“What did you tell Finn?” Rodney asks me, when we video-chat two days later.
“The truth,” I say. “Kind of.” He raises an eyebrow. “Girl.”
“I said that I had a dream and I thought I wasn’t going to wake up.”
“Hm,” Rodney says. “That’s like when you bought a vibrator and said it was for neck massages.”
“First, you bought me the vibrator for my birthday because you’re an asshole. Second, what was I supposed to say when Finn found it? ‘Thought you might like a little help’?”
I watch as Rodney’s adorable little niece, Chiara, toddles up to him with a baby-size plastic cup. “You sit!” she orders, pointing to the floor.
“Okay, baby,” Rodney says, plopping cross-legged onto the carpet. “I swear to Jesus, if I have to have one more tea party I’m gonna lose my shit.”
Chiara starts lining up stuffed animals and dolls around Rodney. “The thing is, I was trying,” I tell him. “I did what Dr. DeSantos said. I started making routines and sticking to them. And since I’m stuck here all day in an apartment, I now clean and cook, too. I have dinner on the table for Finn every time he comes home.”
“Wow, so you single-handedly set back womyn’s rights by like fifty years? You must be so proud.”
“The only thing I did different that day was paint from memory. A little swimming hole that Gabriel and Beatriz took me to. I’ve been out of rehab for a couple of weeks, Rodney, and I haven’t dreamed my way back there until now.” I hesitate. “I tried. I’d lie in bed and hold on to an image in my head and hope I could still hang on to it after I was asleep, but it never
worked.”
“Alternative thought,” Rodney suggests. “Gabriel’s been trying this
whole time to break through to you. Kind of like the way Finn was, when he sat next to you at the hospital and talked to you while you were
unconscious.”
“Then which one’s the real me?” I ask, in a small voice.
From a purely scientific standpoint, it would seem to be this world—the one where I love Finn and am talking to Rodney. Certainly I have been here the longest, and have more memories of it. But I also know that time doesn’t correspond equally, and that what is moments here might be months there.
“Wouldn’t it be weird if I were talking to you in this world and you were trying to convince me I don’t belong here?” I ask.
“I don’t know,” Rodney says. “That kind of shit makes my head hurt. It’s like the Upside Down in Stranger Things.”
“Yeah, like with fewer demogorgons and more coconuts.” “You already talked to a shrink …,” Rodney mulls.
“Yeah. So?”
“Well, I want you to talk to someone else. Rayanne.” “Your sister?” I ask.
“Yeah,” Rodney says. “She has the sight.”
Before I can respond, the camera tumbles sideways and then rights itself and there is a woman standing next to Rodney who looks like a bigger,
more tired version of Chiara. “This her?” Rayanne asks. “Hi,” I say, feeling ambushed.
“Rodney told me all about what happened to you,” she replies. “This
virus sucks. I work in a group home for developmentally disabled folk, and we lost two of our residents to Covid.”
“I’m sorry,” I say, that familiar wash of survivor’s guilt flushing my face. “When I’m not working there,” Rayanne says matter-of-factly, “I’m a
psychic.”
She says this the way you’d say, I’m a redhead or I’m lactose intolerant.
A simple and indisputable fact.
“He says you’re salty because you feel caught between two lives.” I make a mental note to kill Rodney.
“I mean, I don’t know if I’d put it quite like that,” I qualify. “But then again, I did almost die.”
“No almost about it,” Rayanne says. “That’s your problem.”
A laugh bubbles out of me. “I promise you, I’m very much alive.” “Okay, but what if death wasn’t the ending you’ve been told it is? What
if time is like fabric, a bolt that’s so long you can’t see where it starts or it ends?” She pauses. “Maybe at the moment a person dies, that life gets compressed so small and dense it’s like a pinprick in the cloth. It may be that at that point, you enter a new reality. A new stitch in time, basically.”
I feel my heart start to pound harder.
“That new reality, it takes place for you at a normal pace, but within that giant fabric of time. What felt like months to you was actually days here,
because again, time was compressed the minute you left that other life.” “I don’t really understand,” I say.
“You’re not supposed to,” Rayanne tells me. “Most lives end and get compressed into that tiny, tiny hole and we pick up a new thread—a brand- new existence that goes on and on until it’s over and gets condensed down into a single stitch in the fabric again. But for you, the needle jumped. For you, death wasn’t a stitch. It was a veil. You got to peek through, and see what was on the other side.”
I imagine a universe draped with the gauzy textile of millions of lives, tangled and intersecting. I think of needles that might have basted together me and Finn, me and Gabriel, for just a moment in time. I think of yards and yards of cloth as black as night, every fiber twisted into it a different life. In one I am an art specialist. In another, a stranded tourist. There could be infinite versions, some where I cure cancer, or fall in battle; some where I have a dozen children, break a heart, die young.
“We don’t know what reality is,” Rayanne says. “We just pretend we do, because it makes us feel like we’re in control.” She looks at my face on the screen and laughs. “You think I’m loony tunes.”
“No,” I say quickly.
“You don’t have to believe me,” Rayanne replies. “But just remember … you don’t have to believe them, either.” She shrugs. “Oh, and you’re not
done with all this yet.” “What does that mean?”
“Damned if I know. I just get the message, I don’t write it.” She glances to her left. “Real talk, though, right now the universe is telling me to change Chiara’s diaper before the stench wipes us all out like an asteroid.”
She hands Rodney the phone again. He raises his eyebrows, as if to say, I told you so.
Then he lifts the plastic toy cup in his free hand. “And that’s the tea,” he says.
On the days I visit my mother at The Greens, I pack a picnic lunch and
always bring extra. I can’t give any to her, because I am still not allowed inside, but I always have a cinnamon roll or a slice of pumpkin bread for Henry, who is there every time I go, no matter what day of the week it is. I always leave a wrapped offering at the front door, too, for the staff, with a note thanking them for keeping the residents safe.
