Like a Deer in the Dark

Rural Illinois, March 13, 9:36 p.m. I do not want to be here.

The flight from Lisbon to Chicago was 10 hours, then the chaos of passport control and luggage retrieval. The line at the Budget car rental desk was 11 people deep. The drive from the parking garage at O’Hare to this battered farm just north of Sterling was 114 miles long. In Portugal it is nearly 4 a.m. My husband and daughter are still there, sleeping. I wish I were with them.

In the yellow farmhouse, a porch light flicks on and my father peers out, his gray hair gone wild. I turn off the rental car, pray to a god I no longer believe in, and crank myself out of the driver’s seat.

When I walk into the dining room, the oval table buried in detritus of junk mail and granola bars, my mother crushes me in a hug that’s surprising in its bony strength. Her errant whiskers scratch my cheek. I had prepared myself to be confused for my sister. But in this moment, my mother knows who I am.

Both my parents look smaller, my mother thin-skinned and delicate; my father faded and raggedy about the edges. Aging brings with it a thousand indignities, even if you’re not plagued with illness and infirmity. My parents are both 80 now. My mom suffers from dementia. My dad suffers from wishful thinking.

Mom was always the caretaker and homemaker, but those roles fall to my dad now. He does his very best, he tries so very hard, but he is very clearly drowning.

I haven’t been here for nearly a year. My husband spent a week here a few months back when he was in the States for work. My sister came for three weeks shortly after. We split up, try to spread our visits out, try to stretch ourselves across the year. This month, it’s my turn.

It feels like I have so many other things pressing, like there isn’t time to be here. Would I have come all this way if my mother weren’t disappearing?

Snow falls the next morning. March, coming in like a lion. Fat, wet flakes slap our faces so hard we squint while exiting the Kroger with raisin bread and bananas. “This is my oldest daughter,” my mother boasted to the cashier. “She lives overseas.”

She’s forgotten what she named me.

By afternoon the ground has disappeared, the trees festooned in heavy white bunting. My mother chases me from the barn where I’m feeding a piece of toast to my favorite donkey. Her white hair droops with a cap of snow. It’s 3:30. She demands that we drive into town for dinner.

She is wearing navy cotton pedal pushers, tennis shoes, and a spring jacket. My father and I try to bundle her into a winter coat, into woolly boots, into anything weather appropriate. She brandishes her cane to keep us from touching her.

“I’m FINE,” she insists and stalks out into the blowing snow.

In the front seat I wrap her neck and shoulders in the soft cashmere scarf I chose at the Christmas market in Setúbal. She rolls her eyes, sighs like a stone. As soon as I start the car, she pulls off the scarf, throws it on the dashboard. In the next breath she’s shivering, wrinkled fingers patting at the heat vents. My father and I meet eyes in the rearview. She’s always been this stubborn.

It’s been years since I drove in a snowstorm. The plows have not yet come through and I can’t tell the road from the ditch. My mother, coiled in the passenger seat, tells me to be careful. Watch out. She sucks air through her teeth. The headlights bounce off eddies of white. “Pedal to the metal,” she says.

This is her new catch phrase, an all-occasion sort of commentary. She tosses it out in grocery store aisles while I hunt for Lawry’s Seasoned Salt. In the living room as I fold my father’s threadbare Hanes. In a rental car as we creep through a blizzard.

When we reach our destination, the Pizza Ranch parking lot is packed with pickup trucks. The walls are painted ochre and rust. In the bathroom they pipe in the overzealous wails of Christian Country Western: Jesus, yours is the victory, whoa!

My mother likes this place because she doesn’t have to read a menu. Menus are overwhelming. So many words that don’t translate to edible morsels. The buffet displays the food under heated lamps. She can just reach out and take what she wants.

Tonight, the special is Bacon Cheeseburger Pizza. Every other person is wearing a Chicago Bears hoodie, a camo baseball cap.

I want to go home.

I cried the night before I left my house in Portugal, absolutely bawled while shoving a warmer pair of socks into my suitcase. Marido was cleaning the filter on the dryer. I walked up behind him, my face a wreck.

