Martha got the knife away from her mother and shut her in the garage. The garage was not for cars; it had been converted by the house’s previous owners into what the broker called a “mother-in-law apartment.” Martha assumed it was called that because mothers were more likely to move in with daughters, and men were more likely to own houses. She wasn’t married, though, and her sister, Molly, who was, didn’t have a mother-in-law apartment in her garage in Los Angeles, where real estate was much more expensive than it was in Baltimore. Also, Molly was busy with her children and hadn’t spoken to their mother in more than a year.
“Let’s take a break,” Martha told her mother. “You rest here.”
“What are you going to do?”
“I have to clean out the fridge.” In the past, that kind of excuse would never have fooled her mother. Judy had been an expert liar and always recognized her daughters’ amateur attempts for what they were. She would have watched from the window and seen that, instead of crossing to the house, Martha had sat down on the garage step and started looking at her phone. Someone Martha knew had read forty biographies and taken a picture of the stack; someone else had hiked to a hot spring in Iceland.
The house was small, but it included this unusual converted garage. The broker had made much of the potential for extra income, and for a while Martha had rented it to a Croatian couple who were grad students in design. The design students were extremely neat and almost never home, and once left a surprisingly delicious loaf of gluten-free zucchini bread in her mailbox. It had been hard to ask them to leave, when she and Molly had decided that their mother would move in with her.
For what had happened this morning, Martha was to blame. She’d neglected to put Attila in his cage for the night and also neglected to make sure that her mother had coffee in her apartment. Her mother, who usually woke up at five, had padded across to the house at first light, wearing her bathrobe and the red slipper socks that Molly had given her one Christmas, and started rooting around in the kitchen. Martha hadn’t heard her come in, but the rabbit had. He must have been hiding under the counter, where her mother was likely attempting to operate the coffee machine, when he spotted a safer hiding spot and tore across the room. Her mother shrieked. By the time Martha got downstairs, she was brandishing the knife.
“I’m going to do it. You just watch!”
The language suggested a threat to harm herself, rather than the rabbit, who was now nowhere in evidence. But the knife wasn’t near her throat or wrist; she held it out in front of her, parrying. Recently, Molly had sent a video of her son, Leo, at his fencing class. Martha had played it for their mother; her sister hadn’t said not to, and it had been one of their mother’s good days. It was hard to tell if Leo was scared or excited behind his épée mask, if he enjoyed the activity as much as Molly said he did. Judy had watched the video at least three times, shaking her head and declaring that Molly was crazy. Fencing lessons! It was unsettling for Martha to discover that she still experienced a tiny flush of pleasure when her mother criticized her sister’s choices, even though she and Molly were supposed to be a team.
Today wasn’t one of her mother’s good days. In the kitchen, her old, white-blue eyes looked flat, absent, as if, like her grandson’s, they were hidden behind a layer of mesh. She waved the knife back and forth in Martha’s direction, making a sort of infinity sign in the air.
Martha backed away. The light in the kitchen was pale and wintry; a fly buzzed around the thirsty monstera in the pot on the windowsill. Neither one of them had had coffee, and for a moment Martha wondered what would happen if she simply went upstairs, locked the bedroom door, and got back into bed. But she had to get the knife away from her mother.
Podcast: The Writer’s Voice
Listen to Nell Freudenberger read “Attila”
“Put that down,” she said sternly.
Her mother sliced the knife through the air, and said something like hut-cha!
“For real, Mom. Drop it.”
“I’m supposed to drop it, after what she did?”
The social worker, Lynn, had said that Martha shouldn’t tell her mother when she didn’t understand. It was too disorienting for her to hear all the time that her daughter had no idea what she was trying to say. Martha was supposed to feel her way through these conversations, looking for clues.
“What did she do again?”
Her mother stared at Martha in astonishment. “You’ve forgotten already?”
Martha had adopted Attila five years ago from a local rescue group. The process had involved two phone interviews and a home inspection. She’d also had to sign a contract promising that she would never let the rabbit outdoors; that she would not rename him (his name was Bentley at the time); that she would provide him with a quarter cup of dried food, half a cup of greens, and unlimited timothy hay each day for the rest of his life. If he expired prematurely, she was contractually obligated to inform the rescue organization within twenty-four hours.