I start bringing a blanket with me, which I set up on the lawn outside my mother’s screened porch. When I call her, she answers, and I tell her the
same thing each time: It’s a beautiful day, would she like to join me?
We talk like strangers who have only recently been introduced, which isn’t really that far off the mark. We watch recorded episodes of American Idol, and she points out her favorite singers, who are now being filmed from their garages and living rooms without a studio audience. We look over the weekly menus at The Greens. I tell her about the little dog in a yellow raincoat that I saw in the park, and the plots of the books I read. Sometimes she takes out photo albums and walks me through her journeys, while I sketch her in an unlined journal. She can remember the most minute details about the flooding rains in Rio de Janeiro in the eighties, a dynamite explosion in the Philippines, landslides in Uganda. She was in New York City when the Twin Towers collapsed and the air was white with ash and grief. She captured the aftermath of the Pulse nightclub shooting. She did an entire series on the coyotes who brought children over the Mexican border. “I got into a lot of trouble for that one,” she tells me, running her finger over a grainy photograph of a man and a little girl walking across a barren wasteland.
“How come?”
“Because I didn’t show a clear villain,” my mother says. “It’s hard to
blame someone for breaking the law when all your choices have been taken away from you. Nobody’s all good or all bad. They just get painted that way.”
I think about what my life would have been like if she had come home and sat down at the kitchen table with me and told me these stories. Surely I would have understood better what captured her attention and drew her away from my father and me, instead of only feeling jealous of it.
These days I am thinking a lot about loss. Because of this pandemic, everyone feels like they’ve been robbed of something, or—in the most extreme and permanent of cases—someone. A job, an engagement, a painting for auction. A graduation, a vacation, a freshman year. A
grandmother, a sister, a lover. Nobody is guaranteed tomorrow—I realize that viscerally now—but that doesn’t keep us from feeling cheated when it’s yanked away.
During the past two months, the things we are missing have come to feel concentrated and acute, personal. Whatever we forfeit echoes the pain from all the other times we have been disappointed in our lives. When I was sedated and I thought I had lost my mother, it was amplified by all the times she left me when I was little.
She looks up and finds me watching her. I do that, now, trying to see myself in the curve of her jaw or the texture of her hair. “Have you ever been to Mexico?” she asks.
I shake my head. “I’d like to go, one day. It’s on my bucket list.” Her face lights up. “What else is on there?”
“The Galápagos,” I say softly.
“I’ve been,” she replies. “That poor tortoise—Lonesome George. He died.”
I was the one to tell her that, a day before my life changed. “So I hear.” I lean back on my elbows, glancing at her through the screen. She is pixelated and whole at the same time. “Did you always want to travel?” I ask.
“When I was a girl,” my mother says, “we went nowhere. My father was a cattle farmer and he used to say you can’t take a vacation from the cows.
One day an encyclopedia salesman came to the house and I begged my
parents to subscribe. Every month there was a new volume showing me a world a lot bigger than McGregor, Iowa.”
I am entranced. I try to connect the dots between her childhood and her move to New York City.
“The best part was that we got a bonus book—an atlas,” she adds. “There weren’t computers back then, you know. To see what it looked like
thousands of feet up a mountain in Tibet or down in the rice paddies of Vietnam or even just the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco—I wanted to be there. All the places. I wanted to put myself in the frame.” She shrugs. “So I did.”
My mother, I realize, mapped out her life literally. I did mine figuratively.
But it was for the same reason—to make sure I didn’t get trapped someplace I didn’t want to be.
I don’t know what makes me ask the next question. Maybe it is because I have never struck a tuning fork in myself and heard it resonate in my mother; maybe it’s because I have spent so many years blaming her for not sharing her life with me, even though I never actually asked her to do so.
But I sit up, legs crossed, and say, “Do you have children?”
A small frown forms between her brows, and she closes the photo album.
Her hands smooth over its cover, nails catching at the embossed gold words. A LIFE, it says. Banal, and also spot-on.
“I do,” my mother says, just when I think she will not answer. “I did.”
Let this go, I tell myself. Alzheimer’s 101 says do not remind a person with dementia of a memory or event that might be upsetting.
She meets my gaze through the screen. “I … don’t know,” she says.
But the cloudiness that is the hallmark of her illness isn’t what I see in her eyes. It’s the opposite—the memory of a relationship that wasn’t what it might have been, even if you do not know why.
It’s blinking at your surroundings, and not knowing how you got to this point.
And I am just as guilty of it as she is.
I’ve spent so much time dissecting how different my mother and I are that I never bothered to consider what we have in common.
“I’m tired,” my mother says.
“You should lie down,” I tell her. I gather up my blanket. “Thank you for visiting,” she says politely.
“Thank you for letting me,” I reply, just as gracious. “Don’t forget to lock the slider.”
I wait until she is inside her apartment, but even in the space of those few seconds, she’s forgotten to secure the latch. I could tell her a million times; she will likely never remember.
While I’m waiting for my Uber, I laugh softly at my foolishness. At first, I thought maybe I’d come back to this world so that I could give my mother a second chance.
Now I’m starting to think I’m here so she can give me one.
Every night at seven P.M., New Yorkers lean out their windows and bang pots and pans for the frontline workers to hear, in a show of support.
Sometimes Finn hears them when he is headed home from work.
On those days, he comes into the apartment and strips and showers and goes right to the cabinet over the refrigerator to take out a bottle of Macallan whiskey. He pours himself a glass and sometimes doesn’t even speak to me until he’s drunk it.
I didn’t know Finn even liked whiskey.
Each night, the amount he pours gets a little bigger. He is careful to leave enough in the bottle for the next night. Sometimes he passes out on the couch and I have to help him to bed.
