The Fifth Mother

Alison Braid-Fernandez

WHAT THE PATIENT REMEMBERS

The patient swallows one red pill in the morning and one red pill at night. She married a sharp dresser, a man with clear eyes, topaz and shiny. The patient’s father washed his body with Pears soap, a translucent amber bar with a sharp herbal smell. Children? She can’t remember—I tell her pencil shavings remind me of cedarwood and roses. The sharpeners at school were silver and black and screwed to the wall. If you turned and turned the handle without the sharpener’s teeth catching anything, they’d heat up so the metal casings were warm to the touch. The patient closes her eyes at the mention of teeth. They’re very private, she says. Teeth. She has always imagined her torso holds a birdcage secured at the front with a lock and key. Just like a body, a key has its own anatomy: head, shoulder, teeth. Her eyes open again when she says teeth. While speaking, she moves her mouth only slightly. I see the inside of her bottom lip, shiny with saliva. Now she stretches her face into a grin, skin pulling back across her cheekbones, and I find she’s in possession of all her teeth, like the rounded, white petals of chamomile, they erupt out of her mouth.

NONE

None of the orderlies at the long-term-care home knows the tall patient is my mother. I’m only the receptionist who succeeded another receptionist who was popular with everyone, so popular it seems they all agreed no one would be able to replace her, so why bother with me when I turned up. This suits me fine and in any case, I’m not here to cause trouble, easy as it would be to create a diversion and pull my mother out into the claggy, breathless day. 

THE WINDOW

My mother sits on the sofa next to reception, usually reserved for visitors, with its view overlooking the parking lot. Between the window and the parking lot are scanty trees with long, twiggy arms breaking up the sky into small blue triangles. Birds perch there, dark-eyed juncos who cock their heads, trilling Eurasian blue tits, and one big, stuffy bird I do not know with a white cap and red throat who sends all the others scattering. My mother stares out, the overhead lights reflecting off the hard shine of her neatly sprayed hair. She twists the stiff fabric of her pleated skirt between her fingers until she’s undone all its pressed pleats. From behind the counter, I shuffle papers from one side of the desk to the other and spin the mouse wheel when I think of it so the orderlies hear, from time to time, the clicking of its gears. 

My theory is that environments are built from only one or two elements. The orderlies accept me as a receptionist because I sit at the desk where a receptionist is found and I make the sounds a receptionist makes. The rest of it, what I say, who I phone, seems inconsequential. As long as the tone is correct, I can call home to my brother three times a day, as I often do, with updates on our mother, and he tells me the weather, what programs he’s seen on TV, where in the house the light is falling and whether he can see dust motes in the air. 

The rest of the day goes by in a flash. The reception desk faces out on everything: the dining room and common area, one hallway with a dead end, and one hallway that leads into the hospital, where patients are sometimes taken, alarms blaring and bathing the place in red, the orderlies a mere flash of white shirts and pants as they escort stricken patients through swinging doors.

THE GREEN HOUSE

We live in a green house. As soon as we move in, Solomon seeks out the attic. I roam the downstairs rooms like an unshakable spirit. For thirty years, Solomon and I have been together, siblings shunted from one place to the next. In our first two-story abode, Solomon resides on the second floor, where he does pull-ups from the rafters, his long hair cascading around his body, ending in a seething black coil at his feet. I picture everything I cannot see. I can tell he is pacing by the tempo of footsteps on the floorboards above my head. From an early age came a fear of heights, striking so deep in me I have never in my life climbed a set of stairs.

HALL WITH MANY DOORS

Once a week, I do my rounds to clean eyeglasses, armed with a spray bottle and polishing cloth. The metal of each door handle is cold in my palm, so cold it often feels wet. Doors here are heavy, I have to wedge my hip and shoulder up against them and use all my weight to push. My visits are in the morning or late at night when the patients are asleep. I sit in their armchairs and clean the left lens, then the right. Folding the temples of the glasses, settling them back into the case. Tender actions, tender for their precision, like hulling strawberries or threading a needle. The day after my rounds, patients enter the common area blinking rapidly. Sight has been restored! A miracle, one proclaims. They try to rub their eyes and find, with some confusion, glasses in the way.

