by Lev AC Rosen
Nick doesn’t know what his grandpa did that she’s so scared that she wants to lock herself up. He asked once, but she just shook her head, and Dad told him not to talk about it.
“It’s such a beautiful day,” Mom says as they pull into the parking lot of the home. “Like the one when we brought you home from the hospital, Nicky.”
“Yeah, Mom.” Nick pops open the case the game is in, but then snaps it shut again. Repeating sentences isn’t on the checklist. But it could be a symptom of Lyme disease (curable with antibiotics).
Sunrise House is an old-fashioned white mansion, the kind that looks like the plantations in the photos Dad is always showing Nick while telling him “Our ancestors were slaves there.” It’s been painted bleach white, and the grass around it is trimmed carpet thin. A tall white gate rises up like a prison’s between the grass and the parking lot. Dad parks the car in a lot of finger-size pieces of bone-white stone. They crunch under the tires. The fence and gravel are the same shade, like the fence rose out of the stone, a skeletal hand.
“This is wrong,” Nick says. He knows he’s repeating himself, but he has to keep trying.
Mom turns around in her seat to look at him. She’s wearing leather gloves even though it’s warm out. “Remember last spring?” she asks.
Nick nods. “That was just a bad day, though. You said so.”
“There are too many bad days,” she says. “And they are getting worse than bad. I don’t want you around for them anymore. I don’t want you to come home one day and find I’ve forgotten you.”
“You won’t forget me, Mom,” Nick says, crossing his arms. “And what other bad days? What are you talking about?”
No one says anything; no one ever says anything except Nick. Or maybe they say it, but not when he’s around. Dad keeps his hands on the wheel, staring in front of him, and for a moment Nick really hopes he’s going to back out of the parking lot and say “Screw this, you’re staying at home,” but he opens the door instead, and starts getting out.
“It’s a nice place,” Mom says, finally. “Let’s go in. You’ll see.”
“I’ve seen it already,” Nick says. They’ve visited—“as a family”—twice over the past month. Mom doesn’t say anything, just opens the door and gets out. Nick’s the last one still in the car, and so he finally gets out, too.
Nick grabs the game, getting out. He can read the instruction booklet while they’re checking her in. It will be better than participating in his mom’s imprisonment. It’ll be like a form of peaceful protest.
There are stone paths weaving through the grass, and a big porch with lots of chairs on it. A handful of people sit out on the chairs, staring at Nick and his parents as they walk in. Nick doesn’t know if it’s because they’re new or if it’s just the usual stares they get as a mixed-race family. All the people are old, so it could be either. Inside smells like lemon cleaning supplies. The floor has a rose-colored carpet, and the walls are white, with photos all over them. There’s a bulletin board and a high wooden counter that a few people in scrubs sit behind. They look up when Nick’s family comes in, and one of them picks up the phone and says a few low words before hanging up and standing. She smiles broadly and extends her hand. She isn’t much younger than Mom, and wears teal scrubs with a thick brown cardigan over them.
“You’re the Reeves family, right?”
Dad shakes the woman’s hand. “Yes, I’m Lamont, and this is my wife, Sophia, and our son, Nick.” He turns to look at Nick, and his eyes furrow into the expected glare when he sees the game. “Nick, why did you bring that game?”
“Peaceful protest,” Nick says. His dad taught him that term, but he just looks confused when Nick says it now, and then more annoyed. Nick tries not to smirk. He likes that Dad can finally be angry today, that Nick isn’t the only one.
“What are you talking about?” Dad’s voice rises. “Don’t you get what we’re doing here? Can’t you take it seriously?”
Mom puts her hand on Dad’s shoulder. “Relax. It’s okay. You can keep your game, Nicky.”
The woman in scrubs has been smiling pleasantly through this in a plastic sort of way but uses the moment of silence to speak up again. “I’m Maria Lopez, one of the nurses here. I oversee the daily care of patients, and I supervise the early-onset patients, especially. So I’ll be a person you see every day, Sophia.”
“Sophie is fine,” Mom says.
