All the Dancing Birds (15 page)

The familiar sting of tears begins to grow.
No, my little pony… I’m right here. Don’t you see me? Here… over here!

“Of course she has thoughts,” Bryan says. He spreads his arms as if he were about to give a benediction. “She’s not gone.”

That’s my boy…
he
sees me.

“Mom thinks all the time just like everyone else… even you. It’s not her thoughts that are leaving… not at all… it’s her ability to use language. You can call it dementia. Or wigged out, or… or whatever. The point is, Mom is still
thinking
. She’s thinking all the time.”

“Come on, Bryan. She can’t remember one day to the next.”

“Okay, granted. But, how does that make her not our mother? How does that make her nothing? Mom
knows
what she loses every day. Can’t you see how sad she is right now? Look at her. For God’s sake, she’s
crying
!”

Allison fumbles with her hands until they match the prayerful pose of Bryan’s. Slowly, she pulls her eyes up to meet my face. She sees my face, wet with sorrow for my beautiful and befuddled daughter. She looks at how I’m obviously sad above the folds of my robe that I continue to keep pulled tightly to my neck. She sees the agony inside my hunched and crooked body.

Suddenly, something similar to lightning splitting open a night sky flashes across her eyes. My daughter sees me as if I’ve just entered the room for the first time this day.

“Oh, God… Mom!” Allison cries, her face crumbling into small pieces. “Mom.” Her voice crashes against her lips.

She rushes from the couch, her long legs bending to kneel beside me. She buries her face in my lap and circles her arms around me. Together, we become a portrait of remorse‌—‌me with my dark night-secrets and Allison with her daylight tears.

Allison sways me back and forth, her arms tight around my waist, apologies spilling onto my robed lap. “I’m so sorry,” she cries. “You
do
know me, don’t you? You’re still here?”
I’m right here, dear.
“Mom, I’m so, so sorry.”

I release the grip I’ve had on my robe and allow my hands to fall to Allison’s head. I stroke her hair. For the first time all day I let truthful words come from my mouth. “There, there,” I croon. “I’m right here. I’m right here.”

YOU LET. You let words of love drip from your lips until your daughter is bathed and cleansed in the carefulness of your narrow language. You hold your child to your lap and fold your arms like an angel’s wings around her slenderness until it’s impossible to distinguish mother from daughter. While you’re holding her tightly, you lift your eyes in time to see your son tiptoe from the room. You follow him with your eyes. With one on your lap and one in a different room, you find your children are separate, yet nevertheless the same. In your bewildered thoughts, you know no difference between same and separate. When you’re through washing your children with love, regardless of where they move through your house, you watch their bodies go away into the night. When they’re gone, your eyes travel down to the place on your robe that holds dried tears from your repentant daughter. You vow you’ll never allow your robe to be cleaned of the day’s emotion. You realize there’s not much distinction between repentance and shame, except the first can bring joy, while the latter, if not cured, can be terminal. Oddly, the evidence of the day’s mixture of tears on your robe pulls your lips into a brief smile and at last, you’re no longer afraid of the coming night.

Chapter Sixteen

“I
’m
not
leaving my house,” I say. “Not. Not.
Not
.”

My children sit on the couch, their hands tumbling in their laps; Allison picks at a loose thread on her skirt, Bryan straightens invisible wrinkles on his slacks. There’s a growing chasm between my ideas and theirs; maybe there’s always a wrongful distance between a mother and her children. Clearly, I don’t know, but I recognize I’m suddenly in a battle for my future.

I feel lucky to be having a good moment with words coming easily and clearly. Of course, my language skills could simply be propelled by the gravity of the topic. Nevertheless, I use every word that comes to mind in order to argue my case.

“Why would you even
think
I would leave this home, the home where your father lived, where you were babies?” I say. “This is where you grew up. Underneath all this paint is every crayon mark you ever scribbled over the walls when I wasn’t looking. I couldn’t bear to scrub them off, so I just painted over them so I’d know they are still there. And that front door? We went out that door every morning. I walked you to school with your little hands nestled in mine. Every morning. And then every afternoon, I met you outside your school doors to walk you home again… home… here. How could you even think I would walk out that door now…
our
door… and never come back? No. I’m not leaving.”

