Photo by Jen Theodore on Unsplash
by Rebecca Tiger
My mother is tangled in string lights like an artificial tree shrouded in a soft white glow and Christmas always meant toil for her, shopping, cooking, getting the house ready for kids who would stuff themselves sick with crescent shaped butter cookies smothered in powder sugar, leaving half-digested chunks on the carpet for her to clean. One night I confuse a dream with reality and tell her that I saw Santa delivering gifts, that I want her reassurance that he’ll return on Christmas Eve, and she says, “Of course he’ll be back!” as if there is no doubt, while she mixes brown sugar and chopped walnuts and flour for the bundt cake we will eat after the last presents are opened, as she gathers crumpled wrapping paper and boxes into large black carpenter bags, the same type of bags my brother and I will use to clear out my parents’ house after my father dies and we move my mother to a memory care center on a cold November day.
“Why is that tree white?” my mother asks as we sit in the Café Bistro, the trek down the hall from Room 105, her new 400 sq. foot home, made complicated by a hospice-issued walker whose wheels list to the side because at 85 pounds she doesn’t have enough heft to direct it forward. The tree is over 20 feet tall with large blue ornaments and she says she didn’t think pines grew in that color while in her room there are plastic fuchsia flowers in a Styrofoam soil that she waters and I empty so that she can refill.
When I bring her a wreath made of fir and holly held together with red and gold ribbon, she asks me if I’ve seen my father yet, “He was out before I got up,” and she points at the indentation her head made on the blood-stained pillow as an offering of proof that he lives there with her and that they share the single hospital bed. I tell her that I said hello to him when I was walking in, that he was leaving with some friends, but she is worried that he won’t be able to find his way home and I say, “Of course he’ll be back!” as I stroke her bruised and fragile hand.
Rebecca Tiger teaches sociology at Middlebury College and in jails in Vermont and lives part-time in New York City. She writes stories on the train from here to there. You can find her on twitter @rtigernyc.
