“I don’t mean napkin,” Elsa said. “I said blanket, didn’t I? I haven’t made up Claire’s bed yet.”
“That’s right, good, this is Claire. I made the bed this morning, Elsa. Do you remember?” He turned his attention to Claire. “I’ve prepped her. Explained who you are, that you’re coming home.”
Claire stared at the man across from her, him and his loose, gray turtleneck. It was time he left. “That last visit we got in a fight. I don’t think she’ll soon forget that.”
The nurse coughed and looked for his napkin. “I’m afraid she’s progressed. Did you get the pamphlets we sent you? The ones about activities? Who to call if her behavior changes? I’ve written everything down and left instructions in two places, one on the fridge and one in the living room. By the towels she likes to fold. It’s your job to make things simple for her. You have to try to see the world the way she does. It’s a very confusing place. It’s difficult to even navigate the dinner table. She may throw things. Only plastic, see?” He lifted his bowl and set it back down and a little stew sputtered off the side. “There’s a lot to remember.”
As he spoke, Claire decided he’d become a caregiver because anyone with enough vitality would have run far away. Elsa laughed.
He gave her a tour of her own home. She might have been a child at a museum, the way he led her around the squat farmhouse, keeping her on the tight leash of his passive voice, which was so gentle she could, if she felt like it, snap it in half with one mean word.
Claire tried to feel her father in the bedrooms, the attic, an indentation in a couch, a fingered mirror, but the nurse did not let her linger long, which was just as well—she wouldn’t want to cry in front of him.
There was heating now, an upgrade from Claire’s childhood. She wondered who had convinced whom to get it first. Her father must have refused, insisting it was too expensive, when really it was that the radiator, or the need for it, was too big of a change—it meant they were getting old, and the world seemed to be getting younger, easier. Elsa must have gotten sick before he gave in.
“Elsa tends to come in here when you aren’t watching,” the nurse was saying. They were standing in Claire’s childhood bedroom. Now it was a nondescript guest room with garage-sale paintings on the wall. “Something draws her in here. Always keep the door open. Your idea of privacy—let’s just say it will shift.”
Michael walked to the far wall and fingered a nail at chest level. “I didn’t notice this before. Take it out tonight. I did my best, but there’s always something she could hurt herself on in this old house. You have to train yourself to see this type of thing.”
Claire didn’t want to see the house through his eyes, each corner symbolizing some part of Elsa’s disease, some danger. She had her own symbols to keep track of. Dusk had settled and she instinctively reached a hand up to draw the rough burlap-style curtains together. She ran her finger along the frame of the black screen leaning under the windowsill. Beneath each window in the house were screens like this, taken out so storm glass could be put in. Her father must have done that; maybe it was the last chore he ever did. In the spring, Claire would replace them, undo his work. But for now, they rested there—a second, darker window that looked out onto nothing.
Claire showed the nurse sleepily to the door. On the porch, Michael said he’d check in every three days. Claire hummed in agreement, too tired to make an enemy of him now.
“We can’t get a full medical history,” Michael said. “Your mother pretty thoroughly disposed of all her paperwork. I don’t understand it. And your grandmother’s records from the old psychiatric hospital are so incomprehensive it’s amazing they knew her name. Anything you know would be helpful.”
Claire could see her breath in the cold. She hugged herself in the doorway. Michael didn’t seem cold at all.
“All I was told is that it was a head trauma,” Claire said. “Not Huntington’s, if that’s what the paperwork says. She died of pneumonia.”
“There are resources at the clinic I work for,” he said, so soft that Claire had to lean in to hear. “It can be hard to reconcile the hereditary nature of it. I can bring you some brochures. Different methods of warding it off yourself for a time, and there’s a support group for caretakers. Coping with this news yourself, that’s a hard thing. You don’t have to do it alone.”
“You said the old psychiatric hospital. Has it closed?”
There was a pause, and his cheeks seemed to settle into place, as if he hadn’t known how to hold his facial muscles until then. “They’re fighting for landmark status.” Then he touched her shoulder. Something told her it was the same touch she’d seen him use with her mother. He smiled. “You’ll be fine.”
