Maya, swinging her legs under the table, said, "Can we come here every year?" And Tess said, "Yes," and Diana reached across the table and covered Tess's hand with her own, and this time Tess didn't pull away. This time she turned her hand over and held on.
Chapter 19
Before I Forget
The decline came the way Dr. Lim said it would: not as a slope but as stairs. Long plateaus where Diana was herself β thinner, slower, but herself β and then a step down, sudden and irreversible, and a new plateau lower than the last. By December, Tess stopped being able to predict which mother would answer the phone.
"She's asking for the video thing," Jo Park said one afternoon, catching Tess in the hallway between traumas. "She says she wants to record messages for Maya. Before β" Jo didn't finish. She didn't need to.
Tess bought a small camera, the simple kind with one button. They set it up in Diana's room on a Sunday, Maya perched on the bed beside her grandmother, swinging her legs, self-conscious and game. Diana had written notes on index cards in her careful handwriting, the letters getting shakier down the stack. For Maya's first day of middle school. For when she plays her first concert. For when she's sad and I'm not there.
They recorded fourteen videos. Diana forgot the camera was on twice and told Maya about the scar on her knee from 1978. She cried once, apologized, kept going. On the last one she looked straight into the lens and said, "I was not there for your mother's whole life, and that is my great sorrow. But I am here for yours, even when you can't see me. Love is not a place, Maya. It doesn't leave when the person does."
That night, alone, Tess watched the first video twice. Diana, smaller than Tess remembered her, looking into the lens: "For your first day of middle school β you'll be nervous, and that's all right. I was nervous every first day of my life." Tess cried, and then she labeled the files, dated them, and backed them up twice. Some things you only get one chance to keep.
Tess had to leave the room for that one. She stood in the hallway with her forehead against the cool wall and listened to her mother's voice through the door, and thought of all the years of silence, and how strange it was that the woman who'd had nothing to say for twenty-seven years now couldn't stop saying it.
In January, Tess moved Diana to the memory-care cottage.
It was ten minutes from Tess's house in Portland β a small place, six residents, a garden with raised beds and a bird feeder, staff who knew everyone's name and everyone's song. Tess had toured four facilities and hated three of them on sight: the smell, the television always on, the residents parked in hallways like luggage. The cottage had a piano nobody played well and a cook named Rosa who made soup from scratch. Diana sat in the garden on the tour and watched a chickadee at the feeder for ten minutes without speaking, and then said, "This one."
It was paid for, in full, for as long as Diana needed it, from Diana's twenty-seven years of savings. Tess had argued β or tried to. Diana, on a clear day in November, had laid it out with the old steel: waitressing money, cleaning money, every dollar she'd ever earned under three different names, banked and never spent, because she'd always known she'd need it for exactly this. "I saved it for you," she'd said. "For whatever you needed. This is what I need." There was no arguing with that. Tess signed the papers and cried in the parking lot and told no one.
The bad night came in February.
Tess's phone rang at 2:14 a.m. β the cottage, a night aide named Nadia, calm and professional: Diana was awake, agitated, didn't know where she was, asking for her mother. "She's asking for someone named Tessie," Nadia said. "We thought β"
"I'm coming," Tess said.
She drove through empty streets with the heat blasting and her scrubs thrown over her pajamas. Diana was in the common room, wrapped in a blanket, staring at the dark garden. When Tess sat beside her, Diana flinched.
"Who are you?" she said. Not unkind. Just β gone.
Tess's throat closed. All the stairs, all the plateaus, and this was the step she'd been dreading: the night her mother looked at her and saw a stranger.
"It's Tess," she said. "I'm a nurse. I'm going to sit with you for a while. Is that all right?"
Diana studied her, then nodded and looked back at the window. "I'm waiting for my daughter," she said. "She's nine. She's at the station. I have to go get her."
Tess sat very still. Then she reached into her bag β she carried them now, all eleven, in a zippered pouch, the way other people carried medications β and took out the first letter. The paper was soft from handling.
"Can I read to you?" Tess asked.
Diana nodded.
Tess read. Her voice was low and steady, the voice she used for frightened patients at 3 a.m. She read the letter from Reno, 2001: You are eleven today. I lit a candle in a diner... She read the one from 2004: They told me the warrant was recalled. I am still afraid to come... Diana listened with her blanket pulled to her chin, her eyes on the dark garden, and gradually the agitation left her body, the way sedation takes hold β slowly, then all at once.
Halfway through the third letter, Diana turned and looked at Tess. Really looked. The fog thinned, just for a moment, just a crack of light.
"My Tessie," she whispered.
Tess's breath stopped. "I'm here, Mom."
Diana smiled β small, certain β and closed her eyes, and slept. Tess kept reading until the letter was done, to the sleeping woman, to the garden, to no one. Then she sat in the dark common room with her mother's head heavy against her shoulder, and wept quietly, the way she'd wept at a hundred bedsides for other people's grief, except this was hers.