CLARA
My father calls. It’s midafternoon.
“Daddy?” begs Maisie at the sound of the phone ringing, but I say no, it isn’t Daddy.
“Boppy,” I say, and Maisie smiles gaily.
“Your mother has been asking for you,” my father says, “again,” though we both know this isn’t true. She isn’t asking for me so much as she’s asking for Maisie, for the four-year-old version she believes is still me. We feed into her delusion sometimes, letting her believe that Maisie is me because it’s far easier than telling her the truth.
My mother is not that old, and yet it’s hard to remember sometimes when her mind has stopped working and her body is quickly following suit. No one knows for certain how much time she has left on the ever-dwindling hourglass of her life. Some doctors say five years, others say seven, though one way or another she’s simply biding time as we all are, biding time until we die.
“You’ll come see your mother?” my father asks, and I say that I will.
* * *
I open the front door to step outside with Felix in my arms and Maisie on my heels, and, as luck would have it, a black sedan sweeps down the street, a chauffeured car that stops three houses away at the home of Jake and Amy Lawrence, a childless couple in their thirties. They’re business moguls, and one or the other of them always seems to be on the road. Amy leaves their house towing a rolling suitcase in a pair of sling-back heels. Today it’s her turn to go.
But none of that matters. What matters is that Maisie sees the blackness of the car as it drives slowly past, tortoise-like and deliberate, the driver’s eyes converging with hers, and now her eyes are locked on that car as it hovers down the street waiting for Amy, Maisie’s knees trembling, her eyes filling with tears. She says nothing, and yet her body language says it all, the distress and the agitation as she turns on her heels and begins to run. She’s fast, much faster than me, as I lug Felix in my arms and attempt to pursue her throughout the home. I call to her over and over again, Felix frightened by my screaming, and so he, too, begins to scream.
I find Maisie under the bed, a spare queen-size bed in a guest room where no one goes. “Maisie,” I say to her, dropping down to my hands and knees to try to meet her eyes, “please, come out,” but she buries her face into the carpet and cries. “Boppy is expecting us,” I say. “Please, Maisie. Please. Do it for Boppy.”
What I don’t do is ask her why she’s scared; I know. I don’t tell her that everything is going to be okay, because I’m not sure that it is. I raise my voice once and demand that she come out, and when she doesn’t, I beg. I offer treats; I issue threats. And when all that fails I lie on the floor at the edge of the bed, and reach a hand out to hers and pull, and my Maisie cries out this time, not in fear but in pain. That hurt. She bawls, saying how it hurt, how Mommy hurt her, and I tell her that I’m sorry, that Mommy is so sorry.
But it doesn’t matter; Maisie is still rooted firmly under the bed.
I want to tell her that she’s wrong about the car, that there was no bad man in a black car trailing her and Nick. Nick was the bad man, I believe, but as always I’m confused. Did Nick end his life, or did someone do it for him? I have to know, feeling that the uncertainty is slowly driving me mad.
Closure is what I need. I need closure.
More than thirty minutes later my father calls again, wondering where I am. I slip from the room to retrieve my cell and answer the call. “I thought you’d be here by now,” he tells me, and this time I confess that Maisie has cloistered herself beneath the bed and won’t come out. My voice is panicked as I say it, tired, frustrated, panting, with Felix serving as background noise, quietly lamenting. She is a smart girl, my Maisie, hiding under the bed because she knows I’ve mastered removing the hinge pins from the doors.
Nick would know what to do. Nick would slide his body under the metal bed frame and join Maisie beneath the bed, or he would lift up the mattress and box spring with a single hand, and the situation would resolve with laughter before they’d make a fort out of the blankets and sheets and pillows that were now cluttered around the guest bedroom.
But not me. I can only beg.
“Oh, Clarabelle,” my father says empathetically, and it’s decided that my father and I will swap places. He will come to cajole Maisie out from under the bed while I stare into the addled eyes of a woman I once knew.
I come into my parents’ home to find my mother shored up on an armchair, Izzy beside her, painting my mother’s fingernails a cherry red. Izzy gazes at me with her heavy-lidded eyes and a compassionate smile. She has a big bust and fullness around the middle, but the legs that emerge from beneath a denim skirt are disproportionately slim, like the legs of a giraffe.