Pity. That was what that look was. He’d decided, even before she had the chance to prove him wrong, that she would fail at this. She watched him drive away.
Claire thought of going to get the one last item she’d left in her car. She felt, briefly, sorry for it, as if it were a sentient being she’d bound and gagged and locked away in her trunk. Glancing at the driveway, she half expected to see it propped against the car, an escaped prisoner. She dug her heels into the matted porch snow. No, she would not show her mother the painting. It would only upset her. What happened, Claire wondered, to canvas when it froze?
She fell, somehow, into the habit of calling her mother by her first name, as Michael did. Elsa. It felt appropriate—Elsa—since they hadn’t seen each other in a decade. And since her mother was a different person now, with a different mind.
Each day began with berries and sour, dry yogurt. Each morning, Claire carefully set the table, which Elsa had taken to calling the bed. The long wooden table her father had made—a reject commission he’d brought home from the shop. He was always disappointed by his work, which Claire could find no flaw in. She loved running her hand over the wood—bird’s eye maple—slick from touch, but old and deeply grooved, stories of meals buried in its wrinkles.
Each day the berries, every morning the sleeping trees in the yard. Trees so dead they were alive, with brittle twigs like bunches of blooming flowers. Their window reflections leaned over Claire as she prepared breakfast, reminding her of her own winter body. Claire saw her morning-self setting the table. She saw her dry winter hands, the stealthy veins beginning to rise from her skin like waves, the new texture of age, laying down the shallow bowl and thick plastic plate. It made a hollow noise on the wood.
It was getting late, but Claire padded slowly toward her mother’s bedroom, stopping at each window, breathing into a momentary quiet—another habit-cum-ritual she’d adopted—making a point, before seeing Elsa, to stand and watch the yard fill up with light.
As soon as she walked into Elsa’s room, she knew she’d taken too long. It was the second Tuesday in January. She’d been there two weeks and still she hadn’t learned.
Elsa was sitting up against the headboard, watching the door. Her legs were straight, wrapped and weighed with many blankets. They looked separated from her torso, like pieces of a child’s toy detached from its plastic body. She looked at Claire expectantly, waiting, it seemed, for Claire to make the first move. Claire inched timidly toward the lumps of Elsa’s covered feet; they made her think of animals under snow.
A hand moved. Claire saw it travel toward the nightstand, the alarm clock. She saw what was going to happen before it happened, and yet had no power to stop it, not even to lift an arm to shield herself. Elsa grabbed the clock and pulled her arm back, fluid as a ball player, as if the motion were practiced. The shining metal arced across the room. Hit Claire in the forearm hard. Clanged to the floor. The metal bell cried out once.
Slowly, Claire looked at her arm. A small scrape, no blood, but it would bruise. She wouldn’t yell. She walked to the bed and pulled the covers back. Throwing the clock seemed, to Claire, like something Elsa had always been capable of and would have done many times over if she’d ever given herself permission. The only difference now was that
Elsa had stopped arguing with herself.
“You have good aim,” Claire said.
“I’m hungry,” Elsa said. “Stop dawdling.”
Elsa still knew Claire, but sometimes she only seemed to know her. And for the trust Elsa put in her—a trust that was evident despite the throwing of alarm clocks, even if Elsa had little choice in the matter—Claire felt grateful, privileged even. But, on occasions like this, when Elsa revealed her aggression, that trust felt manipulative, as if Elsa were only feigning obedience while planning her secret escape. The house was a prison, and Claire the warden.
The nurse had said not to take these acts personally, to find the immediate cause and change the focus. But what if the alarm clock was an act of revenge?
