The night caregiver with acne—Brandon, Julia Merchant remembered—pushed past her without a glance as she opened the door. Then three sets of eyes turned to stare at her. Two black women in burgundy Park Manor polo shirts strained the cane bottom chairs in front of Constance Hodges.
Hodges stood and addressed the two women. “Maybelle and Josie, I think we’re done here, and I know you must be eager to get home.”
Julia watched the caregivers lumber out. Then Hodges came around her desk and grasped Julia’s arm. “I’m so sorry for your loss, Julia.”
“Thank you,” Julia responded mechanically.
“I wasn’t expecting to see you till four. Your father said—”
“Yes, well, I can’t live my life on my father’s timetable. Maybe he doesn’t want to see my mother before they take her away, but I do.”
Hodges smiled tightly. “Of course. Shall I take you up right now?”
“I know the way, Constance.” As soon as the words were out, Julia knew they had been too curt and that she would be offended. Constance did not exactly see herself as staff. She seemed to think that she and Julia were peers, that they had something approaching a friendship. She stared into Constance’s piercing, yellow-brown eyes. Those eyes looked otherworldly. Had her father ever fucked this woman? Did that explain why the director felt entitled to act like her stand-in mother? She certainly wasn’t unattractive, but she was at least a decade too old to be in her father’s sweet spot. No, he hadn’t fucked her, she decided. Although he might have thought about it, and he might have channeled enough charm in her direction to make her think he wanted to or to make her wish he would. But no. She forced a conciliatory smile. “Thank you. I just want to be alone with her for a few moments. I’m sure you understand.”
“Of course. Of course.”
Julia turned toward the door. “I’ll speak to you this afternoon when I come back with my father.”
She rode the elevator up and made her way to her mother’s suite. The lamps were off in her mother’s bedroom, and Julia did not turn them on. In the grainy half-light that breached the curtains’ barriers, she could just make out her mother’s body lying on the bed under a blanket, her head on a pillow.
Julia sat on the edge of the bed and placed a palm tentatively over her mother’s hand. She had never touched a dead body before. Her mother’s skin had the cool, irregular texture of leather upholstery. Julia pressed harder, trying to find any warmth that remained below the uninviting surface, but there was none. She fought the overwhelming impulse to let go of the lifeless extremity. Instead, she gripped it with maniacal strength.
What should she do now? What was the right thing to do? Say a prayer? Whisper last words of love and gratitude? Enumerate all the details she would never forget about her mother? Try to connect with whatever metaphysical energy lingered here in this last space where her mother had breathed? Julia stretched out on the mattress next to her mother’s body. With her face inches from her mother’s, she listened to the silence. She sensed no energy in this room. She moved a little closer. She remembered the one time her mother had crawled into bed with her when she was a child and had trouble sleeping. And then she suddenly knew how to make this moment sacred and memorable. The knowledge came in the form of lyrics her mother had sung to her on that occasion, and she whispered them now. You are my sunshine, my only sunshine. You make me happy when skies are gray. You’ll never know dear how much I love you. Please don’t take my sunshine away.
She shut her eyes. She wasn’t sure how long she stayed there, but when she finally sat up, she thought she might have slept for a moment or two. When she stood, her body felt insubstantial, as if her cells had seeped through the confines of her flesh and mingled with the grainy light filtering in.
She brushed the wrinkles out of her skirt and blew her nose with a Kleenex from the box next to the bed. She opened the drawer of her mother’s bedside table and looked inside. She closed it and turned to the photos in the windowsill—her mother as a twenty-three-year-old dancer in the Martha Graham Company, her mother as Velma Kelly in Chicago, her mother with Larry Hirschhorn, who had cast her in Vegas Nights. In the last two years, all these memories had evaporated from her mother’s brain, and now her mother’s entire narrative was just a fable encoded into Julia’s brain. And how long would her memories last, she wondered.
She scooped up the photos and tucked them into her shoulder bag. And then she unplugged the sleek digital alarm clock next to the photos, stuffed that into her handbag as well, and left Park Manor.