Chapter 10
He turns his back to me and stares out into the distance at his mom’s grave. Catching his bottom lip between his teeth, he glances back at me as if he realizes he’s said too much. A single curse word forms on his lips, but he doesn’t say it aloud.
“Virgil! What are you talking about? My mom’s never had a stroke. She’s a little forgetful, but her doctor says she’s the healthiest eighty-year-old he’s ever seen.”
Virgil doesn’t look at me. “According to her.”
A sinking feeling washes over me. I can’t breathe. I press my fist against my chest.
Of course, according to her. I’ve been taking her word for it that she was passing along the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth to me about her health. I may have her health power of attorney, but I’ve not needed to use it. Yet.
I haven’t been around since the week between Christmas and New Year’s, and I’ve neither taken her to an appointment nor talked to her physician. She’s always been careful not to give any of her medical practitioners’ permission to discuss private matters with anyone else, me included. She’s from that generation that always talks about their aches and pains but keeps things private from family members who could benefit from knowing. How many times have I had invasive medical tests and shared the results with her, only to learn that the condition runs in the family and she herself has it?
“I’m sorry Laurie.” Shaking his head, Virgil looks down at his work boots and kicks at a tree root. “I thought you knew. After the second stroke—”
“Second?” I squeak.
He exhales deeply and shades his eyes as he looks up at the sun-dappled leaves of the mighty oak above us. He refuses to meet my gaze, instead turning to stare off into the distance.
All I can do is sputter. “She’s a little fragile but, at eighty, that’s to be expected. There’s no way she’s had two strokes. She still gets around fine. Just a little slower.”
Finally, he looks at me. One corner of his mouth turns upward, but the sadness in his eyes override his smile. “Technically, I’m not supposed to know. I wouldn’t have said anything if I hadn’t thought you already knew. You know how it is in small towns. People talk, even when they know if they get caught talking, they’ll get fired or sued. Rumor has it that she had her first stroke the day after your last visit, and she refused to allow anyone at her doctor’s office to call you. I thought it was just small-town gossip, so I ignored it at first, but then I saw it firsthand. It must take Herculean effort for her to hold herself together so you don’t see what she’s hiding. To an outsider, she looks perfectly healthy for her age. The strokes haven’t affected her body at all from what anyone who doesn’t know her well can tell. From what I’ve seen in the nursing home? She could easily live another ten years. Maybe fifteen.”
But an outsider can’t tell it. That’s me. I’m an outsider.
“I-I can’t tell any difference.” I hate to admit it. She’s the same as she’s always been though for the past year, she’s been under considerably more stress with my dad’s health, then his death. Maybe it would have been more obvious if she’d been left to her own devices to handle her bills and taxes, but since Daddy died, I’ve taken care of all her finances and all the stressful matters, even on top of all my own stress.
“You’ve been home literally one day. The more you’re around her, Laurie, the more you’ll notice because she won’t be able to keep up the façade. It takes a lot of effort to hide these things, and eventually she won’t be able to. For now, she has coping mechanisms, but those won’t last much longer. Her long-term memory is still fine, as you could probably tell last night when she was regaling us with stories about her high school sweetheart who never came home from war, so she married your dad instead. It’s her short-term memory that’s shot. She can’t remember the conversation she had with you five minutes ago. It may be frustrating to you to be with her, but honestly the biggest danger at the moment is that she accidentally burns down the house because she forgets she left something on the stove.”
A billion scenarios race through my brain. I cross my arms over my chest and rock back on my heels.
He strokes his thumb along the curve of my shoulder and rests his hand there, palm out. “Are you okay?”
I know how I must look to him: pale, confused, wide-eyed, almost hyperventilating. I nod. “Fine, I’m fine.”
“You know, I see a lot of vascular dementia in my volunteer work. Right now, she’s fine. She doesn’t realize that she doesn’t remember. That will change eventually, but for now, I recommend patience when you answer the same question five times in a day because eventually it will be five times or more in an hour. For her, the most frustrating thing is that the second stroke affected her brain and the way she perceives words. She’s not blind, but she can no longer read long passages. It’s a struggle, and she’ll give it up.”