“Why don’t we all go and sit down in the lounge and we can talk about what you like to do, Sophie, so I can make sure you’re in all the right activity groups and we give you the best possible schedule.”
She walks them to the back of the lobby, to the only other door, where she swipes a card over a panel. There’s a buzz like an insect and she heaves the door open.
“You’ll have to get an aide to swipe you in when you visit, but someone is always here for that.” She smiles again and leads them through the door into a wide room that branches into a few hallways and a large staircase. She starts down one of the halls, and Nick’s parents follow her like happy sheep to slaughter. Nick goes after them. It’s a narrow hall, and on one side of it is an old woman in a wheelchair, her head bobbing wildly up and down, a smile on her face. Her mouth is wet, like she’s about to start drooling, and her eyes follow Nick as he gets close.
“Jimmy?” she asks. Nick shakes his head, keeps his eyes down, tries to keep walking. “Yes, Jimmy,” she says louder. “I know it’s you. You get so dark in the summers. I told your father not to marry an Italian, but he wouldn’t listen and that’s why you get so dark.”
“I’m not Jimmy,” Nick says, and he feels bad because it came out nasty-sounding and this woman is clearly sick. “Sorry,” he adds quickly. She looks confused and then starts more frantically bobbing her head, like a basketball being dribbled, clutching the arms of her wheelchair. Nick takes a step backward without meaning to. His legs feel shaky and throbbing, like his heart is sucking up the blood from them.
“Yes! You are! I know!” she shouts at him. Her voice is loud and screeching, an angry seagull.
Maria turns around at the shouting and hurries back down the hall to the old woman, then kneels down so she’s at eye level. His parents wait down the hall.
“This isn’t Jimmy, Mrs. Wach. Jimmy is thirty now and married, remember? You have a great-granddaughter, Rosemary, named after you?”
The woman’s bobbing slows down a little and she focuses on Maria.
“I remember,” she says. But she looks so confused, Nick doesn’t believe her.
“Good. Why don’t you just wait here until Steve is done getting Mrs. Goldman out of bed, and then he can take you both outside. Does that sound like something you want to do?”
“Yes,” the woman says after a moment.
“Good. Steve will be right here.”
The woman nods again, her head bobbing only a little. Maria stands and walks to a nearby open door. Nick watches her, sticks his head into the room. It looks like a hospital room, with a curtain down the center. Mechanical, cold, not a home, not even a hotel.
“Steve,” Maria calls, “Mrs. Wach is getting impatient.”
“Okay, thanks,” comes a voice from behind the curtain.
Maria turns to Nick, an uneasy smile wavering on her face. “Sorry about that,” she says. “Mrs. Wach tends to see her grandson everywhere if he hasn’t visited in a while.”
“That’s okay,” Nick says, because what else can he say? And Maria seems cool. He thinks maybe she’ll get it. “My mom’s not like that, you know. She doesn’t get people confused.”
“That’s great,” Maria says. Her smile is blank, like she understands what he’s saying but doesn’t feel any particular way about it. It doesn’t change her mind the way it should.
“She shouldn’t be here.” Nick straightens his neck and shoulders out, like a wall, waiting for Maria to disagree, to tell him that she knows Mom better than he does.
“Maybe she shouldn’t,” Maria says
. “But she wants to be.” She’s making the PityFace, that face some teachers and parents were giving him toward the end of last year, after the thing that happened in the spring.
Nick rolls his eyes. “She’s afraid of something. With her dad. She won’t tell me what. And my dad is letting her shut herself away. It’s messed up.”
Maria just shrugs. “I don’t know how your parents operate, or how they decided this, but I know your mom was part of the decision, or she wouldn’t be here. Your dad loves her, and he’s trying to do right.” More clichés. It’s like since Mom’s (incorrect) diagnosis, everyone talks in greeting cards, the ones marked “Sympathy” in the store. As long as she’s in your heart, she’s with you. Love transcends goodbyes. Sorry for your loss.
When they pass by those cards in the drugstore, Nick fantasizes about tearing them all up, about slicing the display down the center with Severkin’s daggers.
“Come on,” Maria says, “let’s get back to them. I need your help, anyway. You need to tell me the sort of things your mom likes to do.”
