The Burning Side(75)
After everyone else has taken turns, April prompts Billy. “What about you, Dad?”
“What about me?”
“Something you love about Mom?”
“Oh, lots of things. I’d have to say her piano skills or the way she always quits smoking on New Year’s just to start again on January second.” He chuckles fondly.
Everyone looks around at each other. Those are things about his mom, who is several decades gone.
Cameron asks gently, “Um, something you love about Deb?”
Billy blinks. “Which one is Deb?”
I catch his eye from across the room. “Hi there.”
Dabbing the corner of my mouth with a napkin, I stand. Walk over to my husband. If a memory won’t make its way through when it’s demanded of him, then I will give him a new one. “Would you like to dance?”
He rises and takes my hand.
Though I did not tell Billy about how he forgot me at the hospital, we made the decision about Greenwood after that. This, however, is the first time the rest of our family has witnessed him forget me.
I look over my shoulder at no one in particular. “Music?”
Our kids whip their phones out like pistols, but it doesn’t matter who’s quickest on the draw because they all know which song to play.
We’re dancing before the music even begins, and I quietly tell Billy that it’s my birthday. “Oh,” he says. “Happy birthday!”
And then Mama Cass sings instructions on how to dream.
The grandchildren dance too.
So with my children and grandchildren circled around me, with my husband in my arms remembering quite well how to dance, I do a rock step and the years tingle through me. In a flash I’ll be gone, my own children recalling their favorite things about me in some new house at some new table with some new iteration of family.
So I dance now as if time is the music.
This, I know, is how you dream. This is how you live forever.
Billy swings me out and back in, and I smile up at him.
A kick. A triple step. A little shift of weight.
* * *
In a month or two, when moving day arrives, everyone will come to help. A few final boxes will be scattered throughout, closets swept clean, and greasy fast-food bags slouching on the kitchen counter. Sadie will practice her cartwheel in the empty space, and Otto’s bare feet will be black from the dirty floors. He first came to Lexington Avenue when he was five days old and couldn’t even lift his own head. He still had a dot on his heel from the neonatal heel prick. He will retain no memories of this home or the sunlit corner where his mother and grandmother rocked him for many a nap.
Josie and Cameron will handle moving day just fine, and I’ll be miffed that they aren’t more upset. Josie is such a nomad that this will be one change among many. She’ll munch salty fries and laugh as she reveals her house-related secrets: best hiding spots, sneaking out of bed for late-night snacks or MTV, walls colored on, and forts made. She’ll point out the coat closet where she had her first kiss, incorrectly believing that this is news to me.
Cameron has never been given to nostalgia. He’ll participate in the reliving with one eye on the now: his bride, his phone, his plans for later. He and Rachel have started taking a swing dance class because Cameron read that learning new skills helps memory. He’ll ask me if we told the new family about the sticking pocket door. We did not. He’ll calculate whether he has the time and tools to fix it. He will not.
John and Brenda Miller will stop by with well wishes, and we’ll tell them what we know about their new neighbors. The following week, Brenda will come to Greenwood and help me set up my kitchen.
April will be my only child to sufficiently mourn our home, touching counters and bannisters with tears in her eyes. And Billy will be an amalgam of our kids: making last-minute repairs, recounting patchwork stories, whispering private memories whenever they grace him. Another adjustment in his medication will help us recall our short-lived gerbil together. The false cancer scare. The recession. The night he streaked naked from our bedroom to the kitchen and back again, crossing his fingers that no kid would get out of bed and be scandalized. We will laugh, even as we did back then.
And I will flood with relief that Billy knows the place he’s leaving. I need us to leave together, to go off and forget our home side by side, he with his dementia and me with my garden-variety hippocampus.
The whole family will end up in the kitchen where the trestle table stood. The movers will have gone ahead with our furniture to its various destinations: April’s new apartment in Argyle, Cameron and Rachel’s gabled starter home, and Greenwood Hills. Cameron will take Billy’s bicycle, and then we’ll have a stationary bike delivered once we’re settled.
Aware that it’s time to go, we will get quiet in the kitchen.
Cameron will set a roll of packing tape on the counter, and it will echo.
Otto will toddle around with a cold french fry.
April will hold a hair clip in her teeth as she tames Sadie’s wild mane.
None of us will quite know how to walk out.
So Josie, bless her, will throw her arms out wide and say dramatically, “Fare thee well, Lexington Avenue!”
Sadie will parrot her aunt while demonstrating her backbend like she’s a lowercase n.
The family moving in will have three young children. Boys, all. Billy will leave dental packets for them in the bathroom and a bottle of wine in the kitchen with a note that reads, From us to you.