Hesitation | ✓

"Are you ready to go?"

My head rose to view the expectant face of Avis, her thin eyebrows furrowed close. She still had her hand on the steering wheel, the brownness of her skin contrasting with the car's white interior.

Avis removed the key from the ignition, dropping it into purse and asking again, "Are you ready? We're here."

I dug my chin further in the curve of my knees, my legs pulled up on the passenger seat as my arms hugged them to my chest. "I don't know."

"It was a yes or no question. It's not like I asked you to graph the function of x2 + 7x - 28."

I gave her a slow roll of my eyes, lifting my gaze up to the pallid building before us, a windscreen away, before averting. "No."

I heard Avis sigh, and with her release of breath came a mound of guilt upon my shoulders.

We'd been going about this for approximately a month then: driving to the hospital, me chickening out while Avis failed to mollify me, and then driving back home with absolutely nothing accomplished. 

"Sonny you can do this. We can. Together."

"I can't," I grumbled, my voice muffling within the intricately woven warps and wefts of my trousers. A light shiver ran down my spine as the cold winter air from outside slowly seeped into the car, a consequence Avis having turned the heat off.

"You can't," she paused dramatically, and nevertheless unnecessarily, leaning over the centre console to touch my forearm, "or you won't."

The pressure of her hand on me was barely noticeable, and almost weightless.

Avis was of a small build, lean and lithe with slender bones and nimble limbs. Like a bird, as her name implied.

Sometimes I liked to compare her to a finch: dainty and colourful with a bubbling effervescence, agile and swift footed, pleasant and beautiful, bold and feisty.

Other times, she was a crow, or a vindictive raven, making sure to pick a bone here and there, lashing out unconventionally with aggression when threatened, holding a sore eye and an even sorer mouth to the world.

And then when she was on stage, in front of the lights, she maintained the grandeur of a peacock, her iridescent clothing forming a bright plumage around her as she spun; she possessed the swift footedness of a Sandhill crane as she glided over the polished floors with a calculated precision so perfect that it appeared like she was floating.

Avis' mellifluous dance song temporarily halted and fell into a dissonant stretch of static as the news of our father came, that he'd become a sufferer of Alzheimer's disease, an illness that robbed him slowly of his cognition, his memory deficiency ranging from not remembering what he had for dinner last night to not remembering how to even wear a shirt on his own back.

His admittance into the hospital seemed to have made things more official, in a way, with his ever constant absence from the house, and the heartbreaking phone calls in which I would press my ear against the speaker and strain to hear his voice reply back to me after I'd warmly greet him.

Only for him to ask who I was.

The doctors said that Papa was a special case, an enigma, since Alzheimer's patients were usually elderly and aged, while he was still skirting around his early fifties, but he was what he was.