“Oh, Diana.” Kitomi sighs. “Once more, minus the bullshit.”
I burst out laughing.
“Why art?” Kitomi asks again. “Why not photography, like your mother?”
My jaw drops. “You know who my mother is?”
She raises an eyebrow. “Diana,” she says, “Hannah O’Toole is the Sam Pride of feature photography.”
“I didn’t know you knew,” I murmur.
“Well, I know why you love art, even if you don’t,” Kitomi continues, as if I haven’t spoken. “Because art isn’t absolute. A photograph, that’s different. You’re seeing exactly what the photographer wanted you to see. A painting, though, is a partnership. The artist begins a dialogue, and you finish it.” She smiles. “And here’s the incredible part—that dialogue is different every time you view the art. Not because anything changes on the canvas—but because of what changes in you.”
I turn back to the water, so that she can’t see the tears in my eyes.
Kitomi reaches across the distance between us and pats my arm. “Your mother may not know how to start the conversation,” she says. “But you do.”
On my way back home through the park, I discover that I have three messages from The Greens.
I stop walking in the middle of the path, forcing joggers to flow around me. “Ms. O’Toole,” a woman says, moments later when I redial. “This is Janice Fleisch, the director here—I’m glad you finally called back.”
“Is my mother all right?”
“We’ve had an outbreak of Covid at our facility, and your mother is ill.”
I have heard these words before; I am caught in a cyclone of déjà vu. I even remember my lines.
“Is she … ?does she need to go to the hospital?”
“Your mother has a DNR,” she says delicately. No matter how sick she gets, she will not get any life-saving measures, because that’s what I deemed best when she moved there a year ago. “We have multiple residents who’ve contracted the virus, but I assure you we’re doing everything we can to keep them comfortable.”
“Can I see her?”
“I wish I could say yes,” the director says. “But we aren’t letting visitors in.”
My heart is pounding so hard that I can barely hear my own voice thanking her, and asking her to keep me updated.
I start walking as fast as I can back home, trying to remember where Finn put the toolbox we use for emergencies in the apartment.
They may not be letting visitors in. But I don’t plan to ask permission.
I ask the Uber to drop me off at the end of the driveway, so that I can detour across the lawn away from anyone who might see my approach. For once, Henry’s car is not at The Greens, and the bird feeder outside his wife’s porch is empty. I can think of only one reason.
I push that thought out of my mind. The only silver lining is that there will be no witnesses for what I’m about to do.
Although I have wire cutters, I don’t really need them. One of the lower corners of my mother’s screened porch is peeling at the base, and all I have to do is hook my fingers underneath and tug hard for the screen to rip away from its moorings. I create just enough space to wriggle through and step around the wicker chair and table where my mother usually sits when I come for my visits. I peer into her apartment, but she isn’t on the couch.
I don’t even know, really, if she’s here. For all I know, they’ve moved all the Covid-positive residents to a completely different place.
I pull on the door of the slider that opens into the porch. Thank God my mother never remembers to lock it.
I tiptoe into the apartment. “Mom?” I say softly. “Hannah?”
The lights are all turned off, the television is a blind, blank eye. The bathroom door is open and the space is empty. I hear voices and follow them down the short hallway toward her bedroom.
My mother is lying in bed with a quilt thrown down to her waist. The radio is chattering beside her, some program on NPR about polar bears and the shrinking ice caps. When I stand in the doorway, her head turns toward me. Her eyes are feverish and glassy, her skin flushed.
“Who are you?” she says, panic in her words.
I realize that I am still wearing the mask I wore in the Uber, and that all the times I have visited her, I have stood in the fresh air not wearing one. She may not know me as her daughter, but she recognizes my face as a visitor she has had before. Right now, though, she is sick and scared and I am a stranger whose face is half-obscured by a piece of cloth.