Page 108 of Forever, Maybe
Chapter forty-five
August2016
Cate and Bobby didn’t question Nell’s announcement that she’d be staying for a while when she arrived at her parents’ home late that afternoon. They simply accepted it, no questions asked—though the weight in Bobby’s eyes suggested he had plenty he wasn’t voicing.
Nell pressed her fingers to her lips, unable to look away from Cate’s deterioration.
Her mother greeted her with a beaming smile, her face lit with warmth. “Hello, my darling! I didn’t know you were coming! How long are you here for?”
“I dunno, Mum. A few weeks, maybe?”
Cate nodded as though it made perfect sense. Nell had called the night before to remind her she’d be driving down, but it seemed the memory had slipped through her fingers like water. Barely two minutes later, Cate asked the same question, adding, “Are you sure you should be spending so much time away from school, the college… in… in… oh, where is it again?”
Memory loss sounded simple in theory. The dementia websites listed it as a key symptom, but none of them prepared you for the jolt of watching someone nod, react and then forget the entire conversation seconds later.
“No, Mum. I’m not in art school anymore, remember?” she said gently.
“Oh, yes, of course,” Cate replied, nodding quickly, overcompensating for the slip.
Her father caught Nell’s eye, offering a sad, weary smile, the kind that said,I know. I see it too.She could tell he was holding back questions about her situation he didn’t have the energy to ask, not when he was already grappling with the weight of Cate’s decline.
“Is… thingie, oh, what’s his name?” Cate asked suddenly, her tone cheerful but her gaze unfocused.
“Danny?” Nell prompted.
“Yes, him. Where’s he?”
“Back in Glasgow, Mum.” Nell avoided her father’s gaze this time, certain he’d catch the crack in her voice.
Cate nodded again, with the same bright, agreeable smile. “Oh, yes! The sandwich man.” She seemed pleased with her ability to recall him, even if it was only as a two-word description. Jenny Curtice had mockingly dubbed Danny the Sandwich King.
There were worse things to be known as, Nell supposed.
But it wasn’t just Cate’s memory that had faded. She was thinner than the woman who had happily swapped outfits with Stephanie months ago too, though thinner didn’t feel like the right word. The mental picture Nell carried of her mother—a sturdy, middle-aged woman with rounded arms and soft hips—had been replaced by something unfamiliar. Her body seemed rearranged, as though someone had tipped an hourglass upside down and shaken it, redistributing everything in the wrong places.
Her top half was painfully thin, her arms reduced to sticks with loose skin hanging from her jawline and neck. But her bottom half seemed to hoard what little flesh remained, her legs swollen, her ankles bulbous and stretched to unnatural proportions. The imbalance was jarring, disjointed, as though her body were betraying itself piece by piece.
Noticing these changes so starkly felt as if she were cataloguing them in an abstract, scientific way when instead every change cut her to the bone. It was impossible to reconcile the woman in front of her with the image she’d always carried in her mind. And though she wanted to look away, to focus on anything else, her mother’s decline was impossible to ignore.
Bobby heaved her suitcase out of the car, and Nell took hold of it.
“Am I in my old bedroom?” she asked.
He nodded, and she returned the gesture, heading inside. Behind her, Cate muttered something about the Hardys, wondering aloud if they might want to come over for dinner.
Nell paused midway up the stairs, suitcase dragging heavily behind her. The Hardys. Her mother was mentioning them again. She held her breath, waiting for her father’s reply.
“No, love. They don’t live here anymore,” Bobby said, his voice soft but firm. “They moved away, remember?”
“Yes, yes, of course. We don’t talk about them, do we?”
“No.”
Nell’s heart, which had been hammering in double time, gradually slowed. She exhaled quietly and resumed her climb, hauling the suitcase up the rest of the stairs. At the top, she pushed open the door to her former bedroom.
The mention of the Hardys had brought memories rushing back, vivid and sharp. The room had changed over the years, but not so much that it stopped her from flashing back to the 1990s—fourteen years old, lying on that bed, staring at the ceiling and wondering what on earth she should do next.
She dumped her suitcase on the floor. It tipped over immediately, one corner snagging on the edge of the single bed, which was still draped in a purple blanket. Single beds for adults had mostly fallen out of fashion, but there was something oddly comforting about the compactness of it. A smaller space to sleep in when there was no partner to share it with.