“Mom, you didn’t even
look
at the brochure we brought,” Bryan says. “It’s a nice‌—‌”

“I don’t need to look at a brochure to know you’re trying to put me away.”

Allison’s hands fly to her cheeks, presumably to hide a sudden flush of color. “No, Mom. We’re trying to
help
you,” she says. Her hands barely hide what now looks like streaks of fire consuming the wall of her face.

“By tearing me away from my home? That’s helping me?”

“Okay, let’s slow down and start this conversation over again,” Bryan says, his face softening into the curve of a half-smile. He seems to be running his own internal version of good cop, bad cop. I wonder if he does this when negotiations at his law firm need to be reset. I can only assume this is the look he uses to disarm anyone foolish enough to go against him.

He sighs and moderates his tone. “Look, Mom, you could have someone do
everything
for you. Housework, shopping, the laundry. They have fun bus trips. You could meet new people. You could have girlfriends again.” He waves the brochure like a fan. “It’s a beautiful facility and you can have your own apartment with your own things. It’s beautiful… really.”

“It is,” Allison says, her smile looking like a wedge of red apple. “We took a tour already and it’s gorgeous. We can decorate your room any way we want, and I know this wonderful designer who is totally gifted with small spaces. She uses really soothing blues, muted colors, soft textures. She could‌—‌”

“No! I’m not leaving. I don’t
like
soft, muted things. I don’t like small spaces. I don’t want someone else telling me where to put my things. I’m not leaving my home just to spend a fortune to go sit in some tiny, cramped little baby blue, softly textured hole waiting to die. I need my space. I need my garden.”

Bryan cups his head and slides the brochure back into his bag.

I’ve made my point.

“Well let’s just postpone the thought of moving until you’re ready. In the meantime, we’ll get you more help around the house, someone to help you keep up with daily things. The dishes and laundry. The heavy gardening. Kind of keep an eye on things around here until you’re ready to talk about this again.”

“I don’t need help.” I place my chin in a defiant pose. “But if it would make you feel better you can send someone over to lop back that yellow… thing… that vine-thing that’s hanging over my rose bed and blocking the sun. But I’m not moving and I won’t discuss this nonsense again.”

With that final, sputtering word, I stand from my chair and head toward the kitchen, leaving Bryan and Allison to clatter about in their seats. Bryan colonizes the couch, while Allison perches on the edge of her chair like a cat ready to spring after a sparrow. I expect they will maintain those positions for at least a few minutes.

I pluck a sponge from the bottom of the kitchen sink and wipe it across the counter.

Even though I’ve won this round, I begin to cry. Great drops of sadness fall onto the kitchen counter. I dab them up with my sponge and move over to the stove, continuing to wipe crumbs and tears and the misery of every woman whose children think it best to take her from her home.

Whether it’s for my own good or not, I can’t imagine never having a cleaning sponge again in my hands. I can’t think of having my garden shears and gathering basket, my dishes, my furniture sitting out on the driveway to be picked over and bargained down in a yard sale. I can’t conceive of never again lying in my bed, listening to the early morning creaks and groans and rustlings of this dear old house. I can’t possibly leave behind the pencil marks on the pantry doorjamb where each year’s growth of the children was carefully measured and tallied, or where their little handprints were pushed into wet cement as we poured the walkway along the side of the house. I can’t be asked to leave the spot where my beautiful Ivan fell to the ground, my arms holding him, my scream keening through the sky as his last breath sighed into the earth.

There is rigorous madness to my arm strokes, a blue sponge creating a ridiculous prop for a crazy woman. The difficulty of a failing memory makes me either obsessively clean, going over and over the same spot like stories that get repeated again and again, or forgetful to pick up a sponge in the first place. Right now, I fall into the former category, rubbing obsessive-compulsively over and over the same spot in a great spurt of muttonheaded behavior.

Soap creeps up my hands, my arms, like bubbles from an ocean surf. I’m reminded of something and I run back to the living room.

