4 A.M.

Previously published in The Avalon Literary Review.

 

After pushing my way into the bedroom, I gave my eyes a minute to adjust to the flood of incandescence before scanning the room for clues. There was some blood on the sheets of the unmade canopy bed, and tubes from the IV machine were tangled in a heap near the pillow. I followed the droplets across the hardwood to an area rug and stopped at the door to the ensuite. She must’ve ripped the vein while taking out the needle, causing the wound to spurt blood with every bump of her little old heart.

 

“Mom?” I asked, while knocking with fingertips. “Maureen?” For whatever reason she’d stopped answering to Mom.

“Who’s there?” a feeble voice sighed. 

“It’s me, Joseph. Can I come in and help you?” Exhausted, I rested my forehead against the door. Other than the eek of floorboards under my shifting weight, there was silence. Having removed the lock years ago, I carefully let myself in. The thinned nightie hung from her wiry shoulders like a windsock on a calm day. She was wavering in the corner with her back to the vanity. At that point, she could no longer bear the sight of her own reflection. I suspected that she didn’t recognize the face staring back, or perhaps the generations of rue had finally caught up.

She looked past me and held her hand up to the light causing the blood to unravel down her arm like a ribbon of licorice.

“What are you doing here?!” she demanded. She had that squinted glare, the one that told me I needed to use more than words.

“It’s okay, it’s just me, Joseph. Look,” I pulled back my grey hairline and revealed the halfmoon shaped scar that stretched to my temple. It was a crude thing to do, but it was four a.m., and I was desperate.

 

“The car crash…” she said.

“Yes, the crash.” For whatever reason, she only seemed to recall the traumatic points of her past, including the memory of an accident that had burrowed its way deep into her bones. I could see it in her fists whenever we were in transit, the way they clenched while cruising through an intersection.

I was riding rear passenger; my brother David had claimed shotgun. Back then, cars were heavy, full of thick metal and bulky glass. Forgiveness had yet to be engineered into the frames; front ends didn’t crumple from a hard kiss the way they do today. 

“Harold?” Though I looked nothing like my father; she tended to call all men Harold in intimate settings.

“It’s Joseph. Let’s get you cleaned up, then I’ll help you back to bed,” I nodded reassuringly, then turned the faucet leak into a stream and wetted a face towel.

 

“Did you get into another argument with that side wench of yours?!”

Ignoring her comments, I tottered with the towel before approaching slowly. On the eve of Dad’s thirty-fifth birthday, he threw his entire inventory of vacuum cleaners into the Hudson River and started over at nothing with the widow two blocks over. He gave us the house, including an unaffordable mortgage. I left high school and started working at the tannery. David quit the military and moved back home. And Mom stopped being a homemaker. In a roundabout way, she blamed Dad for David’s death.

I reached for her hand and noticed the cracks – her skin was like a sun-damaged rubber ball that had lost its bounce. Hoping to bring about some colour, I applied a thick layer of cream. Never in my wildest nightmares could I have predicted that at sixty-five years old, I’d be the sole caregiver of a dementia patient. Those first days after moving across the country were somehow reminiscent of raising my son. It was the same heaviness from the first morning blink of my eyelids. I was terrified of the unknown, always wondering what kind of monster the little guy would bring out of me. But helping a parent die is much different than helping a child grow.

 

I wiped her hand and applied a Band-Aid to the wound.

“I can’t live in this whorehouse anymore!” she yelled, brushing me away, her skeletal frame rattling under the nightie.

I squeezed my fists. “Mom, calm down,” my tongue clicked from the alcohol-induced dryness, “Let’s just…”

She mashed her palm into my nose with surprising force and pushed past me. I wanted to grab her by the shoulders and shake her until those brittle bones ground to dust, and all that was left was an anthill on the ceramic tile.

“You’re going to learn a lot about yourself,” was my father’s only response when I told him my wife was pregnant. There were no congratulations. Just matter-of-fact foreboding. I didn’t understand his words until I found myself in the middle of a screaming fit that was directed at a toddler. These days, I couldn’t tell if I’d learned to curtail my anger or if it was just another thing time had stolen from me. Dad used to say that anger was always the wrong tool, like trying to mend a pane of glass with a hammer.

 

“Mom, you’re going to miss the dance if you don’t start getting ready.”

“Oh, the dance? I need to curl my hair.”

I took out the pencil case sized bag from the cabinet and helped her sit on the toilet lid before running my fingers through the straw-like pouf.

She put a hand to her chest, “Where’s my brooch?”

“Don’t worry, we’ll get it.” I lazily snapped a couple of curlers in place. “There. Just let those sit for a bit.”

“I need a dress,” she said, pulling me to the closet, followed by a visit to the jewelry box. We put in earrings and clasped on a necklace of chunky pearls the size of walnuts, all fake. Her real jewels had gone missing years ago, after an intense bout of paranoia had inspired her to hide all valuables.

 

She held the bedpost while I helped her into the black dress. After my stint as a pathologist’s aide, it was difficult not to think of a body bag with every zipper I encountered. Next, she insisted on thigh-high stockings. But her legs had atrophied so badly, they hung around her ankles like donuts. I could’ve pinned them up with adhesive, but it just didn’t matter.

I fetched the full-length mirror from the back of the closet and revealed our masterpiece. She grinned so big it was as if someone was pouring smiles on her face. I stood beside her; we surely admired the mess in two very different ways. The reflection staring back looked like Mother Nature in winter – grey, with heavy jowls and hair in places there wasn’t supposed to be hair.

“Harold! You’re still in your damn underwear and T-shirt!”

“I’ll change.”

 

“But where are we going? You never take me anywhere. I’m tired.” Her voice had lost the vigor from a moment ago.

The most jolting thing I’ve learned from dementia is, you should create a life that’s worth living multiple times over. Not because life is short, but because reliving a life full of nothing is just as joyless the second, third and fourth time around.

Maybe that’s why my father did it, for the stories. He needed more than a used-up housewife who sat on her hands making small talk with cigarettes while waiting for someone to fill her ears with fables. What a glorious sight it must’ve been to watch that mangled mess of plastic bobbing in the river, knowing he’d never peddle another vacuum.

 

I helped her back into bed, bloodied sheets and all, and watched as she pulled the comforter up to her chin. Against the pillow, with glasses that had grown far too wide for her thinning face, she somehow reminded me of a character in a nursery rhyme. There was no need to remove the jewelry or to change out of the dress.

She closed her eyes and let a sigh so big, I thought her soul had finally escaped. The room took on an iridescent glow as the emerging daylight blushed through the stained-glass window. I sat on the bed and leaned back, hoping to get a wink or two before starting over again.

“Harold,” she said suddenly. “I hate your guts.”

“I know Mom, I know.”