Over the years, my mother had become a beloved resident; she was charming, and easy to be with, and skillful at coaxing people from sedentary spaces to gather together for evening activities. She could also sing at a piano, and there was a dingy brown one with tobacco-stained keys just like a person’s teeth wedged in the main room’s corner. No one knew where the piano had come from; its tone was resonant and full, but the high D was broken, and she would supply the real high D when the tall older man with the cracked knuckles would sit on the bench and play Christmas carols at any time of year. This room was usually where my aunt and I found her at our visits, and that particular one, as I walked toward the main living room area by myself, heart tripping, palms damp, passing the open window screens that let in the perfume of squashed summer fruits and flowers, the fecund abundance of August in northern Oregon, that was exactly what she was doing.
She sat close to the piano player on the wooden bench, a colorful scarf wrapped around her shoulders, her auburn hair combed and thickly wavy. He was finishing up “Sleigh Bells,” and as I quietly approached the room, they started in on the opening notes of “My Funny Valentine,” which had always been one of her favorites. What a wash of sensation I found in those notes, in a song she had sometimes murmured to me at bedtime. The pianist played with confidence, clearly someone who had been accompanying singers all his life, and though I had seen him many times before, I still did not know if he was a resident, or a visitor, or staff. My mother’s throaty alto took ahold of the song, and once I reached the edge of the doorway, I stopped, leaning as softly as I could against the wall to listen, far enough back so that I would not yet influence the room.
I knew this room very well. I took first some orientation just by being at the edge of it. It was a shabby room but pretty, lined with old books and vintage furniture, and decorated with faded paintings in ornate golden frames of cliffside seascapes that had all been donated by a resident’s wealthy relative. It had always been my favorite location of the visit. Most of the other residents were in the next room over, sitting in front of the TV, or settled on the rusting loveseats inside the atrium in the middle of the building, heads tilted back to look at an exposed square of sky, but those rooms had always seemed haphazard to me, thrown together without purpose, whereas the shabby room itself had the aura of a decaying European castle, and before I announced my presence to my person of significance inside it, I let its familiarity and broken elegance pour over me. Those paintings had been anchors for me during so many visits before; I doubted any other visitor knew so well the details of those beach scenes and their pails and wave crests and gradations of sunset. Or, perhaps they did. Perhaps many of us, resident and visitor alike, had learned those beach scenes to their core.
“Don’t change a hair for me,” sang my mother, with feeling. The music climbed the scale, and the piano made its thudding plunk for the high D, and her voice supplied a perfectly pitched ringing D against it, and the dissonance between the two seemed a helpful analogy for her state of being, one that seemed to meld and rotate between the broken D and the whole D, forever and ever amen.
She hadn’t seen me yet, but across the room, a nurse working on paperwork at a chipped, engraved teak desk glanced up and gave me a nod.
At some point I must’ve changed my position in the doorframe; the wood creaked and my mother whipped around, crying out, and then ran over to hug me, grasping my shoulders. “How long have you been there?” she asked, her eyes shining with tears. “You made it!” After thanking the pianist, who smiled at her, she pulled me to the side like we were guests at a party, bringing me over to the usual tattered green silk chairs; “Come,” she said, holding my hand in hers, “sit, tell me everything. How was the flight? How was it by yourself?” I gave her the biscotti, and she laughed, peering in the bag. “My sister,” she said, shaking her head. “Thinking of everything.”
It was awkward without my aunt there; we bumped around our sentences as if we’d just met, and when my mother asked again about the flight I told her every detail I could think of, hanging on to the tiny pieces of information like they were stepping-stones between us, which they were, including telling her my drink choice, and information about my seat companion, and how long I had waited for the bus (twenty minutes) while she listened with her large and hungry eyes. At some point her gaze began to move around my face, and she reached out her arms and held me back by the shoulders to look at me more directly. “Aren’t you such a gorgeous young woman?” she said, grasping my arms. “Look at you! Seventeen!”
“Seventeen.”
She complimented my hair, which was in a regular ponytail, and my clothes, which were the navy blue version of the sweatpants and sweatshirts that were my latest response to the pressures of adolescence. It was like she was complimenting the barest fact of my being. I was not a gorgeous teen; gorgeous was not ever the right word for me, but I knew, could feel, the bright light I was bringing her by sitting there.
She wiped her eyes with a tissue. Our last visit had been almost eight months ago. She looked older in the summer sun, the lines around her eyes finer, more plentiful.
