content warnings
Mentions of death and allusions to pregnancy loss and dementia
[2494 words]
Two things infuriate me today.
Firstly, the music is different. The sluggish jazz melody I’ve spent years humming to myself has been replaced with a pop song about youthful freedom. It’s a sick lampoon in a nursing home but it does make it feel less like death’s musty waiting room. Secondly, the fresh vase of daffodils that usually sit in the window of the nurse’s station is gone. Now, all I see are dyed orchids in an array of grotesque, unnatural colours.
The culprit–a new nurse wearing watermelon earrings–bounces from her swivel chair and greets me with a smile that says, ‘my innovative ideas will transform this place from an idle purgatory to a cheerful utopia!’
Introductions are made and Nurse Not-Ratched insists on escorting me to my mother’s room. Despite my intention to be antisocial, my politeness is reflexive. She gives the same rehearsed speech I hear every afternoon, though her voice is brimming with more optimism than the other nurses usually muster.
‘I’ve just loved getting to know your mother,’ she says.
‘Oh,’ I reply, wondering if her words are nurse-code for ‘I read her file’ or ‘I changed her bedpan and know her bowel movements intimately.’
My mother’s in her usual armchair facing the window that overlooks a brick wall. I complained about the view when she first arrived. The corporation that owns the home emailed a half-hearted reply that was overwrought with platitudes and hinted at a much grimmer message; why waste a good view on her?
I sit beside her, pull out a bag of chips and open a word puzzle on my phone. She reaches over and places her hand atop mine. I freeze. It’s been years since she’s initiated a touch. Or spoken words, or made eye contact. My first instinct is to press the nurse call button but I don’t. Lifting my eyes, I search my mother’s face for recognition but she’s still staring absently outside. Afraid that any movement might sever this rare connection, I lean back, close my eyes and luxuriate in the warmth of her skin.
I wait in the black abyss behind my own eyelids.
Part I: The Porch
I wait and wait until the dull, repetitive tapping frustrates me enough to open my eyes. The wind gently knocks the front door against its frame. It was always a little wonky; the fly screen frayed and pockmarked. I’m standing on my childhood porch. ‘The foundations keep shifting,’ my father would say when my mother complained he hadn’t fixed it yet.
I blink a few big, dramatic blinks, pinch myself and spin around. The porch remains. The screen door lurches open and they appear. Him behind her, his hands covering her eyes but not the coquette smile pulling at her suddenly wrinkle-free face.
‘Phil, I’m going to burst if you don’t tell me what it is!’
‘I married the world’s most impatient woman,’ he groans in the goofy, exasperated way reserved for ‘his girls.’ His tone; the depth, the rhythmic lilt of his soft vowels. He was always the man behind the video camera and his voice is a ghost I’ve tried to conjure over the last decade. Hearing it—and feeling his boyish gusto—I want to weep.
He guides her down the steps of our bucolic homestead and I follow them into the dusty, not yet landscaped front yard.
‘Ta-da!’ he caws, lifting his hands to reveal the Nissan Bluebird 910 my family drove until it was gleaned for scrap in the mid-2000s.
She squeals. ‘Wh—how?’
‘I used my bonus for the down payment. Do you like it?’
‘I’ve never owned anything new before,’ she says, a lifetime of near-poverty cracking open the wonder in her voice. ‘You hate red.’
‘Yeah but you love it,’ he replies, rubbing his neck. Praise, awkwardness, affection. Rub neck. I’d forgotten that habit.
She blushes—a newlywed pink I’d never seen on her—and pushes her nose into the back passenger window, inspecting the interior. ‘It has enough room for a baby seat.’
‘A what..?‘ Hope swells naked in his eyes. ‘Wendy, are you sure?’
She straightens and places a hand on her belly. ‘Eight weeks along, the doc says. I think it’s a girl.’
Rub neck.
Part II: The Kitchen
I’m lured away by an aroma that tugs at every nostalgic thread in my body. It smothers the bittersweet realisation I came to as I watched my parents. While that moment glimmered on the surface as a pretty memory, what followed was ugly. Years of days struck from calendars in angry red crosses, years of pages ripped from baby name books, years of hands falling off bellies.
I don’t turn back once I step inside. The weatherboard house I spent my early years circumnavigating has two stories and is narrow in a way that seems architecturally peculiar. (When my mother was moved to assisted living, the real estate agent called the house ‘cozy’ and I resented the way her nose wriggled when she noted that every room was painted a different unfashionable shade of green. Those emeralds, sages, chartreuses, junipers and pistachios coloured my childhood and I’ve always kept at least one room green in my own homes.)