During the day, when he’s at work, I climb on a step stool and take out the Macallan. I pour some of the whiskey down the sink. Not an amount that would raise suspicion; just enough for me to protect him a little from himself.
By the end of May we aren’t washing the groceries anymore or waiting to open our mail, but we’re freaked out about slipstreams, and whether you can catch the virus from a jogger who runs past you. I start receiving the unemployment benefits I became eligible for when I was furloughed, but they certainly don’t cover my half of the rent.
When I start to feel like I’m going stir-crazy, I remind myself of how lucky I am. I scour forums of long-haul Covid survivors, who are still suffering weeks later with symptoms no one understands and no doctors have the bandwidth or knowledge to address. I read articles about women
who are balancing work and online education for their kids; and profiles of frontline workers who get paid scandalously little to risk their exposure to the virus. I see Finn stagger in after his long shifts, haunted by what he’s seen. Sometimes it feels like the whole world is holding its breath. If we don’t gasp, soon, we will all pass out.
One Saturday when Finn has the day off, we spend the afternoon getting back to ground zero: cleaning the apartment, doing laundry, sorting through the mail that has piled up. We play Rock Paper Scissors to choose chores, which leaves me scrubbing toilets while Finn fishes through piles of
envelopes and junk mail for the cable bill and the bank statements. Every
time I pass by him at the kitchen table, I feel ashamed. Usually we split the
cost of utilities and rent, but with my contributions reduced to a trickle, he’s paying the lion’s share.
He picks up a stack of glossy catalogs he has separated out from the bills and tosses them into the milk crate we use as a recycling bin. “I don’t know why we keep getting these,” he says. “College brochures.”
“No, wait.” I put down my dustrag and sift through them, pulling a bunch back out and cradling them in one arm. “They’re for me.” I meet his gaze. “I’m thinking of going back to school.”
He blinks at me. “For what? You already have a master’s in art business.” “I might change careers,” I tell him. “I want to find out more about art
therapy.”
“How are you paying for tuition?” Finn asks. It stings. “I have some savings.”
He doesn’t respond, but implicit in his look is: You may not by the time this is over.
It makes me feel equally guilty—for wanting to spend money on myself when I haven’t been carrying my own weight on household expenses, and
angry—because he’s right. “I just feel like this could be … a wake-up call.” “You’re not the only one who lost a job, Di.”
I shake my head. “Not only getting furloughed. Everything. There has to be a reason that I got sick.”
Finn suddenly looks very, very tired. “There doesn’t have to be a reason.
Viruses don’t need reasons. They strike. Randomly.”
“Well, I can’t believe that.” I lift my chin. “I can’t believe I’m alive because of the luck of the draw.”
He stares at me for another moment, and then shakes his head and mutters something I don’t hear. He rips open another envelope and
eviscerates its contents. “Why are you mad?” I ask.
Finn pushes his chair away from the table. “I’m not mad,” he says. “But, I mean—going back to school? Changing careers? I can’t believe you didn’t happen to mention this anytime over the last month.”
I blurt out, “I’ve been visiting my mother.”
“Wow,” Finn says quietly. Betrayal is written all over the margins of his face.
“I didn’t say anything because … I thought you’d tell me not to go.”
His eyes narrow, as if he is searching to find me. “I would have gone with you,” he says. “You have to be careful.”
“You think I could get hurt taking the trash into the hallway to dump it.” “My point exactly. You shouldn’t be doing that, either. You’re only a
month out of rehab—”
“You treat me like I’m on the verge of dying,” I snap.
“Because you were,” Finn counters, rising from his chair.
We are standing a foot apart, both of us crackling with frustration.
He wants to gently set me down exactly where I was before this happened, like he’s been holding that place for me in a board game, and we are going to pick up where we left off. The problem is that I’m not the same player.
“When I thought you were going to die,” Finn says, “I didn’t believe
there could be anything more awful than a world you weren’t in. But this is worse, Diana. This is you, in the world, not letting me be a part of it.” His eyes are dark, desperate. “I don’t know what I did wrong.”
Immediately, I reach out, my hands catching his. “You’ve done nothing wrong,” I say, because it is true.
The relief in his eyes nearly breaks me. Finn’s arms come around my waist. “You want to go back to school?” he says. “We’ll figure out how. You want a PhD? I’ll be in the front row at your dissertation defense. We’ve always wanted the same things, Di. If this is a detour on the way to everything we’ve dreamed about, that’s okay.”
A detour. Inside, where he cannot see, I flinch. What if I don’t want what I used to?
“What did you want to be when you grew up?” I murmur. A laugh startles out of Finn. “A magician.”
I’m charmed. “Really? Why?”
“Because they made things appear out of thin air,” Finn says, with a shrug. “Something from nothing. How cool is that?”
I nestle close to him. “I would have come to all your shows. I would have been that annoying superfan.”
“I would have promoted you to magician’s assistant.” He grins. “Would you have let me saw you in half?”
“Anytime,” I tell him.
But I think: That is the easy part. The trick is in putting me back together.
The next morning, I video-call Rodney and tell him that Finn doesn’t want me to go back to school. “Remind me why you need his permission?” he says.
“Because it changes things, when you’re a couple. Like how much we can pay in rent, if I’m not making a salary. Or how much time we’ll actually spend together.”
“You hardly spend any time together now. He’s a resident.”
“Well, anyway, I didn’t call to talk to you. Is Rayanne there?” Rodney frowns. “No, she’s working.”
“Like … doing a reading for someone?”
“Nursing home,” he says. “The only thing that pays worse than a career in art is being a psychic.” His eyes widen. “That’s why you want to talk to her.”
“What if I’m being an idiot, thinking about starting over now? Finn could be right. This could be some weird reaction to having a second chance, or
something.”