My mother told me again how there was a space for me at lunch right next to her, right at her table, and that the food was decent because there was a new cook, a talented woman named Lucy, who maybe we could meet when the meal was over. She talked about her daily routine, how she had been singing all the time, and had started helping with the arrangement of a nightly entertainment schedule, which made her feel more useful, which she appreciated. She talked of her talented friend Edward, who had grown up in the south of India, and who still had lots of family there, and who could sing when no one was listening with a soulful vibrato, which she tried to demonstrate with a heartiness that mortified my teenage self even though no one except the working nurse was in the room. “Edward is the piano player,” she added, nodding at the piano though he had left. She asked more about me, and I spoke first of Vicky, who had developed an interest in the school musical, and had been, at nine years old, a successful helping hand to her teacher in the wings for their production of You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown, and about how Uncle Stan had gotten a new crew job with an action film that might even end up as a series, and how Aunt Minn was working with a new employee at the middle school office who was giving her a hard time by being late every morning. I spoke about my classes, particularly how much I’d liked frog dissection in biology, and how I was starting to collect items from yard sales to resell when I happened to pass by, which I really enjoyed, and maybe was even a little good at, and about my friend Deena, who wore these tiny white faux-leather outfits all the time and who said she preferred my company over any other because I never overshadowed her. My mother made responsive sounds at appropriate times, huhs and aahs, wincing at the Deena statement, making sure to tell me that my appeal was understated but still beautiful, and how she didn’t want anyone to diminish me, and that she thought I would definitely pick objects very well; I explained how it really was a good deal for both me and for Deena, because Deena liked the spotlight, and I did not, and the words moved back and forth between us like some kind of rubber band, a way to keep us linked to one another while we got used to the feeling of being just the two of us together, but it was prelude and overture anyway, because all the while as we spoke, and as I did the filling in, getting the updates out of the way like they were bushes to clear on a trail hike, as the cliffside landscapes around us crashed painterly steel-colored waves onto those pointillated sandy beaches, I could feel, like a hard thing forming within me, what I really wanted to bring up now that I had her alone.
“Mom,” I said. I ran my fingertips over the fraying cloth of the chair seat, where the wood below began to curl into plumes. “There is something I wanted to talk to you about.”
“Anything,” my mother said, taking my hand. “Please, honey. Nothing would make me happier.”
“It is going to sound strange.”
“I’m all about the strangeness,” she said, bobbing her head. “You know that.”
“But I think my mind is okay,” I said.
Her eyes were so intent on mine, so glued. “Listen, Francie. Listen. You are the most stable person I know. You don’t have what I have. Mine was a problem at birth, my mother talked about it from birth! You know they bumped me on the table, right? You were such a capable baby. You crawled at seven months old. It was amazing. I’m sure you’re okay.”
Then I lost my nerve. I made up some story about a guy I liked at school, in a nonexistent chem class, basing him on the man whom I talked with sometimes at the local library who was at least ten years older, likely gay, and had a way of crunching the hair on his head while searching for books that I found appealing. She went on for twenty minutes about birth control, and once back in Burbank, I received several letters in envelopes half-licked containing stuffed pages of articles about different brands of condoms, miraculously delivered by the mail carrier. We veered in the conversation and talked more about Edward, and the entertainment schedule, and when a breeze swelled through the window screen, she pulled her scarf more closely around her shoulders, a giant paisley patterned piece of cloth she said she’d gotten as a gift from Aunt Minn. “Will you take a photo to show her?” she asked, and we asked the nurse, who took many: of her, of me, of her and me, of both of us wrapped in the scarf together, and when we were done and back in the same green silk chairs, and I perceived another opening in the conversation, I tried again.
“When you smashed your hand,” I said, squeezing her good one, beneath the oil-shaped cliffs, to the sound of silverware clattering and the wheeling of the table-setting cart as the staff prepared lunch in the dining area, “I went to stay two nights with the babysitter before I took the train to Aunt Minnie and Uncle Stan’s.”
“God bless that babysitter,” my mother said. “She saved me. I was barely able to think then, Francie. Did you know? I was tied to the bed. All I did was yell about seeing you.”
“And she had a lamp in her living room,” I said. “Of butterflies.”
“How lovely,” my mother said, nodding and nodding. Her eyes were damp, and she seemed to want to affirm everything before it even left my mouth. “I always loved her jewelry. She seemed very thoughtful with her selections.”
“On the morning I was leaving, I saw something.”
“Okay.”
“It was a butterfly,” I said.
“Yes,” she said, pressing my hand. “How pretty that sounds. A lamp of butterflies.”
“Except this was a real butterfly,” I said. “It had fallen into a glass of water.”
Her eyes, still so focused on mine. In the background, the same man with the knuckles and vibrato, Edward, had returned to the piano to play some light medleys, and I vaguely recognized a classic rock song about taking off a load. There was some stirring outside the living room area as residents rose from their seats to walk to the dining room, toward the growing aroma of what smelled like chili. My mother was blinking at me, with her warm doggish eyes, and broken lashes, one bent and high on her cheek, her coarse and generous beauty, and her throat rose and fell with a swallow and I could see, suddenly, obviously, how wrong it was to tell her. I had, for years, taken that care to avoid telling Aunt Minn anything about the butterfly, or the beetle, not wanting to burden her, or frighten her, but wasn’t it far worse to choose the person whose lines between mind and world were already frail?
