by BK Loren
I can feel myself jittering inside because it’s what I want to do, but I’m scared.
“It’s okay,” she says, as if giving me permission to go out and play, or something.
“It is?”
She says, “Yes. We can go outside.”
I don’t waste any time. I just start gathering our winter clothes before she changes her mind. I take Mom’s red hat from the closet. “The other one,” she says.
“What?”
“The striped hat. One you gave me for Christmas a couple of years ago.” Her voice sounds almost strong. Parkinson’s goes up and down in a body, some good days, some bad, but this is Mom’s first good day in a long time. It has never felt so good to do something so simple as taking a hat from a closet. I slap it against my thigh to dust it off. She asks me for the warm boots she used to wear, too, and I scramble to the far back corner of the closet to find those. With her clothes all laid out, I sit her up on the bed and her fingers grasp my neck so hard as I’m dressing her that my neck feels like clay taking the imprint of her hand, and I’m still jittery with hope. It takes me a good twenty minutes to get her shoes on because her feet are so stiff and she can’t muscle her way into the boots, but I’m happy the whole time I’m doing it, and Mom is too. When I take a shirt out of the closet and it has a big stain mapped out across it, because all her clothes are stained by now—no way to keep them clean the way she writhes as she eats—she says, “I like that stain. It’s modern art.” I haven’t heard her try for a joke in so long that I crack up hard at this one, and we both keep laughing way too long, and we fold into each other and wipe tears from our eyes and laugh again and again.
Pretty soon she’s dressed, and I’m pulling her wheelchair backwards, out the front door, and pushing it across the snowy front yard. “Oh look at this sky!” she says, because it is an excellent sky today, bluer because of the fresh white snow outlining the houses, the trees, the fence, the sharp blue horizon across the snowy field. Her face turns upward to feel the sun’s rays, and she opens her arms wide, and they flop there like a rag doll’s. They make me laugh because she looks funny and beautiful all at once. Her wool hat has covered up her veiny head, and I remember what she looked like before she was sick, her reddish hair falling to her shoulders, her beautiful, uncrooked smile on her lipsticked lips.
I push her wheelchair down the dirt road, and I see the faces of our neighbors peering out their windows at us, staring. The ones who had their drapes closed part them just enough to peek out, and the ones who had them open look out real fast, then close the drapes so they can’t see us anymore. Since Mom is in front of me and she can’t see what I’m doing, I raise a middle finger to the starers, hold it up there for a good long time before they can get to the drawcord and close us out.
When we get to the edge of the field, we look at the old house for a while, then I start to turn the chair around. “Let’s keep going,” Mom says.
“We’re at the end of the street,” I tell her, and she asks me why I can’t hold the barbed-wire fence down.
“With your foot,” she says, “And pull this stupid chair and me over it, into the field. Can’t you?”
I know I should not be out here like this with Mom, but I don’t care. I’m used to the feeling of doing something wrong, but usually there’s nothing good at the end of it. This time, it feels right. I wonder for a second if I am healing Mom, like Dad wanted me to, some magic happening that I can’t understand. She’s better than I’ve seen her in a long time, and she has always told me I can make anything happen if I want it bad enough.
When I step on the sagging barbed wire and the rotten fence posts bend inward on both sides, I feel like a cartoon character, like those fence posts are made of steal and I am bending them so my mom can cross into the field. I pull her over the wire, and she raises her hands as high as she can, like a victorious boxer, and she sighs, a good sigh, like she’s home. The grasses that were tall in summer are folded down over the mud like a blanket now, and it’s easier to push her chair here.
“Look!” she says, and she can’t point, but I follow her eyes. In the gathering of blue spruce trees that used to outline the border of Mom’s childhood backyard there’s a flock of bluebirds. They look like the blue light that twinkles off of white snow, but bigger, and brighter, and alive. “Mountain bluebirds,” Mom says.
“I’ve never seen them before,” I tell her.
