by Joy Fielding
I released a deep breath of air. “You’ve had mammograms before, haven’t you?” I stated more than asked.
“Of course,” she said.
“Be sure to let the technician know if she hurts you.”
“Of course, dear.”
“They don’t really hurt.”
“Of course not.”
Such was the extent of most of my mother’s discourse these days. Still, it was more than my sister had said to me since our return from Raiford. I’d tried to tell her what had transpired while she was out of the room, carefully repeating the things Colin had said, then had to sit and listen while she rushed to his defense, as I’d known she would—I’d provoked him, deliberately misunderstood him, put words into his mouth. I told her she was crazy; she told me I was jealous. We hadn’t spoken since.
The technician appeared, clipboard in hand. She was tall and thin, with long, stringy red hair pulled into a ponytail, and she looked no older than Sara. I realized I hadn’t really noticed her before, despite the intimate nature of our encounter. To me, she was just a pair of hands, as no doubt, to her, I was just a pair of breasts. We took from each other only what we needed, no more, no less. So easy, I thought, to separate the part from the whole.
“Mrs. Latimer?” The technician looked around the room, which was small and windowless, though not unpleasant. My mother said nothing, continued staring dreamily into space.
“Mrs. Latimer,” the technician repeated.
“Mom,” I said, nudging her arm. “She’s calling you.”
“Of course.” My mother rose quickly to her feet, didn’t move.
“Follow me, please,” the technician told her, then looked at me. “You can get dressed now, Mrs. Sinclair.”
“The tests were negative?” I asked hopefully.
“Your doctor will discuss the results with you,” she said, as I’d known she would. “But the X-rays are fine. I don’t have to redo them.”
Thank God, I thought, watching as my mother followed the technician to the door.
“I’ll wait here, Mom,” I said.
“Of course, dear,” she answered.
I changed back into my street clothes, a white cotton sweater over gray pants, fixed my hair, reapplied my lipstick, returned to my seat in the waiting area, and closed my eyes. Immediately, I pictured Colin Friendly’s mocking smile, and opened my eyes again, grabbing the latest issue of Cosmopolitan from a nearby end table, and concentrating all my attention on the latest Cosmo girl. She was wearing a royal blue negligee against a royal blue background; her hair was long and dark, her eyes brown and sultry, her cleavage deep and bountiful.
I remembered when Sara was about ten years old, and I found her standing in front of the bathroom mirror studying her naked chest. “When I grow up,” she asked seriously, “am I going to have big breasts or nice little ones like yours?”
I told her the odds favored the little ones, not the last time I’ve seriously misjudged my older daughter, whose breasts have been known to enter a room a full five seconds before she does. I used to joke that had I had big breasts, I could have ruled the world. Kidding on the square, my mother would say, and she’d be right.
When my mother reentered the waiting area, she immediately began removing her hospital gown, exposing herself to the startled women in the room. The women looked away, pretended to be coughing, reading, elsewhere.
“Mom, wait,” I said, rushing to her side, tugging the gown back up across her shoulders. “Didn’t the technician tell you to wait until she was sure the X-rays came out?”
My mother smiled. “Yes, I believe she did.”
“Then why don’t we sit down for a few minutes.” I led her to the row of upholstered navy chairs. “How’d it go?”
“I didn’t much care for it,” she stated, and I laughed.
“Did it hurt?”
“I didn’t much care for it,” she repeated, and I laughed again, because she seemed to be expecting it.
“I didn’t much care for it,” she said a third time, and we lapsed into silence until the technician appeared and told my mother her X-rays were fine and that she could get dressed.
“You can get dressed now, Mom,” I repeated when she failed to respond.
She immediately began pulling the gown from her shoulders.
“Not here, Mom. In the changing room.”
“Of course, dear.”
