“I only wanted Nana,” she said, “and now I only have you.”

I know how this makes her sound. She said those words and then she ambled back upstairs to her bedroom. Within minutes, I could hear her snoring. I was hurt by what she said, but I understood what she meant. I understood and I forgave. I only wanted Nana, too, but I only had my mother.

Whenever she woke up from the drug-induced sleep, she looked frantic, like a woman who had been dropped down onto some deserted island and told that she had only an hour to find water. Her eyes were wild. The pupils darted around, searching, searching. Watching her, I would feel like a lion tamer or a snake charmer. Whoa there, I’d think as she slipped slowly back into reality.

“Where am I?” she asked one day.

“You’re at home. At your house in Huntsville,” I said.

She shook her head, and her eyes stopped searching. Instead they found me out, found me wanting. “No,” she said, and then louder still, “No.” She went back upstairs, got back in bed. That was the beginning.

40

My mother in bed at fifty-two. My mother in bed at sixty-eight. When I lay the two images of her side by side, looking for the differences, at first there seem to be few. She was older, thinner, more wrinkled. Her hair, late to gray, was now sprouting a few silver strands here and there. These differences were subtle but present. Harder to spot: me at eleven—out of my depth; me at twenty-eight—still so.

* * *

—

Ambien is a drug meant only for the short term. It’s a drug for shift workers, people who’ve long lost their circadian rhythm, but it’s also used by people who just want to fall asleep a little easier. The drug is in a class known as hypnotics, and it seemed to me, that first day when I couldn’t get my mother out of bed, that the hypnosis had simply worked too well.

I had been skipping church ever since Nana’s funeral, and that first day of my mother’s slumber I considered skipping school too. It was the only time in my life that I can remember not wanting to go to school, because while I hated the social aspects of my middle school, I loved school itself. I loved the classrooms, and I especially loved the library with its old, damp smell.

    I couldn’t get my mother up, so I decided to put off thinking about what to do and walk to school.

“Are you all right, Gifty?” Mrs. Greer, the librarian, asked when she saw me in the stacks. I was letting the sweat from my walk cool under the frigid blast of the air conditioner. I hadn’t expected anyone to be in the library at that early hour. Even Mrs. Greer tended to show up a bit late, supersized Diet Coke in hand and a sheepish grin on the days I was there first, browsing while she booted up the computers for the checkout system. She was a librarian who was always thinking about ways to make reading hip and cool for young people. The problem was she said things like “Let’s make reading hip and cool for all you young people” to the students themselves, which meant her plans would never work.

I didn’t mind that the library was neither cool nor hip. I liked Mrs. Greer with her soda addiction and her dedication to the eighties perm. In fact, if there was anyone at school that year who would have honestly cared about my problems at home, who would have listened to my worries and found a way to help, it would have been Mrs. Greer.

“I’m fine,” I told her, and as soon as the lie left my lips I knew that I was going to take care of my mother myself. I was going to nurse her back to health through the sheer force of my eleven-year-old will. I would not lose her.

* * *

—

My mother at sixty-eight and me at twenty-eight. Katherine started dropping by my office. She brought baked goods: cookies and pies, fresh bread, a pound cake. She would sit in the corner of my office and insist that we tuck in to whatever it was she had brought right away, even if I was in the middle of writing, which was my usual excuse and almost never really true. “I’ve never tried this recipe before,” Katherine would say, brushing off my faint protests. “Let’s see if it’s any good.”

    It was always good. I knew she was not exactly lying, but skirting the truth about the reason for her visits. These home-baked treats were her way of saying that she was there if I needed her. I wasn’t ready to need her, but I ate everything she made. I brought the baked goods home to my mother, and, to my delight, she ate some of the things too. When Katherine came back, I would say, “I think my mom really liked the lemon pound cake,” and the next day, there would be a fresh lemon pound cake in my mailbox, wrapped in cellophane and tied with ribbons, and so professional looking that I started calling them “Kathy’s Cakes” in my head, capital letters and everything, like she was a one-woman bakery. I don’t know how she found the time.

* * *

—

I rushed home from school early the first week of my mother’s bedroom exile. Every afternoon was the same. I would push her arm and she would murmur softly, loudly enough to convince me that she was still alive. I made her peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, and when, hours later, I found them untouched, I threw them out and washed the plates. I cleaned everything I could think to clean—the bathroom, the garage, her bedroom and mine. I never went into Nana’s room. Instead, I dragged the steam cleaner out from the nether reaches of the closet and steamed the living room carpet, emptying the grayish water into the bathtub over and over again. It soothed me to see all of the filth travel down the drain, leaving nothing but cleaner and cleaner water in its stead. I wanted my life to look like that process. I wanted my mother and me to come out of this difficult period clear, free.

I was accustomed to being alone at home but this, this false aloneness, was so much worse than any loneliness I had ever felt before. Knowing that my mother was in the house, knowing that she couldn’t, wouldn’t, get out of the bed to be near me, to help me in my sadness, made me angry and then my anger made me feel guilty, and so on and so on, in a terrible loop. To combat it, I kept the television on from the time I came home in the afternoons to the time I left in the mornings. I wanted my mother to hear it, to come out of her bedroom and yell at me about how much energy I was wasting. I wanted to hear her tell me, down to the cent, how much she paid in electricity every month, how much money my life was costing her—me, the child she had never wanted.

    “Don’t let the cold air out,” she used to say when she caught me staring into the vortex of our refrigerator for too long, hoping the yet unknown thing I wanted to eat would magically reveal itself. “Do you know how much I pay for electricity?”

So, as she lay in bed, I kept the TV on. I let the cold air out.

* * *

—

Han knocked on the door of my office.

“Come in,” I said. Kathy had dropped off one of her cakes earlier, and it sat there on my desk, beautifully wrapped, taunting me.

“I’m headed to Philz for a coffee. Can I get you anything?”

“Aw, thanks, Han,” I said. “I’m actually going to go home soon.”

“Wow, Gifty taking the rest of the day off?” he said. “What’s the occasion?”

I swallowed hard. “My mom’s in town,” I said. “I was thinking we’d split this strawberry cake Katherine made.”

I knew it was magical thinking, but it made me feel better to say it, to imagine my mother and me sitting on my small balcony with two forks and a fat slice of cake.

    Han said, “See you tomorrow, then,” and I packed up the rest of my stuff and drove home. When I got there, I set Kathy’s Cake down on the nightstand next to my mother and picked up the Bible. I started reading to her from the book of John. It was her favorite Gospel, and, though it seemed like forever ago, it had been mine as well. I wanted to read to her about Lazarus, the man from Bethany whom Jesus had raised from the dead.

Even when I was a child, this miracle had seemed like a stretch to me, too miraculous an event in a book filled with miraculous events. David and Goliath, Daniel and the lion’s den, even Jonah and the whale, had seemed plausible, but Lazarus, four days dead, then beckoned back to life with one “Come forth” from Jesus, seemed like a step too far.