“Only a few migrators left this time of year. Now that you’ve seen them, you’ll see them this summer. They’ll be even brighter blue then.” She says this calmly and certainly. The birds flash like gems in the snow, and then, in one gust, like a bright blue wind, they rise up from the trees and fly above the frozen pond, then disappear out of sight. I’m so distracted by the birds that I push Mom’s chair into a dip, and it begins to fall, and it takes all my strength to keep her from toppling over. It leaves me shaken, and I tell her we should go back now, and she says, “No.” She says, “Take me over there.” She tries to point.
I’m getting cold and more afraid. “Where?”
“Can we go one more time to the house?”
One more time? We’ve never been to the house together before, and I want to go, but for some reason, my teeth start chattering. “It’s getting toward evening, Mom.”
“It’s barely even afternoon,” she says.
“And it’s hard pushing this wheelchair.”
“It’s harder sitting in it.”
“So let’s go back then.”
And that’s when she says, “I feel so good today. I feel like I could walk.”
“You do?”
“Let me hold onto you,” she says. She concentrates and arranges her feet carefully and then puts all her weight on my hands and shoulders. She stands.
I see that I’ve grown to be the same height as Mom. I’ve never known this before, and it makes me feel like we can do this—together. She can walk, with me. “Want to walk to the house?” I ask. It’s less than a football field away from us.
She says, “Yes,” but her lips are pulled taut with the effort she makes to take each step. Still, she is stepping. We walk together. Nothing matters but this. I’m not cold anymore, and my mom and I walk to the house where she lived when she was my age. The rotted doorway is open, as it always is, and we step inside.
There’s a quiet here now. It’s almost like the walls are standing again and the roof is nailed back into place, not sagging. Things echo. I walk with Mom over to the rickety rocking chair. I use all my muscles to lower her into the chair, and when she lets go, I feel light again.
Maybe if she felt better she’d tell me stories of her life in this house. But she is quiet. And I am quiet. I remember all the photographs she has shown me of this place when she lived here, anyway. I can see her in it when she was a kid, can hear her voice back then, and it sounds a lot like mine. The stories of her life find me here, on this land. They know Mom. They know me.
Time passes and I don’t know how, because everything feels still. But pretty soon she starts trembling again, and she is not feeling well, I can tell. She says, “I worry.”
There’s nothing to say back to her. I worry all the time too.
“If you don’t know you don’t have it, you can’t know you’re missing it,” she says.
This is the part of her disease my dad and the doctors call “Lewy body dementia.” It’s when she starts to go away and not make sense, even though she is still there, sitting right in front of you. Nonsense comes out of her mouth. “People move around all the time now. Nothing to hold onto, nothing to lose, so they think they have everything to gain. They think they want everything. It’s crippling.”
I look at her, and I realize what I’ve done. Her muscles are frozen stiff, and her dementia is setting in. The sky dims, and the evening chill comes on earlier than I expected. I stand up. “We have to go back now,” I tell her.
She has the fixed gaze now, too. She doesn’t look at me. I’m nervous le
aving her alone in that rickety chair, but I have to fetch her chair from the distance and bring it back to her side. I run back and get the chair and push it toward her, my teeth chattering the whole way. I’m breathing hard by the time I get back to her. “Come on. Put your arms around my neck.” I try to sound calm and confident, but I have never been so scared.
She doesn’t move. I pry her gloved fingers one by one from the arms of the wooden chair. They are so cold and stiff. “We have to go back,” I tell her. She comes out of her daze a little and almost looks at me. “Good, Mom, good. Move your feet, now please. Move your feet.” But she can’t move her feet. She is connecting with me now, I feel it in my gut, even though her blank eyes don’t show it. She wants to move her feet, but she can’t. I have to bend down and place her feet in position to stand.