I led her toward the small changing room, my heart heavy, as if I’d swallowed something undigestible and it was sitting there in my chest, refusing to go down. I knew what was happening. By this point, I’d done quite a bit of reading about Alzheimer’s disease, and my reading had told me roughly what to expect. The long and the short of it was that my mother was becoming my child. She was regressing, gradually losing pieces of herself, shedding her identity as a snake sheds its skin. Soon there would be nothing left of the woman she once was. She would forget everything—how to read, how to write, how to speak. Her children would become strangers to her, as she would become a stranger to herself. One day, her brain would simply forget to tell her heart to breathe, and she would die. It would remain for the rest of us to try to salvage the pieces of her she’d discarded, to fit them back together, to make her whole again, at least in our memories.
At the time, it felt as if my mother’s deterioration had occurred very suddenly, but, looking back, the signs had been there for years. She’d often seemed vague, occasionally confused, her conversations cheery but essentially empty. She forgot things, mispronounced words, occasionally forgot them altogether.
Didn’t we all? I’d told myself, not paying particularly close attention. And if talking to her was sometimes like talking to the woman on the weather channel, well, so what? Weather, food, constipation—these were probably hot topics in assisted living communities. She’d had enough turmoil in her life, I rationalized. If she wanted to speculate endlessly about the weather, she was entitled.
And, of course, there were times that she was rational, witty, and seemingly normal, when flashes of her old self would appear to remind us that she hadn’t disappeared completely, that part of her was still hanging on, fighting to get through. A piece of her here, a piece of her there. She tossed them toward me, like bread crumbs to a hungry bird. Maybe, like Hansel and Gretel, she was trying to leave a path, a way to trace her steps back home, back to the self she had lost.
“Are you ready?” I asked after several minutes, knocking on the door to the changing room.
There was no answer, so I knocked again, gently pushing the door open. My mother was standing in the middle of the tiny cubicle, totally nude, arms protectively covering her sagging breasts, her ribs clearly delineated, her flesh mottled, heavily veined, her skin the color and consistency of skim milk. “I’m cold,” she said, looking at me as if it were my fault.
“Oh God, Mom, here, let me help you.” I stepped into the tiny changing area, closing the door behind me, tried to gather up her clothes from the floor.
“What are you doing?” Her voice was edgy, on the verge of panic.
“I’m trying to find your underwear.”
“What are you doing to me?” she demanded again.
“Ssh, Mom,” I cautioned. “It’s all right. I’m just trying to help.”
“Where are my clothes?” she shouted, spinning around in the cramped space, knocking me against the wall.
“They’re right here, Mom. Try to calm down. Here are your panties.” I held out a pair of voluminous pink underpants. She stared at them as if they were a foreign object. “You just step into them,” I said, directing first one foot, then the other, inside the legs of the panties, then pulling them up over her hips.
Fitting her inside her brassiere took another five minutes, as did getting her into her ivory-colored dress. When we finally emerged from the cramped cubicle, I was soaking wet and breathing hard. “Are you all right, dear?” my mother asked as we exited the building. “You look a little peaked.”
“You look a little peaked,” she repeated, then waited for me to laugh again, and so I obliged, although the joy was gone, another piece lost.
“Jo Lynn called me last night,” my mother said as I was driving her back to her apartment.
I tried not to sound too surprised. Time had become a relative concept to my mother. Last night could mean anything—last night, last week, even last year. “She did?”
“Said she was getting married next week.”
“She said that?” This time there was no disguising my surprise. Or my dismay.
“I thought she was already married.”
“She’s divorced.”
“Yes, of course, she’s divorced. How could I have forgotten?”
“Jo Lynn’s been married three times,” I reminded her. “It’s hard to keep track.”
“Yes, of course.”
“She told you she was getting married next week?”
“I think that’s what she said. Daniel Baker, she said. A nice boy.”
My shoulders slumped. I tightened my grip on the steering wheel. “Dan Baker was her second husband, Mom.”
“Is she marrying him again?”
“Are you sure she told you she was getting married next week?” I pressed.