WHAT THE PATIENT HEARS

My mother tells me she hears crickets from her bed. They sound so loud it is as if they are singing at her feet. When it rains, she is already wearing her anorak in the seat by the window, for she heard the rain before it came, dried peas hitting the bottom of a tin can. 

I hear stories from other patients. A man rattles the doors at night, looking for his mother. Another wheels up and down the hallways, asking someone to cut the seat belt off his wheelchair. A tall woman, well put together with sharp eyebrows and red lipstick, believes the thin man in 208 is her husband and tries every morning to give him a kiss but the man is not her husband, he is a man who despite his dementia still remembers his own wife and so the kisses of this strange woman terrify him, cause his hands to shake, and, one day, I hear him crying in his bedroom. 

Is he so afraid of love? asks my mother. My mother, the tall woman, stands outside room 208, hands hovering in the air, not daring to touch the door’s surface.

GRACE PASSENGER

We have met four other mothers who were not, in the end, the right ones, and this Grace Passenger is the fifth mother, the final Grace Passenger living in the country.

She might not be our mother, calls Solomon down the stairs. 

I am on my way to work. Remember to drink water, I reply, and feed the cats in the garden, and say something nice to the man when he delivers the post. 

THE OTHER MOTHERS

We don’t want money, as many of them assume. What I want for lately is a purpose, a reason to stay in one place. One Grace Passenger shooed us off her front step with a broom the day we arrived. She was apologetic yet fearful and vigorous, like we were mice with big ears, somewhat endearing, but rodents all the same. Another Grace Passenger had us fooled for a week. We did odd jobs around the house: whacking the dust from round braided rugs; mucking out the stables where she kept two chestnut-brown horses; wiping down a collection of miniature, long-eared ceramic rabbits, themselves depicted performing mostly domestic tasks. Earning our keep, she said at the end. Solomon had found photo albums stashed in the attic, proof of pregnancies at all the wrong times. 

We drove on to the third Grace Passenger. Solomon retreated from conversation. I feared he grew weary of our hunt. At rest stops, when he walked toward me, his hair closed over his body like a cloak, then opened, closing and opening with each step. We had always been like that with each other. Sometimes there, sometimes not.

OUR MOTHER

When we were young, we created files on our mother.

I described her being carried away by a flock of bright green wild parakeets. She cut her bangs in a bathroom mirror or stood next to a tree laden with apples, round red circles at her feet. I gave her long arms, always stretching out to grasp an object: flower, magnifying glass, hand. 

Solomon wrote that our mother had only one kidney after giving each of hers to each of us and receiving a donated kidney from a stranger. He drew her lying under a blanket of stars, the sky so black it looked heavy, heavy enough to fall to earth. His mother wore a green dress. She looked upward or to the side; she was never looking out, at me or him.

Some of our notes were contradictory, and rather than turning a blind eye, we now look more closely. For example, the previous Grace Passengers were all younger, all closer to our idea of what a mother would be. But those Grace Passengers were too young for the date of birth we obtained from the agency, the one fact we can rely on. The agency’s file was slender. Two pieces of white typewritten paper inside a manila folder. For some time, we shuffled our mother’s date of birth to the back but now we stare down its barrel, we are prepared for this septuagenarian with dementia. She’s our last chance, and this is why I take the new approach, finding a way to be near her, to be indirect, to learn from the sidelines. Funny how little the details matter in the end, both of us so eager to belong we’ll throw away everything we thought mattered. 

THE PATIENT ASLEEP

Night shift is the quietest place in the world. I cover it two or three times a month when the care home is short on staff. I lie on the threadbare velvet couch in the common room and wait out hours punctuated by almost nothing, a low baseline of sound, the sleepy tick of the clock above my head. 

It’s not unusual to check in on the patients, and so I watch my mother sleep. She lets her hair down, spread out like flax on the pillow. Where other faces slacken, my mother’s face grows more angular, her brows knitted, lips pursed so little lines appear in her skin, like ridges on a limpet shell. 

Are you my Grace Passenger? I ask. 

