded. Could she not do anything but nod? Who was she, the Nod of Wynken and Blynken? Anger flared inside me and my hands clenched the steering wheel. Nod, nod, nod. Was she just going to nod to whatever I said? Nod away her life?





* * *





Except it wasn’t that way.

In the single week that it took to move myself out of the Panhandle and drive back north, my mother swept the rug out from underneath her life. Underneath our life. There was a standing cash offer on the house and the storage barn and all the surrounding land from one of the Amish families who had moved into Sterns, and she walked through the fields and woods to the too-small house where they lived with their eight children and took them up on it. I heard about this after the fact, from the neighbor William T. Jones, who along with his girlfriend, Crystal, had helped her pack everything up. Kitchen and dining and living room and Tamar’s bedroom and my old bedroom. Bathroom and mudroom.

It sounded like such a long list. All those rooms. As if there would be box after box, bag after bag, truckload after truckload. But there wasn’t. My mother was a woman of few possessions. You could say she was born winnowed. Ahead of the curve. The Amish paid cash for what they wanted and Tamar called the Salvation Army to pick up the rest.

“What about the books?” I said to William T. “Did she donate them too?”

Because there were hundreds and hundreds of them. The books of my childhood, all the books that had gotten me through all the years of school, when I propped them up behind my textbooks and read and read and read, the books that had gotten me through all the summers in Sterns, all those holidays where it was me and Tamar and no one but the two of us and all the other people I loved, the invisible people who lived between the pages of my books.

“Those too?” I said. “All my books, gone? My books?”

I kept repeating myself, as if William T. didn’t quite understand English. But William T. understood both English and me. He shook his head and put his hands on my shoulders. Calm down, Clara, calm down.

“The books are safe,” he said. “We’ve got them at our house. We’ll bring them by for you.”

The next night there they were on Turnip Hill Road, William T. and Crystal, the bed of the truck filled with box after box after box of books. We formed an assembly line and passed the boxes one at a time onto the porch: six high and six deep.