Now the focus was on dressing. Elsa’s nightgown rode up above her knees, which were pale and brittle. Elsa was all knees. Claire helped her slide to the edge of the bed, lower her legs, put on her slippers. She laid out two cotton shirts—one blue, one white—and asked, which one? After five minutes deliberating, Elsa chose “the blue, natürlich,” over the white. Claire set each item of clothing on the bed in the order that Elsa was to put them on, then pretended to be busy organizing the bureau while her mother dressed. It didn’t matter if something was on backward or if dressing took half an hour, Elsa was to do it herself.
In the kitchen, Elsa stared blankly into her floral-patterned bowl of yogurt and berries. Claire watched her dip her spoon gingerly into it, nearly coming up empty.
“What’s the matter? You don’t want it?”
Elsa scowled at her. “I am hungry. I said this already.”
“This is what you like. You like blueberries in the morning.”
“I cannot have this,” Elsa said, pushing it away.
“I’ll get you something else.” Claire tried not to sound exasperated. She was about to dump the food in the garbage when she saw she’d forgotten yet another rule: how difficult it was for Elsa to see food on any patterned bowl.
Elsa was too proud to admit, or simply couldn’t articulate, that she needed help understanding breakfast. Each day, Claire added a new item to her own list of failures.
Claire transferred the yogurt to a solid blue bowl, then sat beside Elsa, watching the slow procedure of spoon to mouth, wondering when her mother would forget how to swallow.
After breakfast, in front of the fire in the living room, Claire would read the local paper out loud if it seemed Elsa was interested. First the feature pieces, then the weather. Elsa would listen calmly, staring into the fire. Sometimes, in her more lucid moments, she would interject with criticism. In the middle of an article about the recession, Elsa said, “I don’t like this one. I prefer the one you read yesterday. Read it again.”
“It’s probably in the bin already,” said Claire.
“I liked it better when he talked about Reagan. I know you worked for Carter. You look guilty. Good thing they didn’t shoot Reagan with better bullets, otherwise we would have lost—” Elsa faltered, searching.
“Another president?” Claire tried.
“Otherwise, we would have lost a great man.”
Claire leaned over the arm of Elsa’s chair to show her a photo of Jeremy Wendell, a man of the community who was found in the late January snow, stuck under his garden fence where he’d had a stroke. Elsa laughed strangely. The same, awkward laugh she’d used at dinner that first night.
“That’s not nice,” Claire said, pulling the paper away. “He’s dying.”
Elsa nodded and laughed again.
Claire had assumed that by a month in she’d be jabbering to herself with cabin fever. Instead, she became more self-conscious of her language, second-guessing every verb and preposition she used with Elsa. Was it “than” or “then?” Did she pronounce the word “prerogative” correctly?
It was the prerogative of elected officials to propose cuts to the federal budget and announce a $91 billion deficit on Monday. On Wednesday, the “freeway killer” was convicted. Then, in a town just down the road, thousands of gallons of radioactive water were released into the drainage system and radioactive steam into the atmosphere when a tube burst at the local nuclear power plant, no danger to the public! There were stories of war veterans being mistreated or untreated, but not enough coverage in Claire’s opinion. She often thought of Bird and had an urge to tell Elsa about him. She’d looked him up years ago and found he’d come home wounded in ’68, but the details of his injury were confidential.
Again, Elsa laughed.
Midmorning, Claire would leave Elsa with the TV and the dying fire to go outside and chop wood. The ax—leaning against the house like some bent and broken man—was brought out to an upright log resting in the snow. Her father had taught her to chop wood when she was six years old.
She arched her lower back, tried to let the cold numb the ache crawling up from her femur. She bent her knees, touched the cold raw-metal tip with her bowed forefinger, swung up and around like the arc of the sun. That’s how he’d taught her—he said she was the earth and the ax head the sun. She’d corrected him—and was sorry for it later—saying that what he meant was the ax was our perception of the sun. That if he thought about it, the ax head was the earth and he was the sun, pulling it in orbit.
Breaking something to pieces, breaking through the wood, destroying its shape into usefulness. It was a muscle memory that had never left, not in the forty-some years since she’d last lifted an ax. Her hips ached—yet another joint she’d taken for granted until it troubled her. But for a moment, she felt strong. Falling on something with all her weight in one unified motion, every ounce of strength needed to get the clean cut. She hadn’t felt this sensation in years, hadn’t known it was something she missed, desired. This was it, this was all there was. Engaging with the world, fixing on a task, finishing it. She felt her father in the swing.
