Chapter 42

Chapter 42 of 56 · 10-minute read

My breath catches. “It’s me, Lauren.”

She looks up at me with confused eyes. “Are y-you my nurse?”

I swallow. The words won’t come out. “No, Mama. I’m your daughter, Lauren.”

My beloved mother blinks at me. No recognition. None.

Finally, her broken voice echoes through the room. “I-I have a daughter?”

And a son, too, I want to tell her, but before I can say a word, she whimpers. She can’t remember me, and she knows she can’t remember me, and it’s upsetting her. It must be a special kind of hell to have a memory that’s just out of reach, much like having a word on the tip of your tongue and not being able to speak it. The mother I knew would never want to live like this.

“I-I don’t remember my name.” The last word drops off but turns instead into a wail.

“Shush, shush. You’re Emma. Emma Hartford.”

“If you say so. I-I don’t remember.”

Choking back tears, I pulse the tiniest of squeezes into her hands. Not so hard as to hurt her, but enough to distract her so that she quiets and gazes back at me. Whatever words can’t convey, the loyalty and dependability in my energy is enough to let her know she’s safe with me.

“Would you like me to tell you about Emma?”

She watches me through watery eyes, then nods almost imperceptibly.

“Emma Shelby was born eighty years ago, deep in the State of Georgia, to two wonderful and loving parents. She grew up on a farm, and the doors of the Baptist Church never opened without her. She loved her church, and that’s where she learned to be selfless. She was a good girl, and as a good girl, she never caused anyone any trouble. That’s how she knew she was good—by her service to others and pleasing people with her selflessness. Her life was one of self-sacrifice and making others happy, even if she had to give up what made her happy. Even if giving up everything she wanted was still not enough. She saw that as her purpose in life: to do for others.”

Brows knitted, she nods a little more strongly. I don’t see any evidence of memory, but I continue.

“When she was still a girl, she wanted to be a doctor. A surgeon, in fact. She thought she could best serve others that way, but young women in this little town didn’t make plans for dreams like that. Not back then. Far more acceptable to become a nurse or teach history or cut hair. She was a product of her time and her community, and she never left home. She always wanted to travel the world and see the Grand Canyon and visit the great cathedrals of Europe, but she never ventured farther than a day’s drive.”

I pause to compose myself. Hanging on my every word, Mama nods again as if trying to connect my story with hers.

“She almost had the chance at a different life,” I continue. “She met her friend’s cousin at a family wedding, and they fell in love. He was a handsome soldier—I’ve seen a black-and-white photograph he gave her of him in uniform. He asked her to wait for him to come home from war and told her to plan their wedding and that he’d show her the world, but he never came back. Missing in action.”

She blinks rapidly. Maybe there’s a memory in there somewhere.

“She was loyal to his memory for a few years, until the official word came that he’d been killed in action. A local boy, Buddy Hartford, had been pursuing her, and against her parents’ warnings, she married him. She may have thought he loved her, or that the love she’d had with her first love was how it would always be, but she settled into a life on a nearby farm with him and had a daughter after many miscarriages and, ten years later, a son.”

I take a deep breath and choose my words carefully. I decide to skip the history of abuse in our family or the beatings all of us suffered.

“Emma was best friends with her children. She did her best to protect them, and they, as they got older, did their best to protect her. Everyone in her little town loved their Miss Emma. She taught Sunday School every week, and baked cookies for the children’s choir practice every Wednesday, and volunteered her time and money at every school event. Every bride-to-be in town sent her a shower invitation whether she knew them or not because she would custom-make luxurious satin and lace pillowcases for them. Every kid with a magazine subscription or calendar to sell to raise money for a band trip or senior trip to the Bahamas knew she would support them.”

With rapt attention, she watches me. I can tell that the story is familiar to her, however much I may tone down the truth of it. I don’t tell her a blissfully happy story, but I do make it truthful enough to be familiar.

She’s always lived in the past or in the future, fretting over long ago slights or worrying about future catastrophes that are 99 percent not likely to happen. This moment of forgetfulness is the paradox of her dementia: for the first time in her life, she lives in the present moment because she doesn’t remember the past and can’t gather her wits enough to think of the future. At least most of the time.

I’m not sure that Priyanka and her staff can give my mom any lasting coping skills—or even that my mom will remember them—but if they can give her some solace, well, I’ll take it.

Her mental abilities have decreased significantly since we rushed her to the emergency room after the sheriff and his deputies showed up to question her. At first, she realized she was losing herself, but no longer. She’s past that stage, and it happened quickly. I feel like I’ve run out of time with her.

I’d come back home, expecting to let old wounds stay covered in the swamp, and she’d refused to take responsibility while expecting me to absolve her for her part in Bobby’s transgressions. I would have been satisfied with nothing more than an apology and the recognition for how my childhood predator had affected my entire life.

