My Two and Only by Carla Malden

Author:Carla Malden
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Rare Bird Books
Published: 2023-06-13T18:24:04+00:00

Chapter Seventeen

Charlotte let five days go by before visiting her mother. She needed to catch her breath, though it unnerved her to go more than two or three without stopping by The Kensington.

She had her key out, at the ready, forgetting that here, on the third floor, the doors were propped open by a doorstop as in a “hospital setting,” as stated on their tour. Alice had scoffed that day, wanting to hurry along, but the Kensington lady would not fast-forward her spiel. Alice and Charlotte glanced inside a room or two, then exchanged glances themselves. “Poor old thing” as Alice used to say of their poodle, Fanny, when she limped into blindness. Poor old things, one after the other, living in these rooms with their doors ajar, enduring such an invasion of privacy.

Now, Alice had joined them. No longer a resident, now a patient.

Propped in bed, eyes closed. Eleven a.m., still in her nightgown. Her fingers worried the edge of the blanket that lay across her breastbone as though she were reading Braille. Her hands were spotted brown, raised veins snaking blue beneath the skin.

Charlotte had redecorated this new room, like the first, given the requirements of the place. She relegated much of the furniture to storage but brought the gauzy curtains with the fern motif, though this window required only a single panel. There was no room for the botanical prints, but she found a place for all the photographs. A few in silver frames, the rest in a hodgepodge—ceramic, painted wood, brass. In one silly one with palm trees painted up the sides, the family frolicked in Hawaii, eight-year-old Charlotte wearing a grass skirt, hula hips akimbo.

She scooted the visitor’s chair to her mother’s bedside, trying to decide if she should rouse her. It reminded her of when the kids were babies—those interminable days when all she wanted them to do was take a nap, but then, as that nap drifted into hour three, all she wanted to do was wake them up so she could play with them. This was like that. But without the playing. Just a facsimile of conversation, possibly in English. Or something resembling it.

Gibberish had picked up the pace of its insidious creep into her mother’s speech. It alarmed Charlotte at first. She bypassed the in-house doctor and called her mother’s personal physician, Dr. Harvey, to describe the phenomenon. Should she bring her in? Should she have an MRI? Or some other scan or test or evaluation?

They could do any of those things, or all of them, said Dr. Harvey, but from everything Charlotte had described, he could confirm Alice was undergoing “cognitive changes.” Charlotte’s father’s decline, though painful and protracted, had been purely physical, leaving her unprepared for her mother’s neurological events, popping like random firecrackers.

By the end of the phone call, the doctor slipped and called them “TIA’s.” (Charlotte looked it up as they spoke, just to be sure. Transient Ischemic Attack. Baby strokes. String too many together, and you’ve got the effects of a grown-up stroke.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.