But this reverse Munchausen, or whatever it is, is something I’ve never heard of before. What kind of mother would go to incredible lengths to fake her own disease for the sole purpose of keeping her daughter tied to her?
I rise and throw on cutoffs and a top, then head to the bathroom to wash my face and brush my teeth. I make no effort to keep my movements quiet. There’s no reason to avoid warning my mother I’m about to appear.
When I walk into the living room, I see she has poured me a cup of coffee and left it on the table in front of the couch.
I reach for it and take a sip, then sit down next to her. “Thanks.”
“Did you have fun last night?”
“It was okay.”
“What movie did you see?”
We’ve done this countless times before, me and mom, sitting side by side on our soft old couch, talking. It never felt unnatural before.
I decide to tell the truth. “I didn’t see a movie. I went to see Ethan.”
My mother’s eyebrows lift above the rim of her mug.
“How is Ethan doing?”
If my mother played a part in the destruction of the only significant romantic relationship I’ve ever had—if she actually spiked my boyfriend’s drink with something like Benadryl to make it appear that he was self-destructing—it isn’t apparent from her expression. I see no guilt or remorse, only mild curiosity.
“The same.”
She nods. “Still tending bar and talking about how he’s going to be a big photographer?”
My mother’s doing it again. She’s inserting splinters that make me look at Ethan in the worst possible light. My words—the same—could stretch to cover a range of possibilities: He’s still charming and handsome and fun. He still makes me laugh. He’s still in love with me. He still makes me want to be with him.
My mother picked the most disparaging interpretation, the one designed to keep distance between me and my ex.
Anger flashes through me. I bite back the words Don’t try to manipulate me.
I take a sip of coffee to buy myself a moment to steady my emotions and voice.
Then I look directly into my mother’s eyes. “Since neither of us has to work today, I’ve got a plan.”
* * *
My mother is staring out the window of our Bonneville, looking for the landmarks we once relied on to find our way. “There. Turn right at the Shell station.”
We’re about an hour from home, but this area was home once, too. We lived in Lancaster for two years, until I was midway through tenth grade, before moving to Harrisburg.
So far today, my mother’s memory has been impeccable. She easily recalled the address of our old apartment—I did, too, but I let her be the one to recite it—and she noticed the dry cleaners on the main road leading to our complex has been replaced by a 7-Eleven.
I don’t feel like playing along with the banter my mother keeps attempting to ignite. We’ve taken a lot of road trips before, but this one is different.
We’re traveling down memory lane, literally and figuratively.
I take a right off the busy road, and a moment later we pull up in front of our old apartment complex. It looks indistinguishable from thousands of other redbrick buildings in hundreds of cities. The building appears to be solid, but no expense was incurred to give it any design flare. It’s a box with windows.
My mother tilts her head up as she gazes at it. “Fifth floor, seventh window from the left.”
That was our apartment, a one-bedroom where my mother and I slept in twin beds with a shared nightstand between us. The window didn’t open more than a few inches, which my mother told me was a fire hazard. But she couldn’t get management to do anything about it, so she bought a fire extinguisher at Home Depot and kept it under my bed and told me that under no circumstances were we ever allowed to light candles.
We were happy here. Eighth grade was painful for me, especially as a new kid joining the school in February, but my life turned around once I made it to high school. My features seemed like they fit my face better, somehow. I suppose I felt a bit more confident in my skin as well. By the end of ninth grade, I’d made a couple of friends, Aliyah and Chelsea, who were studious and shy like me. Once I had someone to sit with at the lunch table, I stopped dreading weekdays.
As for my mom … well, she seemed content, too. She was working at a steakhouse and because I was old enough to stay home alone at night, she took on dinner shifts, which were more lucrative. She bought her first car, the Bonneville, because it wasn’t safe for her to take the bus home so late at night. We didn’t see each other as much because she was usually heading to work by the time I got home from school, but I was fine with that.
It was nice to have a little breathing room for the first time in my life.
That wasn’t my only big change.
At the beginning of tenth grade, I met a boy.
Charlie was a sensitive, sweet guy who wrote for the school newspaper and told me that one day he planned to write novels. I believed he’d actually do it, too. He had a smile that started slowly and spread until it took over his entire face, and even though his vision was terrible and he wore thick glasses, he seemed to see everything.
I’ve learned that our minds skim past slightly garbled written words because we automatically use context to activate the areas of our brains that jump to conclusions about what comes next. That’s one reason why it’s so hard to catch our own typos. We see what we expect to see.
Charlie’s mind didn’t work that way. He truly bore witness to the world, cataloging the details everyone else missed. Shortly after we started hanging out together, he told me that our English teacher’s handwriting was changing, with the letters becoming tighter and narrower. I didn’t believe him, so he made me pull two papers out of my binder—one from the beginning of the year and one more recent. The evidence was there—in blue ballpoint pen.
“At first I thought it was either Parkinson’s or a shift in mood,” Charlie had told me. “I looked it up and handwriting shifts can be symptoms of either.”
“At first?”
He’d nodded. “Now I know it’s a change in mood.”
I was fascinated. “How can you tell?”
“He stopped wearing his wedding ring a week ago.”
Everyone assumed Charlie and I were a couple before we even kissed for the first time. We hadn’t been dating all that long before my mother broke the news: We had to move again.
She gave me a single day to return to school and say my goodbyes. When I got home that afternoon, she’d sold or given away our beds and couch and the rest of our furniture to neighbors, and our remaining belongings were packed in the back of the Bonneville.
It was almost like we’d never lived in Lancaster at all.
I glance at my mother now. She’s still staring up at the apartment from the passenger’s seat. I wonder what memory she is lost in.
If my mother has researched Alzheimer’s disease, she would know more recent memories are typically the first to disappear. It would make sense that her recollections from this time in her life would be relatively unmarred.
“Tell me again why we had to leave.” It’s a struggle to keep my voice from cracking. Charlie, Aliyah, Chelsea … we kept in touch for a little while after I left, with promises to call every week and visit, but by eleventh grade we’d drifted apart. They’d moved on while I’d floated backward.