No, the opportunity to clean out that old wound and finally allow it to heal in the way I had intended will never come to fruition. All these years, and neither of us has really been able to make peace with it, and then Virgil’s red car triggered her old memories of Bobby. When her mind gets in a particular rut, it stays there sometimes for days or even weeks at a time. She doesn’t remember that she’s talked about it already and so she talks about it three, four, twelve times a day.

I tell her a story of truth and joy and sadness and life in a nutshell, but the story I don’t tell her is the one of generational trauma. I don’t tell her that, a decade ago, I started working on healing my damage after my relationship with Quent and that I advanced to healing my damage from my relationship with my dad. From there, I’ve progressed to trying to heal my relationship with the generations before me and after me so that I don’t become the broken ancestor that she is or that others in my family are.

As a young mother, she poured all of her darkness and fears into me and then into Shelby. She taught us the importance of sacrifice and that we—because she had been robbed of the life she had imagined—should never expect long-lasting happiness. We were taught to manage our expectations in relationships and in life and to be grateful if anyone gave us a second look. We were taught to morph ourselves into what someone else wanted because, as she had learned as a young woman, your lot in life is to accept all the pain that comes your way and bear it with grace as she had always tried to do. She had never said it aloud, but she had always believed that this life is meant for suffering and the worse you suffer, the better it will feel to receive your heavenly reward. She’d build that foundation out of her heritage and her environment, passed down through generations, and passed down to me to pass down to my own children and grandchildren.

It’s a pattern that’s bigger than her, bigger than me. But I do intend to break it.

I may never collect the apology I’ve craved since I was twelve years old or the support I’ve wanted, but the old wound has been opened wide and at least now it stands a chance of stitching itself back together so that it can heal more cleanly. I’d always thought of her as the strongest woman I knew because of the abuse she suffered and could still stand upright, but seeing her weaknesses since returning home and looking at her at my middle age rather than as a child, I finally understand better how and why she failed me.

So many times when I was away at college and planning for my first “big girl job,” I begged her to take Shelby and leave my dad and come live with me so she could have some smidgen of happiness at last, but she’d always said no, and that she had no choice but to stay with my dad. She’d implied that he had something on her and she’d end up in jail and not be able to be with me anyway and that Shelby, not yet a teen, would suffer. She was terrified Daddy would take her baby boy from her if she defied his position as family patriarch. At the time, I couldn’t imagine what criminal secrets she’d kept, but now I have inklings that it had something to do with Bobby.

Dizziness hits me. I release Mama’s hands and grab the cold, metal gurney rail to stay upright.

Another vision.

Again, nothing new. I’m standing in a home, in front of a wood and glass cabinet filled with antiquarian books. In my reflection of the glass, I wear a hood, like a ritual robe, but I can’t see my face in the shadow.

The vision slides into another—the one where I’m somewhere in the nursing home in the corridor adjacent to Virgil’s office. I’m alone and running, but someone’s there coming after me.

Then finally the visions mutate into me sitting by Mama’s bedside, her looking very much like she does now. Maybe a little worse. She’s barely breathing, but she opens her eyes and they grow wide.

“Behind you!” she mouths.

No. No, not this again! Why am I still having these visions? Why now when it may be my last chance to talk to my mom?

Hear me, ye Old Gods, I pray once again. If I never ask anything of You again, please give me this one last conversation with my mom. Please give her the lucidity to⁠—

“Lauren?”

My ears prick up at the sound of Mama’s voice, barely above a murmur.

Clearing her throat twice, she opens her eyes wide and surveys the hallway, as if she’s just come out of a trance. Then her gaze settles on my face, and she stares intently at me. She seems confused, but less than usual, or at least less than the usual of the past few months. She grimaces, fear lacing her eyes.

I scoop her hands up in mine. “I’m here, Mama.” I kiss her forehead. She blinks again and smiles before her expression turns again to fear.

“B-Bobby,” she whimpers. “D-don’t let him get me!”

“Uh, what?”

“Bobby,” she mewls more urgently. She clasps my hand and bounces it beside her on the thin mattress. She strains to peer beyond my shoulder. “He’s behind you. Over there against the wall. Just watching me.”

I whip around, my heart racing as I search desperately for a sign of him. I don’t see Bobby. Nor do I see his energy. There’s nothing physical to indicate his presence, yet the air is electric with an energy that I haven’t felt since I was a child.

Is she visualizing things that comfort or frighten her? Or is Bobby really there? Or both?

Mama squeezes my hand even harder this time. “Don’t let Bobby get me!”

Inhaling sharply, I steady myself. It’s probably nothing else that she could say to me that would make me understand her terror. I’d been eleven, then twelve years old, and how many times had I pleaded with her, “Mama, don’t let Uncle Bobby get me!”

But just because she failed me, doesn’t mean that I’ll fail her.

“You’re safe here. Mama, I won’t let him get you. I promise. Bobby’s dead.”

“I know,” she wails. “And he’s haunting me for what I did!”

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