"Say, who do you suppose this belongs to?" She asked me, holding up a gold-chained necklace with little glass diamonds and plastic pearls serving as spacers between.
"That necklace is yours mom."
"Oh," she said, before placing the necklace around her neck.
For almost my entire life, my mother thrived on small events throughout the day, busying herself with the details she had forgotten. By nightfall, she could memorize how to make macaroni and cheese; hang various articles of clothing out on the clothesline; how to whisper the name of her lost friend, her grandparents, mother and father, and her daughter; how to spell them backwards, letting the letters glide along her tongue; how to capture a spider in a cup and release it outside without screaming; and even how to tie her hair into various knots and braids.
The next morning, she would be left stranded without a name, unfamiliar with the feeling of the wind blowing through her black hair.
I told her one morning that she kept forgetting things, that she already knew everything she was learning now, like the back of her hand. When she asked me why, I told her there was a little worm living inside of her head. It was a small and chubby worm, but kept her happy while feeding off of the knowledge in her brain. Then she placed a hand on her forehead and whispered to me, "I wish I could give him a hug, he sounds adorable."
We could walk down the street without ever seeing a car. Then one would drive by, and she would hold her hat tightly onto her head screaming, "What is that!" At the time, it took all of my strength to resist the temptation of telling her it was actually a monster. After all, like the worm, sometimes a monster is an easier explanation than the technology of an automobile.
When we got home I would have her try chocolate for the first time that day. Every day brought the same curious and amazed expression on her face. Some days, I would heat it up on the stove with some water for her to drink. After bringing it to her, I would teach her three translations for the expression of gratitude, xie xie, gracias, thank you. Then she would thank me, and we would drink together.
"I wonder what the sky feels like," she said, lifting her fingers into the air.
"You just lick your finger like this," I said, putting my finger into my mouth. "Then you stick it up into the air."
She did the same as I, giggling as the sudden coldness gripped her wet finger. In all those years I never realized how childish she actually was. She seemed more like a playmate to me than a mother.
"Then call me Clare," she said.
"But that's not even your name."
"It doesn't matter."
She sighed. For the first time in seven years, her stature emitted fatigue and melancholy, rather than play and naive curiosity. Then she looked at me with a raisin-like gaze, her eyes crawling inward as if to escape the world.
"Sometimes," she said. "I don't feel like your mother either."
I found her lying in the driveway after searching the house for two hours. She was curled up like a dead spider, her face pale from the cold of late autumn. Her eyes were fixed on the car's tires. At her side there was a note with white chalk and ink spilled all over it from a pen broken in her left fist.
No words, but figures and scribbles indicated a desperate attempt at communication.
She entered a coma when the ambulance pulled into the parking lot. I was allowed to visit at noon. I stayed there until 6:00 drawing pictures of mother and me as stick figures on the back of the coloring book given to me. In one, we were holding hands, sitting on a bench looking out at the blue scribbles of ocean drawn by my amateuristic hand.
In all the time I had to sit next to her, she never woke up. We held her funeral a month before my tenth birthday. She was 33. I wrote on a sheet of paper, Clare, Rebecca, and Grace, and handed it to the pastor. I drew on a "get well soon" card a picture of Clare and me standing over my mother in a coma, and kept it in a tin box.
Then I laid down in bed, pretending to be sick for a week before opening it up and realizing that the card was actually addressed to me.
I moved in with my uncle who bought me a four layer cake for my birthday. It sat in the fridge and grew mold. Instead, on my birthday, I decided to lay in the backyard , imagining my mother was there with me on a lazy quest to find out what it felt like to wiggle her toes in the grass.
It was so fitting of her to forget that sort of thing.
