Theft (16 page)

Time passes and I don't know how, because everything feels still. But pretty soon she starts trembling again, and she is not feeling well, I can tell. She says, “I worry.”

There's nothing to say back to her. I worry all the time too.

“If you don't know you don't have it, you can't know you're missing it,” she says.

This is the part of her disease my dad and the doctors call “Lewy body dementia.” It's when she starts to go away and not make sense, even though she is still there, sitting right in front of you. Nonsense comes out of her mouth. “People move around all the time now. Nothing to hold onto, nothing to lose, so they think they have everything to gain. They think they want everything. It's crippling.”

I look at her, and I realize what I've done. Her muscles are frozen stiff, and her dementia is setting in. The sky dims, and the evening chill comes on earlier than I expected. I stand up. “We have to go back now,” I tell her.

She has the fixed gaze now, too. She doesn't look at me. I'm nervous leaving her alone in that rickety chair, but I have to fetch her chair from the distance and bring it back to her side. I run back and get the chair and push it toward her, my teeth chattering the whole way. I'm breathing hard by the time I get back to her. “Come on. Put your arms around my neck.” I try to sound calm and confident, but I have never been so scared.

She doesn't move. I pry her gloved fingers one by one from the arms of the wooden chair. They are so cold and stiff. “We have to go back,” I tell her. She comes out of her daze a little and almost looks at me. “Good, Mom, good. Move your feet, now please. Move your feet.” But she can't move her feet. She is connecting with me now, I feel it in my gut, even though her blank eyes don't show it. She wants to move her feet, but she can't. I have to bend down and place her feet in position to stand.

Her legs are stiff as dried wood. It's hard to believe she's not fighting me, but I know she isn't. The strength is all Parkinson's,
all disease. The force of it is never constant. It goes up and down in her, the rhythm of this disease. Her feet are locked into one position. I work up a sweat, and I finally get them under her. I force her arms to my neck, and they feel like iron posts, they are so stiff, and it feels like I'm trapped under the iron girds of her. That's when we both fall to the ground, stiffly. She falls hard, hits her head on the earth, and tears come to her eyes. Fear rushes through me hard, and I feel myself howl, and I lift her in one strong movement into the chair.

Shaking, I begin the long walk back to the house we live in now. I push her chair in front of me, and she sits motionless. It's harder going back than it was coming out. When we finally reach the fence, I stomp the barbed wire down, and the neighbors stare as I walk down the street again. I don't have time to flip them off.

At home, I'm exhausted and cold and I want to feel better. “I can make us hot chocolate,” I say, knowing she hears me but will not respond because she can't respond. It pisses me off and weakens me all at once. I take longer in the kitchen than the hot chocolate requires. I turn the stovetop on low so the milk heats slowly. I stare at the red hot coils.

By the time I pour the hot cocoa into two mugs, my shakes have almost gone away. I head back out to the living room, set Mom's mug right by her chair, and she suddenly moves faster than I've seen her move, maybe ever. Her hands grab my face and she presses both palms on my cheeks, hard, and she pulls my face right up close to hers with a strength that feels like Parkinson's, but I know is all her. She says, “I love you.” I tell her I love her too, and I try to break away from her, but that makes her grasp my face even harder and she pulls me close to her and she says, “I know. I
know
. And I never, never, never,
never
want that to go away.” The way she says it scares me like nothing I've ever felt before. It hollows me out, and I can't feel anything inside. She cries now, and I want to hold her, but I feel as stiff as she usually is. I don't know if this is still her dementia talking, but it scares me to the core. When she finally lets me go, I feel wrung out, like she squeezed every bit of life from me. The room is dark, and I don't get up and turn on
any lights. I don't make dinner. We sit, Mom and me, my hand resting on hers.

That night when I tuck her in bed, she says, “Would you help me?”

I want to tell her I am helping her, I will always help her.

She tells me she wants to see me before she goes away. She tells me she is going away, she knows she is. She asks me to help her go away peacefully, so I can be there beside her when she goes. She says she doesn't want to go alone, and she says Zeb can't help her and she can't ask Dad. She says there's only a strand left of her now. She asks me not only to be there when she goes, but to help her go.

There's nothing but fear and love inside me. I can't imagine it. But I tell her, “Yes, I'll help you, Mom.” I know what she is asking me to do. I have no other answer. I want another answer. But I tell her yes. When she is ready, I will be there. I will help her. Yes.

That night I'm in bed, alone, and I've never wanted Mom to get better more than I do now. I pray for the first time ever that if she doesn't get better, I'll go before she does. Jesus will snag my praying hands, and I'll just wait for her to join me. When she asked me to help her, I told her yes, and I want time to stop now. I want everything to stop. The house is so quiet it feels hollowed out inside, like the houses after me and Zeb left from a job of stealing. I can't sleep, so I get up, pull my rubber boots on over my footie pajamas, and walk outside. The other house feels safer. I want to be there, in the house in the field where Mom grew up.

It's a quick trek in the night. When I reach the house, I sit with my back against the wall, looking out across the field to the icy pond turned silver by the moonlight. I think of the fish under the surface, protected now by the first thin layer of ice. I learned all about fish in biology class before Thanksgiving break. In winter, they sink to the bottom of a frozen pond or lake, where the water is mudlike and silty, too dense to freeze solid. Swimming in the muck there is what keeps them alive through the frozen winter.

I close my eyes; I imagine them trudging back and forth through the silt with their little fins flapping. It's tough swimming. But they keep at it, hoping for summer.

I feel like a fish.

