Fiona
Gripping the shower nozzle in my hand, I adjust the water pressure and turn down the temperature, running my fingers through my mother’s hair as I rinse it. She sits in the middle of the tub with her arms wrapped tight around her ankles, knees to her chest, telling me about how Francis Crump, the treasurer of the garden club, was diagnosed with stage four breast cancer.
“She looked terrible.” Shaking her head, my mother folds her lips together. “And I realized that I don’t ever want to get to that point.”
My hand pauses over her scalp, water raining down over my skin. “What do you mean?”
“This isn’t a pretty disease, Fiona. I can feel it taking over my body with every passing day. It’s clogging my brain, preventing my mobility.”
“But you’ve been doing really well, I thought. Isn’t that what Dr. Anderson said last week?”
She nods slightly, wincing as if it pains her. “I am doing well, but at what cost? My memory’s only improved so much. Yesterday, I forgot Murphy was dead.” Tears well in her eyes, shining beneath the vanity lighting. “It gets harder to remember what he looks like every day. Harder to move, harder to pretend that I’m not in constant agony.”
Swallowing over the burn in my throat, I rinse the last bit of conditioner from her hair and return the nozzle to its hook, switching off the water and wringing her hair with my hands.
“I don’t say anything because I’m supposed to be strong. My family needs me, and not being able to help them is a very difficult reality to come to terms with.”
“Why are you telling me?”
Squeezing the lip of the tub with her hands, she pushes up to a standing position—it’s slow, stilted, as if her body’s made of plastic wrap and has to be unraveled instead of unfolded.
I help her step over, wrapping her in a blue terry cloth robe and getting her settled in the wheelchair she’s been using around the house when it’s just the two of us.
“Your father and Kieran aren’t going to be the ones who need to know,” she says after a moment. Her words come out rushed, like she senses some kind of bodily shutdown looming and wants to get them out before they disappear. “And I need someone to be prepared for the inevitable.”
Exhaling shakily, I step back and cross my arms as she applies night cream beneath her eyes. Her hands tremble almost violently, making it near impossible to complete the task. “I don’t want to talk about this.”
Her jade green gaze meets mine in the mirror and fear mixed with blinding pain ripples through me. A hurricane hellbent on destruction. Tears prick my eyes, and I bite down on the inside of my cheek until I taste blood, tapping my index finger in soft strokes against my bare thigh, trying not to let my mind wander.
Because when I imagine my future, when I think about graduating college, getting married, and doing other adult things, my mother isn’t present. There’s this hole in the picture, a chasm of sadness where she should be, and instead I’m floating aimlessly in a sea of violence and despair while all these good things happen to me.
She’s not there, and I’m angry with the universe for taking her.
Even now, I’m angry with it for sucking away both of our lives over the last few years. Angry that I don’t know what exactly to expect, don’t know how to prepare.
How the fuck does anyone prepare for death? No matter what we seem to do, no one is ever ready for it. It’s like grief is this rite of passage and our souls are bound to it, forced to experience it no matter how long we spend accepting that all our lives end the same way.
I’m not stupid. I know the plateau in her symptoms won’t last. I know she’s lucky she’s gotten this many years after her diagnosis, that she’s a miracle among patients with Lewy Body.
I also know miracles have expiration dates.
The unknown is what scares me. I don’t know how to protect myself against it.
A week later, I’m still trying to grapple with our conversation. We’ve seen each other countless times, but she hasn’t brought up “preparing for the inevitable” again, which really only amplifies my anxiety. It felt calculated and purposeful that day, and now she’s going on as if she never mentioned it in the first place.
Maybe she forgot, my brain nags as I leave drama club one afternoon, tossing my tote bag into the passenger seat of my Jeep and climbing behind the wheel. It’s not like that’d be out of the ordinary.
My father and Kieran don’t seem to be concerned—when I visited Kieran at Murphy’s old cabin in the woods, he’d been flighty and weird, but I’m starting to think that has more to do with Juliet Harrison, considering the number of times I’ve caught him scrolling through her social media in the last month.
And my father, well, nothing ever fazes him, so I’m not sure he’d notice something wrong with my mother in the first place.
I just can’t shake the feeling that something isn’t right.
Waving to Bea and Heidi as I pull out of the parking lot, I head down the highway back to King’s Trace, wondering how different life might be if we hadn’t grown roots in the soil there.
If our curse doesn’t extend from proximity to the sins of our neighbors, the deeds of our ancestors, and could be reversed by fleeing.
When I get home that night, everyone else is gone. My parents are likely out celebrating my father’s birthday, and Kieran’s probably off harassing Juliet or torturing people and acting like it’s not obvious what he does for a living.