She brought the logs inside and put them by the fire, under the old bread oven, to dry. And she could smell him dripping and drying after he came in from the cold. Her father smelled like thawing wood. He must have sat here on the couch, where Claire sat now. He must have held her mother’s hands in both of his.
They said he called the ambulance himself while it was happening, his heart attack—he didn’t want to burden Elsa. He took care of her for more than a year before he passed two months ago, and he’d never told Claire about Elsa’s disease.
It was time for Elsa’s midday medicine but Claire didn’t feel like moving her body. She felt Elsa’s stare on the side of her face just as she felt the flames from the fireplace in front of her, indifferent and hot. Claire could tell Elsa was getting ready to speak from the rough word-searching noise she made with her jaw.
“I’ve got to get ready.”
Claire was surprised each time by the abrupt silence of the house, how it sat with them, in the space between words. The house-sounds and snow-sounds, the throat-sounds Elsa made, were bound up with the silence. The soft creaking of the old wood roof. The guttural sound of the pipes. It was so silent that when a car passed, it caused a shock. Then the massive silence retrieved itself, like a woman gathering up her big skirts before sitting back down.
“Ready for what?” Claire asked lazily.
There was a long pause. It seemed, for Elsa, that each word was a great search, always starting at the beginning of an internal dictionary. Elsa said slowly in her sand voice, “We’re going to celebrate. We’re going to the theater.”
The fire crackled and ticked, keeping time.
“We are?” Claire said, turning to her now.
“Not you. Me and Ernest.”
She said his name as if he were alive. “How old are you?” Claire asked calmly. Locate her in time, the nurse had said. Pull her back. Or not.
Elsa said, smiling, “Fifty-four. Ernest says I look thirty-nine.” She reached for the box of tissues on the arm of the chair and began pulling them out and ripping them in half, one by one. Paper dust floated around her.
Claire
took the box away gently. “Why don’t you fold your towels?” she said, grabbing the stack of clean washcloths from the coffee table.
Elsa shook her head. “I don’t have time. I must get ready.” She still held half a tissue tightly in her hand.
What would her father have done? Had he fueled Elsa’s delusions and entered the past with her, or corrected her and said no, here we are, old and still in love? At fifty-four, what would they have been celebrating? Perhaps that was when Elsa and Claire’s father had finally bought the land they’d always rented. Thirty years ago—long after Claire had left. What had she been doing at that time? Something she was indifferent about, surely, in the city with Freddie.
“Were you celebrating the house?” Claire asked.
It made perfect sense that Elsa would not return to a year when Claire lived there, when they were struggling with money and her grandmother. Who would choose to go back to that? But it hurt, just a little, that she and Elsa would never choose to lob themselves back in time, do it over again.
“He’ll expect me to be ready at six,” Elsa said more confidently. “I must get dressed. The new production opens at the theater tonight.”
Still—there was a movement inside, some small, buried thrill. A lightness in Claire residing right beside the hurt. She wanted to indulge this delusion. She was almost giddy about it; they could do whatever they wanted. And they were going to have a good time at it if it killed them.
“Let’s get you ready then, hurry up,” Claire said. She helped her mother out of her chair and into the bedroom. A painful giddiness in her chest. Desperate, suddenly, to help Elsa stay inside that day she remembered so earnestly. Was there salvation there, if she could help her mother live in a pleasant memory?
She left Elsa standing in the center of the bedroom and went to the closet, which no longer had doors—another story of the house that she would never know. She knew just what dress, one she’d seen Elsa wear ages ago. And she knew it would still be there. Elsa never threw away clothes, preferring instead to alter and patch forever. Claire slipped it from its hanger. The navy-blue dress gave up soft buds of dust.
The Suicide of Claire Bishop Page 23