Fault Line by Jillian McKelvey

Image via Pixabay by fernandozhiminaicela

She flattened her back against the wall, arms planted and slightly askew, fingers splayed, head pressed in profile like a cartoon character, or maybe more like an FBI agent about to leap around the corner, gun cocked. The remains of a potted plant lay recklessly across the floor and up the wall where earth and leaf lingered. Just moments before the upheaval, the pot had sat steady on the corner of a counter and the plant reached its limbs towards artificial light. 

She was mad, my mother. She said she was going to strangle herself with her purse, drown herself in the pool, throw herself under a bus.After hurling the potted plant, she went for Agnes and grabbed her around the neck until frantic caregivers pried her away. 

It’s the disease, Connie said, when she called. Don’t worry, she said, it’s the disease, she said. We all love your mother, and I loved her for saying that, but my hands flew to my face, and my insides tumbled and spilled across the floor. 

~

Connie, the assisted living director, told me I was their poster girl. I brought sunshine in the door and laughter to the fourth floor. She told me I didn’t fuss around playing nursemaid. I visited. I danced. I sang. I read books. I dressed up and hula-hooped. I wasn’t afraid to come and have fun. 

But I was afraid. I was afraid every time I visited my mother. I was afraid of my mother’s dementia, afraid of her pain, afraid of not knowing what to do, of not doing enough, of not being able to delight her the way I had always been able to do. I was afraid of saying goodbye. She hated goodbye.

“I won’t be here when you get back,” my mother said to me. And she shouted my name down the elevator shaft and I could hear her from the ground floor.  
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On the fourth floor, the dementia floor, the knives, the scissors, and the hammer were locked behind glass in green felt pockets. But you can’t lock up someone’s hands, or stop them from kicking, or throwing a glass, or heaving a potted plant.

~

She was sad, my mother. A caregiver had encouraged me to leave while my mother read, Paddle to the Sea, with Ester, another kind caregiver. “Your mother is distracted,” she said. This might be a good time for you to slip away.” 

“But I didn’t say goodbye. And she might come looking for me.”

“It might be easier this way. She won’t remember you were here.”

But she did.

I slipped out while Ester read, “The Canadian wilderness was white with snow.” I backed out of the room and ran to the exit and pressed the secret code and snuck down the back stairs like a thief and left my mother paddling to the sea with Ester. But, I didn’t say goodbye. I didn’t say, I love you, Mummy, and she didn’t say, I love you, back.                  

Just before Christmas, my mother woke in the middle of the night, and in bare feet and a yellow smocked nightgown, she traipsed after Helen, a new fourth floor resident. My mother followed Helen down a dimly lit hall and tapped her on the back. “Where are you going?” my mother said. Tap Tap Tap. But Helen, her long grey hair pulled back in a ponytail, didn’t turn or speak. My mother tapped Helen again and again and Helen swung around and shoved my mother with both hands and my mother tumbled to the floor, her right leg crumpled beneath her. Fractured.

At three in the morning, I found my broken mother in a hospital cubicle, shivering without a sheet. She waved her left arm in the air, clutched her right leg with her right hand and cried, “Hello. Hello. Somebody!”
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“Oh, Mum, I’m here. I’m right here.” 

~

I woke up beside my mother on St Patrick’s Day, her favourite day, and I finger painted her chapped lips with a drop of white wine and fastened a shamrock pendant around her neck. 

She died at noon. 
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When the coroner arrived, she insisted on an autopsy. “Oh, please don’t do that,” I said. “Please. She’s been through enough.”  But the coroner said they needed to know the cause of death. They needed to know if it was Helen’s fault. 

“It’s no one’s fault,” I said. “It’s the disease.”

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Jillian McKelvey writes narrative nonfiction in Prince Edward Island (PEI), Canada. She is currently working on a memoir titled I’m Losing My Mountains. Her work has appeared in Memoir Magazine, Shift, River Teeth, Ravensperch and is forthcoming in Salamander. She can frequently be found bounding across the fields of PEI with her dog, Flying Freddy.