Page 6 of Gone Tonight
The thought is a live wire. I yank my mind away, forcing myself to focus on easing our Bonneville into a tight corner spot in our apartment building’s lot.
After we exit our car and push through the heavy side door into the lobby, we discover the elevator is waiting, its arms thrown open to us. It’s a minor miracle. With five floors in our building and eight apartments per floor, I usually don’t even bother pressing the call button.
As we glide up to the fourth floor, I study my mom, taking her in anew. Trying to see how I could have missed the clues, especially since my job constantly exposes me to tangible evidence of what she will become.
She isn’t wearing mismatched shoes or blinking in bewilderment or exhibiting irrational anger, like some of the residents I care for.
If anything, she’s too calm. That could be shock.
I catalog the furrow between her brows, her full lips, and the slight sheen to her skin.
“You okay?”
Her question jolts me. I realize the elevator doors have yawned open.
“Sorry.” I step onto the diamond-patterned carpet and lead the way down the narrow hall to 406.
When I was a kid, I loved fitting the long nose of a key into a lock. That thrill passed, but our habit stuck. Mom still lets me handle the task.
I wiggle in the metal key and hear the tumblers click, thinking about how she’s the only person in the world who knows that bit of my history. She is the co-architect of our existence: I do most of the grocery shopping, she keeps our car filled with gas, and we split the cleaning. She sat beside me on the couch, watchingThe Officereruns and making sure I ate, when my first real love, Ethan, and I broke up last year. Once we slept in our Bonneville for three nights, her in the front seat and me in the back, when a leak from the shower a floor above soaked our apartment and our jerk of a landlord refused to pay for a hotel. Our favorite dinner is something she invented called lasagna pizza, which we make with dough instead of noodles.
How long until I’m the sole memory keeper of our life together?
A sob rises in my throat. It takes everything I have to fight it back.
I set my purse on the narrow hall table as my mother takes off her black flats and puts them on the mat next to her work sneakers.
“I’m going to change.” My mom disappears into her bedroom.
I stand there, staring at the empty space she left behind.
Our entire drive home from Dr. Chen’s office—it’s a sinkhole in my mind. I can’t say how many red lights we encountered, or whether any raindrops splattered on the windshield, or if we hit traffic.
How many sinkholes are already swallowing pieces of my mother’s brain?
Because I can’t think of what to do, I move into our living room and begin to straighten up, refolding the chenille blanket on the back of the couch and collecting my water bottle from the coffee table.
Sometimes our apartment feels cozy. We aren’t permitted to paint the walls or use nails to hang pictures, but my mother bought Command strips to affix bright prints—one by Matisse, the others created by me in high school art class. We’ve cultivated a trio of leafy green plants on the windowsill, and Mom brought in colorful throw pillows from a secondhand store and a big mirror with a whitewashed frame when she was on an HGTV kick.
Other times, this space feels claustrophobic.
More and more lately, I’ve felt the walls closing in on me.
It’s unnaturally quiet in here at 10:20 a.m. on a Tuesday. Most of our neighbors are at work or school, like my mother and I would typically be at this hour on an ordinary day.
I edge closer to her bedroom, listening hard.
I can’t hear anything.
If she’s crying, her face must be buried in a pillow. I lift my hand to knock, then let my arm drop by my side.
I can’t tell her it will be okay. There is no fixing this.
Her door flies open. I take a step back, startled.
My mother stands there in her uniform, her hair swept back in a headband.
“Where are you going?”
