I’d connected with Mom last night. Now it felt as if I would never be able to hold on to her for more than just a few seconds.
NOW
She’s back in bed.
I feel a physical jolt when I walk past my mother’s slightly open door on Sunday morning and see the familiar mound in her bed. Things have been so different the last few months. I thought I’d set my expectations low in terms of her recovery, but it still feels like a punch when I see her dark room again.
I force myself to cross the threshold, force myself not to run out of the house when I see the ghost of the mother I’ve known all my life.
“Mom,” I say gently, coming to the side of her bed. “Do you need anything?”
“No, sweetheart,” she says, and her face is smushed against the pillow.
“Where’s Dad?”
“I think he stepped out to check on something at the clinic.”
I try to quiet the voice that says it’s all over, that everything is going back to how it was before. I’m alarmed at the way it makes me shaky, the way it makes me want to curl up in a ball and weep.
It was during the worst of everything last fall that Mom started to be more present. On days when I was the one wrapped up in my bed, refusing to budge and unable to stop crying, she’d rubbed my back and brought me water and told me she was so sorry.
Then she’d started meds and started seeing a therapist, and the change in her had been radical. She wasn’t healed. The gaunt, faraway look in her eyes didn’t disappear overnight, but slowly her body seemed less vacant. I could ask her a question and know she’d heard me. She made dinner sometimes. She went for walks without my father.
Even then, I’d been wary. I’dknownit was too good to be true. A person doesn’t suddenly come back from the dead—which, at the worst times, is what my mother seemed to be. Dead. Now I want to kick myself.
There were times in the past when I almost believed that things had changed. I’d catch glimpses of my mother, happy and healthy, for an hour or a day or the length of a conversation about boys, but it always went back to the way things were.
Why did I let myself believethischange would last?
“I’m going out for a while then,” I say, desperate to escape this porthole into the past. “Should I get anything for you?”
“No, thank you,” she says.
I’ve almost shut her door when I hear her call me back.
“Jessi ... I talked to Melanie last night. Is that where you’re going?”
“Yeah,” I admit, surprised. Mel and Mom are talking now? Since when? My mother’s illness meant that Mom and Mel had never gotten to know each other beyond surface-level conversations and platitudes.
“I’ve been checking in on her from time to time over the past few months,” she says, which surprises me even more. But I guess there’s a lot I don’t know about Mom 2.0. I feel sad that I’ll probably never get to know her after all, that it seems like she’s gone already. “She told me you and Luke were seeing each other again.”
My heart drops.
“It’s not that serious,” I say quickly.
“Well, we should still have him over for dinner sometime this week. What do you think?”
“Sure, Mom,” I say, and shut her door, but I already know the chances of her even remembering this in twenty-four hours are slim to none. When the darkness takes her, it returns her to us wiped clean.
For a long time, I used to think that as soon as I graduated from high school, I would pack up and leave Winchester. Leave my parents and this world where I managed to feel both loved and forgotten, at home and adrift. But the past year has turned my world upside down and crushed it. Instead of leaving, I’ve decided to take the next year to catch my breath.
Just like Mom guessed, I drive right to Mel’s house.
It’s like muscle memory being around her again. I push back the thoughts of my parents, forget the fact that Mom 2.0 is gone, and without trying, I am going through the motions, becoming the Jessi Mel knows and loves again. On one hand, I know I will never be that girl again and that this act can only last so long. On the other hand, it feels so familiar to be in the Cohen house again, to be loved by Mel, and to be with Luke, even if it’s all pretend this time.
I’m not sure if Luke is home, but Naomi is there again when I get there.
She’s working at the dining table, probably planning lessons for the coming school year, while Mel sits in the living room, surrounded by her mountain of blankets.