Let her get some rest, an orderly chides from the hallway, and I turn to face him too slowly, he is already moving away, pushing the white trolley they keep all the pills locked in. The hall lights fall on his back and he begins to hum. He is no longer in view but the sound reaches me, it’s a song I know but cannot name.

THE FOURTH MOTHER

The fourth Grace Passenger was the hardest to leave. 

She knew right away she wasn’t our mother, drawing up her top to reveal two dark, puckered scars on her abdomen. 

Both ovaries out in my twenties, she said. All the women in my family dead from cancer, but not me, not yet. 

She told us all this in the doorframe of her sprawling farmhouse. A hot, dry wind blew grit between us as we stood on the front step. 

SOME 

Some nurses are nicer than others. 

One nurse has her fingers in my mother’s arm. She drags her from the thin man’s door, my mother tripping over her feet as she’s marched down the hallway and pushed into an easy chair in front of the TV, broadcasting news from the 1940s. It’s an experiment the director is trying out, to find a common year that keeps all the patients settled.

Leaves are going to fall, aren’t they, the gardener says to me. Not much you can do about it. He’s arguing his way into a contract to tend the grounds, unaware of how little power I hold. 

We’ll offer a trial day, I say, tapping my fingers against the keyboard, sliding a pen across the counter. When can you come in?

When can I come in? It’s not like forecasting the weather, is it? How should I know when the leaves will fall?

I reach my hand toward the pen again but the man snatches it.

Autumn, he says. He hits his forehead lightly with the palm of his hand. The brim of his hat, now sticking out from his jeans pocket, has left a thick red band across his temple. 

The pen makes a scritching noise against the paper. 

My mother has shifted forward in her easy chair. An acrid smell, brine or seawater. I brush the man’s business card off the counter with my sleeve while reaching for it but neither of us moves, we’ve both turned to watch my mother, whose eyes are fixed on the TV, a choking noise coming from her, a cry lodged deep in her chest.

I stand up and take a step toward her. 

Hey, says the gardener. He has the business card in his hand. He’s waving it in the air.

A gray-haired nurse is bustling toward my mother. She glances at me sharply, then at the gardener.

She’ll be right with you, she says to the gardener, and shakes her head at me.

This nurse leads my mother back to her room. Her arm is slipped into the crook of my mother’s arm, she guides her lightly. They pass room 208 and my mother, spurned, looks away in defiance.

The gardener raises his hand, I’ll see you when they fall, he says, and exits through the sliding doors. 

Until then, I say.

Curious, I perch on the chair my mother occupied. On the TV, an ad plays for Diced Cream, a dark-haired woman bearing a silver serving tray in one hand, cubes of ice cream held on small white plates. She’s saying something, her mouth is a shadowy cave filled with static, but the sound is off. The camera pursues the Diced Cream woman as she walks into another room of the house, this room decorated all in pink, and I wonder if this is what scared my mother, the singular attention of the camera’s eye, for how long since such a gaze was turned on her, or any of us in here. 

WHAT THE PATIENT SAYS

I am not your mother, says my mother.

She is in the bathroom with an orderly. I hear the running of the taps, the orderly’s low laugh at something unsaid, then he asks her thoughts on the new soap.

Lilac, she says. 

Ten for ten, he replies, and she laughs, a long laugh that has no end.

I look around the room. No pictures. No books. A window onto the garden where the black walnut tree stands, wild and billowing as a cloud.

ATTACHMENT

You’ve developed an attachment, says Solomon. He’s taken to entering my room at night. I wake with a start. Find him sitting in a wooden chair by my bedside. How he summons the chair each night so noiselessly, I have no idea.

It’s unhealthy, he says. 

He leans over me, smelling like cooking oil and black pepper. Draws my hair from under the covers. Settles one length of hair over my right shoulder, another over the left. Seen from above, I imagine myself as a corpse, Solomon the undertaker. He clasps my cold hands between his warm ones. 

Quit, says Solomon. We’ll find our own way.

I suspect he speaks to me at night when my defenses are at their lowest. I take back my hands. Feel the sharp edges of panic as I rub my eyes with the heels of my palms, my mind caged somewhere between sleeping and waking. 

I shake my head. 

