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Linda

Ashley Pearson

    You pull into the parking lot of the nursing home and park your navy blue Chevy Suburban in the nearest parking spot. You look into the backseat by instinct, despite having just dropped your daughter off at dance practice. Your therapist says alone times like this should be “you” time. You should get your nails done at the local nail parlour or read a Courtney Milan book in a hammock (or whatever other suburbia mothers do). Instead you take your keys out of the ignition, fluff your hair, walk inside, grab your guest badge at the check in at the nurses’ station.You are on a first name basis with them. One of the nurses, a young 20 something year old named Sarah, asks how your daughter is doing and cracks a joke about her dancing skills. Another nurse compliments your ruby red lipstick. The nurses try to brighten your day. You prefer the small talk over the looks of sympathy they used to give you when you first started visiting.
    You open a door (down the hall, to the right, down the hall, to the left).
    It smells like piss inside. It almost always does. You sit down in a worn chair by the bed, in front of the window, and fidget with your badge.
    After a couple minutes of silence, you look into a pair of empty eyes. The pupils are static, unmoving, like those of a doll. But then they blink once, twice, three times. A rapid set of blinks, like when a baby doll with long, lush, black eyelashes gets shaken by a child. The eyes are flawed too, out of order from one too many violent shakes. The eyes are either in rapid motion or completely still, no in-between.
    You want to do something, anything, to fix the problem. You want to repair the eyes with a little bit of glue and thin, needle-nosed pliers. But it feels like your hands are tied behind your back and your tools have been lost to time.
    You take a deep breath and ask, “How are you doing today, mom?”
    Her wrinkled hand reaches out and touches yours, strokes them gently, even though the act should be the other way around. The skin of her hand is thin, constantly becoming more translucent with time. The veins swirl under the skin like a macabre marble cake. It reminds you of parchment paper and the many figures of speech taught in high school classrooms meaning frail or eggshell. But all you can think about is how pale the hand is. How still. How ashen.
    One wrong move and everything (head, shoulder, knees, and toes) could come crashing down.
    You remember how colorful your mother used to be. She loved to paint her nails a different color every week. She loved to match her nail polish with her lipstick, her clothes, and sometimes her eyeshadow too. You used to hate the smell of nail polish remover. Her home used to stink of it. Yet, it is times like these, where you find yourself missing the pungent smell.
    “I know you.” Your mom says. You have come to believe it is the mouth, not the brain, that speaks. It couldn’t be the hippocampus or any of the lobes. Or the neurons, which are mostly broken anyway. Though the voice sounds like your mother, you think maybe the brainstem is speaking. The doctors told you at the time of diagnosis that it would be the last area of the brain to be affected.
    After the brainstem goes, everything (and eyes and ears and mouth and nose) shuts down. You don’t know if all of the internal organs shut off at once, like automatic lighting, or if it’s more of a flickering affair with each shutting off one at a time.
    You don’t think you want to know.
    After a long pause you ask, “You do?” You know you disassociated there for a second, and for all you know she could have called you a no-good whore or a silly, stupid bitch. Yet, you hate how desperate you still come off as. Your voice raises a little too enthusiastically. There’s a tinge of glee to it. You think of how hopeful you are that she knows you. How pathetic you are that you think she knows you.
    “You are Linda.” The mouth repeats, “Linda, Linda, LindaÉ” It repeats, until the eyes go blurry and the air stiffens. You do not know “Linda.” You never have. Maybe Linda was an old friend or distant family member. Who knows? For all you know, Linda could have been a cashier at a grocery store she met in 1995.
    The adult brain weighs around three pounds. The brain stem measures about three inches. You cannot see a neuron with the human eye. You are XXX pounds, X’X high, and visible to the human eye. And still you are beaten by something tiny and miniscule. She doesn’t know you. She hasn’t known you in years.
    Like the weakling you think you are.
    You remove your hand from hers and twiddle your thumbs. Twiddle dee. Tweedle doo. You look at the birds in front of you, chirping joyfully outside the window beside her bed. You think of their little brains, impossibly small. You think of their lobes and their neurons and their happiness.
    A human can live without a brain for a long period of time. Up to twelve years you’ve heard. You are not sure how much longer you can handle this. Twelve years is a long time. Twelve years to act on climate change. Twelve more years to observe the birds in front of you. Twelve years to get your nails done at the nail parlour and read every Courtney Milan book three times over.
    You remember when your mother first moved to this place. You remember when you first started to visit her. It was like visiting her at her home, except the white ranch style home two blocks from your house was now a small room tucked away in a corner of a nursing home. You would drink coffee with her, talk about the weather, and watch the birds outside together. You would show her pictures of her granddaughter. You would joke around and deep inside the back of your mind, you hope you can do this again. You wish you could travel back in time and have a coffee with your mother instead of alone at a Starbucks at 4:00 in the afternoon.
    You think about reaching out and removing the brain stem yourself, ending it all, but even a beheaded chicken can survive for 18 months (you remember his name was Mike). It’s easy to miss the brain stem with an axe. And you are no farmer nor practicing physician. Sadist, maybe (but your therapist says this is all par for the course).
    When a chicken gets its head cut off, it can still “crow.” It gurgles through the back of its throat. When your mother loses her mind, she can still “talk.” She gurgles through the brain stem.

Previously published in the Fall 2020 issue of Catch Magazine; an on-campus literary magazine at Knox College.

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