Rodney slowly puts it all together. “So you want Rayanne to take a peek a few years out and tell you if you’re gluing pom-poms together with kids who have anxiety from gluten allergies—”
“—That is not art therapy—”
“—or if you’re wearing stilettos and in Eva’s old office? Mmnope. It doesn’t work that way.”
“Easy for you to say,” I tell him, pressing my hand to my forehead. “Nothing makes sense, Rodney. Nothing. I know Finn thinks that I shouldn’t make any radical changes, because I’ve been through so much. Instead of trying new things, I should find the stuff that feels comfortable.”
Rodney looks at me. “Oh my God. Nothing bad’s ever happened to you before.”
I scowl at him. “That’s not true.”
“Okay, sure, you had a mother who didn’t know you existed, but your daddy still doted on you. Maybe you had to go to your second-choice college. You had a share of white lady problems, but nothing that’s knocked the ground out from under your feet. Until you caught Covid, and now you understand that sometimes shit happens you can’t control.”
I feel anger bubbling inside me. “What is your point?”
“You know I’m from Louisiana,” Rodney says. “And that I’m Black and gay.”
My lips twitch. “I’d noticed.”
“I have spent a great deal of time pretending to be someone that other
people want me to be,” he says. “You don’t need a crystal ball, honey. You need a good hard look at right now.”
My jaw drops open.
Rodney scoffs. “Rayanne’s got nothing on me,” he says.
In late May, the strict lockdown of the city is eased. As the weather improves, the streets become busier. It’s still different—everyone is masked; restaurant service is solely outdoors—but it feels a little less like a demilitarized zone.
I get stronger, able to go up and down stairs without having to stop halfway. When Finn is at the hospital, I take walks from our place on the Upper East Side through Central Park, going further south and west every day. The more people venture outside, the more I tailor my outings to odd times of the day—just before dawn, or when everyone else is home eating dinner. There are still people out, but it’s easier to social-distance from them.
Early one morning I put on my leggings and sneakers and strike off for
the reservoir in Central Park. It’s my favorite walk, and I know it is because it makes me remember another static body of water and a thicket of brush. If I close my eyes and listen to the woodcock and the sparrows, I can pretend they are finches and mockingbirds.
This is exactly what I’m doing when I hear someone call my name. “Diana? Is that you?”
On the running path, wearing a black tracksuit and a paisley mask and her trademark purple glasses, is Kitomi Ito.
“Yes!” I say, stepping forward before I remember that we are not allowed to touch, to hug. “You’re still here.”
She laughs. “Haven’t shuffled off the mortal coil yet, no.” “I mean, you haven’t moved.”
“That, too,” Kitomi says. She nods toward the path. “Walk a bit?” I fall into step, six feet away.
“I admit I thought I would have heard from you by now,” she says. “Sotheby’s furloughed me,” I tell her. “They furloughed almost
everyone.”
“Ah, well, that explains why no one’s been beating down the door asking for the painting.” She tilts her head. “Isn’t the big sale this month?”
It is, but it has never crossed my mind.
“I must say, I’ve never been more grateful for a decision than I was to not auction the Toulouse-Lautrec. For weeks now, it’s just been the two of us in the apartment. I would have been quite lonely, without it.”
I understand what she’s talking about. I was just staring at a man-made reservoir, after all, and pretending it was a lagoon in the Galápagos. I could close my eyes and hear Beatriz splashing and Gabriel teasing me to dive in.
I remember, again, that the last normal thing I did before getting sick was go to Kitomi’s penthouse. “Did you get the virus?” I ask, and then blush beneath my mask. “I don’t mean to intrude. It’s just—I had it. I went to the hospital the day after our meeting. I worried that I might have given it to
you.”
She stops walking. “I lost taste and smell for about a week,” Kitomi says. “But it was so early that nobody knew that was a symptom. No fever, no aches, nothing else. I’ve been tested for antibodies, though, and I have them. So maybe I should be thanking you.”
“I’m just glad it was mild.”
She tilts her head. “But for you … it wasn’t?”
I tell her about being on the ventilator, and how I almost died. I talk about rehab, and explain that’s why I am trying to walk further and further each day. I tell her about my mother, who was dead to me, and then wasn’t. She doesn’t ask questions, she just lets me speak into the gap between us and fill it. I remember, then, that before she was married to Sam Pride, she was a psychologist.
“I’m sorry,” I say after a moment. “You should probably bill me for this.”
She laughs. “I haven’t been a therapist for a very long time. Maybe it’s a muscle memory.”
I hesitate. “Do you think that’s the only way memories work?” “I’m not sure what you mean.”
“What if your body or your brain remembers something you haven’t done before?”
She looks at me. “You know, I used to study different states of consciousness. It’s how I met Sam, as a matter of fact. That was during the hard drug years of the Nightjars, and after all, what’s an acid trip but an altered state?”
“I think I was in two places at one time,” I say slowly. “In the hospital, on a ventilator. And in my head, somewhere completely different.” I do not look at her as I sketch the story of my arrival on Isabela, my adoption by Abuela, my conversations with Beatriz.
My time with Gabriel.
Including the moment I let myself drown.
“I used to do past life regressions for clients,” Kitomi says. “But this isn’t a past life, is it? It’s a simultaneous one.”
She says this mildly, like she’s pointing out that there’s a lot of humidity today. “Have you returned there?” she asks.
“Once,” I admit.
“Do you want to go back?”
“I feel …” I begin, trying to choose the right words. “I feel like I’m on loan here.”
“You could go to the Galápagos,” Kitomi points out. “Not now,” I say wryly.
“One day.”
I don’t have a response. Kitomi and I walk a little further. We are passed by a jogger with a headlamp. “I could have moved to Montana during any of the past thirty-five years,” Kitomi says. “But I wasn’t ready yet.” She
tilts her head to the sky, and the rising sun glints off the lenses of her glasses. “When I lost Sam, I lost all my joy. I tried to find it—through
music and art and therapy and writing and Prozac. Then I realized I’d been looking in the wrong place all along. I was trying to find meaning in his death—and I couldn’t. It was violent and tragic and random and wrong. It
always will be. The truth is, it doesn’t matter how or why Sam died. It never will.”