I don’t doubt anything Virgil is saying. It all makes sense now. The weight of this revelation weighs heavily on my shoulders, energetically, flattening me as surely as if I carried a boulder on my back. If there’s anything sadder than my mom’s memory loss, it’s the fact that the strokes have robbed her of her ability to read. She must have ten thousand volumes in her personal library—books stacked vertically and horizontally and double-stacked on every bookcase in the house. One of the last things we talked about before my dad died was that after he passed, she would be all alone on the farm but would spend her time finally getting caught up on her reading after years of being his full-time caregiver with no time for herself.
I turn away from Virgil and backhand the tears. I don’t like for anyone to see me cry. These last few years have been relatively easy and confident, and I can’t remember the last time I cried out of hurt. Not even when Daddy died.
And I just walked out on Mama because she wanted to talk about something in the past that I never want to think about again. Maybe whatever’s happened inside her brain has started those memories from long ago while robbing her of more recent ones.
“Listen,” Virgil says, and gives my shoulder a little shake. “Last night while you and Dix were washing dishes in the kitchen, your mother asked me to do her a favor. To tell you the truth, she’s asked three times in the last week for me to do it, but I need your help.”
I pat my cheeks dry and turn back to him. “Sure. Anything.”
“The first time I visited your mom, she saw my car and went into panic mode. Started talking about swamps and camping trips, which sounded kinda off to me because who would plan a camping trip near a swamp? The favor she’s been asking me is for me to go check out—” He gazes upward as if he is reading the words in the shadows of the limbs above. “To check out ‘where the woods meet the swamp’ and make sure everything looks okay.”
I want him to stop talking. I want to run away. I need him to stop talking. This is too close to the bone. It’s all I can do to keep from running like hell.
“Laurie, most of the wetlands have dried up since we were kids. I don’t know where she’s talking about, so you’ll have to show me.”
“Why would she…?”
My mom wasn’t there that night. She’d been snug at home with my dad and baby brother while Uncle Bobby was pitching his tent and unbuckling his belt and grabbing me by my ears to hold me still. She’d found me later, but only because I was wandering the field, following the same fence line back to the house while Bobby had taken me off the premises in his red car and followed the main highway to the farm to the woods where the bastard had made dirty, horrible plans for an innocent twelve-year-old.
In answer to my question to myself, Virgil shrugs. “I don’t know. She just keeps telling me that something’s buried there and that she needs to know it’s still covered up. Whatever that means.”
Heart thudding in my chest, I focus on the distant house where I walked out on my beloved mother. Panic grips me and I worry endlessly about her well-being, unable to concentrate until I know she is safe, even when I’m angry with her. Fear paralyzes me, and a million possible scenarios race through my mind until I’m ready to collapse from the sheer terror of not knowing what could be happening to her mind that she would be so fixated on Bobby and the swamp. What can I tell her to ease her mind and, at the same time, not awaken my own nightmares?
“If you don’t need to get back to your mom in the next few minutes, why don’t you show me the woods she’s talking about? Dix dropped by to check on her at lunch and take her some barbecue that the school’s marching band is sponsoring today. I asked him to take you both an extra plate for tonight.”
Instead of answering, I stare again across the open field at my mom’s old farmhouse, half-obscured now by the barn.
Virgil follows my gaze. “Looks like her on the back porch, in her big wooden rocker.” He points. “That’s her with a red shawl over her knees, isn’t it?”
My mom has been progressively forgetful for months now, but now that it has been brought to my attention, all I can think of is the possibility of her setting the kitchen on fire while making herself a snack. Or shelling pecans and forgetting to remove all the hulls before making tasty little pies that break teeth.
Virgil must be empathic also because he reads my worries.
“She’s okay right now, Laurie. She doesn’t need a sitter yet. When that time comes, I’ll help you find someone. Promise. I know lots of good sitters in my line of work.”
My throat tightens. All I can do is nod and whisper, “Thank you.”