Her legs are stiff as dried wood. It’s hard to believe she’s not fighting me, but I know she isn’t. The strength is all Parkinson’s, all disease. The force of it is never constant. It goes up and down in her, the rhythm of this disease. Her feet are locked into one position. I work up a sweat, and I finally get them under her. I force her arms to my neck, and they feel like iron posts, they are so stiff, and it feels like I’m trapped under the iron girds of her. That’s when we both fall to the ground, stiffly. She falls hard, hits her head on the earth, and tears come to her eyes. Fear rushes through me hard, and I feel myself howl, and I lift her in one strong movement into the chair.
Shaking, I begin the long walk back to the house we live in now. I push her chair in front of me, and she sits motionless. It’s harder going back than it was coming out. When we finally reach the fence, I stomp the barbed wire down, and the neighbors stare as I walk down the street again. I don’t have time to flip them off.
At home, I’m exhausted and cold and I want to feel better. “I can make us hot chocolate,” I say, knowing she hears me but will not respond because she can’t respond. It pisses me off and weakens me all at once. I take longer in the kitchen than the hot chocolate requires. I turn the stovetop on low so the milk heats slowly. I stare at the red hot coils.
By the time I pour the hot cocoa into two mugs, my shakes have almost gone away. I head back out to the living room, set Mom’s mug right by her chair, and she suddenly moves faster than I’ve seen her move, maybe ever. Her hands grab my face and she presses both palms on my cheeks, hard, and she pulls my face right up close to hers with a strength that feels like Parkinson’s, but I know is all her. She says, “I love you.” I tell her I love her too, and I try to break away from her, but that makes her grasp my face even harder and she pulls me close to her and she says, “I know. I know. And I never, never, never, never want that to go away.” The way she says it scares me like nothing I’ve ever felt before. It hollows me out, and I can’t feel anything inside. She cries now, and I want to hold her, but I feel as stiff as she usually is. I don’t know if this is still her dementia talking, but it scares me to the core. When she finally lets me go, I feel wrung out, like she squeezed every bit of life from me. The room is dark, and I don’t get up and turn on any lights. I don’t make dinner. We sit, Mom and me, my hand resting on hers.
That night when I tuck her in bed, she says, “Would you help me?”
I want to tell her I am helping her, I will always help her.
She tells me she wants to see me before she goes away. She tells me she is going away, she knows she is. She asks me to help her go away peacefully, so I can be there beside her when she goes. She says she doesn’t want to go alone, and she says Zeb can’t help her and she can’t ask Dad. She says there’s only a strand left of her now. She asks me not only to be there when she goes, but to help her go.
There’s nothing but fear and love inside me. I can’t imagine it. But I tell her, “Yes, I’ll help you, Mom.” I know what she is asking me to do. I have no other answer. I want another answer. But I tell her yes. When she is ready, I will be there. I will help her. Yes.
That night I’m in bed, alone, and I’ve never wanted Mom to get better more than I do now. I pray for the first time ever that if she doesn’t get better, I’ll go before she does. Jesus will snag my praying hands, and I’ll just wait for her to join me. When she asked me to help her, I told her yes, and I want time to stop now. I want everything to stop. The house is so quiet it feels hollowed out inside, like the houses after me and Zeb left from a job of stealing. I can’t sleep, so I get up, pull my rubber boots on over my footie pajamas, and walk outside. The other house feels safer. I want to be there, in the house in the field where Mom grew up.
It’s a quick trek in the night. When I reach the house, I sit with my back against the wall, looking out across the field to the icy pond turned silver by the moonlight. I think of the fish under the surface, protected now by the first thin layer of ice. I learned all about fish in biology class before Thanksgiving break. In winter, they sink to the bottom of a frozen pond or lake, where the water is mudlike and silty, too dense to freeze solid. Swimming in the muck there is what keeps them alive through the frozen winter.
I close my eyes; I imagine them trudging back and forth through the silt with their little fins flapping. It’s tough swimming. But they keep at it, hoping for summer.
I feel like a fish.
