All the Dancing Birds (25 page)

I shrug my shoulders, a mute gesture that telegraphs the effort guessing would take. I’d like to remind her about the hardening cement of plaques and tangles that are currently taking up the whole of my brain, but I haven’t the foggiest idea about the words it might take to explain.

“Don’t make her guess,” Bryan says. He has moved to the couch where he sits folded tightly like a closed umbrella. “Mom can’t guess things anymore. Just let her open her gift.”

Allison’s eyes flash momentarily and then settle on the simpler, more reasonable course of trying to engage my face. “Never mind him, Mom. Here, just open it up.” Allison grins wildly and places the bag on my lap. I allow my fingers to fumble through its confusing tangle of curly ribbon. Within seconds, I give up on figuring out the complication of a gift bag. I grab hold of a corner of tissue paper and pull. The thin paper tears apart in my hands and tears suddenly travel across my eyes like a swift-moving storm.

“I can’t do this!” I cry. “You’re making me do things I can’t do. Why are you all so cruel to me?” I launch the bag from my lap and it lands with a dull thud on the floor. “Why are you making me do these
hard
things?”

“Jesus, Allison. Give her a hand.” Bryan talks into the neck of a beer bottle he’s half-drained in only a few seconds.

“Here… let me help you,” Allison says, shooting her brother a quick scowl. She picks up the bag and straightens its folds. Without untying the bow or removing the tissue, she plunges her hand inside and pulls out a narrow length of silk material.

“Look, Mom. It’s a handmade scarf I got from this fabulous little online Etsy shop. Don’t you just
love
it? Look! It has little hand-stitched birds along the edge. I know how you love little birds.”

“It’s so pretty,” I say. I reach out and take the scarf into my hands. The fabric glides softly on my skin and I rub it across my cheek. I smile the mouth-only kind of smile that besets one in my state‌—‌the Alzheimer’s Mask.

“Bryan, aren’t you going to give Mom your gift?” Allison asks.

“Just waiting for you to finish irritating Mother to death,” Bryan flashes. He stands from his seat on the couch and crosses over to me. Kneeling, he unties the ribbon from his gift bag. He pulls out the tissue paper and opens the bag for me to peer inside.

I clap my hands. “Oh, goody!” I say. “It’s lovely. What is it?”

Bryan pulls a small book from the bag. “It’s a memory book for you, Mom. It’s filled with pictures of us all… here, look.” Bryan opens the cover to reveal pages of pictures, each one marked with a caption. Every page is decorated with clever cut-outs and stickers. “A colleague of mine does scrapbooking in her spare time and she did this for me. This one is all pictures of me. I have two more books… one with all pictures of Allison and one with pictures of you and Dad.”

I point to a picture on the first page. “But who is this
little
boy?”

“That’s me, Mom. When I was just two, I think.”

“You,” I say. “Oh… it’s you?”

Bryan ignores my confused eyebrows. “I also have a DVD that we made that has all the pictures set to music.”

“You’re in a
movie
?”

“Well, that’s a good way to put it. Yes. Very much like in a movie.” Bryan produces a larger bag that contains two more books and a plastic DVD case. “Here are the two other books, and I’m sure Jewell can help you start your DVD any time you want.”

“Yes, ma’am, I sure can,” my woman says from the edge of the room. “Now, come eat, everyone. Dinner’s on the table.”

Someone wheels me to my place at the table. My Happy Birthday balloon still floats above me. Hands also float around me; they place a napkin over my blouse, cut my food into small bites, help me stab a piece of chicken with the pointed end of my fork, dab now and then at my chin. A birthday cake with white frosting and a single purple candle occupies the center of the table. Everyone is talking and smiling across my cake‌—‌my beautiful birthday cake. A few times, I locate a word or two to interject into the conversation, regardless of the appropriateness to the subject at hand. I roll these snippets of words around in my mouth and then toss them across the table for everyone to hear.

Bryan relates a story about a water law case, detailing its complexity and how it’s probably going to go down the drain in spite of all his good efforts. “Hahaha,” I laugh. “I’m so happy about all this.” Bryan looks up, his fork hanging from his hand like a misplaced punctuation mark, his words stunned in mid-air.

