The Burning Side(46)

Curious, I tilt the frame toward Billy. “What do you remember from this Halloween?”

He comes closer, looking down. “That was the night Josie called Cameron ‘a soprano’ as an insult.” He chuckles and says, “April gave him a jumbo Snickers to stop his tears. Jo said she didn’t know Pikachu was such a crybaby, and April said she didn’t know coffee was so stupid, and you said something about how they needed to be kind to each other or their candy would be seized by management.”

I had completely forgotten about all that.

He adds, “It was hot that year.”

I don’t know whose memory about the weather is accurate, but it doesn’t matter. I smile and interlace my fingers through Billy’s. “Want to go out back?”

He nods, and we turn from the photo.

When we open the back door, we’re met with a metallic scent. We squint up at a pewter sky, anticipating a spit of rain. It’s only when we look back down—dark disks swelling on the deck—that we realize it’s already raining. Some things are seen more clearly at their end than at their start. So we stand at the threshold as rain washes the world clean.



* * *



If it’s not one thing with this house, it’s another. The laundry machine is screeching, and I glare at it while it hurricanes. No one else is home at the moment. Billy normally fixes this kind of thing, but he keeps forgetting—not forgetting to do it but forgetting that it needs to be done. Several times already, he has said something like, “Uh-oh, machine’s on the fritz.” Or, “Yikes, when did that start?” And I’ve had to bisect my thoughts from my words, like egg whites from yolks. It started before you asked me the last time, and the time before that. “Not too long ago.”

I shut off the malfunctioning machine and scowl at the soaked clothes. I could do the wash by hand; there are worse things. Or I could call a repairman. But it feels futile, because there will be something else after the laundry machine, and something else after that.

I turn my back on the wet socks and underwear for now, and I meander through our quiet house, seeing Billy’s fingerprints everywhere. He’s the one who waters the fiddle-leaf fig, sprays for bugs, and unclogs the disposal. He changes the fridge filter, puts up the Christmas lights, moves seasonal accoutrements to and from the attic, and installs anything that needs installation. He mows the grass, touches up scratched paint, and checks the roof after hail.

I wonder what will break next and how much of our precious time I might spend watching YouTube videos about something like how to adjust a fill valve in a toilet tank. I can do it all if necessary. But if I’m doing it all, will that be all I’m doing? The doctors were noncommittal with the timeline. They said it could be three years, four years, five years, ten. Which told us so little. He was already “fairly progressed” at the time of diagnosis, they said, and there’s “no way to know” how aggressive Alzheimer’s will be in each individual case. But Billy was young and fit, they pointed out. It was cold comfort, and we drew our mouths into lines that weren’t quite smiles.

I walk now past the back door, where the weather stripping needs to be replaced. Our home is a body of sorts, a protective casing for its most vital parts. It’s a brain that holds memory after memory: the stairs beneath April’s heeled feet as she came down for prom. Josie’s room, where she sequestered with reams of script pages. The windowsill that held Cameron’s toothpick-maimed potato with its wispy legs. Our kitchen, where— I stop myself. Because if I open the floodgates of kitchen memories, I might drown. And because this home is also a mouth, filling with cavities.

In the kitchen, among a scatter of sticky neon reminders, I rifle through the junk drawer for the latest edition of Best Picks, and I flip to find a repairman.

I love our home, but I have to admit that there’s been a certain sadness since April, then Josie, and then Cameron packed up their things and left. The day after we settled Cam into his dorm in Oklahoma four years ago, I thought I would come home and do a little dance through our house that was finally clean. Instead I wandered the halls, forlorn and teary and aching for one more frustrated huff about muddy shoes that I had already told someone three times to clean up. Memories pulsed at me from the empty bedrooms, and I longed to squeeze Josie’s cheeks or have a late-night talk with April.

But my kids left me for healthy reasons. They had lives to live.

This is different. It’s my husband leaving me while he’s still here, staring blind at memories that stand in front of us like ghosts. I imagine us here with screeching appliances only I can hear and ghosts only I can see. I shudder and circle the name of a random repairman, wondering if this house will be the best place to do this. To watch my husband die.

The doctor spoke with me privately after the diagnosis. She said it would be imperative for me to take care of myself, to get support. That Billy will become a shell of himself. She handed me a pamphlet.

I dial the repairman. We set a time for him to come next week.

That moment with the doctor, with the pamphlet in hand, was when I asked, How long?

Part of me wanted her to promise that it would be fast, but her eyes were full of apology.

Could be three years, four years, five years, ten.





APRIL


July 17, 2022

BY THE TIME WE ARRIVE in Argyle for more sorting and cleaning, the tarp over the kitchen is slapping at the house. Trees are frenzied and bending low, as if waving their limbs to get our attention. Wind seems so innocent until a day like this, when it could lift a pole from cement or throw a cottonwood through a window. We knew the forecast was iffy, but we thought we had more time.