I take the twelve steps from the entranceway to the kitchen’s arched opening. Above me, a crucifix that came with the house hangs, mottled with dust. My father always wanted to take it down but the one time he did, his football team had a ten-game losing streak. My mother suggested putting it back up and the next week, they won. My parents both insisted they weren’t ‘really’ believers but the crucifix continued looking down at us until the house was sold.
My mother is standing at the stove, one hand stirring a sticky sauce and the other adjusting the ancient radio on the window ledge. The 6pm news is the canvas from which every dinner is made in this house.
‘It’s nearly ready!’
I almost topple as I rush past myself; a lot younger and far more buoyant than now me.
‘Orange chicken!’ I proclaim. ‘Can I taste-test?’
My mother laughs and hands nine-year-old me the wooden spoon. ‘No licking. Use your finger.’
I remember the taste instantly. Citrus, ginger, cloves. It was both summer and winter. Caramelised sweetness and tangy sourness.
‘Well?’ My mother asks, snatching the spoon back.
‘Hmm…’ I strum my fingers along my chin dramatically. ‘Needs more salt.’
Handing me the salt, she nods to the pan.
Tentative, I pour a small mound into my hand and clap it into the pot. My mother mixes it through and offers me the spoon again. ‘Better,’ I say.
We share a smile then—the kind of secret smile that only transpires in modest moments—the kind that you forget about later but informs your feelings about a certain person or thing.
‘You have a great palate, better than mine,’ my mother says, turning off the gas and pouring the sauce over rice. ‘You could be a chef one day.’
Part III: The Bathroom
Somewhere above me, a door slams and I know it’s time to move on. Sniffing a final, homesick whiff, I turn and climb the stairs. It’s dark on the landing, the only light a thin golden horizon under the gap in the bathroom door.
I see my own silhouette cross from my bedroom to the bathroom and knock four times.
‘Mum?’ I call through the door.
No reply.
‘Mum!’
The door opens and a monstrous fluorescent light burns my eyes. My mother’s standing by the sink, a cheap pink nightgown draped over her skinny shoulders. Age sees her face a little more sunken, her hair more dehydrated than the woman I just saw in the kitchen.
I don’t remember this.
‘Was I in here too long?’ She asks, turning back to the lime-tiled room as if it might reveal a giant question-answering clock. ‘Sorry, I don’t want to make you late for school.’
I can’t see my face but I know I’m frowning. ‘Mum, I finished school eight years ago.’
‘Oh.’ Momentary disorientation morphs into a jubilant smile. ‘Of course. You’re a fancy restaurateur now!’
‘I wouldn’t say fancy,’ I retort, ‘it’s literally a hole in the wall.’
‘Well, I bet it’s the best hole in the wall anywhere.’ She places a hand on my cheek, her affection curative. ‘I can’t wait to finally see it.’
I pull away and suddenly remember. Though it’s been years, the same hot, sickening dread engulfs both then me and now me.
Part IV: The Lounge Room
I wander the house, traversing the quaint spaces like a tomb raider searching for my ancestral treasure. The vampiric quietness is unnatural to a house with such old bones. There’s no creaking floorboards or whistling drafts. No clanging pipes or rattling window frames. Perhaps I’m not listening close enough?
I pause halfway down the stairs. There it is. A pattering. Soft thumps. The sounds are faint but create a sudden fissure broadcasting the return of life. I jog towards the lounge room which is dark except for the static glow of the TV screen and the green digits on an old alarm clock in the corner.
My father’s on his hands and knees in front of the TV unit, his head hidden in the cavern of wires. ‘Is it working?’ He calls.
‘No,’ teenage me answers from the couch. I’m sitting cross legged beside my mother who’s knitting a cardigan for a new baby in town. Dressed in a different nightgown—this one fluffy and checkered—she’s humming softly, dreamily, obliviously.
‘Damn. I—’ he fumbles. There’s some rummaging and he asks, ‘Now?’ The TV flickers and the screen clears as much as a pixelated 80s brick allows.
‘It’s working,’ I announce.
‘Huzzah!’ My father leans back on his heels and slips a VHS into the player.
Quietly, he joins us on the couch and lifts his arm for me. I roll my eyes but nuzzle under the crook without protest. From here, I can feel the warmth radiate along the left side of my body as if there’s no such thing as time or death.
