By the time I came home from school my cat was gone. Mom had stuffed him in a cardboard box and driven to the farm, where my grandfather lived with my Great Aunt Gutherie, a sour spinster who made herself useful enough to stay.
An indoor cat that was used to predictable dinners, Socks was found dead a few weeks later, killed by a coyote that must’ve found him easier to get at than the chickens, which were kept safely shut inside their coop at night.
The last time I saw my mother alive was early last December. I drove all night, blowing snow making the usual two-hour trip from Regina a wheel-gripping four, until I finally pulled up in front of the house near midnight.
As always, my father had left the porch light on for me and was dozing in a living room chair when I let myself in. It was an old habit of his, waiting up for me. Mom couldn’t go to sleep if she thought there might be a knock at the door in the middle of the night. With Dad keeping watch, if I didn’t come home and was discovered lying in a ditch somewhere, he’d be the one to meet the police at the front door. He could break the bad news to Mom, gently, after breakfast.
“Hi, honey, rough trip?” Dad had yawned and stood up when I came in and shoved the front door shut hard against a gust of wind and snow and an ill-fitted frame. I stomped my boots, snow slagging away from them to melt on the rubber mat that filled the entryway.
“No worse than usual.” We both knew it was a lie, the kind we always told if Mom was in the room. Even when she had still been lucid. “How is she?”
My mother had been diagnosed with dementia a year earlier and ever since we had watched her give in to it as though she were crawling under a warm blanket for a long and needed sleep.
“I think she’s still awake. Why don’t you go on up and check on her before you head in.”
Abandoning my suitcase, I flapped my arms out of my winter parka and headed up the stairs, padding softly over the hallway floorboards without causing a noise.
“Mom?” I said quietly when I reached her half-opened door. I leaned in and found her sitting up in bed, an afghan and lamplight draped across her lap along with a picture album open to the middle. She was staring off into a corner of the room as though she truly was somewhere else. Off wandering through those pictures, perhaps. Re-imagining our history.
“Mom? It’s me. I just got here.” I stepped round to the side of the bed and knelt on the bare floor where that old rug used to be. When she didn’t acknowledge me at first I rested my head on the mattress, tired from the trip, tired of pretending I didn’t think dementia was just another way for her to keep me at a distance.
After a few minutes I lifted my head when my mother spoke.
“This was my daughter,” she said. Her words came slowly and she paused, seeming to search for her next syllable. “Tess,” she added with some difficulty and pointed to the page she’d stopped on. Both sides were covered in a tidy collage of pictures. Me as a grass-skirted hula girl in my first figure skating recital, dressed in stiff corduroy slacks and vest for my first day of the third grade. Another of me hugging Socks.
“Mom, that’s me,” I said and covered the papery skin of her cool, age-mottled hands with mine. Like everything else about her, her hands had aged suddenly, blotting out the woman she used to be.
“No,” she said. “My daughter died a long time ago. Like everyone else.”
I looked into my mother’s face, expecting to find the worry creases she’d always worn at the corners of her eyes between her brows. They weren’t there. Her face after all her years, was more peaceful than I’d ever seen. As though in believing she had really, finally, lost those she always pushed away — seeming to test whether we’d keep coming back — she had found a way to let go.
I took the album and closed it lightly, kissed my mother on the cheek, and turned out the lamp. When I went downstairs, Dad was waiting for me in the kitchen with a pot of camomile tea.
“Figured you probably drank a lot of coffee on the way here,” he said and handed me a clunky mug, which I’d always preferred to Mom’s dainty china teacups that had been passed down to her from my grandmother. Now, Mom is gone and I can hardly believe how distant that night seems. And I’m here, alone, following my mother’s footsteps into her kitchen.
I open the door to her tea cupboard where delicate cups still dangle by their ears from small brass hooks. The hooks were installed because of the trains that sped along the tracks just yards from our back fence.