THREE DAYS LATER, ZEB and Dad are back from hunting. From the kitchen window, I watch them hang the deer, their bodies moving like dark patches of smoke in the wintry fog. Zeb makes a cut near the hooves of the deer, and the ankle turns into a bony eye of a needle. He works thick rope through the hole between tendon and bone to make a loop for the deer to hang from. Behind Dad and Zeb, the Thatcher dog stands at attention in his pen, eyes riveted to the carcass of the deer. That dog has been out there alone for four nights now, shivering.
Zeb uses his whole body, bending at the waist, to hoist the deer up with the pulley system he has rigged over the branch of a tree. When the deer is hung, Dad pats Zeb on the back and they walk inside, Dad’s arm around Zeb’s shoulder. It looks, at first, like Dad’s taking care of Zeb, like Zeb’s been hurt. But they come inside, and I see Zeb’s fine, and I figure they’re just quiet from spending all that time in the woods. They peel off their hunting clothes, and I can smell the woods on them. Their flannel-lined canvas jackets are soaked with snow and the scent of blood, like the meat department at the Piggly Wiggly grocery. It mixes with the salty smell of the pheasant and sage stuffing I tried to make, with a little of Mom’s help.
Zeb sits on the couch, staring out at the deer he got. I sit next to him, keeping quiet like he is. “It’s a beautiful deer,” I tell him, almost whispering.
He nods halfway, like he’s tired, even a little bit sad. “And we take all that beauty inside us.”
I think about it for a little bit, what he said. Then I ask him, “What about the fear?”
He looks at me now. He’s not angry, but he says, “What about it?”
“The deer must’ve been feeling fear when you shot it. I figure we take that in too when we eat it.”
He squints his eyes at me like he hates me, but his look softens right away. He looks back at the deer. “Maybe,” he says.
We sit down to dinner as daylight fades to evening. Dad and Zeb are still so quiet. It haunts me a little, makes me afraid that something happened between them up there, like maybe Dad knows about our stealing now. Out the window, Christmas lights glow.
“They’re so pretty.” Mom tries to smile. I want her to smile like she did when they were gone, and I want to tell Dad that she walked and we spent time in the old house. But it reminds me of the secret between me and Mom now. I want that secret to go away.
A few minutes later I notice the red Christmas lights suddenly fill up the whole window. They pulse against the misty November sky, red, grey, red, grey. I stop eating. I look outside.
A police car parks in front of our house. Zeb sees it, I can tell by the way he fixes his eyes, then looks away real quick. It makes him nervous, but he acts all tough and nonchalant. I know w
hat’s about to happen, and I want to spill out all my confessions now. I do not want that police officer coming up here and telling Mom and Dad on Thanksgiving that me and Zeb have stolen things. I want to confess before he gets to the door. I wish I had confessed everything before now, but things just kept piling up, and I couldn’t tell where my confessions should begin. I open up my mouth intending to spill out everything I know once and for all, and the only words that come out are, “Dad, pass the green beans, please.”
Zeb looks at me, even glares. It’s that tug between us, and he senses I’m scared and about to tell on us both. The cop lights keep pulsing. I can’t tell if the pheasant I roasted is dry, or if it’s just that my mouth is a desert and even water wouldn’t quench it.
“A toast to the cook,” Dad says. His back’s to the window, and he hasn’t seen the police car yet. So he’s cheery, like he always is on Thanksgiving. But this year it’s fake. I can see by the way his smile is flat and broad, more like a dog bearings its teeth than a smile. All the same, me and Zeb clink Coke classes with Dad, and we bend down to toast with Mom.
My eyes swing toward the window. The sky is one bruised heartbeat. Then comes the knock.
Dad wipes his mouth with his napkin. “Who could be visiting during the Thanksgiving dinner hour?” he says. But his voice is fakey, and he tries so hard to act happy. When he turns and sees the red lights flashing, he falters a little. Then he bucks up like I’ve seen Zeb do. He stands up, carries his napkin with him to the door, wipes his mouth as he walks. He’s still chewing his pheasant as he opens the door. He sees the police officer standing there, stuffs his napkin into the pocket of his slacks and he makes his fake smile even bigger. He sticks out his hand to greet the cop. “Evening, Sir.”