T
HREE DAYS LATER,
Z
EB and Dad are back from hunting. From the kitchen window, I watch them hang the deer, their bodies moving like dark patches of smoke in the wintry fog. Zeb makes a cut near the hooves of the deer, and the ankle turns into a bony eye of a needle. He works thick rope through the hole between tendon and bone to make a loop for the deer to hang from. Behind Dad and Zeb, the Thatcher dog stands at attention in his pen, eyes riveted to the carcass of the deer. That dog has been out there alone for four nights now, shivering.

Zeb uses his whole body, bending at the waist, to hoist the deer up with the pulley system he has rigged over the branch of a tree. When the deer is hung, Dad pats Zeb on the back and they walk inside, Dad's arm around Zeb's shoulder. It looks, at first, like Dad's taking care of Zeb, like Zeb's been hurt. But they come inside, and I see Zeb's fine, and I figure they're just quiet from spending all that time in the woods. They peel off their hunting clothes, and I can smell the woods on them. Their flannel-lined canvas jackets are soaked with snow and the scent of blood, like the meat department at the Piggly Wiggly grocery. It mixes with the salty smell of the pheasant and sage stuffing I tried to make, with a little of Mom's help.

Zeb sits on the couch, staring out at the deer he got. I sit next to him, keeping quiet like he is. “It's a beautiful deer,” I tell him, almost whispering.

He nods halfway, like he's tired, even a little bit sad. “And we take all that beauty inside us.”

I think about it for a little bit, what he said. Then I ask him, “What about the fear?”

He looks at me now. He's not angry, but he says, “What about it?”

“The deer must've been feeling fear when you shot it. I figure we take that in too when we eat it.”

He squints his eyes at me like he hates me, but his look softens right away. He looks back at the deer. “Maybe,” he says.

We sit down to dinner as daylight fades to evening. Dad and Zeb are still so quiet. It haunts me a little, makes me afraid that something happened between them up there, like maybe Dad knows about our stealing now. Out the window, Christmas lights glow.

“They're so pretty.” Mom tries to smile. I want her to smile like she did when they were gone, and I want to tell Dad that she walked and we spent time in the old house. But it reminds me of the secret between me and Mom now. I want that secret to go away.

A few minutes later I notice the red Christmas lights suddenly fill up the whole window. They pulse against the misty November sky,
red, grey, red, grey
. I stop eating. I look outside.

A police car parks in front of our house. Zeb sees it, I can tell by the way he fixes his eyes, then looks away real quick. It makes him nervous, but he acts all tough and nonchalant. I know what's about to happen, and I want to spill out all my confessions now. I do not want that police officer coming up here and telling Mom and Dad on Thanksgiving that me and Zeb have stolen things. I want to confess before he gets to the door. I wish I had confessed everything before now, but things just kept piling up, and I couldn't tell where my confessions should begin. I open up my mouth intending to spill out everything I know once and for all, and the only words that come out are, “Dad, pass the green beans, please.”

Zeb looks at me, even glares. It's that tug between us, and he senses I'm scared and about to tell on us both. The cop lights keep pulsing. I can't tell if the pheasant I roasted is dry, or if it's just that my mouth is a desert and even water wouldn't quench it.

“A toast to the cook,” Dad says. His back's to the window, and he hasn't seen the police car yet. So he's cheery, like he always is
on Thanksgiving. But this year it's fake. I can see by the way his smile is flat and broad, more like a dog bearings its teeth than a smile. All the same, me and Zeb clink Coke classes with Dad, and we bend down to toast with Mom.

My eyes swing toward the window. The sky is one bruised heartbeat. Then comes the
knock
.

Dad wipes his mouth with his napkin. “Who could be visiting during the Thanksgiving dinner hour?” he says. But his voice is fakey, and he tries so hard to act happy. When he turns and sees the red lights flashing, he falters a little. Then he bucks up like I've seen Zeb do. He stands up, carries his napkin with him to the door, wipes his mouth as he walks. He's still chewing his pheasant as he opens the door. He sees the police officer standing there, stuffs his napkin into the pocket of his slacks and he makes his fake smile even bigger. He sticks out his hand to greet the cop. “Evening, Sir.”

I hear only snippets of what the cop says. “We're looking into it. . . . She'll be all right,” and so on.

“Are we in danger?” Dad asks.

My thoughts whir
. Dad thinks he's in danger because of me and Zeb
?

“No danger,” says the cop. “You could help her out a little at this time.”

For years I've been rehearsing my confession. I want, most of all, for Mom to understand that I thought I was helping her. I'm ready to tell her now.

Dad sits at the table. He sucks in a deep breath, lets it out in a whistle. “Seems something's happened next door,” he says.

I look at Zeb. He avoids making any eye contact with me. For the first time ever in my life, I see his hand shaking as he cuts his meat.

Right then a knock comes on the door again. Slower this time, Dad walks to the door, pulls it open, and smiles his fake smile. “Officer,” he says, sticking out his hand as if he just met the guy, even though it's been less than ten minutes since they last spoke.

The cop pokes his head into the house, and we can all see his ruddy face now. He points with his clipboard to Zeb. “You had some run-ins with Mr. Thatcher in the past, didn't you, son?”

Zeb looks at Dad, not at the cop, and Dad keeps his smile going, and he steps outside. He stands on the porch, talking to the cop for a few minutes. Then he leads the cop around to the backyard. From the window, we can see him showing off the deer that Zeb got. They stand there in the cold, fog billowing from their mouths, and I can see Zeb trying not to watch them as he eats his meal. Pretty soon Dad's back at the table again and his jaw must ache from fake-smiling. The cop car sits in front of our house a few minutes longer. Then it pulls away.