The whole house rattled when the trains passed by, carrying their heavy loads of wheat and potash out of the province, causing the china to tremble to the edge of their shelf. So I suppose it may have seemed deliberate when, a few days after my cat was eaten by coyotes, I opened the cabinet door and one of the teacups fell, breaking in half against the sharp edge of the countertop before tumbling to the floor and shattering.
My mother rushed into the kitchen, already wringing her hands. “What did you do?” She grasped my arm with anxious, pinching fingers that would leave a bruise.
“It — it fell,” I said. “I didn’t mean — It was just there when I opened the door. I tried to catch it.” For proof I held out my hand, which had been cut against a falling shard.
“But you didn’t catch it.” She sucked in a thin, serrated breath before she let go of me and stared at the shelf, as though expecting to see the rest of her teacups lined up along the edge, ready to leap down after the first. Tenderly, nervously, she nudged each one to the back of the cupboard, counting as she touched their rims. With one gone, the remaining ones could no longer be called a set. She knelt and, with shaking hands, began to pick up the pieces of broken pottery into her apron.
“From now on you don’t touch these,” she said. She glanced at the blood that was dripping slowly from my fingers. I thought she’d offer a Band-Aid, but she only cradled the broken cup in her lap, fitting a few pieces together as though it might miraculously be made whole again if it was all accounted for, and fault assigned.
“We could try to glue it,” I said, tucking my hand behind me.
My mother was quiet for a moment. “And do what with it? Tea would dribble into my lap. It’s in a hundred pieces. No. No it’s broken, and that’s that.” She stood up, found a small box in a drawer, arranged the shards inside and placed the box on the shelf with the rest of the cups.
While I swept up what remained, dust and slivers, Mom went upstairs to lay a cold cloth over her eyes. She disappeared into her bedroom, drew the blinds and didn’t come back downstairs until after I’d left for school the next morning. By then my father had installed the hooks.
My mother’s name was Penelope Reimer. Her own mother, Ada, was not like those of her friends.
Ada was raised in the city — Winnipeg, an entire province away — and wasn’t the sort of woman who could be kept cheerful with the daily busyness that would be hers as the wife of a farmer. After she married Joseph, she seemed to think that anything lacking in the way of society and culture would be made up for in views and experiences to fill her journals and watercolours.
By the time Penelope was about to go into the seventh grade at the country school near their farm, she had known for some years that Ada was becoming increasingly unhappy. When grownups didn’t think Penelope could hear them they whispered things like, “That poor woman is like china in a bull shop. Never should’ve left the city.” They shook their heads and tsked and prayed for her. Because of their own hardships, however, they were of the opinion that miracles were the exception, and suffering the better evidence of God’s love.
As long as Penelope could remember, sadness seemed to come over Ada the way dark clouds stalked the horizon before closing in quickly and completely. Recently there was less and less space between those times. Hardly enough for them to get ready for the next storm.
Ada also suffered from headaches, which meant all the drapes in the house had to be drawn. And Penelope, who wasn’t trusted not to carelessly make noise, was sent outside to amuse herself w
ith whatever could be found lying around in the yard. Penelope though, who had gradually taken over Ada’s share of inside chores while Joseph picked up the slack in the barn, had forgotten how to play. Her dollhouse was nothing more to her than a plywood box, emptied of the magic that once brought dolls to life.
Penelope spent weeks planting and tending her own little garden on the exposed side of the house, from a jar of miscellaneous seeds that turned out to have no practical use. She was secretly pleased when flowers grew up in the place of the expected carrots and kohlrabi and began to bud, until a windstorm came through and carried off the soil around them, exposing their roots.
In the evenings, when Penelope and Joseph returned to the house, she opened the front door and listened before going in.
Sometimes, Ada might be recovered and at the stove, humming while sprinkling spices into stew, eager for company. Other times, she was still in her nightgown, dishevelled and overwhelmed by the ingredients in front of her. On those days Penelope would quickly take over in the kitchen, but the simplest things would still pluck at the taut strings of Ada nerves. The sound of toast popping up was enough to make her startle, so that Penelope and her father developed a knack for quietly lifting the toaster’s lever just when the bread was medium-browned. Between the two of them they almost always got there in time.
