She said she couldn’t confirm or deny that anyone by that name had been a patient. Then she said, in a different voice — slower, the voice of someone choosing words that are technically nothing — that if I were a person whose adult daughter might one day need somewhere to go, the useful thing would be to have it ready before she asked, and to never once say the word leave to her.
She said: they come back seven times on average. She said: the ones who make it out are the ones who had somewhere that didn’t require an explanation. Then she said she had to go, and she said it kindly, and she stayed on the line another twenty seconds saying nothing at all.
So I cleared the back bedroom. I put sheets on the bed and towels in the closet and a spare charger in the drawer and I never mentioned any of it. I stopped asking why she’d missed things. I started saying, every single time we spoke, some version of the same sentence: the room’s made up, no notice needed, no questions. She’d laugh it off. I said it anyway, forty or fifty times, like leaving a porch light on for a person who might not be coming.
She called on the second of February at 11:40 at night. She didn’t say what happened and I didn’t ask and I have still not asked. She had a bag and her dog and no coat in February. I said the coffee’s on, and she cried in my doorway for a long time, and then she slept for fourteen hours.
That was seven months ago. There’s a lawyer now, and an order, and a counselor she sees on Wednesdays that she doesn’t talk to me about. Some weeks she’s furious with me for reasons I’ve stopped trying to follow, and I let her be, because the social worker told me that too without telling me anything. Last week she wore a tank top to my kitchen table and neither of us said a word about it. I made the coffee. She read the paper. It was ninety-one degrees.
