Shivah by Lisa Solod

Author:Lisa Solod
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Jaded Ibis Press, LLC
Published: 2022-06-15T00:00:00+00:00

I told Erika about both visits from the neighbors as we ate our lunch. And then I broached the subject we had all been afraid to touch.

“The doctor next door said that by the time we get it, if we do get it, they’ll have a cure. I would love to believe him, but I can’t.”

Erika shook her head. “I don’t want to talk about that. Besides we’re already old. We could already have it.”

“Yes,” I said, “that is the point. We are already well into middle age. The plaques and tangles in our brain could just be waiting to strike. Don’t you forget things? Where you’re going, where the keys are, what day it is?

“I daily walk into a room and forget what I went there for,” I said. “But until now I always assumed it was because I’m so preoccupied. The same reason I walk into tables and trip on the sidewalk when there’s nothing there.”

“It’s more than that,” Erika said. “We do have a history, and we could. But I can’t think about it. Not now, anyway.”

I gave up. When Erika pronounced a subject closed it was indeed closed.

We resumed our cleaning. In the drawer of a hutch that took up most of a tiny room off the kitchen, I found a huge box of candle ends and stubs. Purple, mostly, my mother’s favorite color. I laughed when I thought about telling the neighbor not to overdo his paint job: Mother’s house was the gaudiest on the street, painted as if it were a huge gingerbread Victorian instead of a small cottage. The siding was a deep mocha, the trim fuchsia, the stairs and shutters an unusual shade of purple. It worked in an odd way, but it had been hell for Mother to keep up. I wondered what new colors the house would be painted by its new owners. (When I drove curiously by the house a year after Mother moved out, I saw that the new owner hadn’t touched a single color.)

As I pawed through Mother’s candle “collection,” I could not imagine what made her save them; some were barely an inch tall. There were dozens of stubs that wouldn’t give off another half hours’ worth of illuminations. Like the mounds of paper we had already gone through, the candles felt like they held a message that I couldn’t read. Some secret we were not privy to.

Her affection for candles and low lighting was the stuff of legend: like Blanche DuBois, she knew she looked better in candlelight. When I would get out of my car after the long drive up north, come to the back door and step inside, the house was often so dim I could barely see to let go of my luggage—the lights on dimmers pushed way down, tiny mood lamps dotting the living room. And everywhere there would be candles, some sticks, some votives, some pillars, all flickering and throwing shadows.

In the earlier days, Mother would have a meal ready when Ben, Ivy and I came to visit.

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