Penelope tried to think of other ways to help Ada. When one of her friends invited her to see a new litter of kittens, she told them she was busy, so she wouldn’t be far should Ada call for her. She also tied lengths of cotton string from a leaky faucet to the drain, so drips would find a quiet way to the bottom of the sink. She made up the beds with fresh sheets on Saturday mornings, careful to run her hand along the entire grid of her mother’s linens to make sure there was nothing to make her itch, no bits of hay that made their way through the wash to irritate her skin and scratch their way into her dreams. But no matter how Penelope tried to insulate Ada, her mother’s nerves crackled with tension, like naked wires.
Finally, Joseph decided something had to be done.
“I’ve bought a house in town for you and your mother,” he told Penelope one morning as the two of them sat at the kitchen table, eating bowls of cereal quietly. “She’ll be happier. You’ll go to a new school come fall and I’ll visit on Sundays.”
Penelope stared into her cereal. She thought about how, without her father there, there’d be no one to help remember the toast.
Penelope never wrote in her diary about how she felt. Just that moving to Swift Current, where there were shops and parks, revived Ada for a while. Even though the house was modest, bordered the railway, and had a summer kitchen for a back porch, she was cheered by the sight of people strolling along the sidewalks. Walking for the sake of walking, she said. Because there’s more to life than work.
For a full month, and another after school started, Penelope and Ada kept busy cleaning, boarding up mouse holes, choosing wallpaper and fabrics, arranging the wedding dishes and tea set — which were too fine for the farm — in the kitchen cupboards. In the afternoons when Penelope returned from school, they started a new tradition. They had tea together, with cubes of white sugar dissolved in the bottom of their finely-painted china teacups.
“How was school today?” Ada would ask. “Did you make friends?”
“A few,” Penelope would lie, anxious to keep her mother from knowing she sat alone at lunchtime, looking out the classroom window to avoid the other girls. It wasn’t their fault. They had tried to be friendly. During her first week they included her in their secrets at recess, giggling at their own silliness. One morning though, Penelope was distracted by the thought that she’d left the stove lit after cooking cream of wheat. And although she tried, she couldn’t make herself giggle along with the other girls. She stood as conspicuous as a hat rack while they gradually turned away.
Since then she’d watched them from a way off, wishing she could think of a reason to go over and talk to them again.
“You know Penelope, to make friends, you have to be a friend,” Ada said, perhaps filling in what Penelope wasn’t saying. Perhaps just filling in the silence. “Why don’t you invite some girls over tomorrow? The house is ready for guests, don’t you think? We’ll have tea and biscuits.” She looked around, seeming pleased with what she saw. Penelope thought she saw something else though, a familiar darkness that passed like a shadow over her mother’s face.
“I don’t think — ” Penelope said, but stopped short of saying it wasn’t a good idea. “Okay, I’ll ask.”
The next afternoon Penelope walked home with two other girls. Susan and Annabelle were “spirit sisters,” they said, although they were as unrelated as pigs and pigeons. They dressed the same for school each day and braided each other’s hair with wildflowers and dandelions. Penelope’s promise of store-bought cookies, when all they’d ever had was homemade, was more than enough to tempt them. But when she led them up the porch steps and opened the front door, she knew by the tightly-closed drapes that Ada was having one of her spells.
Still on the porch, Penelope closed the door and backed up so quickly that she bumped into Susan and Annabelle. The two were holding hands as though they were Siamese twins joined at the palms.
“Hey,” they said in one voice, stumbling, but not letting go of one another.
“Sorry.” Penelope grasped the doorknob again, trying to think of a reason to go back to school. In the end there was no way out. With a deep breath, she pushed the door open and led the girls inside.