My mother was born Louisa Berne, the only child of Irish parents who imparted to Maisie and me our green eyes and red hair, and a face full of freckles. She married my father over thirty years ago, he a former business exec and she a happy homemaker, the type of woman who could do most anything on an hour or two of sleep and a good cup of tea. Her dementia developed slowly at first, a few forgetful moments that spiraled into something more over the coming years.
Izzy smiles at me and says, “Look how lovely our Louisa is,” while my mother watches on, staring at me with a confused and yet hopeful look in her eye because she doesn’t know me from Eve, and yet she’s waiting for a response, for me to also say that she’s lovely.
“Beautiful,” I say, though she’s not. This woman is not my mother.
My mother is self-sufficient and adept; she doesn’t need some woman to paint her fingernails or to introduce me when I step inside.
“It’s Clara, Louisa,” Izzy prompts. “Clara’s come to see you. You remember Clara,” she adds while my mother decides pointblank, exhaling heavily like Izzy and I are both a bunch of idiots, that I am not Clara.
“This is not Clara,” my mother insists, and Izzy tells her, “Well, sure it is. This is Clara.” I stand pressed to a wall and awkwardly smile, an outcast in the home. My mother has no memories of me, not the twenty-eight-year-old me at least.
There are bruises on my mother’s arms, bluish bruises on the pale skin that lines her tender forearm, and as my eyes move to them in question, Izzy explains, “She’s been clumsy lately. Not so good on her feet anymore,” which of course is an effect of the dementia. My heart sinks. This is something the neurologist has been forewarning us about for a long time now, how my mother would need more and more help performing those everyday tasks she used to do on her own with ease, how her mobility would become stunted, how in time she might be bed-bound.
“She fell?” I ask, and Izzy nods her head.
“The doctor said it’s a problem with her depth perception,” Izzy tells me, though I wonder why I have to hear this from Izzy and not my father. Why didn’t my father tell me? Like Nick, has he been keeping things from me, too? “She runs into doorways, mistakes shadows on the floor for things, tripping over her own two feet.”
The expression on Izzy’s face is grim, and I wonder how in the world she’s able to deal with this, day in and day out. I couldn’t do it. And yet there’s a stoicism about her, the way Izzy feeds and clothes and cleans my mother without complaint, all the while being called names like idiot and imbecile, which are my mother’s preferred epithets these days. I think of a young Izzy, caring first for her ailing father and then her mother, and losing both in the end. I can’t imagine how hard that must have been. I can’t bear to think what will happen when my mother and father are one day gone. I smile at Izzy and say, “We’re lucky to have you,” knowing I don’t say it as often as I should.
“It’s me, Mom,” I say to my mother, forcing a smile on my face. “Clara.” But to my mother I’m an outsider, a pariah, a leper, and the expression on her face is one of cynicism and doubt. I am not Clara. I am persona non grata. I don’t exist.
I talk to my mother anyway. I tell her about Felix, the way he sleeps with his mouth open wide—a robin fledgling begging for food; the gentle whistle of air that flutes through his nose as he dreams. He hasn’t smiled yet, nothing intentional at least, but rather thanks to an unconscious reflex or the passage of gas, but when he does I’m certain it will be Maisie’s big, bright grin he smiles at first. “You remember Maisie?” I ask my mother, but she doesn’t reply, eyes lost on the curtain rod above my own head, and in time I give up.
“She’s usually like this,” Izzy says as a means of reassurance, and yet it bothers me that Izzy knows my mother more than me. “She doesn’t say much.”
“I know,” I say. These days my mother doesn’t even remember that she has dementia. This is a blessing, I suppose, the perquisite of being in the advanced stages of a dreadful disease. The memory lapse is only part of it. There’s also her irascible nature, that quick-tempered tendency of hers to become mad and curse and cry, my mother who was once nonconfrontational to a fault. Now she sits propped up in a chair unquestioningly—her fifty-five years taking on the semblance of someone who is seventy-five—letting a woman comb through her hair while I sit on the edge of a sofa and behold the scene: the way that Izzy knows my mother’s mannerisms and oddities by heart, how she can predict my mother’s anomalous habits, like asking for tea and then refusing to drink it, reading the newspaper upside down. Izzy seems to know before my mother when she will stand up and how she will aimlessly pace, the irrational path she will take around the room, Izzy two steps ahead of her all the time, picking up fallen throw pillows so that my mother will not trip.