“Well, now, maybe I’m not. I thought that’s what she said, but now I don’t know. Whatever happened to Daniel?”
“They got divorced.”
“Divorced? Why? He was such a nice boy.”
“He beat her up, Mom.”
“He beat her?”
“Yes, Mom.”
Tears filled my mother’s eyes. “We let him beat her?”
“We didn’t have much choice. We urged her to leave him. She wouldn’t.”
“I don’t remember,” my mother said, pounding her fists against her lap in obvious frustration. “Why don’t I remember?”
“It’s over, Mom. It happened a long time ago. They got divorced. She’s all right now.”
My mother stared anxiously out the car window, her fingers twisting the fabric of her dress. “What’s happening to me?” she asked, her voice high, birdlike. “What’s happening to me?”
I swallowed, not sure what to say. Dr. Caffery had discussed the various possibilities with her, including Alzheimer’s disease, a conversation my mother had seemingly forgotten. Was there really any point in going over it again?
“We’re not sure, Mom,” I told her. “That’s why you’re going for all these tests. It could be something physical, some blockage somewhere, maybe a tumor of some kind that they can remove, or maybe you’re just starting to forget things. It happens when people get older. It doesn’t necessarily mean it’s Alzheimer’s,” I qualified, more for my benefit than for hers. “I know how frustrating it must be for you, but we’ll get to the bottom of all this soon, and hopefully there will be something we can do about it. You know medical science. It moves so quickly, they could find a cure before they even know what you have.”
My mother smiled and I patted her hand reassuringly. She closed her eyes, drifted off to sleep, and I drove the rest of the way with only my thoughts for company. My mother would be all right, I told myself. This was just a temporary problem, not a permanent condition, and certainly not irreversible. Before long, one of these X-rays would turn up something, and it would be small and entirely treatable, and my mother would be her old self again, all the pieces neatly back in place.
I pulled into the parking lot of the Palm Beach Lakes Retirement Home, turned off the ignition, gently nudged my mother awake. She opened her eyes, smiled lovingly. “Jo Lynn called last night,” she said. “She’s getting married next week.”
“Relax,” Larry was saying, as I paced back and forth behind the kitchen counter.
“Please don’t tell me to relax.”
“I’m sure Mrs. Winchell will reconsider.”
“I’m sure she won’t.”
“Kate, stop pacing. Let’s sit down, talk this out.”
“What’s there to talk about?” I plopped down on the family-room sofa, jumping immediately back up again, resuming my pacing, this time in front of the TV. “You didn’t see her. You didn’t hear her. She was very adamant. She said that she has a responsibility to the other residents, that the whole building could have burned to the ground.”
“She’s exaggerating.”
“She doesn’t think so. She says that if old Mr. Emerson hadn’t smelled something burning in my mother’s apartment, then they wouldn’t have discovered the pot she left on the burner, and the whole building would have gone up in flames.”
“Everyone forgets to turn a burner off now and then,” Larry argued, the same words I’d used earlier in the afternoon with Mrs. Winchell.
“Palm Beach Lakes Retirement Home is an assisted living community,” I said, repeating Mrs. Winchell’s words verbatim. “It is not a nursing home. It is not equipped to deal with Alzheimer sufferers.”
“Grandma has Alzheimer’s?” Sara asked, bringing a stack of old papers into the kitchen, dropping them into the garbage can under the sink.
“We don’t know that yet,” Larry told her.
“What are you doing?” I asked.
“Cleaning my room,” Sara said.
“You’re cleaning your room?”
“It’s a mess. There was nowhere to study.”
“You’re studying?”
“We have a big test in a few weeks.”
“You’re studying for a test?”
“I thought I’d give it a try,” Sara said, and smiled. “Will Grandma be all right?”
“I hope so,” I told her. “Meanwhile, I have to find her a new place to live.”
