All the Dancing Birds (18 page)

“Well, actually that’s a good question,” Dr. Ellison says, matter-of-factly. “Although this was certainly frightening for you, your mother is doing well at the moment. We’ve started her on an anti-seizure medication that will help control further problems. Of course, we want to evaluate her carefully before we’re able to completely determine your mother’s specific needs. She might be out of sorts for a day or two… that’s common after seizures. But she shouldn’t have any long-lasting effects and certainly we’ll treat whatever other issues, should anything crop up.”

“Thank you, Doc,” Bryan says. He shoots a look of victory at his sister. Allison continues to look at her hands, seeming to not notice her brother’s arrogant flippancy. In spite of assurances that I’m not dying, Allison’s chin continues to tremble.
My poor little pony.

Dr. Ellison pats my knee. “You let your nurse know if you need anything, Mrs. Glidden, and I’ll stop in tomorrow morning to see you.” I’m still afraid of my mouth, so I just nod my head. Dr. Ellison takes my chart and leaves my children to continue their ghostly, silent hovering over me.

After a while, when I’m settled and drowsy again, my children leave‌—‌Bryan first, then Allison. They back away with kisses and promises to come the following morning. Their absence causes me to spend the next hour hiccupping and crying for them to come back. A nurse injects something into my IV which quickly makes me fall into a dreamless sleep, my eyelashes still wet. Confusion wraps around me like a cocoon of unfamiliar, scratchy hospital blankets.

Nurses come in and out through the night. They are noisy in spite of shoes that squish with every step. They turn lights on and then forget to turn them off when they leave. They take my blood pressure and temperature, grimly writing down their findings. Still, everything is done with care. Every movement is accompanied with a question.

Question: “Are you feeling any pain?”

Answer: “I want to go home.”

Question: “Do you know your name?”

Answer: “Who are you?”

Question: “Would you like anything?”

Answer: “Yes. My wine. And for God’s sake, try to give me a decent serving this time.”

In the morning, it’s clear I’ve become a trembling, feckless, gray-haired Alice in Wonderland, complete with pills to make me sleep and pills to wake me up, pink liquids in tiny little cups and still more pills and capsules in a colorful array of sizes and shapes. Bryan and Allison arrive only to wait in my room‌—‌again like silent, worried spirits‌—‌even haunting my empty bed as I’m wheeled off for another test or scan.

I feel nothing but circling confusion and I worry over it all.

People come and go; I don’t know who they are.

I pull at a narrow, bothersome tube sticking out of my arm; someone then ties my wrists to each side of my bed. I call out for help to use the restroom but no one hears me. I soil myself. I cry. I sleep in deep confusion, only to wake even more confused. Faces continue to float above and around me‌—‌I’m afraid of these floating images. People talk, but I can’t figure out what they’re saying. I talk and my listeners can’t figure out what
I’m
saying. I’m a foreigner in my body and I don’t know what to do. I’m afraid. I’m afraid.

I tell someone a murderer lives in the elevator‌—‌I hear him behind the door that whooshes open. I still hear him when the door closes. He is in there and I tell on him.

More pills are brought to me in small paper cups. Twice a day, blood is pulled from my body into tubes labeled with someone’s name. I’m asked if it’s
my
name. I tell them it is, but I don’t know. I don’t know.

I don’t know.

After three days, I’m released to two people who say they’re my children; they smile and coo over me like I’m a newborn, ready to be presented to the world. It appears I’ve achieved the medical trifecta of a normal brain scan, good blood tests indicating the rainbow of new medications are working, and (best of all) I’m apparently no longer in danger of imminently keeling over again into a heap of quivering motherhood.

Sometime during the wheelchair ride from my hospital bed to the car, I remember the faces of my children. I’m comforted that I’m not in the hands of the elevator murderer.

Bryan helps me into his car with hands as gentle as his father’s would have been. I nearly fracture into a million tiny pieces under the gesture. When we reach home, my woman throws open the door and beams brightly at me as Bryan and Allison‌—‌one on each side‌—‌help me into the house and to the couch where I’m propped up with pillows and covered with a blue crochet quilt.