She’d complied with some but not all of those strictures. She’d renamed him immediately, in light of his relative boldness and his bad habit of biting: Attila the Bun. She had also let Attila hop around the yard, until the neighbor’s tabby had become interested. The tabby’s soft red collar had a bell inside it. It was puffy, sort of like a court jester’s, giving him an Elizabethan air. The bell was to keep him from killing birds, but Attila didn’t know enough to run from a cat. Their one interaction had been a sort of tense standoff, during which the cat’s tail flicked ominously from side to side, like a metronome.
Attila hated to be picked up, but he would let you stroke his head. He was a Holland Lop, and the tips of his velvet ears rested on the ground when he was lying down. Once he could no longer go outside, he preferred the living room, where he could stretch his body almost flat on the sisal rug, his long back feet extended behind him. As a prey animal, he did this only when he was very relaxed, absolutely certain that no hawk was circling overhead, ready to lift him into the air and snap his neck.
One of the things their mother had loved to say when they were young was that she’d accidentally got her second child first—a sort of joke. Molly had blue eyes and long, honey-colored hair. At the all-girls high school that she and Martha attended, she had been admired, not only for her effortless good looks but for how much fun she was to be around—she seemed always to be in hysterics about something. Their father, now retired, had been a trusts-and-estates attorney; their mother, formerly a flight attendant, had left that job when she became pregnant. Judy had once said that everyone in her generation was called Judy or Carol or Barbara and that she had wanted to give her daughters old-fashioned names, “with some class.” Martha didn’t mind her name, but she thought that if their mother had really expected a different type of child to come first, she would have started with the sober Biblical name and gone with the charming nickname second.
Molly had floated through school with B’s and C’s, seeming to understand from an early age that grades didn’t determine one’s future. From about fifteen, she’d devised ways to sneak out of the house at night. If Martha detected her, Molly would buy her little sister’s silence with promises of candy or trips to the mall. Usually, Molly forgot these promises, but Martha didn’t need to be rewarded. It was enough to listen to her sister from the safety of her room: turning off the burglar alarm with a T-shirt pressed over the speaker to muffle the sounds, easing open the back door, and slipping through the wrought-iron gate to the street. Not only were Molly’s transgressions exciting; they left a niche—the good-girl niche—which Martha, with her love of school and her aversion to risk, was happy to fill.
Molly always had a boyfriend. It was one of Molly’s boyfriends—Jason, at first as unremarkable as his name—who had been involved in the events that changed their family life forever. Those events had not stayed within the thick stucco walls of the house. Because Molly could never keep her mouth shut, all the girls at school had known, and then so had their families. The shame had spread immediately and in all directions; trying to contain it was like trying to mop up a large puddle with a single paper towel. On the other hand, this had happened before social media and even before casual use of the Internet. It was easy to imagine how much faster the news would spread now, how much worse something like that would be.
At the time, Molly had been able to escape simply by going to college on the other side of the country. Their father had initiated the divorce, and Martha had remained with her mother. At first, Martha had been afraid that, once they were really alone, they would have to talk about what had happened, that Judy would want Martha to hear her side of the story. Maybe Judy was afraid of the same thing, because, for the first few weeks, they tiptoed around each other, barely breathing.
Once it became clear that the conversation they were dreading was one that neither of them wanted to have, the tension drained from the house. Aside from the two weekends a month that Martha spent with her father, it was just the two of them. Their relief made them generous with each other. Judy’s social circle had contracted, and Martha didn’t mind giving up a Friday or Saturday night standing on the edge of a party in someone’s yard, drinking beer from Solo cups, to read a novel or watch a rented movie with her mother. Sometimes she secretly preferred it.
English had always been Martha’s favorite subject. Once, she’d found Judy in her room, reading from her textbook, “The Norton Anthology of English Literature,” which she’d left open on her desk. “How can you understand this?” her mother had asked, a little awed. In Martha’s memory, it was Chaucer whose difficulty had impressed Judy, but she wouldn’t have been surprised to discover that she was wrong. She was always amazed by the radical differences in people’s memories of the same events, even people whose neurological functions were perfectly intact.