“I took you to the goddamn ocean and this is how you treat me? We stood together in the surf, laughing, with bubbles of saltwater climbing up our legs and this is what you want to do to me? Put me away?” I shake my wet sponge at the startled faces of my children, flipping water across the room like a blessing. “You can’t hide the ocean we stood in and you can’t hide me.”

I run back to the kitchen and start scrubbing the counter again. Again and again and again my arm makes wild circling arcs across the countertop. I feel John Milton winding his soft body around my legs, his tail curling like a plant tendril up a garden stake.

I run back to the living room. “And I’ll not leave John Milton,” I cry. “And you can’t take him away either. He’s my comfort… and… so there!”

I march back to the kitchen where I find John Milton looking as nonplussed as my children. I seem to dismay those I love these days. My children. My cat. Even myself.

Here is my predicament: I’ve now become that electric moment between a spark of lightning and its thunderous announcement when everyone counts the seconds between the flash and the boom. My children say something I find disagreeable and I can nearly watch them count in their heads,
one Mississippi, two Mississippi
, as they measure the time until I come crashing down around their ears.

Now here I am, standing in the middle of the kitchen, tears falling onto the floor, drop by drop, when Bryan and Allison come in. Without a word, they braid their arms around me.

“Shhh, Mom,” Bryan whispers. “It’s all okay.”

“We won’t make you move anywhere,” Allison says. “We’ll get someone to take care of you.”

“Forever,” Bryan says. “We’ll make sure you always stay right here. We promise.”

We begin to sway a slow, small dance. It’s the dance of a broken mother and her frightened children, the tender waltz of a woman who is well beyond anything but her own terrifying and myopic needs.

I dance within the arms of my children. My hand releases the wet sponge; it falls away to the floor and, for now, the notion of moving me from my home falls away with it.

Chapter Seventeen

M
y head is a box of dust. Somehow I’ve altogether lost my ability to reason with myself. I’m now an argument with every movement and every sound I make. I feel as if I’m in a paper boat, floating down a sidewalk stream during a torrential rain. Ahead is a sucking drain, waiting to swallow me up, paper boat and all, and I’m paddling to stay afloat in all this water and dust, but it’s useless.

I am lost, lost, lost.

Every room of my home is now littered with the evidence of my fractured thoughts. Laundry clutters the floor of my bedroom, trickling in lumpy little piles down the hallway. I stack mysterious envelopes on the kitchen table into towers of puzzlement; my name is on everything, often printed behind little glassine windows. I’m not curious enough to open any of the envelopes, but neither am I ambitious enough to clean them off the table. If, now and then, an envelope should get brushed away and fall to the floor, it is simply left where it lands. Newspapers lie on the front porch until the delivery boy finally stops leaving them. Some days I’m bright enough to bathe, but then halfway through I find myself adrift and splashing. My hair often goes unwashed, as do the dishes.

I no longer make a distinction between what is John Milton’s food and what is mine. We eat what we eat. It’s all the same and, every now and then, I’m horrified at what I’ve become.

Colors have turned to varying shades of gray. Differences and nuance between this and that are no longer available to either my senses or my abilities. Every day there are more and more small downward steps‌—‌tiny little backward movements that leave me stunned and ashamed. I shuffle, drift, float through time. Now and then I surprise myself by popping up to take a deep breath of clarity before once more diving under the surface of an ocean always stormy with forgetfulness. During the times when I notice how my disposition has turned to become mostly dreamy and unconcerned with ordinary tasks that are part of running a house, I also understand that in the next moment, I’ll likely forget what I’m supposed to be doing anyway.

New things don’t stick in my mind for long, in spite of the chewing gum and glue that continues to fill up all the little nooks and crannies of my brain. Making sense of little things is now the occupation of every day. Nights are always long hours of anguish.

This head of mine, filled with its dust and gum, is always an unreasonable question mark. A comma. A period. Punctuation that interrupts the flow of every day. At times, I find long moments of brilliance when thoughts are clear enough to provide encouragement to me that perhaps I’m not really so very ill at all.