3.

Life in the house was organized by Sunday-to-Saturday pill containers and the old oven clock.

They watched icicles form, watched with wonder the slow falling of the snow, the slow rise of the surface of the snow. It was constant. Only the midsections of trees were exposed, branches moving up like veins. They watched the snow-shapes of deck furniture, foreign objects, the summer gone out of them. The pie tins on the garden gate no longer clanged their innocent percussion. They were buried now too. There were no more animal tracks.

In the bath, Elsa’s body was so small. She seemed to take up less and less space in the world, the house. And the house, after a snowbound week, seemed to shrink along with her mother. She could swear the walk from Elsa’s bedroom to the toilet took fewer steps.

They had enough wood to last the week, but the fire wasn’t keeping them warm enough. The heater wasn’t working, or it was functioning but not penetrating their skin. Elsa was crying. Claire got down every blanket they had from every closet in the house and piled them all on Elsa and herself. On the couch, Claire held her under the heavy pile, the heaviness like another body on top of them. Elsa laughed through her tears, thought it was a game. She shivered in Claire’s arms.

The cold snap. Black shapes brimmed from tree trunks, spying on them. The women rubbed their eyes until they were raw.

Michael came to check on them the fifth day of the storm, walking all the way from town in high-tech snowshoes. His visits were no longer an indication of time; he’d been stopping by less, and she suspected it wasn’t due only to the weather.

“We have a handle on things here,” she said. He stood there in the cold on the porch, the wind roughing up his hair. He wouldn’t budge. “Come in, please,” Claire said, more warmly.

“No, I better say what I have to say right here.” Behind him was a blank white canvas of sky, no trees or neighbors’ fences were visible, no depth at all.

She put on a stern voice. “I won’t let the heat out like this. You can stand there and talk to me through a closed door, or you can come inside.”

He stepped in scornfully, tracking snow into the house. He barely moved out of the way enough for Claire to close the door, which put up a fight against the wind. When she turned, he was very close, and they stood together in silence. His features cast shadows over his face, and the light was too dim to understand what his mouth was doing.

“Are you all right?” Claire said.

He looked down at his open palms. “I’m taking on—patients,” half his words also swallowed by his shadow.

“What?” she said, leaning in closer.

He looked into her face. “I’m taking on too many patients. I’m going to have to quit you. I’m sorry. Another respite nurse will take my place.”

“Oh.” Claire looked toward the kitchen. “Would you like to stay for dinner?”

“Unless you want me.”

“What?”

“Unless you want me to stay on.”

Claire kept her eyes on the kitchen. “I understand,” she said, nodding. “Maybe it’s…” She didn’t know how to finish the sentence. Maybe it’s for the best? Maybe it’s a terrible idea, I need you, please don’t go? “Please stay for dinner,” Claire said.

He shook his head, ironed out his posture and said, “You’ll be fine.” Then he slipped out into the cold as if it were not cold to him at all, walking always through a different weather system than she.

———

Elsa was not the only one outside of time. The days fell into one another. Claire wasn’t sure if Michael’s visit was the same day Elsa messed the bed or the day before. There was nothing to look forward to and Claire accepted this with something like relief.

Sometimes Claire stared out the window at the snow for so long she lost herself, her mind burrowed into the snow, and she’d forget to give Elsa her medication on time. All this snow made it possible to feel that many things and nothing were happening all at once. That somewhere, right now, even right here, people were coming and going, falling in love or dying. When she retrieved herself, she didn’t know where the time had gone. What was she thinking of for so many hours? It frightened her not to know.

Marlene Dietrich sang softly even when the record had stopped. On the quietest days, Claire heard music in machines. In the washer, there was a soothing sequence of minor notes. Her mind felt loose. At times, she felt she was looking for her madness in the house, that she’d find it like a long-lost wedding ring under the cushions or held tight in Elsa’s clenched fist. At times she thought, stupidly, and for the briefest of moments, that she had caught Elsa’s dementia. And then she’d laugh the thought away. If she could question it, she told herself, it was not so.

