The Cuckoo Girls by Patricia Lillie

Author:Patricia Lillie [Lillie, Patricia]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: JournalStone
Published: 2020-04-20T00:00:00+00:00

LEGACY

“LOOK,” MY MOTHER SAYS. “It’s a miracle.” She hands me a gaudy plastic frame. The photo inside is pixelated and distorted, a landscape image squished into portrait orientation. The words scrawled across the top are unreadable.

“See?” She shows me a small picture on her iPad, the one I for some reason thought was a good idea to give her for Christmas. She’s printed a tiny illustration she found through Google, a low-resolution thumbnail enlarged to fill an eight-by-ten frame.

I tap the image and follow a couple of links. A larger version fills the screen. A white-man Jesus with flowing blond hair and crystal-blue eyes walks on a beach with two children. Behind them, two small sets of footprints stretch into the distance. Jesus leaves no footprints. The style is soft and comforting yet slightly disconcerting, like an Eloise Wilkin illustration from a 1950s Little Golden Book. The garish red of an uncredited T.S. Eliot quote from The Waste Land, set in that font that people love to hate, clashes with the vivid blue sky.

“Who is the third who walks always beside you? When I count, there are only you and I together. But when I look ahead up the white road, there is always another one walking beside you.”

My mother is technologically inept. She’s not “ept” at much of anything anymore. The fact that she found the image and managed to print it at all is a miracle, although probably not the one she’s talking about. She’s also not religious and never has been. Nor is she, as far as I know, a big fan of poetry or Eliot, although once, when I was a child, we attended a local production of Cats. We were both big fans of cats, but never had one. My father was allergic.

“Would you like me to print you a better copy of this?” I don’t point out everything wrong with the image or ask why she wants it. She probably couldn’t answer if I did. Today, she’s alert, bordering on happy. I don’t want to mess that up by frustrating or angering her. Whatever she sees in the sappy, stupid image, I’ll let her have it.

“No, no—don’t you see? You’re saved.”

Maybe she has found religion in the midst of her dementia.

“No, Mom, I don’t see. Explain it to me.”

“She’s breaking up. Falling apart. We can be two. You will be one.”

The pixilation is her miracle. Either that or gender-bending Jesus.

I’ve never seen her face. Not Jesus, although I’ve never seen him—or her—either. The other one. The third who walks beside us. Maybe she has blonde hair and blue eyes. Or maybe she’s the product of my mother’s illness.

“Maybe,” I say. Let her have her hope. It’s all she has left.

***

I am in Milo’s bed when the nursing home calls. My mother had a bad night. I don’t need to come in, they say, but they want me to know.

“I need to go,” I tell Milo.

“So early? I thought maybe brunch. Or maybe…” He reaches for me.

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