feminine all at the same time—bleached white, and often adorned with flowers, her body decked out in an odd bricolage of things: skirts and tights, gimmicky jewelry, ornate socks pulled clear up to the knees. She has a silver pendant on a rolo chain, one that bears her name on a charm in an easy-to-read typeface, large enough for the elderly and disabled to see. Large enough for my mother to see, and when she gazes at her disoriented as she often does, Izzy plucks that trinket from around her neck and holds it out for my mother to see. Izzy, it reads.
Izzy cooks, she cleans, she micromanages my mother in the bathtub with reminders to wash this and to scrub that. She’s a babysitter to a degree, there whenever my father can’t be and sometimes when he is, to assure that my mother doesn’t hop in the car and decide to take it for a spin, or serve herself a bowl of cat litter and eat it with milk and a spoon, both of which she’s done before. More than once. Why do you even have cat litter when there is no cat? I’d asked my father at the time, and he shrugged his shoulders and said my mother insisted on it. Of course she did. Because to her there is still a cat, poor Oliver who was run over by a truck years ago.
She still sees him sometimes, hiding behind the curtain panels.
But the incident that takes the cake is the time she decided to give Maisie’s hair a trim, disappearing stealth-like into the kitchen and coming back moments later with a pair of scissors in hand. When we asked her why she did it, she said, Clara’s hair smells pungent, as Izzy drew her from the room that day while Maisie plummeted to the floor, crying. Like a dirty old sponge. That’s why. I can’t even get a comb through it anymore. It needed to be trimmed. It’s disgusting.
Clara’s hair.
My hair.
My mother has needed more and more assistance of late, no longer sleeping through the night, becoming nocturnal and spending her nights pacing the home, oftentimes crying for no apparent reason at all. Her brain no longer receives messages from the bladder that she needs to pee, and as a result she wets herself almost every day. She fought the illness tooth and nail once, using memory games, crossword puzzles, reams of sudoku. She memorized nursery rhymes to prove to herself that she could do it, and then waltzed around reciting the words to Simple Simon without a clue as to why. She read the newspaper; she exercised more and as often as she could, remembered to take her vitamins. She discovered that eating salmon helps with memory retention and took to eating it day in and day out, and she signed up for clinical trials to test the efficacy of experimental drugs. She pulled my old Simon memory game from storage and played it at great length.
Nothing worked; her mind continued to fade.
Izzy hadn’t wanted me to help look for the missing rent check that day for obvious reasons: I was nine months pregnant and could hardly walk. Why don’t you take a load off, she said to me as we drifted into my father’s office together, and I tried logging in to his bank account online, to be sure my father hadn’t deposited the check and somehow or other forgotten. My mother rarely left the house; it seemed the check had to be here somewhere, and yet it wasn’t. But as I sat down at the computer and found the slip of paper where my father kept a listing of his accounts and passwords, I felt the first contraction. Izzy gently withdrew the computer mouse from my hand and told me in no uncertain terms to leave, to go lie down, staring at me with a look of genuine fear at the prospect of childbirth. She took care of all kinds—women with dementia, aging men suffering from incontinence—but she didn’t deliver babies.
It’s nothing, I’m sure, I told her, trying hard to catch my breath from the shock of it, from the sudden pain. Just Braxton Hicks, I said. But still, I left to go home and lie down while Izzy continued the search. I assured her I’d check the account later, from home, but by the end of the night, Felix was born, and I, of course, had forgotten the password anyway, forgotten all about the missing check.
Now, standing in my kitchen, my father shakes his head. The check has not been found.
“Don’t worry about me,” he says. “You have a lot on your mind, and there’s plenty more money where that came from.” He pats my head in the way he did when I was just a girl, a statement, which is really neither here nor there, but altogether true. I have many things on my mind, though one thing eclipses all other thoughts this morning as I stare blankly out the double-hung windows and into the backyard, neglecting my pancakes as they drift from hot to warm to cool. Outside it is hot, as hot as it is inside our now un-air-conditioned home. Rain plays a game of hide-and-seek with us, here one day before disappearing again for another six. The lawn yellows with thirst, turning brittle in the sweltering summer heat. It is just after 9:00 a.m., and already the mercury on the thermometer reaches eighty degrees. Birds wait in vain on the perch of a backyard birdbath that has long since gone dry. That is something Nick is in charge of: feeding the birds, filling the birdbath. Even the birds miss Nick, the American goldfinch sitting on the edge of the resin birdbath, a female cardinal perched in the boughs of an evergreen tree.
The bad man is after us. He’s going to get us.
That’s the one thought on my mind. In no uncertain terms, Maisie has made it clear that Nick’s car accident was no accident at all. Maisie’s words return to me again and again, so many questions running through my mind. Does Maisie know this bad man? This bad man in a car that pushed Nick and her from the road? Did she get a glimpse of him before the car went airborne, flying into the tree? I want to ask Maisie, but I don’t want to upset her any more than she is already upset. And yet when my father steps from the room to gather laundry to wash for me, I lean across the breakfast nook and guardedly ask, “Did Daddy see the man in the car, Maisie? Did he see the bad man in the car?” Her eyes turn sad, and she nods her head a negligible yes. Nick saw the man. Before he died, Nick saw the man who was about to take his life.
But before I can ask more, my father returns.
Like Maisie, I stab at my pancakes. I mutilate them, too. My father tells me to eat.
* * *
It just so happens that Felix has a well-baby check this morning with the pediatrician. “You and Felix go alone and I’ll stay with Maisie,” my father says as he removes the breakfast dishes from the nook. “Take your time,” he adds. “Izzy is with your mom.”
Normally I would object but today I agree. Today there are other things on my mind, and I know that if Maisie were there, standing beside me on the minced gravel that flanks Harvey Road, there would be questions.
And so I leave the breakfast nook and slip away to my bedroom alone, stuffing myself into maternity clothes because that’s all I have that will fit. It doesn’t matter that there is no baby in my womb; my body has yet to collapse back into its original shape. I’m still fat. My uterus cramps and clenches, trying hard to shrink down to size. Involution, it’s called, the shrinkage of my uterus from a watermelon back to a pear, as lochia dribbles from my insides and every single atrium and artery and ventricle in my heart aches. My heart is broken, as is my womb.
It comes to me again in that moment, as I step into a pair of stretchy gray leggings and a sleeveless tunic top: Nick is dead. I reach into his dresser drawer, plucking undershirts out at random, pressing them to my face in an attempt to breathe in his scent, an intoxicating combination of deodorant, cologne and aftershave, finding that Nick’s scent has been washed clean and replaced with lavender detergent, a realization that again makes me cry. I dig deeper into the drawer, smelling them all, hoping to find one on which his scent remains. But I find none. No undershirts that smell of Nick, but what I do find, tucked there beneath a dozen white undershirts, is a scrap of paper that for whatever reason piques my interest, paper where no paper should be. I set the shirts aside and grope for the scrap, finding a receipt to the local jewelry store in excess of four hundred dollars. The receipt is dated months ago, and under the line item it reads pendant necklace. Unconsciously my hands go to my neck, knowing there’s no necklace there. Nick never gave me a necklace, nor is my birthday or our anniversary coming anytime soon. My stomach clenches. This necklace isn’t for me.
Nick spent four hundred dollars on a necklace that wasn’t meant for me? How could that be?
It’s a mistake only, I assure myself, rummaging for excuses and coming up near empty.