as if nothing was wrong indicated one of two things: either my mother had been keeping secrets for reasons unknown, or she’d been subtly losing her mind well before the night she went missing.
She was tested for concussion, stroke, tumor, drugs, and alcohol but appeared to be in perfect physical health. Her change was psychological, my father was informed, and so began months of tentative answers, treatments, and futility from various professionals, including therapists and priests, who taught us there are mysteries that nobody can plumb.
Her memory was scattershot. Her cognizance was warped. Certain times she knew us and began to feel like Mom again, but other times our faces sparked terror in her eyes, or flashes of euphoria, or unvoiced epiphany. Her life was dream and nightmare with hazes in between.
Some days, no one could penetrate the haze and she would sit at the living room window, breathing on the glass, convinced the snow was falling from the otherworld. Most days, it seemed as if the opposite were true and she was falling from the world and settling beyond us.
She would not—or could not—answer simple statements, or replied as if the statements had been something else entirely, or asked her own questions that defied understanding.
“Do you want a piece of cake?”
“Rooms are bodies when we’re in them.”
“Are you cold?”
“Three o’clock.”
“I love you, Mom. It’s me.”
“What if the spiral wasn’t hungry but expanded like a flower?”
My father was patient, loving, lost. He sat with her and held her hand. He cooked our meals, cleaned the house, and helped her in the bath. He steered their conversations, falling silent when she spoke to him in mysteries and riddles, and trying to guide her back to concrete memories and facts.
My mother was placid and easily cared for but my father refused to leave her alone for long periods of time. A friend of his suggested several nursing care options but my father wouldn’t hear of it.
“She only needs some company,” he said.
He found a new job and moved us two hundred miles away, into the middle of New England, where my mother’s retired aunt could stay with her during the day.
I was lonely and generally friendless, a state of being that intensified in an unfamiliar school, where I spent my days preoccupied and tried to disappear. My withdrawal was so subtle, I was scarcely teased or bullied. My teachers didn’t notice. Vanishing was easy.
At home in the evenings, I read books and comics next to my mother in the living room, predictably obsessed with supernatural material.
Sometimes my father put the television on and we would sit there and try to make a new kind of normal. He did his best to focus on her moments of lucidity, as if by ignoring her weird pronouncements and dementia he might, piece by piece, reconstruct the ordinary woman he remembered.
I saw her as I knew her, different but herself—a mother who chuckled when she sneezed, and hugged a lot, and daydreamed. I focused on her puzzling words and thought of them as clues, desperate to believe the mystery had meaning.
How else could I believe her when she told me that she loved me?
One night she came to my room and touched me out of sleep. Her eyes were oddly blue, like miniature jellyfish, and the rest of her was darker than the night should have made her.
“Mom?”
“Don’t be scared.”
I jolted up in bed.
“Shhh,” my mother said. “I need to show you something important.”
I relaxed at the soothing timbre of her voice, and once I’d settled back in bed, she almost seemed herself again—enough to make me wonder if she’d finally recovered.
“Close your eyes and cover your ears,” she said, “and try to feel me standing here. Then see if you can recognize the difference when I’m gone. Will you do that for me?”
“OK,” I said.
“Good.”
I closed my eyes and covered my ears, distracted by my thoughts and peeking once or twice, and then I did my best to visualize her standing in the room. She was between the side of the bed, closer to the foot, and my battered wooden dresser, topped with books, against the wall. My nightlight had backlit the edges of her hair. The open door to the hallway was behind her to the right and if she backed away, five short steps, she’d be gone.
My nose had grown accustomed to her milk-and-nutmeg smell, and since I couldn’t sense her bare feet moving on the floor, I trusted in the feeling she was teaching me to recognize. Her thereness and her beingness. Her room-filling motherness.
She’d given me a terrible task—to learn another way of feeling she was gone—and my heart beat heavier and sadder as I tried.
Hollowness emerged from the place she’d been standing. It was almost like the quiet after someone had been crying, or the space where a just-popped bubble had been floating. She’d softly left the room…or had I tricked myself with worry? I wanted to peek—I needed to know—but what if she was watching from the hall to see if I cheated, and all I wound up seeing was her disappointed face?
Instead of dwelling on the hollowness, I thought of how her closeness felt, summoning her near again and wishing it were true. Eventually I couldn’t tell the difference anymore. I finally opened my eyes, with a hopeful kind of fear, and she was standing at my bedside just as she had been.
“I couldn’t do it.”
“Did you feel me here?”
“I thought I felt you leave.”
“I did,” my mother said, haloed by the nightlight. “But then I came back so you wouldn’t feel alone.”
Three weeks later, a full season after my mother had changed, I was drawn out of bed at 3 a.m., wearing green flannel pajamas, with the kind of mysterious purpose only children and somnambulists are wont to understand.
My father’s distant snores harmonized with the refrigerator’s hum. I walked down the hall and found my mother in the living room, sitting in her chair beside the window in the dark. She wasn’t looking outside but faced me as I entered, and I crossed the carpet barefoot and stood in front of her chair.
She wiped her glassy eyes but only made them glassier.
“I dreamt that I was here and it was wonderful,” she said. “I had bones and blood and fat and hair. My muscles changed shape underneath my skin. There were vibrating sounds, and colors I could touch, and if I pulled the air inside me, I could turn it into words.”
I balled my fists, wishing she would simply be my mom again. I felt an urge to slap her, as people do in movies, and it made me feel queasy and demonic and adult. A parallelogram of light lay across her chest. The sky outside was moonless and the lamps weren’t lit, and I was suddenly convinced the light was from a window that was hovering between us like a portal in the air.
She said, “I love you, William. Hold my hand.”
I couldn’t move my arms.
She was radiant but thin like a flame about to gutter. “I’ll tell you something secret. Something you’ve forgotten. We choose a way forward, at the start and at the end. It’s time for me to choose again. It’s time for me to go.”
I felt the space broadening and shadowing around us, and a cold, prickling updraft floated from the floor. She reached her hand toward me with an upturned palm, and since I didn’t have pockets in the pants of my pajamas, I slid my hands deep beneath the tight elastic waistband and held my own legs. They were goosefleshed and skinny.
A pine scent, evergreen and gray, wafted off her.
My