“You might as well know before you hear it from someone else, but I ran off your cousins, Ranger and Fallon, a couple of weeks ago. Walker may have been with them, but I didn’t see him if he was. Now I know—everybody in this small town knows—that you’ve got a restraining order against your kinfolks on your mom’s behalf, and you’ve got no trespassing signs up on her property, but I caught them sneaking through our neighbors’ property to get to your mom’s. Fallon tried to tell me that your mom had invited her to move in with her and be her full-time sitter and caregiver. I told her I knew better because I knew you were going to be coming back.”
“But Virgil, two weeks ago I hadn’t even considered coming back for a long visit. All the issues that were preventing me from selling my house and moving away were suddenly gone when I got an offer I couldn’t refuse, and we signed papers two days ago. This indefinite stop wasn’t part of my plan; it was just a quick visit before I go to wherever my next adventure takes me—possibly traveling alone around the world to explore sights I used to think I needed a travel companion to see.”
Is he empathic? Psychic? How could he know more about my next direction in life than I did?
He shrugs. “Dix and I have been looking out for her since we got back. Being good neighbors, you know. But your cousins—” he clears his throat— “are fucking vampires. I’ve seen Fallon volunteer as a sitter for the elderly and then rob them blind. I don’t think she has a permanent place to live, and she was planning on taking up residence here. I’ve already had her removed from the legitimate list of sitters that my employer uses or recommends. But she’s one little vampire who doesn’t wait for someone to invite her in.”
Gratitude swells in my heart for both Caine brothers. My mom is passive enough that, with the right kind of manipulation, she actually would invite them in and then complain when they suck her dry.
Maybe I should check out where the woods merge with the swamp and see if it’s the same as I remember and let my cousins follow me there. I make a silent joke of it in my head: I found my way out of the swamp back then, but that doesn’t mean other people can.
I shake off my dark sense of humor. They say that what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger, but in reality, it just gives you really dark coping skills and a twisted sense of humor.
Instead of fighting it, I proclaim, “Let’s go check out some swamp!”
Virgil leads me away from the grandmother oak and to an old all-terrain vehicle that I haven’t seen since I was a teenager. The red paint has faded, but it’s clean except for mud around the four tires. I hadn’t noticed it behind a mound of limbs from the oak. He settles into the driver’s seat and pushes the seat back, all the way against the cargo area where a worn leather backpack is strapped, and then beckons for me to sit between him and the steering wheel. It’s a tight fit, much like it was the days when Shelby and I rode the fence line together to make sure there were no holes that would allow either cows or horses to escape. My mom would send us off on that errand while she sang the cows home in a Southern version of kulning herding calls.
My companion shifts uncomfortably in the seat behind me. I’m a little too aware of his arms on either side of me as he clutches the wheel. He’s definitely grown up since I saw him last. I can’t possibly think of him as a childhood friend because there’s no child left in either of us.
We lurch forward only a few feet before I signal for him to stop. This isn’t going to work, and we both know it.
As soon as he kills the engine, I stand and twist myself around his body until I am seated behind him. Then, as I wrap my arms around his chest clad in a soft T-shirt the color of his eyes, I motion for him to go.
We jostle across the pasture on the four-wheeler, both of us ducking as we go under low hanging limbs of an oak yet to be pruned. The loudness of the motor discourages any chatter between us. All I can do is point toward the distant corner of the field where a barely discernible dirt road leads toward the woods. We hit a bump—probably an abandoned ant hill—that bounces me out of my seat. I come down hard, losing my grip with one hand and hanging on for dear life to Virgil’s chest with the other.
The last time I saw him, he was a snaggle-toothed kid, and I was a girl in a double-A cup who had just gotten her first kiss.
I grab frantically at the edge of my seat for anything to hold onto that’s less dangerous than a grown-ass man who grew up in my absence. I find something solid and hold on tight for a full second before I realize that it’s the carved wooden staff that functions as Virgil’s walking cane.
Death.
Death is all around me. All around him. Virgil.
Before I can withdraw my hand from his cane, the vision unfolds. I notice the smell first. Like the scent of old clothes in a thrift shop or the back of my mom’s closets.
The vision descends over me like a veil.
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