Never Coming Back(8)

When I hauled the boxes of books into the cabin, I opened them up and spread them out in the middle of the room. All the books of my childhood, each inscribed To Clara, with love from Ma. I stacked them up right there on the floor. 6 stacks x 4 stacks = one coffee table made out of books, with the unopened shoebox buried in the middle.

Now, week by week, I was giving them back to her. As my coffee table grew shorter, my mother’s books grew taller. She piled them up beneath the window, on the nightstand, once in a while under the bed. Unruly piles, just like the firewood she used to chuck onto the porch in an unorganized heap.

“Thank you,” she said, and she placed Charlotte’s Web in the exact middle of her lap, unopened.





* * *





The place my mother moved herself into, the day after she handed the keys over to the Amish family, was a place where if she fell, someone would know immediately, and if she had a bad dream and was crying in the middle of the night, someone would know that too. Where if she needed medicine, someone would give it to her, and if she wanted to watch Jeopardy! she could. No questions asked.

Where she lived now there were few locks. She was not strapped to a bed or tied to a chair. She was free to go where she wanted within the confines of the building, and where she wasn’t supposed to go she wouldn’t go anyway, because of the black swatches of painted floor that she wouldn’t step over for fear of the bottomless black holes.

Although how did they know if bottomless black holes were what she thought they were? How could anyone who was not her know exactly why she avoided them?

My mother was never coming back.

Sometimes I said that out loud. When I was driving I said it, to myself and the windshield and the seat belt and my two hands on the steering wheel.

“Your mother’s never coming back, Clara.”

A six-word sentence. A whole story in six words. Like the kind of assignment the me who made her living writing words for other people would give herself if she felt stuck. At first I tried variations, like Ma’s disappearing or Ma’s never coming back. But those were too hard to say. Ma was the word I had known my mother by my entire life. Not Mom or Mama or Mommy. Not even “my mother.”

Just Ma.

So I went back to the original sentence, which was an exact quote from the shaven-head doctor in his white doctor coat and in whose office I sat, surrounded by diplomas and plastic plants. This was the day after Tamar and I had sat there together. I had made a solo appointment, so as to get more information. All the information I could, on my own, straight from the horse’s mouth, as the saying went, although did horses talk? They did not. Not in words, anyway.

“Your mother’s never coming back, Clara. Early-onset is particularly cruel because it strikes so much younger than the typical patient. It seems to go faster sometimes too, probably because early onset is often not diagnosed until the later stages. We hope that won’t be the case with your mother, of course. That’s rare. That would be the worst-case scenario.”

He pushed a box of tissues across the table and my head filled with images of other people, dozens of them, who must have come before me and sat in the same chair that I was sitting in. Your mother’s never coming back, Clara began a slow scrawl across the bottom of my brain. A wandering-minstrel-without-an-instrument of a sentence.

“Isn’t there some kind of medication that can help?”

“To slow the progress, possibly, but stop it, no.”

“Aren’t there any studies she might be eligible for, clinical trials where she could get new medicine that’s not FDA-approved yet?”

“Not at this time.”

My mind kept coming up with reasonable questions and I listened to myself say them, one after another. Part of me admired the reasonableness of the young woman sitting across from the doctor. Look at her, her hiking boots laced with red laces, her vintage Future Farmers of America jacket, the lavender streak in her brown hair. She was so rational! Logical! Articulate! Concise! Self-restrained! Exclamation marks scrolled themselves along the bottom of my brain. Little Hitler youths out for a march. Hitlerjugend.

“The brain affects everything about the body, so there are physical symptoms as well. Large and small motor skills. Stumbling, falling. Et cetera.”

“How long will it take?”

Until what, Clara? Until she couldn’t drive any longer? Until she couldn’t live alone? Until she needed a personal-care attendant? Until she was in diapers? Until she forgot how to feed herself? Until she refused food and drink? The words “care facility” exploded into huge boldface letters in my head. CARE FACILITY CARE FACILITY CARE FACILITY CARE FACILITY.

Clara.

Shhh.

I came out of that meeting and I spoke about it with no one, not even Sunshine and Brown. Not Burl Evans, the postman, who must have wondered when suddenly the name Winter was painted over with Beiler on the mailbox at the end of the driveway. Annabelle Lee, the choir director, who was my mother’s only real friend, and William T. Jones and Crystal already knew, but I did not talk about it with them either.

My mother made me promise to be silent, and silent I would be.

The only ones I talked about it with were the doctor and the nurses and the aides and the therapists, because I had to. Her next of kin was me, her only kin was me, and what that meant was that it was all up to me: power of attorney, legal guardianship, health proxy. All those terms that no one wanted to hear or think about because were they ever to become necessary it would be many decades hence and only to other people. People who were not you. People who were not your mother.