Was it those years with her mother that had predetermined her role as caregiver? They managed now because Martha instinctively knew how to set boundaries; boundaries were her specialty, in a way. By contrast, Molly and Judy had always tended toward conflict. The argument that had precipitated their break had taken place over the phone, more than a year ago, when their mother had said something critical about the children’s extracurricular activities—in her opinion, there were too many of them—and Molly had responded that Judy was hardly in a position to give parenting advice. The phone call had devolved after that, and the two of them hadn’t spoken since. Things would have been easier if that phone call hadn’t happened, of course. But it was pleasant to be someone’s confidant, pleasant to be cherished and needed; if Martha was honest, it was pleasant to be preferred to someone else.
“I’ll do anything,” Molly told Martha after that, “anything that doesn’t involve actually interacting with Mom.” That was when she’d said that they were a team, and that she’d always be available to talk things through with Martha. If they eventually decided on assisted living, Molly and her husband, Gabe, would pay for most of it. Molly had even promised to take on their father’s care, when the time came. Their father lived fifteen minutes from Molly in L.A., and had no health problems beyond borderline cholesterol numbers. His wife, Bethany, was ten years younger than he was, and Martha thought it was possible that he would never cause either of his daughters a moment of worry. “I know you have the heavier burden,” Molly had said at the time. “It’s just—me and Mom. . . .”
Martha had a tenure-track job at Johns Hopkins, thanks to her well-regarded book about the seventeenth-century poet Katherine Philips. Philips was known (to the extent that she was known) for the anti-marriage poem “An Answer to Another Persuading a Lady to Marriage.” The closest Martha had come to marriage was in her late twenties, when she was living with her boyfriend Alan and doing postgraduate work at Harvard. She was offered a job at U.C. Santa Cruz, and, to her surprise, a discussion about being in a long-distance relationship turned into a discussion about breaking up. Alan, it seemed, had a lot of goals that didn’t involve Martha; he wanted to leave his Ph.D. program, go backpacking in South America, and perhaps try his hand at journalism. He’d been telling Martha these things for months, he said, but felt that he never “got through” to her.
Later, Martha had to admit to herself that this might have been true. It wasn’t the first time that a boyfriend or even a close friend had surprised her with overwhelming feelings of which Martha had previously been ignorant. Listening to Alan’s revelation, she’d felt herself drifting further and further away, until it was almost as if she were a character in a novel or a TV series. Maybe it was the words he chose: she had a strong aversion to the casual use of terms like “gaslighting,” “projecting,” and “narcissism.” That kind of language was the opposite of the kind she studied, in which figures of speech were as clean and sharp as knives. Reading Philips’s poems, she felt as if the human mind and heart were being put into words for the first time.
She’d been hurt but not devastated when things ended with Alan. It had taken her a while to start dating again, and the situation wasn’t helped by the fact that she moved three more times, for three different jobs, before finally landing the position at Hopkins. She’d dated a bit when she first arrived in Baltimore, but at the moment she was taking a break from the apps. It was too difficult to think of explaining a scene like the one this morning—the kitchen, the rabbit, the knife—to a person she might arrange to meet at a bar or a coffee shop. When she had been dating, she’d always chosen locations with care, to avoid running into her students. But, even if she could avoid running into them in person, there was no way to avoid their finding her on the apps. Her friend Brian was now in the habit of alerting his students in the first lecture that he didn’t want to be contacted on dating apps, even if they were just saying hi. “Keep calm and swipe left,” he told them, which always got a big laugh. Brian was very likable and also very attractive, the kind of person whom even someone in their twenties might pause over on a screen. Martha was pretty sure that the same warning from her would have come off as pathetic, if not insane.
When her seminar ended that afternoon, Martha saw that she had a message from Gisela, who came on Mondays, Tuesdays, and Thursdays, ostensibly to clean but really to care for Judy while Martha was teaching. She hadn’t told Gisela what had happened in the morning, and, as the phone rang, she pleaded with the nameless authority who replaced God in her mind that nothing dramatic had occurred since she’d been gone. For once, this seemed to work: Gisela reported that they’d had a quiet morning and that Judy had eaten a piece of toast with her second cup of coffee. She was just calling to ask if she could leave a bit early, because she wanted to pick up her son from the school bus.
