I move closer and press my palm against hers. There’s a screen between us. Where are you? I wonder. The world that my mother inhabits, it’s not this one. But that’s not to say it isn’t real to her.
It might be the first thing we’ve had in common.
If you had asked me a few weeks ago, I would have said my mother was a burden, an albatross, a grudging responsibility. She was someone I owed a debt to. But now?
Now I know everyone has their own perception of reality. Now I’m thinking that when we’re in crisis, we go to a place that comforts us. For my mother, it’s her identity as a photographer.
And for me—right now—it’s here.
“You look good, Mom,” I whisper.
Her vision clouds; I can see the exact moment that she slips away from me. I pull my hand back from the screen and tuck it into the pocket of my jacket. “I think I might come visit you more often,” I say softly. “Would you like that?”
She doesn’t respond.
“Me, too,” I say.
When I get back to the parking lot, the old man is sitting in his car with the windows open, eating a sandwich. I order my Uber and awkwardly smile at him.
“Good visit?” he asks.
“Yes. You?”
He nods. “I’m Henry,” he says.
“Diana.”
“My wife, she’s got white matter disease,” he says. He taps his head, as if to underscore this is a brain thing. But then, everyone in the building has a brain thing. Alzheimer’s affects the gray matter, not the white, but the outcome is the same.
“She only has three words left,” he says. He takes a bite of his sandwich, swallows. Then he smiles. “But they’re the three words I need to hear.”
The sound of ambulance sirens is constant. It gets to the point where they become white noise.
In the middle of the night, I wake up and roll over to realize Finn is missing. I have to shake myself out of sleep to remember whether he’s pulling a night shift. It’s hard to tell time when every day is the same.
But no, we brushed our teeth together and climbed into bed. Frowning, I sit up and pad in the darkness to the living room, calling softly for him.
Finn sits on the couch, limned by moonlight. He is bent like Atlas, bearing the weight of the world. His eyes are closed and his hands are pressed tight against his ears.
He looks at me, his face bruised from his mask, shadows ringing his eyes. “Make it stop,” he whispers, and it’s only then I hear the whine of another ambulance, racing against time.
My therapy session with Dr. DeSantos—like everything else—is going to take place over Zoom. She has been recommended to Finn, and apparently is doing him a favor to schedule a session with me so quickly. When I ask Finn how he knows her, the tips of his ears go red. “She was made available to residents and interns,” he says, “when a bunch of people started losing it during their shifts.”
Finn is at the hospital during our session, for which I am grateful. I have not told him about my excursion to see my mother—I know he’ll be angry that I went out. I have convinced myself it is kinder not to tell Finn.
I can convince myself of virtually anything these days, it seems.
“What you’re talking about,” Dr. DeSantos says, “is ICU psychosis.”
I’ve told her about the Galápagos—haltingly at first, and then with more abandon when it became clear she wasn’t going to interrupt. “Psychosis?” I repeat. “I wasn’t psychotic.”
“An elevated dream state, then,” she points out. “Why don’t we call them … ?ruminations?”
I feel a prickle of frustration. Rumination. Like what cows do.
“It wasn’t a dream,” I reiterate. “In dreams you do things like fly through walls or come back to life or breathe water like a mermaid. This was a hundred percent realistic.”
“You were on an island … ?one you’ve never been to … ?and you were living with local residents,” the doctor says. “That sounds pleasant. The mind is remarkable when it comes to protecting us from pain we might otherwise feel—”
“It was more than just a vacation. I was sedated for five days, but in my head, I was gone for months. I went to sleep dozens of times there, and I woke up in the same place, in the same bed, on the same island. It wasn’t a … ?a hallucination. It was my reality.”
She purses her lips. “Let’s stick to this reality,” she says.
“This reality,” I stress. “What about this feels real? I lost ten days of my life that I can’t remember, and when I woke up suddenly everyone is standing six feet away and we wash our hands twenty times a day and I lost my job and there’s no more sports or movies and all the borders are closed and every time my boyfriend goes to work he runs the risk of catching this virus and winding up—”