With my hair fanned out, I know I look like her, my last Grace Passenger. I turn onto my side, to shut him out. It’s not so hard, I tell myself, for each time a mother is lost, there’s always a turning back, loneliness overriding fear. But this time, something is different. I want this mother. 

I’ve never lied to him before, but now I sense Solomon growing worried. I know he fears he’ll lose me to her. And it’s true, isn’t it? I might leave him, if I had someone else to go to, mightn’t I?

I tell him I only want to find our mother, for her to be found, for the act of finding to be completed. It changes nothing. Mother or no mother.

I hear the soft pad of his footsteps treading up the stairs. He chooses to go where I can’t follow.

Next morning, I cut off all my hair. I look like the sad bishop I saw once in a tapestry wearing a flat red cap, his straight blond hair bobbed above his ears. 

After I cut my hair, Solomon stops visiting me at night. Nothing ever ends the way I think it will.

LUNCH

They let my mother out for lunch. Half a sandwich covered in cling wrap. She peels each layer apart: slice of white bread, pale pink bologna, watery sheet of lettuce, slice of white bread. Deconstructed, lined up in a neat row on the table, she cries over them.

I neglect my lunchtime phone call to Solomon and sit with our mother instead. 

Gracie is what the orderly calls her, handing her a thin paper cup of liquid medication to drink. 

I clear my throat. I hear they do a nice dessert.

My mother turns her head. She has tiny holes all down her ear, little indents in the skin, six or seven piercings.

They what? she asks.

Do a nice dessert.

My mother slaps one palm against the table. Ha! 

She points toward the lettuce. Can I interest you?

I smile, shuffling my chair closer to hers. Here we are, having a conversation. She’s not as far gone as all that. My breath hitches and quickens. The lettuce limp, pale green.

I touch my stomach and shake my head. I couldn’t!

My mother folds her hands in her lap. Ha! she says again.

What’s your name? I ask her, holding out my hand.

My mother leans in. Grace, she says, in a whisper. 

A patient brushes past my chair, then past my mother. The patient’s hand grazes the back of my mother’s neck.

Unhand me! cries my mother, standing, jolting the table, and knocking over all the cups.

No response comes. The other patient wanders off down the hallway, unperturbed, and my mother’s shoulders drop, her bluster lost. I take her hand and steer her to the easy chair.

There, there, I say, as she settles in. Another patient arrives and claims the seat next to her. 

The TV is a black box. I leave it that way.

The new patient is neatly dressed aside from her collar, buttoned askew. I bend over her to fix it. In the reflection of her glasses, I see my looming face and behind it, the miniature reflection of my mother. I have never before seen us side by side like this, as if I am on the outside of a room looking in. I wait for some further realization to come, or recognition. My mother’s face shifts out of the frame and I am left with the new patient, her hand warm where she’s holding my wrist.

Have you come to see me? she asks.

SOLOMON

When I phone Solomon, I lie again. I have yet to see our mother today. 

She’s not our mother, he says.

Maybe so, I say, and I hear a thud I recognize as Solomon kicking open the front door with the toe of his shoe. 

What else? he asks, and I tell him there is a woman who is afraid of the TV. I turn the gardener’s business card over, flipping it front to back to front. 

I want a job, says Solomon. The thought shouldn’t startle me but it does. I look up to imagine an orderly passing the counter with Solomon’s face, his long black hair sweeping the floor behind him. The space belonging to me grows narrower. I press my shoes into the soft linoleum floor and grip the phone more tightly. The mouthpiece is warm, a little wet from my breath.

Hello? It’s not Solomon’s voice in my ear but the orderly in front of me, the one who spoke to me the night I first sat with my mother. He’s holding out a clipboard stacked high with yellow papers. 

I have to go, I say.

I hang up the phone. 

THE THIN MAN’S WIFE

I have met the thin man’s wife only once. Eliza is her name. If I had to guess, they have ten years between them, she in her seventies and he in his eighties. The nurses like to gossip about the families. Who visits, who doesn’t. It becomes clear they don’t like Eliza one bit but my mother is disliked even more, for constantly disturbing the peace. 