Martha agreed reluctantly. Gisela wasn’t trained in memory care, but she was affordable and gentle, and Martha hoped to employ her for as long as possible. When Judy got her diagnosis, she’d made Martha promise again and again that she would never put her in any kind of care facility—she’d had a sort of panic about it. Martha had made those promises, but that was before the decline had really begun. At some point, like Attila and the tabby, they were going to come to an impasse.
She told Gisela that of course she could leave at two. Judy would be fine for an hour until Martha got home. She was superstitious about the nameless authority and didn’t feel she could ask for another favor on the same day. Maybe Judy would take a nap after lunch, as she did increasingly often.
Martha had several recommendation letters to write before Monday and had promised her co-author a draft of their article, “The Personal and the Political in Seventeenth-Century Women’s Lives,” so she should have gone straight to her office. But the office was shared—with Graham, a talkative Miltonist—and instead she decided to go out to the quad, where she found an empty stone bench and called her sister. The temperature was in the low fifties, not cold, but it was very windy and the sky was white. Students hurried past without lingering.
Molly answered on the first ring. “Hang on,” she said, and then, “Did you check your backpack? Do you need your viola today? You’re not wearing socks!”
“Sorry,” she said to Martha. “Crazy morning.”
“I can call back.”
“No, no—Gabe’s driving them. Just one sec.”
There was another interval, in which Martha’s niece, Stella, could be heard yelling at her brother. Then there was Gabe’s deeper voice, presumably marshalling everyone toward the car. Martha personally had never much wanted a child, but she envied her sister Gabe’s presence. She would have liked to have a sounding board, a person with whom she could be honest about her doubts and fears without feeling that she risked damaging his opinion of her.
“Out the door,” Molly said. “Whew. What’s up?”
“I’m worried about Mom.”
“Uh-huh.”
“She was waving a knife at me this morning.”
“What?”
That got her sister’s attention. At the same time, Martha was aware that she was exaggerating slightly. The knife clearly hadn’t been intended for her.
“She looked a little like Leo with his foil.”
But her sister didn’t laugh. “Is this the first time she’s been violent?”
There was the time Judy had slammed the door of the apartment in anger and caught Martha’s finger—the nail was still purple—and another when she’d yelled at a small child on a tricycle on the sidewalk. Neither incident was really violent, though. It was more like their mother was constantly being dropped from sleep into waking life, with no transition, and all her responses were thrown out of whack.
“I think she was afraid of the rabbit.”
“I can see that!” Molly sounded relieved by the logic of this explanation.
“Really?”
“I mean, Attila’s not scary. He’s the cutest! But if you see him out of the corner of your eye—”
“What?” She was a little sensitive about Attila. Was it weirder to love a rabbit than a dog or a cat? When he cleaned his face with his paws, he looked like an illustration out of Beatrix Potter, but when he yawned there was something wild about his impressive incisors; under his tawny fur, you could make out the quadrate shape of his skull. Sometimes in the evening, when she was working at the desk in her bedroom, he would show up out of nowhere and collapse on her bare foot like a slipper.
“Probably she’d recognize him better if he was a kind of pet she was familiar with in the past.”
“We didn’t have any pets.”
“And we’re O.K., right?” Molly had a habit of switching gears without warning. “That’s what I told Gabe! The kids want a dog, and I just can’t. I told him, If this is the thing they’re talking about in therapy someday—that we didn’t get them a dog—then we did a pretty good job! Right?”
Martha laughed, although it sounded like a joke her sister had made before.
“Because I just can’t add anything right now, you know?”
“I get it,” Martha said. Her sister was a therapist who saw teen-agers, a growth industry these days. She was in the office only three days a week, though, and her own kids were now fifteen and eleven. “It’s just that at a certain point—”
“—we’re going to have to find a care facility,” Molly finished. “That’s what everyone does.”
“Not everyone. For a lot of families, that would be anathema.”
“You have a great vocabulary,” Molly said. “But those families don’t have Mom in them. Can I call you back from the car?”
“It’s O.K. I’m done.”
“We’ll talk soon—this weekend!”
When her sister hung up, Martha stayed on the bench for a moment. The wind was unpleasant, blowing bits of grit against her cheek, wrapping a plastic shopping bag around the base of a newly planted tree. A cardinal sat on one of its branches. It was the dun-colored female: she had only traces of red in her crest, wing, and tail feathers, but her beak was bright orange.
