My mother’s caregiver kept a notebook and left it behind when she quit. It was a spiral drugstore notebook containing four years of my mother’s vitals, meals, medications, and notes about what kind of day it had been. But the last eleven pages weren’t about my mother. They were about me—what time I came, what I brought, what I said, all carefully dated. She had stopped writing about the patient sometime in February and started writing about the daughter instead. Nobody had asked her to keep those records.
I read the whole thing twice before I called her. She didn’t deny it. She said she had started keeping the notes because of something she saw in June, something that made her uncomfortable enough to document everything afterward. I asked what she had seen, but she wouldn’t tell me over the phone. Instead, she asked whether I still had the spare key to my mother’s house. When I said yes, she told me to check the bedroom closet before I came to see her.
I went there that evening and opened the closet. Everything looked exactly as I remembered it, except for a small cardboard box pushed behind some old blankets. Inside were receipts, photographs, and several envelopes with my name written on them. None had been mailed, and the dates on them were from the same weeks the caregiver had been writing about me. One photograph showed my mother sitting in her chair while I stood beside her, but there was someone else reflected in the dark window behind us. I couldn’t identify the person, but the caregiver had circled them in red ink.
I called her again and told her I had found the box. She went quiet and finally said she had been afraid to tell me what she knew because she wasn’t sure who she could trust. She said that on the day she started keeping the notebook, she had seen someone enter my mother’s room while I was supposedly the only person in the house. Then she said something that made me look back at the photograph. “The person in the window,” she said, “wasn’t outside.”:::