Elsa was born in 1904. She was made an adult at sixteen, when her mother was hurt on the boat coming to America, 1920. Other than these dates, Elsa’s tracks had been covered up. Papers buried under snow.

Claire rummaged through the attic. She found diaries written in German and a few in English, a set of old watercolors (Claire never knew her mother had an artistic bone in her body), and boxes of photographs, warped and yellowed. She brought the best-preserved of the photos downstairs to show Elsa, tried to get her to reminisce, though it was hard to find a time Elsa was alert for long enough. She kept her eyes closed most of the day, drew a curtain, shut out the world, and Claire.

Claire began teaching herself German from an old beginner’s reader she found in the attic. She paced around the living room with the book held up in front of her face. Elsa listened to her practice, eyes closed, nodding as if in agreement to Claire’s butchered request to please pass the salt, or her overly formal greetings to imaginary Felix. Eventually, Elsa might revert back to her childhood language, Michael had said. Studying made the nights go by more quickly, anyway, when she stayed awake to stop Elsa from wandering.

She used her mother’s diaries to practice German as well. The few pages she could translate weren’t how Claire remembered things at all. One entry, written when Claire returned home for a visit, seemed a blatant lie, as if Elsa had wished to warp her future memory. It made Claire worry some for her own.

She read about the hospital in the local paper. A feature piece about the closure and dispute over landmark status. For now, it was closed for safety renovations. She read the article to Elsa once, and to herself twice more: the asylum where her grandmother had lived was being shut down.

Claire asked if Elsa remembered her mother.

“Of course I do,” Elsa said angrily. “She was mean and pompous and never home, always out at the opera. She slapped me.”

“She slapped you? Why?”

“When I was fifteen. For being with a sailor. I never told you about him? Very handsome. Your grandmother was jealous more than anything. That was long before I met your father.”

It was the most expressive Elsa had been in weeks. Claire wanted to encourage her on. “Do you remember visiting her in the hospital with me?” Claire asked.

“She was never in any hospital,” Elsa said in an accusatory tone.

Claire nodded. “All right,” she said.

She read the article again, standing alone in the kitchen. Then she threw it in the bin. It wasn’t as if she’d expected them to consult her first. But hadn’t she always planned to go back? To see it once more?

She lifted the paper from the bin.

She’d never asked her mother questions when she could have, always so self-absorbed. Now their history was lost. Now Elsa’s organs were tittering away, having a laugh with one another. Calling out who will go first, glistening at the ends of the snipped gold threads that had once connected her body to her mind.

It didn’t matter if what her mother had said was true or not, the sailor or the slap or the hospital. If that’s what was in her mind, if that was what tormented her, then it was true enough.

That night, Claire went out to her car and brought the painting inside. She hammered two nails into her bedroom wall, but she couldn’t bring herself to hang it.

She’d located the painting with the help of that man, Nicolette’s subject. It was being sold at auction, too much to bid on. The only person she knew who could afford to help was Freddie. And he did so quite willingly, a gesture of peace—after which he’d tried to sleep with Claire as compensation, his new wife at home all the while, unsuspecting.

Here she was, standing in the living room, the painting propped up against her so her mother could see.

The last time she’d shown the painting in confidence, it had been stolen from her. This time, Claire didn’t give an explanation. But, for a moment, when her mother’s eyes fluttered then steadied, Elsa seemed to understand the weight of it. That in front of her were two possibilities of Claire. Briefly, Elsa’s eyes contained all those missing years. And Claire saw that Elsa had also stood on a roof, or a bridge, and made a decision.

It is important to be known.

Elsa raised her hand in a strange gesture, above her lap, waiting. Claire laid the painting on the floor, then kneeled and rested her head in her mother’s lap. Elsa’s hand was warm and weightless on Claire’s head.

“I have a question,” Elsa said.

Claire held back her tears. “What is it?”