Eight years ago, when Martha was an associate professor at Kenyon, in Ohio, she had gone to the emergency room with severe abdominal pain. They’d initially thought it was appendicitis, but it had turned out to be volvulus, a twisted colon, which required emergency surgery. The doctor had said that if they hadn’t caught it the blood would have stopped flowing to that section of her intestine, and she would have died. Martha hadn’t been sure what to do with this information.
“Wow,” she’d said. “Thanks for catching it.”
On her second day in the hospital, her mother had arrived unexpectedly from Seattle, where she’d been living with the man she was involved with then, a retired high-school teacher who trained Seeing Eye dogs. This was five or six years before she started showing signs of Alzheimer’s. Martha had woken up from a nap in her hospital bed, and there was her mother, sitting in an armchair, doing a word search in a book with newsprint pages.
“What are you doing here?” Martha asked.
Her mother looked up, as if it were no more surprising for her to be at Martha’s bedside now than it had ever been. “Hello.”
“I didn’t know you were coming.”
“Of course I came.”
“Thanks,” Martha said. It was like being a kid again, knowing that someone was there to take care of her, to be in charge.
“I always will, as long as I’m able,” her mother said. “How could I not, when you’re all alone?”
When she got home, Judy was awake, lying on the pink couch—which Martha had bought on a whim when she moved in and now regretted—with a wet washcloth over her eyes. She sat up abruptly when Martha came in the kitchen door, dropped the washcloth on the rug, and gasped, “You scared me!”
“Sorry,” Martha said. “I thought you’d hear me coming in.”
“I didn’t know it was you! I couldn’t see.”
“Sorry.”
“I don’t know where that girl is. She ran off.”
“Gisela? She went to pick up her son.”
“She’s a single mother,” Judy said, suddenly sympathetic. “It’s a hard road.”
Martha had noticed that her mother often spoke in clichés, maybe because they came to mind more readily. The problem was hardly unique to Alzheimer’s patients.
“Gisela’s married.” She couldn’t help correcting her mother.
“At her age,” Judy said, disapproving again. Martha had never asked, but Gisela looked to be in her mid-thirties.
“I have a rotisserie chicken for dinner. I thought we could make some of that rice pilaf you like.”
“Not hungry,” Judy said. “Don’t make any for me.”
“Well, it’s only three. We won’t eat dinner for a while. I have some work to do, unfortunately. Why don’t you watch something?”
Her mother didn’t respond to that suggestion, so Martha crossed the room and turned on the box from the streaming service. “ ‘Downton Abbey’?” she suggested. “You love that. Or ‘Big Little Lies’?”
“ ‘Law & Order,’ Season 7,” Judy said, which was encouraging.
“It’s great that you remember where you were,” Martha said. “I never do.”
“I only remember stupid things,” Judy said clearly. “The stupider they are, the more I remember them.”
Martha hadn’t been there, of course. She’d been at some after-school activity: the literary magazine or speech and debate. Her sister had been at tennis. As Molly told it—as she’d been telling it for thirty years—tennis had ended early that day. Instead of calling their mother, Molly had got a ride with a friend from the same neighborhood; they lived, at that time, in Rancho Park, south of Pico Boulevard, near the public golf course.
The house was a Spanish-style bungalow with three bedrooms. The front door was arched, with a bevelled-glass window covered by a wrought-iron grille. Down a step from the entry hall was the living room, which had a deep-blue rug with a gold border, a white crane at each corner. Martha could see it clearly: Molly bursting into the house in her pleated lavender tennis skirt, her white collared shirt with the school’s insignia in purple, a racquet in her hand and her backpack over one shoulder, calling out, “Mom! I’m home!”
The couch faced a shelving unit with a TV in the center; behind it was a narrow wooden table, which divided the room. On the table stood a tall ceramic vase filled with dried flowers, which partially obscured the couch, so Molly didn’t see anyone right away. What she did see, lying on the floor beside the couch, were shoes—her mother’s zebra flats and a pair of black Chuck Taylors that she recognized, because Jason wore them every day. Martha couldn’t have given even a vague description of any of Molly’s other boyfriends from this period, but Jason’s face remained as clear in her mind as the faces of her current students: floppy blond hair, dull expression, a dusting of red acne on his forehead and cheeks.