They head down the hall to where his parents are waiting in front of a closed door. Maria leads them inside, to what looks like a lounge, or maybe a conference room. Round tables, chairs. Maria sits down, and his parents sit down next to her. Nick takes a seat farther away.
“So,” Maria says, looking at them like they’re contestants on a game show, “let’s talk about your day-to-day activities, how you like to spend your time. What did you do for a living?”
“I taught,” Mom says. “College—”
“Anthropology,” Dad interrupts. He’s been doing that a lot lately. When Nick interrupts, he has to apologize. Not Dad, not when he interrupts Mom.
Nick looks down at the game he’s still holding and opens the box. Inside is the disc and the instruction booklet. He takes out the instructions and closes the box with an audible click. No one says anything, and he smiles. He starts flipping through the instruction booklet. He’s happy there even is one, and that it’s thick. Most games have only digital instructions these days.
“And your accent,” Maria continues. “You’re from Germany?” Nick looks up and sees Mom nodding. “We have foreign-movie showings sometimes in the afternoon. I’ll be sure to let you know if we show anything German. Your family might even be able to come watch with you.”
“That sounds fun,” Dad says. Nick looks back down at the game instructions and keeps flipping through them as they talk about stuff Mom likes: reading, painting, nature documentaries, according to Dad, though Nick has never seen her watch any. Listening to all this is making him angry.
“She likes watching me play my game,” he says. So much for peaceful protest and non-participation.
“We have some game consoles here, actually,” Maria says, which is cool, but he wonders what for. He imagines the old wet-lipped woman in the hallway with the bobbing head trying to play a video game, yelling at it when it doesn’t do what she wants. “So you can come play together, if you want.”
“That’d be cool,” Nick says. The room is warm. They should open a window.
“What about keeping her academically challenged?” Dad asks, like Mom isn’t in the room. “Anthropology—can you provide her with the latest papers and books? And read them to her, if…”
“Yes,” Maria interrupts as Dad trails off. “If you give me a list of publications, we can make sure she sees the ones we subscribe to. And you can direct her subscriptions here, of course.”
Nick shakes his head. For a moment he has a vision of Mom in a wheelchair, her head bobbing. He doesn’t voluntarily think of it, it just appears in his head, and suddenly he can’t breathe and his eyes sting. He feels the instruction booklet in his hands, the stickiness of the pages, and looks down at it. He takes a deep breath and blinks the image from his mind and focuses on the words in front of him. The online play is optional, the booklet says, but makes the experience more fun. He doesn’t get how. He likes getting lost in the game’s world. It’s open, and filled with adventures, and the other open-world games he’s played with people online—the MMORPGs—are filled with people talking in slang and joking out of character, which immediately takes him out of the world and the story. It’s like everyone is just pretending, instead of experiencing the story.
Nick doesn’t want to miss out on anything, though. The booklet says the game has online servers dedicated to people who have their characters speak only in character, in appropriate language, and where anyone who violates those rules will be tossed off. Maybe he could do that. He’ll try it, but the moment he sees “OOC” or “LOL,” he’s shutting it down and going back to single-player, off-line play.
The other big change to the game is that you can play as a dwarf. Nick isn’t sure how he feels about this, either. The dwarves had been bad guys in all the others (in fact, the main bad guys in the first one), but now there’s an uneasy truce, so everyone can take on the newly awoken giants together. But Nick was used to fighting the dwarves. They had these huge underground cities that Severkin had to sneak through, sniping in the dark, fighting off their machines.
“How about you, Nick?” Maria asks.
Nick looks up from his booklet. “What?” he asks.
“Can you pay attention?” Dad asks.
“I was just saying that you should visit before sundown,” Maria says. “And that if you plan to visit after, you should let me know. Is that okay?”
“Sure.” Nick shrugs. “I have to come with Dad, anyway. I can’t drive yet.”
“Maybe a friend could drive you,” Dad says. Nick almost laughs. Like he’d ever bring a friend here. “Well, we’ll come every weekend. Right, Nick? At least. Every day if we can.” Dad reaches out and takes Mom’s hand.