To my shock, Sara walked to my side and drew me into a warm, comforting embrace. “It’ll be all right, Mom,” she reassured me, as I had reassured my mother earlier. I hugged her tightly to me, relishing the feel of her skin against mine, burying my face into the elegant bend of her neck. How long had it been since she’d allowed me to hold her this way? I wondered, realizing how much I’d missed it.
“I love you,” I whispered.
“I love you too,” she said.
For a few minutes, it seemed that everything would be all right.
Chapter 23
Wednesday morning found me lingering over my second cup of coffee and looking forward to a day of total self-indulgence: a much-needed, long-anticipated massage at ten, a facial at eleven-thirty, followed by a hairdresser’s appointment, a manicure and a pedicure. I thought of my mother, putting lipstick on her nails, then pushed her out of my mind. Wednesday was my day, my oasis in the desert, my day to unwind and regroup. It seemed I hadn’t had such a day in an eternity.
The phone rang.
I debated answering it, almost didn’t, gave in after the third ring. “Hello.” I crossed my fingers, praying it wasn’t the masseuse calling to cancel our appointment.
“Just wanted to tell you how nice it was seeing you the other day,” the male voice said.
“Who is this?” The muscles across my back contracted painfully. I already knew who it was.
“How was L-lake Osborne?” Colin Friendly asked.
I said nothing, my eyes shooting instinctively to the windows, to the sliding glass door.
“And how are my lovely nieces-to-be?”
I slammed down the receiver, my hands shaking. “Damn you!” I screamed. “Damn you to hell, Colin Friendly! You leave my daughters out of your sick fantasies.” I began pacing, turning around in a series of increasingly small circles, until I felt my head spin and my knees grow weak. “Don’t let him get to you,” I said aloud, collapsing into a waiting chair, hating his newfound power over me. “There’s no way I’m going to let you torment me,” I said, reaching for the phone, about to call the prison officials in Starke, when the phone rang again.
I stared at it without moving. Slowly, I plucked it from its carriage, brought it gingerly to my ear, brac
ing myself for the familiar stutter, said nothing.
“Hello?” a woman asked. “Hello, is someone there?”
“Hello?” I asked in return. “Mrs. Winchell?”
“Mrs. Sinclair, is that you?”
For an instant, I considered telling her that I was the cleaning lady, that Mrs. Sinclair wasn’t home, and wouldn’t be back till the end of the day. “What can I do for you?” I asked instead.
“I was just wondering if you’d been able to find other accommodations for your mother,” she began without further preamble.
I informed her politely that I’d made inquiries into several upscale nursing homes in the area, but that there were no current vacancies. In a sympathetic, yet firm voice, Mrs. Winchell told me that I’d have to look farther afield, and recommended several nursing homes I hadn’t tried, one in Boca, another in Delray. Boca, I told her immediately, was out of the question. It was too far away. I might consider having a look at the one in Delray.
“Please do,” she said. She didn’t need to add “as soon as possible.” The tone of her voice said it all.
I poured myself another cup of coffee, took my time drinking it, refusing to think about either Mrs. Winchell or Colin Friendly, then made my bed, arranging, then rearranging, the fourteen decorative pillows that graced it, trying out new groupings, ultimately returning the pillows to their original configuration. It was only then, when there was no more coffee to drink, no more pillows to disturb, and nothing left to straighten, that I phoned the nursing home in Delray, and, much to my chagrin, was able to get an immediate appointment.
There goes my day, I thought, reluctantly canceling my various appointments. Why did it always have to be me? I groused. Why couldn’t Jo Lynn assume at least some of the responsibility as far as our mother was concerned? Did she have anything better to do with her time? If she could spend between ten and twelve hours every weekend driving up to north-central Florida and back, surely she could spend thirty minutes driving to a nursing home in Delray. And she could damn well tell her psychotic boyfriend to leave me and my daughters alone. On a sudden impulse, I picked up the phone and called my sister, although I hadn’t spoken to her since our ill-fated excursion to the state pen.