“Oh, ma’am, welcome,” she says. “Welcome home. I’m making your favorite dinner.” Jewell smiles and gushes over me like I’ve just done something important and impressive, rather than having fallen at her feet only days earlier in a frightening heap of a seizure, complete with leg-thrashing, tongue-biting, and eye-rolling terror.

“I’ll take my wine now, thank you,” I say. My mouth continues to feel broken and slurry, my head still foggy and shattered.

“Instead of that, how about a grand glass of Southern-style sweet tea? I made it especially for your homecoming.”

“I see you’ve lost your charm while I was gone,” I say. “Is that your idea of a proper homecoming celebration? Sweet tea? Really?”

“Sorry, Mom,” Bryan says. “Wine’s not compatible with your new meds. It’s either wine or seizures. Take your pick.”

“Can’t I think about that over my evening wine?”

Everyone laughs as if I’ve made a very clever joke, but no one answers my entirely reasonable request. Jewell simply wanders into the kitchen to finish dinner. Bryan opens the sports section to read and fret over the latest ball scores (he’s a Giants fan, of course), while Allison putters about the living room, her hands rearranging things in nearly imperceptible increments‌—‌an inch here, two inches there.

If I were in my right mind with a generous glass of red in my hand, I’d be able to figure out the analogy of things being moved without actually making a difference. But it seems I’ve only John Milton the Cat (who’s now curled onto my lap) to listen to my sighing disappointment that so many people can now ruin me by withholding a simple glass of sociable wine.

I spend the rest of the evening stroking my dear little cat, who continues to snuggle deep into the folds of my gown. I most likely look as though I’m in thoughtful repose, but in fact, I’m wildly sulking.

I don’t know when it occurred that I turned into a child to be ignored, denied, and quite probably snickered over when I’m out of earshot. Nevertheless, this seems to be the state of things, now that I’ve had this turn of events. It should have made me important, but instead that seizure turned me small.

Maybe tomorrow someone will serve me up something better than a glass of sweet tea, iced with the growing and palpable doubt of who I used to be.

Chapter Twenty

I
n the months since my small seizure episode, my woman has turned completely and purely evil and I can find no good explanation for her horrid behavior. She now withholds my wine completely, instead handing me an array of pills, all to be washed down with tasteless water. I’ve developed an embarrassing inability to hold my bladder and the only cure, it seems, is to pull plastic-coated adult diapers up my legs.

“I don’t need diapers,” I protest.

“They’re to keep you a
lady
, ma’am,” Jewell says, her lips smiling with illogical assurance.

“There is
nothing
ladylike about these goddamn diapers,” I say. “Take them off me. Now!”

“Yes, ma’am,” she says. But she leaves the diapers in place and tidies my room the same as she tidies my bottom‌—‌without fuss or comment.

I’m angry, but I console myself by concentrating on her one spot of redeeming brightness.

My woman sings.

Great, heaving songs of heaven and joy and Jesus her Redeemer. She sings of nights in white satin and having blues down to her toes, just as easily as she sings about amazing grace and blackbirds singing in the dead of night. Her voice thrills the walls of every room as she moves about the house, cooking and cleaning. When her voice is quiet, the silence of the house begs her to begin again.

She is comfort to the bones of the house and comfort into the depths of my ears.

She helps me remember that my Ivan was a singer, too. He sang into the whorls of my ears and made me stumble with weakness for him. He caused tears to flood my eyes and smiles to spill like rivers of joy across my face. He danced me through the kitchen and sang me into the tangles of our sheets. His songs were tender and lusty and full of his fair-haired musky scent. Long after they left his warm lips, I could hear the melodies, the lyrics, the tempos, all deeply fastened within my mind.

Ivan’s songs traveled from his round lips through the skin of my body and all the way into the tiny ears of my babies while they grew themselves to become Bryan and Allison. I could feel their watery dance inside my belly as they swam toward the songs of their father. I too swam toward his voice.

When Ivan died, it must have been the awful silence of his voice that caused my brain to shrivel and die. There seems no other explanation.

Misery by absence of song.

