11/26/2023 0 Comments Lightspeed university panties![]() “Renata is seventeen now,” I say brightly, as if it were utterly normal that nine years had been absorbed into the fungus. Plaque filling up the interstitial spaces between her neurons, her brain like Swiss cheese filled with fibrous mold. She doesn’t really know anymore that she has Alzheimer’s, but sometimes she knows something is wrong. She has an inkling she’s missing something. When I picked her up at the police station, her bare ankles almost broke my heart. When she was living at her condo, the police found her in her nightgown and a pair of black high-heeled shoes, carrying an empty pocketbook, walking down Ashleigh Drive. It’s called a Digital Angel and it monitors her blood pressure and temperature and has a GPS so that at the reception desk they can track her. She leans forward and whispers, “Take me home.” She got the angel in a Christmas gift swap with her bridge club, but she thinks it’s something inherited, antique. My mom’s room has her own furniture from her condo-her gold couch, her bed, her little dinette table, the white ceramic angel that sat on an end table. It’s more like a hotel near the freeway, the kind that includes breakfast in the lobby. The hallways are carpeted, and there is none of the clatter and echo, the institutionalization I associate with nursing homes. I go to see her Tuesday and Thursday and Saturday, and even though she doesn’t know what day it is or what days I visit, I think maintaining the pattern is important. Today is Tuesday and on Tuesdays I drive from work to the nursing home where my mother is. That was last night, the second night Renata didn’t come home. And then the horror of it all hit me and I said, “Sonia, up!” She stayed because I held her there by looking at her, the way you can sometimes will a dog into submission. She trusts me, she’s more my dog than anyone’s, and she didn’t like it, but for me she laid there. There was some horrible fate impending for Sonia and I had to kill her before something worse happened. The second night, I dreamed that I was on a desert island and Sonia, our Golden Retriever, was with me. Seventeen-year-olds sleep on friends’ couches, I know. That was the first night Renata didn’t come home and it doesn’t take Freud to figure out what that meant. The first night, I dreamed of seeing a stray dog and not stopping to pick it up although it was wandering in an empty parking lot near a busy road. I don’t dream about Renata, although when the dreams wake me up, it’s thinking about Renata that keeps me awake. The last two nights I have dreamed of dogs in trouble. In the background, shining, is Renata, who is young and healthy and good, raising her arm to show her grandmother that the chip is nothing, nothing at all. ![]() ![]() It’s another low-grade moment of horror, but I think about that particular time with my mother because Renata was there and we were united, she and I. The doctor has an injection gun and while my mother is focused on my daughter, she puts it firmly against my mother’s arm and puts the chip in. Her head swings around, from Renata to me to the doctor and then back to Renata. I try to say it every time as if it was the first time I said it. “They’re going to give you an injection.” My mother winces at the injection and is surprised again. She has professional hair, lightly streaked. The doctor swabs her upper arm with antiseptic and says, “I’m going to give you something to numb it, okay?” To me, the doctor says in her normal voice, “It’s just a little lidocaine.” I don’t like the doctor, but I don’t know why. The doctor bares my mother’s arm, where the crepey flesh hangs loosely on the bones. She looks at me and then at Renata, who is smiling, and finally submits uncomprehendingly. In the time it takes me to explain, she grasps and loses the words, grasps and loses phrases as they go past. “It’s an implant that will let them know where you are, and how you are. My mother is bewildered, her face turned up toward me. The doctor, a woman I don’t know, is sitting in the other chair. There’s just a desk, a little white table with two chairs and a scale. Everything is white and hospital-like but there’s no examining couch. My mother is sitting in the little examining room at the assisted living complex. “I had it done when I was little and see, you can’t even tell.” My sixteen-year-old daughter pulls up her t-shirt sleeve to show her bare arm, the skin summer brown and the muscle swelling slightly into smooth biceps, flawless.
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