What We Carry by Maya Shanbhag Lang

Author:Maya Shanbhag Lang [Lang, Maya Shanbhag]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2020-04-28T00:00:00+00:00

13

We meet with our assigned caseworker, Kathy, while my mom has her vitals checked.

“So what brings you here?” Kathy asks. “Tell me about your mom.”

My brother and I both begin speaking at once.

“Well, she’s started doing this thing where—”

“Recently she’s been a little confused about—”

We glance at each other and laugh uneasily. There is so much to say.

Talking with Kathy is like talking to a magician. She instantly divines what the past few months have held. “It sounds like she’s been confabulating,” she observes. “Yes!” my brother says. “That’s exactly the word!” It occurs to me how foolish we’ve been, trying to deal with this ourselves. Simply being offered a vocabulary for my mom’s behaviors brings enormous relief.

While collecting background, Kathy asks what originally brought my mom to the States. Before I can answer, my brother speaks up. “The idea was never to stay here. Her plan was to go back to India. She just wanted to make some money first.”

“What are you talking about?” I interrupt. “She—she said she came here to give her kids opportunities.”

My brother regards me with something like pity.

“You know,” Kathy intones, “siblings often don’t really discuss their parents until something like this happens. I see it quite a bit.”

A knock at the door interrupts. By some chance, the doctor assigned to us is an Indian woman I’ll call Dr. Singh. She and my mom enter the room, the two of them laughing at some joke in Hindi. I glance at my brother and smile. Camaraderie! Surely this is a good sign.

“So.” Dr. Singh sits behind her desk. “I’ve had a chance to check your mother’s vitals and do some baseline cognitive testing. She performed quite well.”

My mom straightens up at the mention of her high test scores, chin in the air.

“What concerns me, however, is her weight. Your mom is now eighty-seven pounds. While her score on the MMSE, the Mini–Mental State Exam, puts her—”

“I’m sorry,” I interrupt. “Did you say eighty-seven pounds?”

“I did.”

I glance at my brother. I glance at Kathy. “That’s…I mean…that’s not good.”

Dr. Singh nods. “Precisely. At her last checkup, she was one hundred pounds. Six months prior to that, she was one-fourteen. Her blood work and labs have all come back normal….”

As Dr. Singh continues, I have to sit on my hands to keep them from shaking. My whole body begins to tremble. The number has rattled me. It is an incomprehensible number—a child’s weight.

I look over at her. She’s wearing several layers even though it’s a warm June day. It’s hard to assess her size through the clothing. Have I become so inured to her appearance that I’ve stopped seeing her?

“I’ve been dropping off extra meals,” my brother interjects.

“We call her,” I add. “Once a day, one of us calls to make sure she’s eaten.”

“Yet her weight has dropped precipitously.” Dr. Singh takes off her glasses. “Listen, I don’t doubt that you’ve been trying your best. You’re here at this appointment. It isn’t easy when you have your own lives—careers, kids.

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