She has Covid.
Finn has drummed into me, daily, how little we know about this virus, but I’m counting on the fact that I still have antibodies. I reach up and unhook one side of my mask. I let it dangle from my ear.
“Hi,” I say softly. “It’s just me.”
She reaches toward her nightstand for her glasses, and has a coughing fit. Her hair is matted down in the back and through pale strands I can see the pink of her scalp. There’s something so tender and childlike about that it makes my throat hurt.
She settles her glasses on her face and looks at me again and says, “Diana. I’m sorry, baby … ?I don’t feel so good today.”
I fall against the frame of the door. She hasn’t called me by name in years. Before Covid, she referred to me as “the lady” to staff, when they talked about my visits. She has never given me any indication that she knows we are related.
“Mom?” I whisper.
She pats the bed beside her. “Come sit.”
I sink down on the edge of the mattress. “Can I get you anything?”
She shakes her head. “It’s really you?”
“Yeah.” I remember what Eric Genovese said about terminal lucidity. Terminal. Whatever is causing this clarity from her dementia—whether it’s fever, or Covid, or just sheer luck—is it worth it? If the trade-off is knowing that it means she’s probably going to die? “I’ve been here before,” I tell her.
“But sometimes I’m not,” she says. “At least not mentally.” She hesitates, frowning, like she’s probing her own mind. “It’s different, today. Sometimes I’m back in other places. And sometimes … ?I like it better there.”
I understand that viscerally.
She looks at me. “Your father was so much better at everything than I was.”
“He would have argued about that. He thought your work was brilliant. Everyone does.”
“We tried to have a baby for seven years,” my mother says.
This is news to me.
“I tried fertility treatments. Traditional Chinese medicine. I ate bee propolis and pomegranates and vitamin D. I wanted you so badly. I was going to be the kind of mother who took so many photos of my baby that we had a whole closet full of albums. I was going to chronicle every step of your life.”
This is so far from the Hannah O’Toole I know—that everyone knows. An intrepid photographer of human tragedy, who didn’t realize the shambles she’d made of her own deserted family. “What happened?”
“I forgot to take you to the pediatrician when you were a week old,” she says.
“I know. I’ve heard the story.”
“It was an appointment for you, and I left you sitting at home, in your little baby car seat,” she murmurs. “That’s how awful I was at being a mother.”
“You were distracted,” I say, wondering how it’s come to this: me making excuses for her.
“I was determined,” she corrects. “There couldn’t be more mistakes if I wasn’t around to make them. Your father … ?he was so much better at taking care of you.”
I stare at her. I think of all the times I thought that I was a distant runner-up to her career, that photography held her captive in a way I never could. I never imagined she’d had so little confidence parenting me.
“I used to get asked why I photographed catastrophes,” my mother says. “I had a whole list of stock answers—for the excitement, to commemorate tragedy, to humanize suffering. But I mostly shot disasters to remind myself I wasn’t the only one.”
There is a difference, I realize, between being driven and running away from something that scares you to death.
“I forgive you,” I say, and everything inside me shifts. I may not have had much of my mother, between her career and her dementia, but something is better than nothing. I will take what I can get.
“Do you remember the time Dad and I went with you to chase a tornado?” I ask.
She frowns, her eyes clouding.
“I do,” I say softly.
Maybe that’s enough. It’s not having the adventures or crossing off the line items of the bucket list. It’s who you were with, who will help you recall it when your memory fails.
My mother coughs again, falling back against the pillows. When she glances at me, something has changed. Her eyes are a painted backdrop, instead of a dimensional landscape. There’s nothing behind them but anxiety. “We have to get to higher ground,” she says.