She asked whether my brother had called. She’d been holding onto something — she couldn’t name what — and she said, “Is Michael still angry with me?” She hasn’t been able to hold a name for a year and she held his, and she was frightened, and I said, “He called this morning. He’s fine. He’s not angry.” He hadn’t called. He hasn’t called since March. The shop lie is a mercy she can’t be argued out of; that one was for me. I said it because if I’d told her the truth I’d have had to say out loud, in a room with a woman who has no memory, that her two children stopped speaking over how to handle her.
So now I’m running two of them, and only one has a defense. The dementia doctors talk about entering the person’s reality and every support group says the same thing, and I have thirty pages printed out from the Alzheimer’s Association that I’ve reread like scripture at two in the morning. None of it covers inventing a phone call from a living man who could pick up the phone. That’s not stepping into her world. That’s decorating it. And she was calmer afterward, which is the part that scares me — that it worked, that I’m getting good at it, that the distance between comfort and convenience gets thinner every week I do this alone.
I wrote to my brother in September. Not to argue. I told him about the third time, the one where she couldn’t breathe, because he wasn’t there and he’s been litigating a scene he never saw. And I told him what she asked about him. He hasn’t answered. What I want is for him to come and take a Tuesday, any Tuesday, and tell her himself, whatever he decides to say — and then I’d have to lie about one thing instead of two. Until then, Bill’s at the shop. Michael’s fine. She eats her breakfast. I drive home and sit in the car in my own driveway for a while before I go in.
