I take the pile and look at the one on top:A sloth can hold its breath for 40 minutes.I was so excited when I found that fact during an internet deep dive on sloths. It had been getting harder and harder to find more things about sloths that were true but would still elicit a “Holy shit!” out of Mason. But this one … He must have held this piece of paper, must’ve read the words, was undoubtedly impressed, and all the while some part of him was thinking aboutme. The stack of Post-its practically vibrates with his energy.
Instead of responding, I go into the hallway, reach into my coat pocket, and pull out an identical pile of neon paper. It is suddenly essential that Mason’s mom get to feel part of what I’m feeling, that connection to a specific moment when he was alive that we can linger in.
“Here are Mason’s. I think you should have them,” I say, handing her the facts written in his tiny, slanted printing.
“Oh,” she says, taking them carefully like they’re a rare first edition. “Thank you.” She presses them into her palm, and I know she gets it. I wonder if she can sense, somehow, how closely Mason is hovering next to us right now.
“I feel like if Mason were here, he’d want to tell you something,” I say. I look at him.
“You were a good mom,” he whispers.
“You were a good mom to him,” I say.
“It’s not your fault.”
“It’s not your fault,” I repeat, breathless.
Cat nods and smiles again, and when she closes her eyes for a moment, I notice how tired she looks.
“It’s not your fault,” I say again. She opens her eyes and cups my chin in her hand, like she’s drinking in my face. “You’re sweet to come,” she says, and leads me back to the door. “He thought the world of you.” I put on my coat and she fixes my collar, seeming to linger on being able to do the tiniest bit of mothering.
As I head down the front steps and turn onto the sidewalk, I’m not sure I did what I set out to do, but I guess as long as I don’t feel like I’ve ruined everything, that’s an improvement. I feel her standing at the picture window, watching me, and I turn to wave. But when I do, it’s Mason, hand pressed against the window toward me, and for a moment it feels like the only thing separating us is a piece of glass.
I step through our front door, keeping my hand on the storm door so that as the spring contracts it doesn’t slam closed. My dad hates that slamming sound. He’s gotten a lot more sensitive to loud noises since he lost his sight. Last month, he sent my brother to his room in the middle of dinner for laughing too loud.
I hear my dad now, washing his hands in the powder room. I know it’s him and not my mom because it’s pitch-dark in there—he doesn’t turn on lights anymore. I think of all the things Mason must have wanted to say to his mom but didn’t when he had the chance. Maybe I should give it another shot.
“Hey, Dad.”
“Hi there, Henrietta.” He shuffles his way into the living room and we sit, him in his big chair and me on the rug.
“Where’s Mom?” I ask.
“She’s picking up Nate from a friend’s. They’ll be back shortly. What do you need?”
“Nothing, just curious.” I pause. “Hey, I didn’t ask before, is Dr. Porter your eye doctor, too?”
“No.”
“But isn’t she the best in the state?”
“That seems to be the consensus.”
“So why don’t you go to her, too?”
He inhales through his nose like he’s doing an anger management technique. “Until there’s a cure, I don’t really see the point of the drive.” His face is darkening. I can tell I’m losing him. This isn’t what he wants to talk about, like ever. But instead of switching the subject, I talk faster.
“Well, Dr. Porter said there was a lot of promising research, clinical trials and studies and stuff. There’s injections and tiny robots—a lot of possibilities that are, like, straight out of a sci-fi series.”
He clears his throat. “To be clear,” he says, “the medical field has been saying that a cure was about five years away for a very long time, twenty years at least. And the initial treatments won’t really be cures—they’ll just stop your eyesight from getting worse. That’s an important step, and could be really significant for you. But unfortunately”—he shrugs—“won’t have much of an impact on me.”
“I get all that, but what about just going to see her to be ready for when something breaks? You know, stay in the loop.”
They say that the eyes are the window to the soul, which really blows, because it means that when you have a blind dad there’s no way in. I want to look hard into his eyes, to tell him without words that we’re in this together, that I want to be close, or at least closer. But his eyes are a dead end, and the rest of the muscles on his face have built a wall.
“You seem to be quite the expert all of a sudden,” he says, and there’s a meanness in his voice that I usually only hear when he’s criticizing a politician on TV. It feels like shame.
“What, me? No, not at all. I’ve just been thinking about it a lot since I went to see her. I don’t know.”