“My hands are dirty; do you want me to hug you?” he said. I sniffled. Nodded. He complied.

I wanted to stay there, safely enclosed beneath the high Iberian sky. In Illinois the sky is so low it crushes your soul.

When I called my dad to tell him I was buying plane tickets he said, “Well, I hope you don’t feel like you hafta come.”

He didn’t say that in a bitchy way. My dad is never anything other than sincere, like when he tells me: “Folks from the church say How’r you doin’ Dave? and I don’t know howta answer. I’m livin’ a life of quiet desperation.”

He can’t get my mother to take a shower. He thinks it’s been two weeks. When I try, she stops speaking to me. The next day I take her to get her hair washed and set at a salon by the gas station. I avoid the direct route into town because there are at least two dead raccoons on the shoulder, and she mourns them every time we pass by.

“Mom. Do you ever feel like you forget things?” I ask abruptly. I keep my eyes on the road.

She frowns, purses her lips. “No,” she says. “I don’t forget things.” Two minutes later she asks me if she’s ever met my husband of 22 years. I say yes, his name stuck in my throat. She whispers, “Pedal to the metal.”

That evening my dad and I sit down with books in the living room. Me on the recliner, my parents on the blue couch. We read in companionable silence while Mom sits staring into the fire. She clasps her papery hands together, turns them over, unclasps them, begins again. She asks me how many children I have. Every five or ten minutes she gets up to micromanage how the dog sleeps (“Bella, get on the couch! Bella, get off the couch!”) or she’ll climb the stairs to count the cats (there are three). Then she comes back and sits down, stares into the fire again, clasps her hands, asks me how many children I have.

She used to be a whirling dervish of doing. Cleaning or sorting or gardening or scolding or rummaging or teasing or cooking or mothering. Never sitting still unless she was mending my dad’s denim overalls. Now she’s caught in a loop inside her head, pressing replay/replay/replay. I did feel like I had to come, that I had to check in just to see how much worse things had gotten, though I’ll never tell my father that.

One afternoon I succumb to a potent cocktail of heartache and jet lag and hide under a red and orange afghan on the couch for two hours instead of cleaning out the basement as I promised my dad I would.

“It’s okay!” he says when I apologize. “You’re on vacation!”

But I am so very not on vacation. I’m here because I should be, not because I want to be. Love and duty and guilt are all bound up in a Gordian knot. Every fiber so tightly enmeshed, I can hardly parse one strand from the other. I’m either going to cry or burst out of my skin.

On my last night we return to Pizza Ranch. I drive my borrowed Hyundai through the country dark, my mother fidgeting in the front seat, my father silent in the rear.

In the distance I see the green shine of animal eyes—deer on the shoulder, more than one. I slow then roll to a stop and my mother says, “What’s the matter?”

“Deer,” I whisper as if my voice is louder than an engine.

“Ohhhhhhhhh!” she breathes.

Here they come, crossing the road in the beam of the headlights. One, two, three-four-five, my mother counts them all. Six-seven-eight appear from behind snow laden pine trees, hesitate in the ditch before setting small hooves atop the pavement.

“Come on, come on,” my mother encourages. She is whispering, too.

The last two cross the road in a rush, white tails flashing Danger! Danger! as they join the herd. I keep my foot on the brake for a few more seconds in case of stragglers.

“Wow!” my mother says, and laughs with her whole body exactly like the woman I used to know. “Wasn’t that neat?!”

She is effervescent. We laugh along with her, me at the wheel and my father in the back seat. For a moment in the dark, she returns to us. The mother and wife we remember. The one she’s forgotten how to be.

Not in the moment, but hours later as I’m falling asleep, I realize that I got what I came for. I hadn’t even realized I had come across the water for any reason other than duty. But I did. I came hiding a nameless hope.

That’s why I’m here. Why I put up with Pizza Ranch, suffer through the oppressive gray and the maddening loops and the antiquated ideals. I think that’s also how my dad bears up beneath his interminable grief.

Just to see her, for a moment. Something small and precious I can polish and save for later.