Page 87 of The Unraveling

“I talked to a friend of yours today,” says Mimi.

“You did?”

“Yes, I did. Handsome boy. I can’t remember his name—Morgan or…or something like that.”

“Alistair?” I ask, thinking this makes some sense. But not a lot.

“No, no, no,” she says.

I tilt my head, not believing my next guess. “Jordan?”

“That’s right. Oh, he’s such a nice boy, darling, you two would make such a nice couple.”

“He’s—I think you might be confused, Mimi. Jordan and I broke up. I don’t think—”

“No, no, I’m sure of it,” she says.

“Okay,” I say, going with it even though I don’t believe it. “What did you two talk about?”

“Who?”

“You and Jordan?”

“Who, dear? I’m sorry, my memory is just—” She makes a squiggly hand gesture and then looks at me to fill her in.

“It’s not important,” I say. “What are you reading?”

For the next hour, we have some version of the same conversation over and over. Her memory comes and goes, fleeting and thin. I don’t mind, I can be patient with this cyclical nature.

My mom had been impatient with her, but in a warm, familiar way. She would say, Ma, I just told you!

At some point, I ask Mimi to show me the pictures on the wall behind her. Even through the shitty quality of the international call, I can see that they’re mostly of me and my mom. More of me.

I lean closer to puzzle out one of them, one I’ve never seen before.

“What’s that picture behind you, Mimi?”

She turns and looks and I instruct her to which one I mean. She takes it off the wall and holds it in front of the camera.

Her hands shake a little, but I can tell that it’s my mom in a classic ballerina outfit. The pink leotard and tutu, pale stockings, pink satin shoes, her hair in a bun tied with a pink ribbon. She’s in Mimi’s backyard.

I know it’s my mom, but it’s hard to believe. I never knew my mom to have had any interest in ballet besides through me.

“Is that my mom?” I ask.

“No, no, that’s Brandy,” she says, confirming that it is, indeed, my mom.

“Did she want to be a ballerina?” I ask.

She furrows her brow in thought. “I think that was Halloween.”

“Oh, I see.”

“But she always wanted to be a ballerina. She went as one for Halloween almost every year. She was always too tall for it, and we didn’t know how much she wanted it until she was too old to get started.”

She looks lucid enough as she says it, but I have to believe she’s got something wrong. Maybe conflating her memories of me with the scattered remains of movies or something.

I realize with a sad drop in my stomach that I’ll never know for sure. The three of us were all we had. And now…well, now it’s really just me.

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