“Jason?” Molly had said, and then she’d seen that there were two bodies on the couch. “Oh, my God,” Molly said, then covered her face with her hands. “Oh my God, oh my God, oh my God.”
According to Molly, Judy had stood up quickly, speaking in the slightly formal tone she employed when she felt defensive or insulted by someone: “We were just talking.” Jason had said nothing, picking up his shoes instead of putting them on, rushing past Molly and out the door. But their mother’s line—delivered after she’d adjusted her clothing, her back to Molly, then turned to see her daughter’s wild expression, the accoutrements of upper-middle-class teen-age life scattered around her on the chinoiserie carpet—was enshrined in the story, like a moral. “Get over yourself,” Judy said, and went upstairs.
In the context of her time, Katherine Philips was considered a secular poet. But there were several religious poems collected at the end of what scholars called the Tutin manuscript. In one of Martha’s favorites, Philips contrasts the clarity that the soul will experience in Heaven with its confusion here on earth:
The poem ends with the idea of the soul being cleansed in Heaven, but it was these lines that Martha loved—not because she thought people were bad per se but because they behaved in such inexplicable ways, as blindly and irrationally as babies.
A student approached her after the seminar on Tuesday. Ava had once volunteered that she’d grown up in Florida, but that was all Martha knew about her background. She had light-brown skin, narrow dark eyes behind clear-framed glasses, and very straight dark hair, cut in a bob. Today, she was dressed in an outfit that wouldn’t have been out of place when Martha was an undergraduate: a white sweater, brown corduroy miniskirt, and black tights with chunky shoes.
“Ava,” Martha said. “What can I do for you?” The room had emptied out, so it was only Martha at the white laminate seminar table, under a buzzing fluorescent light. Outside, rain streaked down the mullioned window, through which they could see the wet, green quad.
Ava was looking at the whiteboard, where Martha had scrawled at different times during the seminar the words “contentment,” “contemptus mundi,” and “A Valediction Forbidding Mourning—John Donne.” She seemed to be thinking about where to begin.
“What didn’t you like about my paper?”
The tone made Martha wonder if her question was really: What don’t you like about me? It was only two o’clock, but the lamps in the quad had been lit because of the weather. Beyond it, a construction site was demarcated by temporary fencing; it would be a new student center, funded by a billionaire alum. A crane and two diggers sat dormant in the rain, their shadowy bulk blocking the lights of Charles Street.
“I liked your paper. You’re a good writer—better than good. You’re one of the best writers I’ve had in a while.”
The girl’s eyes widened behind her glasses. “Then why did I get a B?”
“Well, first . . . I don’t think of a B as a bad grade. I’ve just never been convinced by the theory that Philips engineered the unauthorized publication of her poems.”
Ava pushed her hair behind her ears. “But she was dying for people to read them. That stuff she said about not writing for the rabble—that was just being snobbish in front of her fancy friends. People do that all the time around here.”
Martha couldn’t help smiling at this reimagining of the court of Charles II as spoiled Hopkins undergraduates. “We have to remember that most British women at the time couldn’t even sign their names,” she said. “Writing poems could make a woman seem less virtuous or genteel—and that was especially risky for women like Philips, who weren’t born into the aristocracy.”
“But she still wrote them.”
“Yep.”
“So why wouldn’t she want readers?”
“Poems can be humiliating. They can reveal things that the writer didn’t intend to reveal. Maybe even things the writer is later ashamed to have thought or done! Why shouldn’t she have been able to control who saw them and when?”
Ava was playing with a jade ring, turning it on her finger, but Martha noticed her recoil slightly, an indication that the emotion in Martha’s voice was disproportionate to her subject. She was so used to students trying to convince her to change their grades that she’d hardly considered whether this one had been fair. She tried to modulate her tone.
“In Philips’s time, the word ‘private’ was often used in a negative way—to mean isolated or self-interested. Most scholars think there was no conception of a right to privacy until the early nineteenth century.”
Ava looked up. “But you don’t think so.”
“I think we all have private experiences, whether or not we memorialize them in words.”
Ava nodded. “She died so young. Only thirty-three.”