Eliza is a beautiful woman in good health, and once, or so I was told, she tore into a nurse who had taken down all the family photographs that hung in her husband’s room. The nurse bit back, asked why Eliza only visited every few months, even though it was well known she lived on the opposite coast to be close to their daughter and grandchildren. 

The day I met her, I left the care home later than usual. All the other daytime staff had gone home; only a handful of cars remained in the parking lot. I heard Eliza’s sobs as I walked past her car. She had the windows rolled down. A bright yellow rental. For some reason, I couldn’t turn back. All I could think was that I’d passed the car now, it was done, the action complete. The heels of my shoes clicked against the pavement like a metronome. That’s all I could hear, that and the jagged crying of Eliza.

ALONE

For two years, Solomon tried living alone. He piled his hair up on his head and walked out the front door. His hair then was just past his knees. When he returned, thinner, a string of parking violations to his name, he moved back into his old bedroom, where the walls were still painted black. I’d begun sleeping in the sunroom. I sat among piles of newspapers, working through an archive of crossword puzzles, chewing on pencil ends. We stayed in our respective rooms. Alone and together, together and alone.

WHAT I WANT

As the fifth Grace Passenger sleeps, I run through the gamut. 

When did you get your first period?

Is your horoscope ever accurate?

What song do you know by heart?

A question unanswered holds countless possibilities. I’m reaching out for love but no one’s reaching back. I imagine my mother and me in our own houses opposite each other. There are the usual comings and goings. People with their different routines. Every few hours, there’s a split second where our timelines overlap. I sit in my window with a flashlight in my hand. Click the light on. Off. On, on, on. Off. It’s no distress signal but rather a code, one I know she’ll crack someday, sitting in her own window, her mirrored face looking back.

THE BIRDS

Rarely do I look up to notice the care home from the outside. After parking my car, I tuck my chin into the wide collar of my jacket and keep my eyes trained on the plastic toes of my shoes, ever approaching the front doors. Until one day when the toe of my shoe touches a feather, brown and wispy at the edges, with a flaming orange shaft. Next to it, a far smaller feather, blue and curved and downy. I stop. I see the window first, this window I’ve always been on the other side of, looking out. The golden light of the dining area spills toward me, washing over the spindly trees, the tall grass, and the sleek white cat sitting at the base of the trees, the cat newly decorated in a fine coat of bold, many-colored feathers. 

In the cat’s mouth, a tiny bird rests, the bird with its own beak open, and I wonder if the beak once held something, as if the bird and the cat are merely in a certain stage of repetition, a series of nesting dolls designed to stop here and now, unless I am also a doll meant to take the cat into my arms. And Solomon? Where is he? The child who wants the doll. Yes, that’s it. I take a step in the cat’s direction but the cat senses the movement, she turns her green eyes on me and is away with her catch, trotting across the road and over a low wooden fence, until she is only a tail moving through long grass. 

Here and there are stray feathers. I pick them up, the ones I can see. My fingers pinch them into a soft fan I carry behind my back, through the sliding doors and over to my desk, where I finally release them; my fingers can no longer hold them in position. I drop them onto the keyboard, a lively scattering.

LEGACY

Grace’s husband told us to leave. We had stayed one month, the longest we’d stayed with any Grace, and this one the only mother we knew for sure wasn’t ours. We took nothing from this Grace. Not even a photograph. They kept their history intact, their legacy. That’s the last word I spat out at her husband: legacy. Like it was the most sickening concept I’d ever heard. 

We drove out through the town square and I spat on it too. Grids of streets where drivers inched along, hands out the windows slapping the bodies of their vehicles along to the radio, a flower bed in the center of a roundabout where they’d planted velvety black irises, so inky and dark they looked like the mouth of a well, a chasm with no discernible bottom. We drove around the roundabout twice while Solomon decided which direction he would take us in next. I kept my eye on the black hole the irises formed. I knew that in outer space a black hole formed as the outer edges of a dying star were blown away. I knew nothing could escape it, not matter, or light. 

Whore, shouted Solomon, though Grace was far behind us. Slut. Common whore. I flinched; my hands shook in my lap as I looked up at the sun.

I checked behind us. In the rearview mirror, the black hole loomed as large as ever. I breathed in but the breath would only go so far. Solomon continued to shout, as if into the rearview mirror, as if Grace’s image was still trapped there.