“Yes,” she says. “We can come as often as you’d like.”
Nick looks up at Mom. Dad is staring at her, too. There is a long moment, and she smiles, and Dad smiles back at her, but Nick can tell it isn’t a real smile. Nick knows this is a check-box moment, but he isn’t sure which. He decides on number 4, “Confusion with time or place.” Currently, it’s empty. One check doesn’t mean anything.
“Except for the first week,” Maria says. “No visiting then. It’s best if we get her used to the routine without interruptions.”
“Oh,” Dad says. “Will that be okay, Sophie?” Mom nods, and he pats her hand. “Then we’ll be back in a week.”
Nick flips through the booklet to see if there are any major control-play changes, but there don’t seem to be any besides a few more moves. They all seem like natural controls, though, no button switching. Severkin uses a bow and a pair of daggers. The bow is great for sniping while hidden, so he can take out enemies in ruins without disrupting the actual ruins. The daggers—long and curved—are for when he can’t snipe. He uses disguises, too, to get past guards into off-limits areas, where he shouldn’t explore. He’s badass. He was a street urchin, a pickpocket as a child. An orphan. Swift hands were important for treasure hunters. Old locks that needed picking, traps that needed removing, and sometimes artifacts, owned by people who didn’t appreciate them, that needed to be “liberated.” Severkin isn’t above theft. He’s even a member of the Thieves Guild, although he never takes from the poor. Nick has worked hard on Severkin. He turns back to the front of the booklet to make sure he can carry his old character over to the new game. He can. Good.
Nick goes back through the booklet to see if he’s missed anything, and then he notices a new subrace: underelf. A gray elf raised among the dwarves. Nick didn’t know such a thing even existed. But that’s not Severkin. Severkin was raised by a human in the overworld.
“That all sound about right to you?” Maria asks. Nick looks back up. They seem to be finishing. His parents are nodding.
“So let’s take you to your room,” Maria says, getting up. Nick puts the game and booklet away as everyone rises to follow, then grabs his mom’s hand, holding her back a little, so they’re walking behind, out of earsh
ot. It feels silly, holding mom’s hand, but it feels sort of good, too, like a cure for the rage poison, or a healing spell. She looks down at him, as if also confused by the handholding.
He opens his mouth to say something, but suddenly he feels like his throat has a film over it. Mom stares at him, waiting.
“Please don’t do this,” he says, after his breath comes back, but it’s taken so long it feels stilted, silly. “Please, please, please,” he says. “Don’t lock yourself up. Tell the doctor to test for other things. It’s something else.” He squeezes his mother’s hand so tightly, her fingers start to turn pink. “I’ve researched it, I have a checklist, I know it’s something else.”
“I love you, Nicky. Don’t you forget that,” his mother says quietly, and squeezes his hand back. Nick doesn’t respond. He’s going to rescue her. Bring her home. She walks back into the hall, not letting go, pulling Nick with her, and though he could resist, he lets himself be dragged along. Out in the hall, where the nurses and other patients are, Nick lets go of her hand.
Dad looks back at them, and Mom hurries to catch up with him. Nick follows, a little behind, watching his parents hold hands. They walk up the wooden staircase they’d seen when they first came in, then down a hall. Up here, the carpets are blue. They take her to a room at the very end of the hall. It’s like an old-fashioned hotel. There’s a bed with white sheets, some drawers, a closet, a bathroom, and a big window—the kind with a seat built in—that looks out on the lawn in front. Nick goes and sits in it, looking out. A nurse is walking down a path in the lawn, a man with a walker hobbling next to her. He turns back to his family. His parents are quiet, looking at the room. Maria stands in the doorway, watching them.
“This is very nice,” Mom says, sitting on the bed. Dad sits down next to her and lays his head on her shoulder, something Nick doesn’t think he’s seen Dad do before. He has a sudden flash of memory—he was very little, maybe six, and Dad laid his head on Mom’s shoulder after a long phone call. Later that week was his grandmother’s funeral. Nick looks back out the window. The man with the walker hasn’t gone very far.