Just then, the sun breaks over the tree line, setting the trees aflame. It is the kind of art that no master could ever capture on canvas, but it’s here for the viewing every single day.
I understand what Kitomi is telling me: Trying to figure out what happened to me isn’t important. It’s what I do with what I’ve learned that counts.
There are more people on the reservoir trail now. All of us are grieving something.
But while we are, we’re putting one foot in front of the other. We’re waking up to see another day. We’re pushing through uncertainty, even if
we can’t yet see the light at the end of the tunnel.
We are battered and broken, but we’re all small miracles.
“I’m here most days before the sun comes up,” Kitomi says. “If you want to join me.”
I nod, and we walk a little further. Just after we part ways, my phone dings with a notification.
It is a Facebook message from Eric Genovese, with a cellphone number and an invitation to call.
Eric Genovese tells me that in his other life, he lives in Kentwood—a suburb of Grand Rapids he’d never heard of before and had never been to, before he was hit by a car. “My wife’s name is Leilah,” he says. “And my little girl is three.”
I notice he uses the present tense. Lives. Is.
“I do computer programming there, which if you know me here is laughable,” Eric says. “I can’t even figure out my TV remote.”
“When I was in the Galápagos, months passed,” I tell him. “But here, it was days.”
We have been on the phone for an hour, and it is the most liberating conversation I’ve had in over a month. I had forgotten that I messaged him, it’s been so long—but Eric apologizes and says he doesn’t use Facebook much anymore. He completely understands what I’m talking about when I say that I was somewhere else while I was lying in a hospital bed; that the people I met there are real. He doesn’t just give me the benefit of the doubt
—he dismisses the people who are too narrow-minded to know what we know.
“Same,” he says. “My wife and I have been together for five years in Kentwood.”
“How did you get back here?”
“One night we were watching Jeopardy! like we usually do, and I was eating a bowl of ice cream. And it was the damnedest thing—my spoon kept going through the bowl. Like it was a ghost spoon, or something. I couldn’t stop staring at it. I couldn’t go to bed, either, because I had the weirdest premonition that this was just the beginning.” He sighs. “I don’t blame my wife. Leilah thought I was going crazy. I called in sick to work
and stared at the spoon and the bowl the whole day. I kept telling her that if the spoon wasn’t real, maybe nothing was. She begged me to call the
doctor, and when I wouldn’t, she took Maya and went to her mom’s place.” He hesitates. “I haven’t seen them since then.”
“What happened to the spoon?”
“Eventually, it got bright red, like a coal. I went to touch it and burned my hand and it hurt like hell. I started screaming, and then the room fell away like it was made out of paper, and all I heard was yelling and all I felt was pain. When I opened my eyes, there was a paramedic pounding on my chest and telling me to stay alive.”
I swallow. “What about after that? When you came back?” “Well,” he says. “You know. Nobody believed me.”
“Not even your family?”
He pauses. “I had a fiancée,” he admits. “I don’t anymore.” I try to reply, but all the words are jammed in my throat. “Do you know what an NDE is?” he asks.
“No.”
“Near-death experience,” Eric explains. “When I got out of the hospital, I became obsessed with finding out more about them. It’s when someone who’s unconscious remembers floating over his body, or meeting a person who died years ago, or something like that. Ten to twenty percent of people report having them after an accident, or if their heart stops.”
“On Facebook, I read about this farmer,” I say excitedly. “In the middle of bypass surgery, while he was under anesthesia and his eyes were taped shut, he swore he saw his surgeon do the Funky Chicken. When he said something after surgery, his doctor was shocked, because he does wave his elbows around in the OR—it’s how he points, so he doesn’t contaminate his gloves.”
“Yeah, exactly. It even happens during cardiac arrest, when there’s no brain activity. Have you ever seen the MRI scan of someone with end-stage Alzheimer’s?”
I feel a shiver run down my spine. “No.”
“Well, you can literally see the damage. But there’s hundreds of reports of patients with dementia who can suddenly remember and think clearly and communicate just before they die. Even though their brains are destroyed. It’s called terminal lucidity, and there’s no medical explanation for it. That’s why some neurologists think that there might be another reason for NDEs other than messed-up brain function. Most people think
that the cerebral cortex makes us conscious, but what if it doesn’t? What if it’s just a filter, and during an NDE, the brain lets the reins go a little bit?”
“Expanded consciousness,” I say. “Like a drug trip.”
“Except not,” Eric replies. “Because it’s way more accurate and detailed.”
Could it be true? Could the mind work, even when the brain doesn’t? “So if consciousness doesn’t come from the brain, where does it come from?”
He laughs. “Well, if I knew that, I wouldn’t be working for Poland Spring.”
“So, this is what you do now? Armchair neuroscience?”
“Yeah,” Eric says, “when I’m not doing an interview. I can’t tell you how awesome it is to talk to someone about this who doesn’t think I’m a whack job.”
“Then why do them?”
“So I can find her,” he says flatly. “You think your wife is real.”
“I know she is,” he corrects. “And so is my little girl. Sometimes I can hear her laughing, and I turn around, but she’s never there.”
“Have you been to Kentwood?”
“Twice,” Eric says. “And I’ll go back again, when we don’t have to quarantine anymore. Don’t you want to find them? The guy and his
daughter?”
My throat tightens. “I don’t know,” I admit. “I’d have to be ready to accept the consequences of that.”
He’s lost a fiancée; he understands. “Before my accident, I was Catholic.”
“I read that.”
