The Bird House A Novel by Kelly Simmons

Author:Kelly Simmons
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: Fiction
ISBN: 1439160937
Publisher: Washington Square Press
Published: 2011-02-02T08:00:00+00:00

August 3, 1967

MY MOTHER IS NOT DELUSIONAL, just asleep, although sometimes that can be the same thing. She thrashes as I stand above her, repeating the word “no” as she shakes her whole body along with her head. I put the bundle of roses at the foot of her bed, freeing my hands to hold hers.

“Mom,” I say gently. “It’s okay.”

“No,” she continues, “no.”

Her damp hair, parted low, clings to one side of her face, obscuring one eye. When I reach up to brush it away, she swats at my hand. I go to the bathroom and dampen a washcloth, not the standard-issue ones stacked on the toilet tank, but one of the plush ones I brought last week and hid in the metal cabinet.

The cool cloth calms her for a second; her head stops turning and her breath becomes deep. When she speaks, I jump a little, as if I’d forgotten she was alive.

“If you don’t stop this, you’ll regret it,” she growls.

I lift the cloth above her head.

“I’ll make you pay,” she says.

“Make who pay, Mom?”

“Mark my words, P.S. Mark my words.”

When she wakes up, it’s as if she doesn’t know me. I try to tell her about my trip to the doctor, but she gets a faraway look in her eyes. Half an hour later, after we have tea, she has no recollection of what she said when I arrived, and brushes it aside. I tell her she said it in a different voice, as if she was restaging something someone had said to her.

“Like playacting?” she says brightly, and I say yes. Then she asks me if she’s ever told me the story of how she won the lead in her high school play. And even though I know it by heart, every nuance of how she found out the name of the play in advance, and memorized all the lines for her audition, I say no, Mom, tell me how you did it.

And that is the end of it. When I mention it to the nurse later, she tells me that dementia patients often remember things in their dreams that they can’t remember awake, things that they have shoved aside, things that hurt, things they can’t bear to recall.

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