The title card rolls and an image of a big white house with a perfect green lawn and shuttered windows appears. Since this memory, I’ve seen this movie several dozen times, yet oscillating my head from my family to the TV, I know this is then me’s first time.
‘This guy’s not going to turn into a werewolf is he?’ I ask a few minutes into the movie.
‘Shh!’ My father hisses. ‘Just watch.’
I don’t say another word.
I settle on the floor beside the coffee table and watch the entire movie again. A few times I turn and see my father shake with laughter and my mother gasp at the audacity of the characters. At the end, Ferris Bueller turns to the screen and says; ‘Life moves pretty fast. If you don’t stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it.’
I rub my ankle, where–under my socks–I had those words immortalised the night of my father’s funeral.
‘Are you crying?’ He asks.
Startled, I realise he’s not asking now me. ‘No!’ I protest too loudly as he flings a tissue at me. It flutters into my lap but I refuse to pick it up.
‘What did ya think?’
‘It was okay.’
‘I thought it was brilliant,’ he remarks.
‘So you’d be cool with me doing that?’ I say daringly. ‘Faking a sick day and going into town?’
‘Sure,’ he remarks. ‘In fact, why don’t I take tomorrow off and we can all go into the city. We’ll get some Thai food, go to the market and buy ourselves something new.’
I try to recall if we ever went through with it. I back out of the lounge and strain until I reach the painful epiphany that I didn’t care enough at the time to commit the answer to memory.
Part V: The Bedroom
There are footsteps upstairs and I find my bedroom door ajar. My mother’s sitting at the end of my bed and my father is standing a few feet away holding a small round fish tank.
My lamp in the corner provides just enough light to see the dead goldfish bobbing along the surface.
‘How should we tell her?’ My mother whispers.
I’m sleeping under the patchwork quilt cover my grandmother repurposed from her old floral curtains. The wall is shamrock green so I age myself at about four or five. Every couple of years, with the exception of 1995-1997 when my mother went through a wallpaper phase, a new shade would be furiously painted. I imagine if you striped them back, the walls would read like the rings of a tree.
‘We don’t,’ my father says, swirling the water and watching the fish cartwheel. ‘I’ll go down and buy a new one in the morning.’
My mother huffs. ‘I don’t know, that seems dishonest.’
‘It is,’ my father admits, ‘I just think she’s too young to learn about death.’
‘I think she’ll notice it’s not Daffodil. Maybe we just explain that the fish went to heaven and then take her to choose a new one herself.’
A sigh from my father. ‘So we teach her that life is easily replaceable?’
‘I… I don’t know.’ My mother settles into this frantic kind of silence.
‘Come,’ my father takes her hand and draws her into an embrace.
‘Philip, I don’t know how to do this,’ my mother whimpers. ‘She asks so many questions and I haven’t showered in days and I forget things and… maybe this would be easier if I were her real mother.’
I stir in bed as her voice magnifies.
My father soothes with his one free hand, his words sounding like a lullaby. ‘You are her real mother,’ he coos. ‘You’re wonderful. She’s wonderful. Whatever we choose to do, it’ll be okay. She’ll be okay.’
I wake to the ambient sound of a new pop song thumping through the nursing home corridors. This time, it doesn’t anger me. I’m still clasping my mother’s hand but the warmth is gone. The slowness of her passing—the aching idleness of her recent life—has hidden the march. I give her fingers a gentle squeeze and await the inevitable combination of panic and guilt.
I picture the times she looked at me in that motherly way. All the calls I didn’t answer, the unsolicited advice I threw in her face, the worried creases my defiance earned her.
‘You’ll always be my mum,’ I whisper, knowing it’s too late, it’s not enough and it’s mostly just for me.I remember the proud smiles, the patient instructions, the I love yous I may not have earned but still received. The panic and guilt doesn’t come. Only relief. The necrotic schism that tethered her to her own mind finally snaps. She’s gone back to The Memory House; she just needed someone to walk her to the door.
Maddison Scott is a teacher, writer and former film projectionist from Melbourne, Australia. Her short stories have appeared in, among others, Maudlin House, The Molotov Cocktail, Flash Fiction Magazine, Five on the Fifth and Stupefying Stories. You can find her online at: maddisonscott.wordpress.com
This story was previously published as a finalist in the 2023 Melton Short Story Competition
