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“Go where, young lady? Back out there? Back to him?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she says weakly, and struggles as Smith laughs and grips her arm harder still—hard enough to hurt, hard enough to bruise.
“You know,” he says, “your pa was awfully sore at me for letting you run away that day. Said I was supposed to keep an eye on you. Said I was supposed to keep you safe. He said you was a good girl, asweetgirl.”
He grins wider, leaning in, hissing his rank brown breath into Miriam’s face. “What do you say we wake him up, and see what he thinks of you now?”
Miriam stops struggling. In place of fear and panic, something else is rising: a cold rage, cold as the frozen sea, and she sees in Smith’s facethat he sees it. His terrible smile falters, his grip on her arm loosens by a single degree, and she’s suddenly seized by an idea. Wonderful and terrible and fierce, the same impulsiveness that once sent her off a cliff with her arms outstretched, that she followed into the frigid night to lie in Theodore Caravasios’s arms.
“You want to wake my father up? Here, this ought to do it,” she says, and sinks her teeth into Smith’s hand as hard as she can. Something crunches, there’s blood in her mouth, and Smith screams and reels backward, and screams some more. From upstairs, there’s a shout and the sound of doors opening, feet pounding.
Miriam wipes the blood from her lips and sits down at the table to wait.
13.
2014
December
I woke up groggy on the morning of Christmas Eve, my tongue fat and my thoughts tangled. My brain had taken yesterday’s events and remixed them overnight into a series of strange bad dreams in which I stumbled frantically through the house, searching without knowing what I was looking for, while from behind the closed doors came the sounds of moaning, sobbing, urgent whispering that abruptly cut off the moment I reached for the doorknob. In one dream, I was struggling to decorate an enormous Christmas tree while Richard and Colin, who looked just as he had when I’d last seen him except that he was now wearing Adam’s Willowcrest uniform, kept pulling the ornaments down and smashing them on the floor. In another, the fox from the terrace had gotten inside the house, and I was chasing it from room to room, tracking its paw prints across the dusty floors until I realized with horror that the paw prints weren’t paw prints anymore, but the tracks of a stranger’s bare feet.
But it was the last dream, the one I had just before waking, that stayed with me. In it, I opened the door to the bathroom and found Mimi sitting naked in the tub, her knees drawn up against her chest. Water was running out of the faucet and the tub was overflowing, with water spilling onto the floor, and outside the window the sun was sitting so low on the horizon that it seemed to be sinking into the ocean. The sky was streaked crimson and gold, and Mimi lifted her hand and pointed.
“Sailor’s delight,” she said in a lilting little girl’s voice, and she laughed in a way that sent chills down my spine. She turned to smile at me over her shoulder, her expression sly. “He’ll be here soon.”
“Who?” I asked, moving in slow motion to turn off the taps. Mimi only shook her head and laughed again.
“Youknow,” she said, and as I leaned over, she suddenly caught me by the throat, pulling me in close while I fought to keep my grip on the slippery sides of the tub. She lifted her other hand out of the water, silver glinting between her fingers. She was holding the pendant, its chain threaded through the eye of a long, sharp needle, and in my dream, I watched helplessly as Mimi leaned forward while I squirmed and fought but couldn’t get free. There was no pain as she popped the pendant into my mouth and pushed the needle through the soft flesh of my lips, through and around and through again, sewing them shut.
“Now it’s your secret, too,” she said, her eyes glittering. When she smiled again, blood rimmed the edges of her teeth. “I know you’ll never tell.”
My mother had never come back downstairs again the night before, after Mimi called her a parasite. In fact, everyone seemed shaken by it—not just the viciousness of their confrontation, but how quickly it was over, so fast that it seemed like something we’d hallucinated. When I got back from washing my grandmother’s feet and helping her to bed, Adam wordlessly handed me a glass of wine and then poured one for himself, which under any other circumstances wouldhave earned some sort of snarky comment from Richard, but he only stared into his whiskey glass, swirling the amber liquid in it around and around without drinking.
“Someone should talk to her,” I said.
“Good luck with that,” Richard said. “You should know, she’ll never apologize. She never would. Even before her brain started melting.”
“Richard,” Diana said, and he rolled his eyes.
“I may be impolite,” he said, “but I’m not wrong.”
“I meant someone should talk to Mom. To my mom,” I said. What I didn’t say was that bysomeone,I meantanyone but me. I couldn’t stop thinking about the way she’d grabbed Mimi, and about whether it might not have been the first time. If I measured the bruise on Mimi’s neck, would it be a perfect match, the exact diameter of my mother’s thumb? Was she taking out her anger at being thrust into the caregiver role on my grandmother, one rough touch at a time?
Adam touched my arm. “I’ll talk to her.”
“You shouldn’t have to—” I started to say, but he gave my forearm a squeeze and cut me off.
“It might be better coming from a non-family member.” He kept his eyes on me, but it was clear he was speaking to all of us. “I didn’t know Miriam before, so I don’t know what she used to be like. But I have known a lot of people with dementia, and I can tell you, this is something that’s going to happen. After this, it’s probably going to happen more. She’s scared and angry, and she’s going to lash out. You’ll need to be prepared for that.”
“Dear god,” Diana said faintly. “For how long? How much longer can she go on like this?”
Adam was still looking at me, and in the moment before he turned to answer my aunt, I saw something flicker over his face. It was a dark, unhappy expression that was there and gone in an instant, and while I wouldn’t grasp its full meaning until much later, I understood instantly that there was something, some awful truth, that he wasn’t telling us. Something like the horrible thought I’d had on my own,not that long ago.She’s going to die soon,but not soon enough. You’ll wish she was dead a hundred times over before she ever takes her last breath.
“What’s important is that you make the most of her good days,” he said.
“That’s not an answer,” Diana said, and Richard snorted.
“Good lord, sister,” he said. “What do you want, a timetable? Is Mother not dying fast enough for you to put a down payment on that condo in Key West?”