“So, do you live here alone or something?” Susan said loudly as Annabelle went to part the heavy living room curtains. Sharp angles of afternoon light fell across the floor. Neither of them noticed a mouse hunkered down in the middle of the living room. It had helped itself to a dish of stale marshmallow peanuts on the coffee table, but must have frozen when the three girls came inside.
“I think my mom is sleeping,” Penelope said in a near whisper meant as a hush. She was anxious about upsetting Ada. Nearly as much though, she worried that Ada might come downstairs, nightgowned and agitated, and embarrass her in front of Susan and Annabelle.
Penelope made tea, catching the kettle before it whistled. She arranged cinnamon biscuits on an everyday plate, poured milk into a cream jug and set out a bowl of sugar cubes, along with three teacups that no one cared about. Before she could ask Susan and Annabelle whether they preferred lemon and honey, she heard a thump from upstairs, followed by the sound of Ada’s voice crying out.
Penelope’s heart became a stone in her chest. As calmly as she could, she set down the biscuit box and arranged her face into an apology, then quickly turned to leave the room, her legs as wobbly as cooked noodles.
“You might need help,” Susan said. Both girls stood to follow Penelope, eager as volunteers to clean up after a church bake sale.
“No, it’s fine,” Penelope said, but Susan and Annabelle were like burrs on her socks. They stuck right on her heels and Penelope was too flustered to pick them off. “Okay, just wait here,” she said with as much authority as she could when they reached Ada’s room at the top of the stairs.
Penelope found her mother bent over her knees on the rag rug beside her bed, a stream of thin, white-flecked vomit spooling out in front of her. On the nightstand were an empty pitcher of water and a tipped-over bottle of Aspirin, the last few tablets spilled out.
“Did you take all these?” Penelope said, trying to keep panic from rising into her voice. She stepped round her mother and knelt next to her.
“Just a few at first,” Ada said, looking up and reaching a cold and trembling hand for Penelope’s. “For my head. I had to do something, but they didn’t help so I took more.” She turned her face away, rested her forehead back on her knees and quietly began to sob. “I thought I was better.”
“Tell me what I should do,” Penelope said, wiping at tears that sprung onto her cheeks. Her mother said nothing.
When Penelope left Ada’s room to fetch a
cold cloth for her face, she found Susan nervously chewing her thumbnail. Annabelle had disappeared.
“She went for her mom,” Susan said. “We didn’t know what else to do.”
Penelope took a deep breath, went into the bathroom and turned on the tap.
Moments later, Annabelle and her mother were followed into the house by a man whom Penelope mistakenly thought must be Annabelle’s father.
“She’s fine,” Penelope said, coming halfway down the stairs and standing in their way. “She’s in her nightgown. She won’t want company right now.”
“I think I’ll have to be the judge of that,” the man said, introducing himself as Doctor Westfall. He put out his hand as if to greet Penelope, but when by habit she extended hers, he relieved her of the cloth she was holding and made his way past her, shutting her attempts to follow him into her mother’s bedroom.
“Come, dear,” said Annabelle’s mother. “My daughter tells me that you made some tea. Why don’t we go downstairs and enjoy it before it’s hopelessly cold?”
Without thinking, Penelope obeyed. She watched dimly as the woman sent the other girls home, shushing their protests that they should be allowed to stay.
For what seemed like hours, Penelope sat at the kitchen table while Annabelle’s mother busied herself with the few dishes in the sink. She swept the floor before starting a pot of soup.
Penelope absently accepted tea and a plate of toast with butter and cheese spread. Slowly she began to settle down. She closed her eyes and took deep breaths.
Some time later, Doctor Westfall came downstairs into the kitchen.
“She purged the Aspirin and I’ve given her some pills to help with sleep. It’s enough for now, but I’ve also written a script for more.” He looked around, as though unsure to whom he should give the prescription. Finally he settled on Penelope, but Annabelle’s mother quickly stepped forward and took the paper from him.
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