Allison dusts off the silence and begins to chatter on about a new boutique she wishes I could see, offering to take me there one day soon. I clap my hands and shout into the startled ears of everyone, “Lord Tennyson…
Break, Break, Break
. If you could peel back the edge of his grave, I bet he smells like dirt by now.” I grin at my cleverness with my mask of a smile that refuses to allow my eyes to crinkle and sparkle. I clap and show my teeth and beam over my birthday cake with its one purple candle.

The room grows quiet but I’m giddy with my birthday and my floating balloon and the faces of my children that rise above their chairs like puffs of cloud over the landscape of the dinner table.

“Well, let’s have that cake, then… shall we?” my woman says.

“Good idea,” Bryan says. “Here, I’ll light the candle. Ready, Mom?”

“We’re going to light my cake… and Lord Tennyson stinks like dirt!” I clap and laugh.

My children leave shortly after the cake is cut. Both leave their pieces uneaten on their plates, with excuses that it looks delicious but they are late for separate events. They brush their lips over my cheek and leave with apologies that next time they’ll stay to help clean up. My woman waves them away. There is gentleness in her eyes as she ushers Bryan and Allison to the door, even though they probably don’t deserve her hospitality after not eating her magic cake.

Jewell seems not to mind.

She cleans the kitchen while I watch my new DVD. I don’t know why Bryan would give me a video filled with images of little half-familiar children, but they are charming and I find myself grinning broadly by the time the video ends.

After the DVD, my woman readies me for bed. Before she leaves, I ask her to bring my birthday scarf and tie it around me. “Is it still my birthday?” I ask as she places the silk around my neck.

“Yes. It’s still your birthday.”

“Good. That means you still have time to do me in… and with my new scarf. It has birds on it, you know. So, hooray! I can still die on my birthday.”

I watch my woman stifle a laugh. “Now, why do you want to die on your birthday?”

“So I only have to remember this simple day, you foolish woman. Just make sure I’m not buried next to Tennyson. Poor fellow smells, you know.” I clap my hands and laugh at my joke.

“Yes, ma’am. Let’s talk about dying tomorrow, though. It’s been a long day and I’m very tired. Aren’t you tired now?”

“I guess. Where’s my balloon? I want my balloon.”

“Right here, ma’am… still tied to your chair and ready for tomorrow.” My woman turns out the light and leaves me to a night of vividly colorful dreams of balloons in the sky, a frosted cake in the center of a table, and a blue scarf with little embroidered birds fluttering and squeezing around my neck.

Chapter Twenty-Nine

A
wheelchair measures the depth and breadth of my world. I’ve watched my world shrink from wide as the sky to small as a sink basin, then to something like the bowl of a cracked and weathered teacup. Now, it seems my world fits in a thimble. My woman helps me into my wheelchair each morning and she removes me from it at night. The balance of the day, I sit wherever I’m placed: sometimes the patio where I’m entertained by peeping birds, their feathers, now and then unfurled in abandoned delight; sometimes the garden where my woman coaxes young tendrils to shoot up high from the earth with nothing more than her hearty songs and a trowel; sometimes the living room in front of the whirring television; sometimes cozied up to the dining table where my woman urges me to take in spoonfuls of things like ham hocks and beans, washed down with sweet tea and pills. I eat very little of what’s offered, but I swallow the sweet tea without much complaint.

It is, after all, sweet.

During the long afternoons, while my woman cleans the house or folds laundry, I doze in my chair, my head lolling, drool stringing from the corner of my mouth, John Milton always on my lap. We are one another’s warmth, a symbiotic relationship of fur and fabric and the skin of my hand that, all combined, comforts the both of us. The weather’s cooled for the year and each day descends a bit deeper into the chill of winter; my woman keeps my legs covered with a soft quilt.

There’s not much I talk of now. I’ve quieted, much like a still water well that may either be sweet or brackish, depending upon the mood of the earth.

Bryan and Allison visit often. They take turns seeing me; sometimes I know them, often I don’t.

To help, Jewell has made signs with large lettering that read,
Hi Mom. I’m Allison, your daughter‌—‌
or‌—‌
Hi Mom. It’s Bryan, your son
. Oddly, I can still read these simple placards and their use helps me feel less confused about who is standing in front of me with a sheepish grin and a bag of taffy or horehound candy that‌—‌I’m told‌—‌they get from the Internet.