“I never even met anyone Muslim. I wasn’t aware there was a mosque in my town. But there are things I just know now, part of me, like my skin or my bones.” He pauses. “Did you know that the Sunni believe in Adam and Eve?”
“No,” I say politely.
“With a few differences. According to the Quran, God already knew before he created Adam that he’d put him and his offspring on earth. It wasn’t a punishment, it was a plan. But when Adam and Eve were
banished, they were put on opposite ends of the earth. They had to find each other again. And they did, on Mount Ararat.”
I think I like that version better—it’s less about shame, and more about destiny.
“Don’t you feel guilty?” I ask. “Missing a person everyone else thinks you invented? When all around us, because of the virus, people are losing someone they love? Someone real, someone they’ll never see again?”
Eric is quiet for a moment. “What if that’s what people are saying to him, now, about you?”
Kitomi tells me that someone has made an offer on the penthouse. A
Chinese businessman, although neither of us can imagine why someone from China would want to come to a country where the president refers to the virus as the Wuhan flu. “When would you move?” I ask.
She looks at me, her hands resting lightly on the railing that borders the reservoir trail. “Two weeks,” she says.
“That’s fast.”
Kitomi smiles. “Is it? I’ve been waiting thirty-five years, really.” We watch a flock of starlings take flight. “How disappointed would you be if I decided not to auction the Toulouse-Lautrec?” she asks.
I shrug. “I don’t work for Sotheby’s, remember.”
“If I don’t consign it,” she asks, “will you ever work there again?”
“I don’t know,” I admit. “But you shouldn’t make a decision based on me.”
She nods. “Maybe I will have the only ranch in Montana with a Toulouse-Lautrec.”
“You do you,” I say, grinning.
For a moment I just hold on to this: the wonder that I am walking at dawn with a pop culture icon, as if we are friends. Maybe we are. Stranger things have happened.
Stranger things have happened to me.
Kitomi tilts up her head, so that she is looking at me from under the rims of her purple glasses. “Why do you love art?”
“Well,” I say, “every picture tells a story, and it’s a window into the mind of the—”
“Oh, Diana.” Kitomi sighs. “Once more, minus the bullshit.” I burst out laughing.
“Why art?” Kitomi asks again. “Why not photography, like your mother?”
My jaw drops. “You know who my mother is?”
She raises an eyebrow. “Diana,” she says, “Hannah O’Toole is the Sam Pride of feature photography.”
“I didn’t know you knew,” I murmur.
“Well, I know why you love art, even if you don’t,” Kitomi continues, as if I haven’t spoken. “Because art isn’t absolute. A photograph, that’s different. You’re seeing exactly what the photographer wanted you to see. A painting, though, is a partnership. The artist begins a dialogue, and you finish it.” She smiles. “And here’s the incredible part—that dialogue is different every time you view the art. Not because anything changes on the canvas—but because of what changes in you.”
I turn back to the water, so that she can’t see the tears in my eyes.
Kitomi reaches across the distance between us and pats my arm. “Your mother may not know how to start the conversation,” she says. “But you do.”
On my way back home through the park, I discover that I have three messages from The Greens.
I stop walking in the middle of the path, forcing joggers to flow around me. “Ms. O’Toole,” a woman says, moments later when I redial. “This is Janice Fleisch, the director here—I’m glad you finally called back.”
“Is my mother all right?”
“We’ve had an outbreak of Covid at our facility, and your mother is ill.”
I have heard these words before; I am caught in a cyclone of déjà vu. I even remember my lines.
“Is she … does she need to go to the hospital?”
“Your mother has a DNR,” she says delicately. No matter how sick she gets, she will not get any life-saving measures, because that’s what I deemed best when she moved there a year ago. “We have multiple residents who’ve contracted the virus, but I assure you we’re doing everything we can to keep them comfortable.”
“Can I see her?”
“I wish I could say yes,” the director says. “But we aren’t letting visitors in.”
My heart is pounding so hard that I can barely hear my own voice thanking her, and asking her to keep me updated.
I start walking as fast as I can back home, trying to remember where Finn put the toolbox we use for emergencies in the apartment.
They may not be letting visitors in. But I don’t plan to ask permission.
I ask the Uber to drop me off at the end of the driveway, so that I can detour across the lawn away from anyone who might see my approach. For once, Henry’s car is not at The Greens, and the bird feeder outside his wife’s porch is empty. I can think of only one reason.
I push that thought out of my mind. The only silver lining is that there will be no witnesses for what I’m about to do.
Although I have wire cutters, I don’t really need them. One of the lower corners of my mother’s screened porch is peeling at the base, and all I have to do is hook my fingers underneath and tug hard for the screen to rip away from its moorings. I create just enough space to wriggle through and step around the wicker chair and table where my mother usually sits when I
come for my visits. I peer into her apartment, but she isn’t on the couch.
I don’t even know, really, if she’s here. For all I know, they’ve moved all the Covid-positive residents to a completely different place.
I pull on the door of the slider that opens into the porch. Thank God my mother never remembers to lock it.
I tiptoe into the apartment. “Mom?” I say softly. “Hannah?”
The lights are all turned off, the television is a blind, blank eye. The bathroom door is open and the space is empty. I hear voices and follow them down the short hallway toward her bedroom.
My mother is lying in bed with a quilt thrown down to her waist. The radio is chattering beside her, some program on NPR about polar bears and the shrinking ice caps. When I stand in the doorway, her head turns toward me. Her eyes are feverish and glassy, her skin flushed.
“Who are you?” she says, panic in her words.
I realize that I am still wearing the mask I wore in the Uber, and that all the times I have visited her, I have stood in the fresh air not wearing one. She may not know me as her daughter, but she recognizes my face as a visitor she has had before. Right now, though, she is sick and scared and I am a stranger whose face is half-obscured by a piece of cloth.
She has Covid.
