Late October leaves spiral down from the willow oaks as I drive cautiously behind Dad’s Buick. I still think of the Buick as Dad’s, though he is one year dead. And I still think of Mother as his wife, though she has no memory of their seventy-two years together. Last week she asked me if she was old enough to have children yet.
In the driver’s seat of the Buick is my sister Claudia. Beside her, Mother is so small that I can see only the top of her head. When we left Claudia’s house a few minutes ago, I strapped the seat belt around Mother and kissed her cheeks, one then the other, as if sending a child on a long journey. In fact, our destination is only a few miles away: the modest house set deep in the pines, where a dark-haired woman and her husband wait for us. We have brought Mother to the house three times now. “Baby steps” is how I think of the Sunday visits. Rehearsals for a day I’d hoped would never come. “What is your mother’s favorite color?” the woman asked me last week. Her Romanian accent is strong, and I had to listen with my eyes as well as my ears. I told her that baby blue would go well with Mother’s quilt. “Good, we like blue,” she answered, adding that her husband would get right on it; he wanted the bedroom paint to be dry when Mother arrived.
“Precious cargo,” I whispered to Claudia as I closed the passenger door on the Buick. Claudia nodded, her beautiful face wet with tears. Of the four daughters, she alone inherited Mother’s distinctive, wide- set eyes and arched brows. We’d decided earlier that Mother, our most precious cargo, should ride in the spacious, leather-seated Buick. I would follow behind in my Toyota, its backseat packed with what is left of Mother’s “earthly possessions,” as my parents’ minister called the things that crowd out our lives. Little is left to crowd out Mother’s: four boxes of clothes, one quilt that Claudia and I chose from the dozens our mother once stitched, a carton of puzzles and crayons to keep Mother’s hands busy, and a stack of books spanning her perennial girlhood: fairy tales, nursery rhymes, Black Beauty, Anne of Green Gables. Endings escape Mother; her mind can hold only a few pages at a time. So each time I read from the book, Mother worries aloud about Anne, the red- haired orphan. “I hope they keep her,” she always says, of the aging couple who hesitate to take Anne in.
We pass a horse pasture circled with a white fence. North Carolina autumns can be breathtaking, especially along winding country roads like this one. I’m glad Claudia is taking the curves slowly. I wish the drive could last longer. Now Mother turns toward Claudia, probably to ask something. Maybe she thinks we’re finally taking her back to Indiana. “It’s getting late,” she says each evening when the sky begins to darken. She has been saying this for four years, ever since we moved her and Dad to North Carolina so we could care for them here. “Time to go home now,” she always repeats. “My parents will be wondering where I am.”
Or maybe, on this brilliant October morning, Mother understands exactly where we are taking her. Such flashes of clarity happen when we least expect them, recognition sparking in her eyes: Suddenly, we are not strangers, we are her daughters, and her sons are her sons. I once longed for this. To be known again! To have my mother back! But recognition always comes with a price, the sting of loss that appears visibly on her face: Her parents are gone, her sister and brothers, her husband, her home. In these moments, too, Mother recognizes herself, naming what she sees: An old woman who is no use anymore. A burden to her children. “Be careful,” she always says when she reaches for an arm to steady her. “Be careful I don’t take you down with me.”
“Never happen,” I joke, working to lighten such moments. The truth is, the years of caregiving took me down more times than I can count. I’d planned to care for them both until the end, never imagining how difficult it would be. Beyond the unending tasks and the constant medical emergencies, there were Dad’s night terrors and Mother’s delusions and wanderings. The day after Dad’s funeral, I finally confessed to my siblings that I couldn’t do it anymore. Yes, confessed is the word I need here. A public airing of a private shame. And relief, the feeling that followed: Claudia would take Mother. My life would be mine again. Mine: another word I’d lost track of years before. The cry of a child, grabbing what she claims as her own. Her own and no one else’s.
But what of my sister’s life? With each day I have gained this past year, Claudia has lost one of her own. And now, she has been taken down too. “It’s okay, Sis,” I said this morning as we carried the last box from Mother’s bedroom, which Claudia had furnished with such bright hope. “We can still see her each week.”
Claudia looked up, her eyes wild with pain. She did not want to do this.
“It’s been a year,” I reminded her, as if either of us needed reminding. “You’ve done all you can, let it go.” I was thinking of the Alice Munro story I read last night, its wisdom and hard-edged love. In the story, a mother recalls a time when her young daughter’s life was in peril, and as I read I imagined the two characters drawing closer, touching each other tenderly—isn’t that the way such things go? But no, the story mother confesses that when she touched her daughter, she was careful “not to feel anything much.” The “forms of love,” she now saw, could include a love “measured and disciplined, because you have to survive.”
Mother turns her face back to the window, pointing to something in the distance. Does she recognize this curving road, the red barn, the horse stables we are now passing? In a few minutes, when we reach our destination, will she remember the pine trees and the house? “Maybe they’ll want to keep me,” Mother said last week as I drove her back to Claudia’s after a visit with the woman. There was no lightness in her voice, no hopeful longing. It was a statement, flatly simple. Recalling it now, my mind seizes. Was she trying to tell me that she understands? That she knows what the next chapter holds? I imagine the woman dressing Mother for bed, buttoning the pink flowered gown I gave her years ago. Tucking her in. Leaving the nightlight on in case Mother calls out, as she often does—for her mother, her father. When I was a child and a shadow startled me, Mother always came when I called, kneeling beside my bed and stroking my hair until I fell into sleep.
Today is Saturday, so maybe the woman’s grandchildren will be there, too, as they are most weekends, crowding the fragrant, steamy kitchen with their shrieks and sweet bluster—and kisses for their ancient visitor. Scroll back sixty years and it might be our family kitchen, the dark-haired woman at the stove our own mother. Except she isn’t. The woman is a fairy-tale version of our mother. Warm and kind, yes, but a stranger from a foreign land, her accent marking the distances she has traveled to arrive in this country, where work is plentiful. This strange country, where daughters leave their mothers.
We pass another pasture, where spotted horses graze. The houses grow smaller; a few trailers appear. Now here comes a white church, and another. The childhood rhyme comes to me—“Here is the church, here is the steeple”—and our young, beautiful Mother showing us how to fold and unfold our small hands to “open the door and see all the people!” Does Mother sense that this will be her new family? How can we bear to do this?
Yet we are. Look at us bearing it. Bearing our little mother away. Ahead, the Buick’s turn signal flashes. The stand of pine trees thickens, then clears: Here is the house. Here is the porch. Here is the kind, dark- haired woman, waiting by the door to receive us.
Rebecca McClanahan has published ten books, most recently The Tribal Knot: A Memoir of Family, Community, and a Century of Change. Her work has appeared in Best American Essays, Best American Poetry, Boulevard, Georgia Review, Kenyon Review, Gettysburg Review, Southern Review, The Sun, and numerous anthologies. Recipient of the Wood Prize from Poetry Magazine, two Pushcart Prizes, the Carter Prize for the Essay, and the Glasgow Award in Nonfiction for her suite of essays, The Riddle Song and Other Rememberings, she teaches in the MFA programs of Queens University and Rainier Writing Workshop. Red Hen Press will publish her memoir-in-essays In the Key of New York City in 2020.