“Lives were very compressed compared with ours. Philips had read the Bible by the time she was four, married at seventeen, written all these poems and given birth to two children before she died.”
“Are you married?”
Martha was a little taken aback.
“Sorry—I mean, if that’s too personal? I just noticed you’re not wearing a ring. I don’t want to get married or have kids.”
“Do you want to go on and get a Ph.D.?”
Ava didn’t hesitate. “Nope. I want to be a poet myself.”
“Honestly, that’s probably more practical these days. Are you writing poems now?”
Ava nodded. “I publish them on Instagram. I’m sure you think that’s stupid.”
“Of course I don’t.”
“I want people to read them—that’s the point.”
“I agree with you.”
“But you’re not changing my grade?”
“Probably not,” Martha conceded. “I’m sorry.”
“O.K. I heard you were tough.” Ava smiled, then casually reached down and adjusted her tights, grabbing the excess fabric and pulling it up toward her crotch. She continued talking, although now Martha was looking at the top of her head, the smooth cap of dark hair falling forward over her face. There was nothing sexual about what Ava was doing—it was, rather, the total lack of self-consciousness that Martha sometimes noticed in strangers in women’s rest rooms, an assumed sorority that always made her deeply uncomfortable.
“My poems are totally honest. I’m not hiding anything.”
“That’s a good goal.”
Ava straightened up. She didn’t go so far as to lift her skirt, but she did push down the waistband, revealing a pale swath of midriff. “It’s pointless, otherwise.”
“Poetry?”
“Everything,” she said, looking right at Martha. “Don’t you think?”
When Martha came in, Gisela was on her hands and knees in the kitchen. She was wearing green scrubs with a white turtleneck underneath, and her cheeks were flushed in an alarming way.
“What is it?”
“I can’t find Attila.”
Martha let out a breath. “He’s probably hiding under the bed upstairs. How’s Judy?”
Gisela stood up. She looked as if she were going to say something but thought better of it.
“Is something wrong?”
“She’s fine. She’s in the garage, napping.”
Martha put down her bag, relieved. With luck, her mother would sleep until dinnertime. She could make coffee and get some work done. Maybe she wouldn’t bother with dinner, just order pizza or something for the two of them.
“I can go check on her before I go.”
“Oh, that’s O.K.,” Martha said. “You should get out of here. I’m sure she’s still sleeping. I’ll go over in a bit.”
Gisela didn’t argue. She got her stuff together and went out the front door, which they almost never used.
“Have a good night,” Martha called after her.
She sat down at the kitchen table, but, before she could even take out her laptop, she saw her mother making her way across the back yard. Judy stopped to look at something in the grass, then continued to the back door. Martha waved at her through the frosted glass, but Judy still knocked on the door, as if she were a guest.
Martha got up and opened it. Her mother looked as if she’d just got out of bed and come straight to the house without a stop in the bathroom or a glance in the mirror. Her hair was messy, and her face had a sort of creased, bewildered look.
“Is everything O.K.?”
“Well,” her mother said.
“Come in and sit down. Do you want coffee?”
Judy nodded mutely. She was wearing a sweater and a blouse with a pair of wide-legged sweatpants. Everything matched, pink and black, so the outfit must have been Gisela’s handiwork.
“Did you have a good day?”
“I left it open.”
“Left what open?”
“The file. You have to hit Save.”
“Uh-huh,” Martha said. Maybe it had been a bad day, and Gisela hadn’t wanted to say so. On the other hand, she could remember days recently when her mother was perfectly fine all morning, then woke up from her nap confused. It was as if sleep gave the disease more scope to work its dark magic.
“It’s your sister’s fault.”
“Have a seat,” she said. “I’ll make the coffee.”
“Did she call?”
Martha tried to remain patient. “She doesn’t usually call here. Because the two of you don’t get along.” That was totally within the bounds of what was acceptable, according to Lynn, the social worker. It was more upsetting for her mother to be disoriented than it was to hear unpleasant facts about her life. At least for now, Martha was supposed to tell her the truth, ideally in a neutral way.
“Because of that thing.”
“Right,” Martha said. “That caused problems between the two of you.”
“You know that never happened.”
Martha was careful to keep her voice even. “I always thought it did.”
Her mother nodded. “Everyone did. But it was all a story your sister invented, to punish me.”
