I stand in the doorway for a moment, absorbing the scene before me with fresh eyes. The residents in this room are among our easiest. None are shouting expletives or trying to grope or hit me.
It’s difficult to predict how the disease will manifest in an individual. There’s no way to say which camp my mother will fall into.
My stomach heaves and I run for the nearest bathroom, barely making it to a stall and dropping to my knees before I throw up the banana bread.
I rise to my feet, legs shaking, and walk to the sink. I rinse my mouth with water and wash my hands, wondering how I’m going to make it through the rest of my shift now that every resident I encounter wears the face of my mother.
When Mom needs full-time care, I won’t be able to afford a place nearly as nice as Sunrise; it costs more than one hundred thousand dollars a year. I’ve heard stories about what can happen in some of the bare-bones facilities. Sometimes patients are hit, medicated into oblivion, or left to rot in their beds.
How can I relegate her to that when my mother has devoted her entire life to me? Until I began dating Ethan, my mom and I had never spent even a single night apart—she couldn’t afford to send me on any overnight school trips or let me go to the Jersey Shore after graduation, like a lot of the kids from my high school class. But I understood. It’s easy to keep perspective when new clothes for us always meant a trip to the thrift store and a bad stretch of tips meant our only food was what she could carry home from the diner. Until I started working full-time, we never had enough money for a landline telephone, let alone cell phones.
All that time together produced an uncommon bond between us.
My first word was Mama. She knows my every incantation, from the toddler who loved Barney and would eat anything as long as it was covered in ketchup to the moody ninth grader who wore thick black eyeliner and blasted punk rock music. We’re the only emergency contacts for each other on the forms we fill out.
I can’t lose her, but I’m no match for the disease that has already claimed my grandmother. I’m an ant in the path of an eighteen-wheeler.
I’m spiraling. Dizziness engulfs me, and the shaking in my legs radiates through my entire body.
I close my eyes and grab the cold, hard edge of the sink, fighting to pull my mind away from the abyss.
I can’t save my mother, so I have to find a way to keep her at home, where she’ll be more comfortable. I’ll eventually need someone to watch over her while I work. But the only people who volunteer for tasks like that are family, and we don’t have one.
A glimmer of an idea dangles before me. It holds the faintest promise of hope—nothing that will fix or cure the situation but something that could buy a little time.
My mother would try to stop me if she knew about it. So I’m not going to tell her.
She’s been keeping secrets from me—about her mom dying from early-onset Alzheimer’s, and the fact that her symptoms started four months ago—so I feel entitled to keep one from her.
I’m going to find out everything I can about her dad and brother and friends. And even her ex-boyfriend, the guy I think of as my sperm donor. I’ve asked my mom for details about her past before, but she has always gotten sad or angry and refused to talk about it. But now everything has changed.
They all expunged my mother from their lives, but that was almost twenty-five years ago. People change. Perhaps her father has softened, especially in the wake of his wife’s death.
It’s a long shot, but maybe he’ll want to apologize and reconcile. Perhaps he has the money to pay for someone to take care of my mom while I work. Maybe he’ll even welcome the chance to do it himself.
The odds aren’t good.
But this is all I’ve got.
CHAPTER EIGHT
RUTH
There’s an old adage I keep turning over in my mind: The eyes are the window to the soul.
Some people think William Shakespeare came up with the line, while others credit the Bible, or a sixteenth-century French poet. I learned this by reading one of Catherine’s high school English papers.
But her paper left out the most important point. Whoever said it was dead wrong. Sometimes eyes don’t tell you anything about a person’s soul.
Here’s my theory: The real window into someone else’s soul can only be found inside your soul.
It’s that little voice, the tingle, the sixth sense—or as I like to think of it, a compass that points to the true north about people. Sometimes the compass arrow gets pulled off course by physical attraction or alcohol or—especially when you’re a teenager—by the opinions of friends. More often, though, we convince ourselves we’ve misread it.
The compass tries to lead us, but it can’t make us follow.
Catherine has James’s eyes.
They’re midway between round and oval. They’re the shade of a favorite old pair of jeans. They radiate gentleness and calm.
But I have never once kidded myself that they reveal every facet of her soul.
There’s this thing Catherine does when she’s sleepy. She rubs her feet together, like they’re giving each other a little massage. They move slower and slower as her eyelids droop, then they stop right at the moment she drifts off.
James used to do the exact same thing.
The first time I noticed it in Catherine—she must’ve been about two or three—my throat felt like it was swelling shut and I had to pretend I needed the bathroom so I could get away for a minute.
I didn’t know it was possible to pass down habits to a child you’d never met.
And it makes me wonder: What else did Catherine inherit from James?
It would have been easier to feed Catherine fake details about my family and James through the years. But it pains me to lie to her.
So I’ve withstood her questions, remaining firm and immobile. Refusing to let any of them penetrate.
If it’s the last thing I do, I will keep Catherine and the horrors of my past apart.
I stand up from the bench in the glass shelter as the city bus pulls up, my feet feeling achy and a bit swollen like they always do at the end of my shifts. The bus doors exhale open and I step aboard, flashing my pass.
I pull my focus onto the evening that lies ahead. After I shower and change, I’m going to throw together dinner and pop it in the oven. There’s a six-pack of Michelob in the fridge, but I’m not going to drink more than one. I need to keep my mind clear and my mouth from running.
I know exactly what Catherine is up to.
Catherine and I share an Amazon account because all our money goes into one pot. The account is under my name, though, because I set it up.
A few minutes ago, I received an email confirming a new order. Normally I’d assume Catherine bought socks or pens and carry on with my day.
But nothing is normal right now.
I used my phone to navigate to my account—this investigation wasn’t one I needed to hide—and clicked on the recent orders. Catherine’s purchase popped right up.
It’s a kind of journal—Catherine splurged for the hardcover rather than the paperback—titled Tell Me Your Life Story, Mom.
It has a map for a family tree. All you have to do is fill in the names.
It has a page with the headline “My Details and Time Capsule,” where you write down things like your place and time of birth, age, and full name.