“I have a question,” Elsa said again, more slowly.

“Ask me.”

And Elsa said, “I have decided it’s time. I would like you to help me.”

Claire sat up and looked into Elsa’s face. Her mother’s eyes were fixed and present. “What do you mean?” Claire asked, though she knew very well what she meant.

“I would like you to help me—”

“I don’t know what you mean,” Claire interrupted her. “You aren’t making any sense.”

Elsa paused. “This is not right,” she said. “We can stop it.”

Still kneeling, Claire took her mother’s shoulders in her hands. If she were looking at herself, she would have begged someone to shoot that woman.

Elsa attempted to turn away but Claire held on. “No,” she said.

Elsa closed her eyes in acceptance or defiance, Claire didn’t know which. Once again, Claire rested her head on her mother’s lap, and Elsa replaced her hand on Claire’s hair.

“You have plenty of good years left,” Claire said.

“How long are you staying?” Elsa said after a moment.

“As long as you need me.”

When Claire was out, only briefly, returning the painting to the trunk of the car, Elsa spread all the food from the refrigerator across the living room floor. Claire gaped speechlessly at the mess. Elsa looked up at her and asked, “How long are you staying?”

She would not, or could not, stop asking the question. Three times a day, five times, Elsa asked, “How long are you staying?” And Claire replied, “As long as you need me.”

Then one day, Elsa didn’t want berries and yogurt anymore. If she spoke at all, she found new names for everyday objects. Books were stacks. Linens became rubber. The new nurse, a frumpy woman with a tattoo of a kitten on her neck, said, “Each day is the new normal.”

Claire took the nurse aside and asked what kind of options one had in the later stages of Alzheimer’s.

“What do you mean?” the nurse asked.

“I only mean, are there any options to,” Claire coughed. “Opt out?”

“You mean suicide.”

“I mean options.”

“Not in this state. People do it, but people also steal and cheat. It’s illegal.”

“So you’re saying her only choice is to rot away for decades?” Claire said.

“Did Elsa say something to you?”

“No.”

“I can help you talk to her. It’s hard to discuss what happens next.”

“I was only curious,” Claire said.

The nurse gave her an aggrieved glance, but at least she never mentioned nails protruding from the bedroom walls.

Blackberry winter. Dogwood winter. The snow wouldn’t let up. Nothing was thawing like it was supposed to.

Elsa was listening to Marlene Dietrich on the record player again. Sag’ mir, wo die Blumen sind. Dozing beneath a mountain of blankets. Elsa the volcano, hibernating. In the kitchen, Claire was sweeping up another dinnertime spill when she noticed something was missing and hurried to the living room: the record had stopped and was spinning static. Claire had hardly heard the song at all until it was gone. Elsa sat stiff and pale, no longer shuffling her feet as she often did. Did a shadow pass over her then?

“Who’s talking?” Elsa said. “Is that Ernest?” She was staring to her left, just below the window at the dark screen. “What’s that he said? That’s not Ernest. There’s a man there. Make him stop. Make him go away.”

Claire moved to the record player and replaced the needle. She turned on the small lamp beside it. “Did it stop?” she asked.

Elsa’s gaze froze on her. “You dirty devil! Dirty gay! Nazi!”

Claire walked across the room, opened the door to the side porch, and stepped out into the snow, shivering uncontrollably. The snow was everywhere. The snow was snow. It was her mother. It was the sea.

It was the disease talking, not Elsa. This was the mantra Michael taught her. It was the disease, not the person, that Claire was hurt by, angry at. Unless, of course, Elsa knew Claire better than ever now; unless Elsa saw her as the devil for keeping her alive.

The snow rushed in as Claire closed the door. The house was a mad snow globe. Claire sat down on the couch, beside Elsa in her armchair. She touched Elsa’s arm, her rubbery skin. Her mother flinched. “I know it’s scary,” she said. Claire handed her the stack of towels to fold, and Elsa seemed to forget what frightened her.