“Huh.”
“I even saw her once. At the zoo.”
“The zoo?”
Her mother shook her head in frustration. Her hair was wild, bits of pink scalp showing through like evening light in a cloud. “The store.”
“You saw Molly at the store?”
Her mother sighed, as if Martha were being particularly obtuse. “Not Molly. The mother.”
It took Martha a moment. “Jason’s mother?”
“What’s-her-name. She was buying those purple things.”
“Grapes?”
“This was in California.”
“Figs?”
Her mother nodded enthusiastically. “I told her we had a tree at home. That was true. Do you remember?”
“Yeah, of course. We hated them, but you and Dad used to eat them for breakfast.”
“They were so good, off the tree. Just a little sour. Too soft and sweet in the store.”
“Did what’s-her-name say anything to you?”
Judy looked surprised. “Her name is Linda. She’s still alive—probably. She said, ‘How’s your daughter?’ ”
“That’s nice.”
“Not nice.”
“Oh. So what did you say?”
“I told her all about you. Harvard and all that. Your awards.”
“Oh.”
“That’s nice,” Judy said with a secret smile.
“But don’t you think she was asking about Molly?”
Her mother raised her eyebrows, but this time it was put on—a joke. “I have two daughters, don’t I?” she said, and gave Martha a little wink.
It had stopped raining when Martha stepped outside, but it was already almost dark. Was today the twelfth or the thirteenth? By the Julian calendar, used in Philips’s time, December 13th was St. Lucy’s Day, the shortest of the year.
She’d just come out for a moment because of what Judy had said about leaving something open. Not a file, certainly—it had been years since her mother had used a computer. The door to the apartment was often a problem, though, one that foretold future problems. How long could Judy be trusted to walk unsupervised from the garage to the kitchen? How long would it be before she wandered off on her own?
Martha crossed to the garage, but the door was shut properly. Most of her mother’s instincts were still there; muscle memory compensated for some of the damage. She looked back at the lighted window, which framed her mother in profile at the kitchen table. Judy was sitting up straight in her chair, the coffee cup arrested halfway between the table and her mouth, as if something had engaged her attention. Did her thoughts run continuously in maddening loops, or did they get stuck in particular places, like the cassettes Martha had listened to as a teen-ager, snagging inside the player, spewing untidy nests of black magnetic tape?
Another strange characteristic of the disease was the way it intensified how Judy had been before: the frightening unpredictability of her speech and actions. This was an accident of her mother’s personality, Martha thought. With most people, the disease hung on to the neural networks, stifling and eventually distorting their original shape. Judy’s scrambling of past and future and her lack of any filter weren’t so different from the way she’d always been. Martha had never been able to anticipate what would come out of her mouth; she seemed to save things up, like arrows in a quiver. It didn’t matter if you were a kid with a tennis racquet or an adult in an adjustable bed. You needed to be always on your guard.
Martha was heading back to the house when she narrowly avoided tripping on something in the grass. She fumbled for the flashlight on her phone, then crouched down in disbelief. There was no obvious wound, but she could tell even before she touched the rabbit’s coat. The fur was oddly erect, as if from static, and spangled with rain. Attila’s side-facing prey animal’s eye—blank now, like a marble—hadn’t saved him. It must have been the kitchen door that Judy had left open. Attila would have hopped down the steps and into the yard. The cat would have slipped through the fence and out of his foolish collar, given in to all his ancient impulses.
It was too cloudy for stars, but a half-moon was rising low over the horizon. She would need something to wrap him in, maybe a bag to carry him past her mother. If Judy understood what was in the bag, she would be likely to ask questions, but whether she would connect the event to her own error was anyone’s guess. What was certain was that she wouldn’t remember that it had happened; she might not remember that Attila had existed at all.
Was it possible that a creature with Attila’s particular combination of wildness and vulnerability shouldn’t be loved, that loving him showed Martha’s desperation? She forced herself to look at the corpse, which seemed to have grown smaller in the minutes she’d been crouching in the grass. Stay, she thought, but that directive couldn’t be for the rabbit, who was ineluctably gone. The grass was soaking her canvas shoes, but it seemed important not to get up just yet. This would be one of those private moments lost to history, in which Martha so passionately and unfashionably still believed. ♦