My only hope is that my woman’s songs will bring my dying memories back to life. Certainly, the pills she gives me only serve to make me dim and tired. They cause me to shuffle my feet back and forth in paths through the house, making me the thing I’ve always feared becoming‌—‌a doddering old woman in a leaking, wailing, shriveling body.

When Jewel is finished cleaning my room and smoothing my bedcovers for the day, she leaves me to pull at my clothing and fuss at my completely dissolved sense of whatever Southern charm I once might have had.

I would continue to try the doors for my escape from this place of hell, but someone has dug great black holes in front of each door. Now and then, I see my woman pick up the holes and shake them out into the day like small area rugs. Then she returns the holes in front of each door. She confuses me with such magic.

I’m like an old dog now who circles and circles, before finally grunting and folding its legs under its body. Perhaps the only comfort this old dog has is in the habit of circling. Still, I’m a dog smart enough to avoid the holes in front of each door.

YOU FIND. You find yourself in terrible and perplexing unfamiliarity with the world. Forgetfulness settles over everything, especially hangers and zippers, which baffle you with their complexity, their use, their meaning. You can smell the change in yourself like you can smell a coming rain. You know there is great loneliness that rides on the back of rain, so you turn, disquieted, waiting for those slow, first drops to fall. You’re more silent now. Words are as gray as the clouds you smell and you are justly startled by the dearth of thoughts you now have. You might consider it all good and a blessing that life has turned simpler, except you stand with your blouse in one hand and a hanger in the other and, for the life of you, you can’t figure out the puzzle because the pieces have changed shape since you last put them together.

My woman is spicing the air in the kitchen with some gusty, bluesy song while she fusses about. I sigh and allow myself to be caught up in the song. I tug again at the sticky plastic that covers the outside of my diaper. A diaper, indeed!

I move to my closet and find myself reaching for the comfort of my letter box. I select a paper and let it unfold in my hand like a flower opening in the morning sun. It’s becoming harder to read my own scrawling hand, but still, I manage to decipher every word. I spend most of the morning reading and re-reading words and sentences, allowing them to settle into the memory of my bones.

I read:

My children:

Your MeeMaw had the most beautiful eyes ever seen. Even when her eyesight failed, her eyes were clear and lovely and nearly the color of a day in its first morning light‌—‌almost blue and almost lavender. It was even more striking that her hair was like the last day’s light‌—‌almost black and almost purple. The combination made her seem like there was no separation between morning and night.

Ma was also a wise woman who knew things‌—‌like precisely how many grains of salt to pinch between her fingers for bread dough, or just when the tender onion bulbs were plump and sweet and just ripe enough to pull from the garden soil.

Pa, on the other hand, was a hardened tree stump of a man. He was bone and grit, formed from the wrinkled clay of generations of lumbermen who chipped and sawed and hauled their days through the sawmills of the South. Pa was lucky he carried all his fingers. “Just a matter of time,” he would marvel at the end of every day that all his fingers were still accounted for.
Just a matter of time.

I must have looked in the mirror early on and decided I took after Pa, figuring myself a tree stump as well. A freckled, sawdust-colored chunk of a tree stump.

Ma caught me one day practicing my endless mirror gazing. I must have been about ten or eleven years old and complaining to myself that I wasn’t pretty enough, or tall enough, or something-or-other enough. I’d been pinching my lips, trying to make them look fat and red and grown up.

“Why’d I have to take after Pa?” I complained. “Why couldn’t I be pretty like you?”

“Lillie Claire, you hush your mouth right now,” Ma said. “If I drop dead right this second and you never hear another word I say, you listen to this. There’s never going to be another Lillie Claire. You think you don’t look pretty right now? What you look like will change, maybe not so much as you’ll notice in that mirror of yours, but you’re going to change and you can’t stop that. Just remember that who you really are is deep down inside and was set by God. You’re done set for life in how God made you.”

Ma fixed her near-blind eyes on me like she could see all the way to the center of my bones. She continued. “So don’t you go telling God you don’t like how you were fashioned. You can’t be trying to pinch your mouth and cheeks darker, all the while thinking that makes your soul better. There’s nothing uglier than a red-mouthed beauty with a soul shriveled from neglect. Listen to me when I tell you that if you make your heart right, the rest of you will follow right along.”