I don’t know what that means, the Internet.

I’m comforted, though, that I can still read simple words and I can make out the significance of those words.

My Bryan! My Allison!

My woman has other tricks to keep me soothed, not the least of which are soft tunes she loads into a CD player, usually just moments ahead of any coming distress. I don’t know how she figures out when to play music for me, or when to soothe my forehead with a cool cloth. Or when my quilt needs to be snugged again around my legs.

Bryan (according to his sign) is usually content to sit across from me, reading the newspaper or watching a ballgame. He seems to know conversation is out of the question. Simply having him nearby is conversation enough. He’s become like a sturdy tree, silent and steady in the wind. His branches lean toward me, but he seems happy enough to let me be silent or find my voice as I’m able.

Allison, on the other hand, clatters on about girlish things while she brushes new color across my fingernails. She tries to embellish my plain and lengthy days with her whimsical thoughts and worldviews. She’s the chattering magpie to Bryan’s stoic tree. They approach me differently, but their visits are the delight for which I live.

When my children leave, it’s as if my heart will break. “Come back again,” I manage to say during our goodbye hugs and kisses. When they’re gone, tears slide from my eyes. It seems the closing of every door signals the tragedy of forgetfulness. It’s hard to hold the knowledge that‌—‌only moments earlier‌—‌I’d been the recipient of grand smiles and kisses from one of my children, approaching me with fistfuls of flowers or small, white paper sacks filled with exotic sweets.

The moment they leave, I forget they had just been with me.

Every goodbye is heartbreak. Every hello is celebration. The endless hours between are excruciating. My days are now divided between what is lost and what is found. What is joy and what is grief. What is now and what is not.

The worst thing is that I’m vastly aware. I simply can’t wrap words around any of these flickering moments. Most words are gone. My eyes now serve as my voice. They are the watchers of what passes. My eyes cry. They wait. They follow and mimic and then move on to the next event as though nothing’s ever preceded by anything; nothing’s ever followed by anything.

I’m in some grand and ever-immaculate sense of the immediate.

I listen to the chattering of my heart; I hear it clearly because everything else within me is so largely silent. I try to pray behind closed eyes like Ma would have done, but God is nothing more than a vague cloud.

I wonder what will happen when I finally lose the last of these slim and narrow words that still bubble up now and then from my throat. How can I be assured that the loss of letter and syllable will not matter to heaven? After all, how will the angels gather up my words to be recorded when they are no longer uttered? For someone with no answers, it seems there are far too many questions.

I wonder if there’s consequence for my side of things if I should feebly forget everything I’ve ever done. How can I be certain if I was bad or good? How does God forgive what is not remembered? Oh, this quiet, darkening brain of mine. It’s all so shameful. Oddly, I also feel shame for my continued heartbeat, my breath, my simmering uselessness.

Now here I am, a small and winnowed woman, spending my days a tragic sleeper with open eyes. I call out. I hear answers. But nearly and utterly gone is the back-and-forth of words that would indicate literate conversation. The connection is almost irretrievably broken.

I’m little more now than a mysterious, rain-filled cloud in a rolling chair.

YOU GLIDE. You glide through each day, seated in your wheelchair as if you’ve never known any other way. The only evidence of your movement through the many hours is contained in narrow tracks across your carpet and the footprints of someone who pushes you from here to there, and then‌—‌at the appropriate time‌—‌back again. Your mind is filled with large blank sheets, nothing written on them, nothing recorded, nothing remembered. You try to hold your thoughts, your water, your bowels. Nothing stays. Nothing works. Eating is difficult, as is transferring from your chair to your bed. Dressing is done for you by your woman, bathing as well. There is nothing private on your body, nothing left for your modesty to claim. You think someone has died in your home. In a moment of inspiration, you realize it might be you.

My woman comes to me. “You’re crying, ma’am. Are you ill? Do you hurt anywhere?”

I shake my head and manage to let two words whisper from my mouth. “My babies.”

“Did you forget Allison was here today? She fixed your nails up again nice, ma’am. Purple this time.”