It’s then that, to my horror, my mother finally returns to her seat and peers toward Izzy reverently, saying to her, “Can you be a good little girl and get Mommy her slippers, Clara, dear? My feet are cold.”
And Izzy looks at my mother and at her feet, already clad in a pair of nonslip, suede slipper clogs, with the most luxurious-looking fur lining on the inside, and says, “You already have your slippers, dear,” as she reaches for her necklace with its Izzy charm, her hand coming up empty. The necklace is there, but there is no charm. Like so many other things missing around the home, the charm is gone.
But Izzy doesn’t miss a beat. Instead, she says, “It’s Izzy,” to my mother, while stooping down to stare her in the eye. “Remember, Louisa? Izzy. Clara’s over there,” she says, motioning to me.
But whether or not my mother remembers is impossible to know.
“Don’t take it personally,” Izzy says to me then, smiling this uplifting sort of smile that’s meant to improve my mood, though of course I already have. I’ve taken it very personally, knowing how it must feel for my father when my mother looks at him, calling for help, saying there’s a stranger in her home, a burglar, meaning my father. How alone he must feel. Heartbroken and alone. “Most of the time she doesn’t know me, either,” Izzy says, and then she excuses herself to brew hot water for tea, my mother’s favorite elixir. She pauses once in the doorway and says to me, “She doesn’t even know me now. She thinks I’m you.” I know she means well, that this is supposed to make me feel better, and yet it’s a sorry consolation prize. I watch as she goes, seeing a weightlessness about her, though she’s not small by any means. And yet she’s airy, unhampered by the mishaps in her life—the untimely death of her own parents, the responsibility of caring for a younger sibling—while I’m weighted down by mine, feeling buried alive.
My mother is watching me. I know I shouldn’t cry, but I can’t help myself. Big, fat tears fall from my eyes while her eyebrows furrow and she rises from her chair. My first instinct is to call for Izzy, worried that my mother will do something unexpected or that she will trip over her own feet and fall. But that’s not what happens at all.
She takes a series of small steps toward me, and sits down on the sofa by my side. She takes my hand into hers, her movements steady and sure. She knows what she’s doing. Her pale green eyes fall on mine, and for this moment in time she knows who I am. I can see it in her eyes. A second hand skims the surface of my hair as she asks of me, her words lucid and clear, “What is it, Clara? What’s bothering you?” pulling me into her gentle embrace. Her arms feel light on mine, weak and anemic, and yet in them I feel undeniably safe. Like my father, she’s getting too thin, her body lost in the fabric of a soft sweat suit.
“Mom?” I ask, choking on the word, crying. I wipe my eyes on the sleeve of a shirt, and beg, “You know me? You know who I am?” Behind us, the window is open, a gentle breeze blowing in, a zephyr passing through the curtains so that they billow into the room. Motes of dust hover in a narrow beam of sunlight like glitter, suspended in the air above our heads.
She chuckles, her eyes filled with unassailable recognition. She knows me, and whether it’s the four-year-old me or a twenty-eight-year-old me, I don’t know and I don’t care. She knows me. That’s all that matters.
“Of course I do, you silly goose. I wouldn’t ever forget you. You’re my Clara,” she says, and then she asks, “What’s making you so sad, Clara, dear?” But I can’t bring myself to tell her, knowing how this moment is as reliable as tabloid magazines, and that chances are good her memories of me will disappear just as quickly as they appeared. And so I revel in it instead. I take pleasure in it, my mother’s hand on mine, her arm draped around my back, her eyes staring with cognizance rather than confusion.
“Nothing, Mom,” I tell her. “These are happy tears,” I say. “I’m happy,” though I’m not really happy, but rather a dangerous cocktail of happy, sad and scared.
Izzy appears in the doorway with tea in hand, but upon seeing my mother and me, she retreats, not wanting to steal this moment from my life.