THE THIN MAN

I’m working the night shift when it happens. The halls are silent. They stretch into the distance, like the bellows of an accordion. The doors aren’t locked at night; that’s what we’re here for, the orderlies and the rest of us cobbled together to form some semblance of care. 

I reach my mother’s door. Standing in front of it, my shadow grows larger, I watch the shadow reach for the door handle.

Inside, my mother sits in the middle of the room. At first I think she has fallen asleep in her chair. Then I see the chair is not the right chair. It is one of the metal chairs from the dining room and the nurses have strapped Grace to it, padded restraints circling her wrists and ankles. She wears only a thin cotton nightgown, which has fallen off one shoulder, revealing a constellation of bruises. I’ve seen the nurses do it once or twice before, but never overnight, never to a patient in their nightclothes.

From behind me, a shuffling. I step away from the door, drawing myself up against the wall and around the corner. The shadow that moves across the floor is long and trembling. I look up.

The thin man is wearing a dark blue suit. There’s a gray tie knotted at his neck but it hangs awkwardly; the tip of the tie points toward his left hand. In the hand, a knife catches the light. So this is where relentless love will get you. I lunge for the knife at the same time the tall man drops his arm. He is surprised by me or he is surprised to find the tall woman waiting like this, as if delivered to him. There’s a hot, slick feeling as the blade opens up the palm of my hand. Clatter of the knife against the floor. Blood on the floor. Blood on my shoes. I pick up the knife with my good hand.

Out, I say to the thin man.

Grace has woken up. The toes of her slippered feet are spattered with pink. She screams and screams, her whole body shaking in the chair.

Out, I say again, pointing the way with the knife. The thin man holds his hands in the air. Later they’ll tell me he’s ex-police, and I’ll understand the angle of his elbows in the air, his hands resting on the back of his head. He stays that way, standing in the hallway, even as his arms begin to shake, as orderlies rush all around us, and I’m whisked next door to the hospital, where a medical student blows her bangs out of her eyes as she pushes the needle under, through, and up out of the skin. 

PERFORMANCE

Reality soon hits. I’ve been doing a piss-poor job of taking messages, passing them on. There will be a meeting to determine my future here. The director is on the fence. My bravery, he says, will count for something.

The night before, I stay up late writing out my defense. I like this job, even after everything.

SOLOMON

Solomon takes a job delivering laundry to businesses in the town, including the care home. He sees our mother through the window once a week, is content to raise his hand in greeting, though he maintains she may or may not, in fact, be our mother. I have told him the truth—that I rather like this mother with her memories out of order and the possibility that she might, one day, come across a memory we too recognize from our own shifting recollections.

THE JOB

They let me keep the job, providing I pass a probationary period. I’m somewhat swept under the rising tide of bigger issues. Security, for one. The patient restrained without proper clothing. Another patient’s access to knives. I’m the one who types up each report. My language is professional, detached, the words cool as they reach the paper. The language, dictated by the director, is sloppy, uneven; there are holes within holes within holes. But I remain at my desk. I am the one to take each page, hot from the mouth of the printer, shake the plastic box that holds the paper clips, walk the report down the hall to the hospital, where it’s swallowed up by the hand of the hospital administrator with her curt nod and my curt nod in return.

THE PAINTING

The first words my mother says to me: It’s a painting. She’s looking out the window on my third day on the job. I’ve introduced myself to every patient and now find myself at her side. 

She names the many paint colors she can identify in the painting that is a window: raw umber, aquamarine, burnt sienna. The phone is ringing and I’ve forgotten it’s my job to answer when it rings and so it goes on ringing, phthalo blue, ivory black, ringing, vermilion, flake white, Prussian blue, ringing, ultramarine blue, cerulean blue, and that tiny bird there—see where the painter has caught the light on his wing just so, that’s Hansa yellow, I’d bet my life on it. The phone rings on. I hear my own recorded voice rise into the air to join my mother’s. It asks the caller to leave a message.

I was a painter once, my mother says. The sun is going down over the brown shingled rooftops and her cheeks redden in its light.