Finn has drummed into me, daily, how little we know about this virus, but I’m counting on the fact that I still have antibodies. I reach up and
unhook one side of my mask. I let it dangle from my ear. “Hi,” I say softly. “It’s just me.”
She reaches toward her nightstand for her glasses, and has a coughing fit.
Her hair is matted down in the back and through pale strands I can see the pink of her scalp. There’s something so tender and childlike about that it makes my throat hurt.
She settles her glasses on her face and looks at me again and says, “Diana. I’m sorry, baby … I don’t feel so good today.”
I fall against the frame of the door. She hasn’t called me by name in years. Before Covid, she referred to me as “the lady” to staff, when they talked about my visits. She has never given me any indication that she
knows we are related. “Mom?” I whisper.
She pats the bed beside her. “Come sit.”
I sink down on the edge of the mattress. “Can I get you anything?” She shakes her head. “It’s really you?”
“Yeah.” I remember what Eric Genovese said about terminal lucidity.
Terminal. Whatever is causing this clarity from her dementia—whether it’s fever, or Covid, or just sheer luck—is it worth it? If the trade-off is knowing that it means she’s probably going to die? “I’ve been here before,” I tell her.
“But sometimes I’m not,” she says. “At least not mentally.” She hesitates, frowning, like she’s probing her own mind. “It’s different, today.
Sometimes I’m back in other places. And sometimes … I like it better there.”
I understand that viscerally.
She looks at me. “Your father was so much better at everything than I was.”
“He would have argued about that. He thought your work was brilliant.
Everyone does.”
“We tried to have a baby for seven years,” my mother says. This is news to me.
“I tried fertility treatments. Traditional Chinese medicine. I ate bee
propolis and pomegranates and vitamin D. I wanted you so badly. I was going to be the kind of mother who took so many photos of my baby that
we had a whole closet full of albums. I was going to chronicle every step of your life.”
This is so far from the Hannah O’Toole I know—that everyone knows.
An intrepid photographer of human tragedy, who didn’t realize the
shambles she’d made of her own deserted family. “What happened?”
“I forgot to take you to the pediatrician when you were a week old,” she says.
“I know. I’ve heard the story.”
“It was an appointment for you, and I left you sitting at home, in your little baby car seat,” she murmurs. “That’s how awful I was at being a mother.”
“You were distracted,” I say, wondering how it’s come to this: me making excuses for her.
“I was determined,” she corrects. “There couldn’t be more mistakes if I wasn’t around to make them. Your father … he was so much better at taking care of you.”
I stare at her. I think of all the times I thought that I was a distant runner- up to her career, that photography held her captive in a way I never could. I never imagined she’d had so little confidence parenting me.
“I used to get asked why I photographed catastrophes,” my mother says. “I had a whole list of stock answers—for the excitement, to commemorate tragedy, to humanize suffering. But I mostly shot disasters to remind myself I wasn’t the only one.”
There is a difference, I realize, between being driven and running away from something that scares you to death.
“I forgive you,” I say, and everything inside me shifts. I may not have had much of my mother, between her career and her dementia, but something is better than nothing. I will take what I can get.
“Do you remember the time Dad and I went with you to chase a tornado?” I ask.
She frowns, her eyes clouding. “I do,” I say softly.
Maybe that’s enough. It’s not having the adventures or crossing off the line items of the bucket list. It’s who you were with, who will help you recall it when your memory fails.
My mother coughs again, falling back against the pillows. When she glances at me, something has changed. Her eyes are a painted backdrop, instead of a dimensional landscape. There’s nothing behind them but anxiety. “We have to get to higher ground,” she says.
I wonder where she is, what other time or place. I hope it’s more real to her than here and now. That in the end it’s where she will choose to remain.
I imagine her existence shrinking down to the point of a pin, a hole in the fabric of the universe, before she jumps into another life.
She seems to be falling asleep. Gently, I reach for her glasses and slide them from her face. I let my hand linger along the soft swell of her cheek, her paper-thin skin. I set the folded glasses beside a paperback novel on the nightstand, and notice the deckled edge of an old photo that is sticking out from between the pages, like a bookmark.
I don’t know what makes me open the book to better see the image.
It’s a terrible picture of my mother, when she was young. The top half of her head is cut off, and her wide smile is blurry. Her hand is outstretched,
like she’s reaching for something.
Someone.
Me.
I remember being the one behind the shutter, when I was no more than a toddler.
Here. You try.
I must make some small noise, because my mother blinks at me. “Have we been introduced?”
Surreptitiously, I slip the photo into my pocket. “Yes,” I tell her. “We’re old friends.”
“Good,” she says firmly. “Because I don’t think I can do this alone.”
I think of the staff, who might come in to check on her at any moment. Of this virus, and how if I catch it again, I may not survive a second time. “You don’t have to,” I tell her.
I don’t realize how late I am until I am in the Uber on my way back to the apartment, and see that Finn has left me a barrage of texts and six phone messages. “Where have you been?” he says, grabbing me when I walk through the door. “I thought something terrible happened to you.”
Something already did, I think.
I set down the toolbox I took with me. “I lost track of time,” I tell him. “My mother tested positive for Covid. There’s an outbreak at The Greens. But they told me I couldn’t visit.”
Finn’s fingers flex on my arms. “God, Diana, what can I do? It must be killing you to not be able to see her.”
I don’t say anything. My gaze slides away from his face. “Diana?” he says softly.
“She’s dying,” I say flatly. “She has a DNR. The odds of her getting through this are virtually nonexistent.” I hesitate. “No one even knows I was in her apartment.”
Yet. Eventually someone will notice the torn screen.
He suddenly lets go of me. “You went into the room of a Covid-positive patient,” he states.
“Not just some patient—”
“Without wearing an N95 mask …”
“I took off my mask,” I admit. Now, in retrospect, it seems ridiculous.