“How sad,” my mother said.
“Yes,” I said. “It was dead.”
“How sad,” she said again, and her gaze began to scatter.
“It was the same color and pattern as the ones on the lampshade,” I said, pushing on anyway. “And, it was floating in the water, directly below the lampshade.”
“My goodness.”
“And the babysitter’s windows were closed.”
“What a clever butterfly, wasn’t it, to find a small space to fly in.”
“I did not see any small spaces.”
“Portland is known for its butterflies.”
“The coloring was just like the ones on the lamp,” I said. “Exactly.”
“There were real butterflies on the lamp?”
“No. There were pictures of butterflies on the lamp.”
“It was a picture floating in the water?”
“No. It was a real butterfly floating in the water glass.”
She tugged at the scarf to wrap it around herself more tightly. It was really an enormous scarf, nearly the size of a twin bedsheet. I had no idea where my aunt had found it.
“What a very odd coincidence,” she said, brightly. “What did the babysitter say?”
“I didn’t show her.”
She shifted in her chair.
“Why not then? Why not show her?”
“I don’t know,” I said.
“Did you take a picture?”
“No.”
“Do you have it here?”
“I drank it,” I said.
“This was how many years ago? You didn’t show Shrina?”
“No,” I said. “I swallowed it down with the glass of water, and then she took me to the train.”
“Who else did you tell?”
“You are the first person I’m telling.”
It was like lightly unhooking a necklace, the one that held her thinking together. I couldn’t seem to stop myself. And she wasn’t the first I had told, not at all; I had told Vicky the whole story of spotting and drinking the butterfly in the water glass many, many times over. I had shown Vicky the beetle from my purple knapsack when she was four years old, in a beam of sunlight in her room, like a talisman dredged from the river of a dreamworld. Months before this visit, I had even told a random and handsome young man at a long bus stop wait one afternoon about how that same dead beetle had first been on a paper, and then had rested on my palms on the train, telling the story slowly, in a spooky voice, before we headed over the hill into Hollywood to attend a Halloween parade. He had listened with focused eyes, tilting in, tapping his knee, and had he not terrified me with his attentiveness, I might have walked to the parade alongside, and told him more. But for whatever reason, that day, I wanted to amplify a pressure on my mother, and I wanted her to think it was all hers, and as soon as I had her alone I couldn’t help myself. I paused in my chair. The storm clouds in the painting glowed with a steely intensity. My mother pulled the scarf around her body even tighter, as she had done with the excess crocheted July blankets years earlier, always wrapping herself in things, swaddling herself, and then, as she waited for me to continue, she somehow began inching her wrapped tight body up the high back of the green chair.
“I’m sorry to bother you,” I said. “Maybe I shouldn’t have said anything—”
“Of course you should tell me,” my mother said, rising up the back of the chair.
“Mom?” I said.
“I’m honored,” she said, edging her body higher as if it was the only possible exit from the conversation.
“Are you okay? Nurse?” I said.
“I—” my mother said.
“Nurse!” I said, and my mother bent herself over the back of the chair and tipped her whole body over. She fell to the floor and banged her shoulder and the side of her head as I rushed around, and the nurse across the room who was still doing paperwork at the same teak desk ran over. We helped my mother up and she wasn’t bleeding, just dazed, a little shaken, and when the nurse asked what happened, what was wrong, my mother said nothing, nothing, but her hands now emerging from the wrap of the scarf were beginning to spring around in that rabbity way I knew so well but hadn’t seen in years. “Stay back,” the nurse told me, harsh, and she helped my mother to her feet and let my mother lean hard on her arm and led her to the room she shared with someone else, someone powerfully old, so faded and bony she barely registered in the blankets. I asked if I should still stay for lunch, if my mother was going to be able to have lunch, or what I should do, and the nurse shook her head, not looking at me, mumbling something to the floor, about how lunch wasn’t going to happen; she asked me not to go too close to say goodbye, but just to wave from the doorway supervised as my mother lay tucked in bed with her hair spread over the pillow like a child from another century. My mother had a glass of water at her bedside with a pill bottle, a framed school photo of me, and a classic lampshade of pure white, and I—waving from the doorway, shaking with guilt and meanness and now a desperate desire to leave, still felt a great pitch of relief that the only thing that could fall into her water off her lampshade would be white light, the emptiness of white light. “I’m so sorry,” I told a different nurse, who walked me past the dining hall with its clinking of forks and light chatter, out to the front of the facility where she stood with me on the brick steps looking at the full speckled world, humid and touched with purple and orange, bounty from the months of rain. “She’ll be okay,” said the nurse, “we’ll take good care of her. When’s your flight?” “Not for four hours,” I said. “I—” “Honey,” said the nurse, gently, patting my shoulder, “go early.”