Risky. Suicidal, even. “She was scared and didn’t recognize me.” “She has dementia and never recognizes you,” Finn argues. “And I wasn’t about to let that be the last experience we had!”
A muscle leaps in his jaw. “Do you realize what you’ve done?” He spears a hand through his hair, pacing. “How long were you in contact?”
“Two hours … maybe three?”
“Unmasked,” he clarifies, and I nod. “For fuck’s sake, Diana, what were you thinking?”
“That I could lose my mother?”
“How do you think I felt about you?” Finn explodes. “Feel about you?” “I already had Covid—”
“And you could get it again,” he says. “Or do you know more than
Fauci? Because as far as we know right now, it’s a crapshoot. You want to know what we do know? The more time you spend in a closed-in space with someone contagious the more likely you are to catch the virus, too.”
My hands are shaking. “I wasn’t thinking,” I admit.
“Well, you weren’t thinking about me, either,” Finn shoots back.
“Because now I have to quarantine and get tested. How many patients am I not going to be able to take care of, because you weren’t thinking?”
He turns like a caged animal, searching for an exit. “God, I can’t even get away from you,” Finn snaps, and he stalks into the bedroom and slams the door.
I am shaky on the inside. Every time I hear Finn moving around in the bedroom I jump. I know that he will have to come out sooner or later for
food or drink or to use the bathroom, even as the shadows of the afternoon lengthen into the dark of night.
I don’t bother to turn on the lights. Instead, I sit on the couch and wait for the reckoning.
I’ve already learned today that caretaking is not a quid pro quo; that if
someone neglects you in your past, that doesn’t mean you should abandon them in their future. But does it hold the other way? Finn’s as good as any other reason for why I survived such a bad case of Covid—he tethered me. So what do I owe him, in return?
Obligation isn’t love.
It stands to reason that Finn and I might have disagreements while we’re locked together during a quarantine. He’s exhausted and I’m recovering and nothing in a pandemic is easy. But our relationship used to be. I don’t know if I’m just noticing the hairline fractures for the first time, or if they’ve only just appeared. Where we used to be marching toward the future in lockstep, I’m now stumbling or trying to catch up. Something has changed between us.
Something has changed in me.
At about nine o’clock, the door of the bedroom opens and Finn emerges. He goes to the kitchen and opens the fridge, taking out the orange juice and drinking from the carton. When he turns around, he sees me in the blue
glow of the refrigerator light. “You’re sitting in the dark,” he says.
He puts the carton down on the counter and comes to sit on the other end of the couch. He flicks on a lamp, and I wince at the sudden brightness.
“I thought maybe you left.”
At that, a laugh barks out of me. “Where would I go?” Finn nods. “Yeah. Well.”
I look down at my hands, curled in my lap like they do not belong to me. “Did you … do you want me to leave?”
“What makes you think I’d want that?” Finn seems honestly shocked. “Well,” I say. “You were pretty pissed off. You have every right to be.”
And I’m not paying any rent right now, I think. “Diana? Are you happy?”
My gaze flies to his. “What?”
“I don’t know. You just seem … restless.” “It’s a pandemic,” I say. “Everyone’s restless.”
He hesitates. “Maybe that’s not the right word. Maybe it’s more trapped.” He looks away from me, worrying the seam of the couch. “Do you still want this? Us?”
“Why would you ask that?” I choose those words carefully, so that I don’t have to lie, so that he can interpret them however he wants.
Reassured, Finn sighs. “I shouldn’t have yelled at you,” he says. “I’m really sorry about your mother.”
“I’m sorry I contaminated you.”
The corner of his mouth tips up. “I needed a vacation anyway,” he says.
Two days later, my mother is actively dying. You would think that FaceTiming her while she was unconscious would be old hat, after all the energy I expended on her while I was a child and receiving nothing in return. Instead, I only feel silly. A staff member holds up the iPad near her bed and pretends she isn’t listening. I stare at my mother’s sedated body, curled like a fiddlehead under the covers, and try to find things to talk about. Finn tells me it’s important to talk to her, and that even if I think she can’t hear me, on some level, she can.
He’s right. The message might be garbled, but it will get through. My voice might be a breeze in the weather of whatever world she’s in.
Finn sits with me, and when I run out of words, he jumps in and charms with the story of how we met and how he’s teaching me the rules of baseball and that he thinks the apartment is haunted.
The last thing I say during our call is that it’s okay for her to leave, if she has to.
I realize she’s been waiting to hear those words from me her whole life, because less than an hour later, The Greens calls to tell me she has passed away.
I make the necessary arrangements in a strange, detached way—deciding to cremate her body, deciding not to have a funeral. I remember learning, as a child, how the Shinnecock made dugout canoes—by burning out the
middle of a log and carving the insides away. That’s how I feel. Hollow, scraped, raw.
For someone I was angry at for so long, someone I rarely saw—I miss her.
It’s amazing how easily someone can leave your life. It’s standing on a beach and stepping back to see the hole of your footprint subsumed by the
sand and the sea as if it were never there. Grief, it turns out, is a lot like a one-sided video conversation on an iPad. It’s the call with no response, the echo of affection, the shadow cast by love.
But just because you can’t see it anymore doesn’t make it any less real.
The day that we get a message saying my mother’s ashes are ready to be picked up, The New York Times runs her obituary in their Covid section,
Those We’ve Lost. They talk about her rise as a feature photographer and her Pulitzer Prize. There are quotes from colleagues from The New York
Times and The Boston Globe and the Associated Press, from Steve McCurry and Sir Don McCullin. They call her the greatest female photographer of
the twentieth century.
The very last line of the obituary, however, is not about her art at all.
I take the paper with me into the bedroom, crawling under the covers. I read that sentence, and read it again.
She leaves behind a daughter.
For the first time since I got the call about my mother’s death, I cry.
