I am sitting in the living room late at night with my head in my hands. He's finally gone to bed. He can probably hear me sobbing. Maybe I want him to hear me sobbing.

I try to cry quietly but I can't.

I need to sob. I need to cut myself with tears. I need to binge on snot. I need to purge this despair.

I wonder what it will feel like to be in this house when he's gone. Will I ever be able to reclaim the rugs that he incessantly paces, spills his coffee on, tripping over the sofa telling me our furniture is a death trap, or smudge the guest room with burning sage where he's slept since he had me in a headlock in the middle of the night when we still slept together in the same bed?

Will I ever be able to to look at the dangling latch I screwed to the outside of his door so he couldn't sleepwalk out into the driveway or find the carving knives in the kitchen?

Sometimes I forget to unlatch it in the morning.

Will I ever be able to look out back where the overgrown chain link gate leads to a path he scythed all the way to the reeds, to the marsh, so we could drag our kayaks out to open water when the tide was high; where bursts of white jonquils explode and multiply every spring?

How long will it take for me to lose the tiny gold necklace he gave me the Christmas before we realized he was very very sick and his brain was disintegrating? It's a miracle I've still got it. But it's only a matter of time before it snaps. Before one day I touch the dip at the base of my neck and it's gone.

He still tells me I am pretty.

If I tell him I'm sad he looks at me with a grey blank face, as if I'm telling him we're out of bread.

He still comes with me to the beach, sits under a flapping umbrella, now afraid to swim. He watches me picking up shards of bleached clam shells along the edge of the water. What are you, six? he calls out to me and we laugh.

And I think, he's back.

I'm scared that when he's gone the beach will be gone, too. Impossible to reclaim. I will have forgotten the heartbreakingly beautiful bright blue days when sun glints and dances across the water, when wind is nothing more than a breeze.

I will have forgotten how to tread water, how to float, how to let go and trust the current to bring me back to shore.

Interview with Issue 5

Altman is talking about caring for her aging mother. I’m talking about my partner of only five years. We’re not married.

Three years ago, he was diagnosed with Lewy Body Dementia, a ravaging and cruel form of what is euphemistically called “mild cognitive impairment.” There’s nothing mild about it. It’s often misdiagnosed, mistaken for its close cousins, Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s.

But Lewy Body is the trifecta of dementias, characterized by a steadily worsening maelstrom of movement, cognition, behavior, sleep, and autonomic function. (I looked that last one up. Basically, it means the total loss of control.)

I am his caregiver. Full stop.

He went from loving partner to faltering patient seemingly overnight.

What if we’d been married for decades? Raised kids together? Doted on grandchildren as we frolicked together through our golden years in a Winnebago? I’m pulling the Winnebago thing out of thin air, but you get the idea. Would this have made the fact that I willingly threw my own life overboard to take care of a man I loved more plausible?

When the reality of Lewy Body began to dawn on us, I promised I would never leave him. I haven’t, and I won’t.

As the grip of his disease turns slowly into a stranglehold, I ask myself why.

Is it because his family calls me “heroic”? Because they applaud my fortitude, my resilience, and my selflessness? Is it because it makes me feel noble, capable, and needed? We all want to feel needed. We all want to be on a pedestal.

I scarfed down every accolade that came my way. And then some.

Just before we moved in together, just before Covid shut the world down, I lost my job. I was rudderless, without the armor of a prestigious career. Gone was the professional persona I’d honed over twenty years. Poof. In an instant.

For the first couple of years after his diagnosis, we managed, able to hold the fear and loathing of this dreaded disease at arm’s length. It wasn’t really so bad, was it, we said to each other. We can get through this. We’ll outrun the five-year prognosis.

But Lewy Body is quicksand. You step into that ground-sucking hole, and there’s no way out. No doctor can chart the course, the ups and steep downs. They still don’t know much about it, unlike Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s. Until recently, it was only a presumptive diagnosis. Now, with skin biopsies looking for the Lewy Body proteins that attach themselves to brain cells, it’s officially clinical.

They can’t tell you when things will get really bad. All they can do, outside of prescribing a complex cocktail of neuro and psych drugs, is to exercise, eat well, and do things like crossword puzzles that might, but only might, stave off the ravages of this horrific disease. So, he rides the Peloton bike almost every day, I cook with a lot of turmeric, and he takes stabs at organizing the work of his fifty-year writing career before it’s too late.

Check, check, and check.

But he can’t really read anymore. Email, his lifeline, gone. He can’t type. He thinks the remote is his iPhone. He puts ice cream away in the dishwasher. He used to take the garbage out until one day I found him sorting through apple cores, crusted yogurt cups, and chicken bones, having spread that week’s trash out on our front lawn.

Don’t get me wrong. There are stretches of three to four "good days.” That’s the heart-wrenching piece of this. He’ll wake up one morning, get himself dressed, make a couple of phone calls, and pour cereal into a bowl instead of on the floor. I’ll think, Hey—there you are! Welcome back! Until he’s not. The doctors say this is what makes Lewy Body such a cruel disease. It fluctuates, fools you, tricks you into thinking this is all a bad dream. It’s like an exorcism gone wrong, with my head spinning in perpetual whiplash.

But are you taking care of yourself? well-meaning friends and family ask me when they don’t know what else to say. I don’t know what that means anymore.

My partner’s 85-year-old stepmother called me the other day. “How are you doing?” she asked. It was the first time anyone had asked me this and actually wanted a truthful answer.

I burst into tears.

The bar at Bittersweet is crowded. It’s Thirsty Thursday, and the parking lot is packed. I’ve been circling, looking for his maroon Mazda Miata convertible, which I eventually see at the far end of the lot parked at a weird angle on the grass as if he’d had to jump out in a hurry. His keys might still be dinging in the ignition, and I’m tempted to try the door see if it actually is unlocked, which I doubt but seriously consider anyway. There’s a good chance that someone who rubs finger marks off the driver’s side door with a microfiber cloth would know that I’d been rooting around in the glove compartment and feeling under the seats.

But he’s been a no-show, hasn’t shown up at my house two nights running now, and I’m panicking.

He doesn’t have a cell phone. Once, I left a message on the answering machine at his mother’s house, which, as far as I can tell, is the only actual address he has. Don’t ever do that again, he said.

I’m on a stool, back to the wall, at the near end of the bar, where I have a clear shot at the entrance without being too obvious about it. I’m eating peanuts and sucking on the olives in my latest martini, staring at the silent basketball game and flashing Keno numbers overhead. I’m trying to look like I’ve just stopped in on my way home and that my coat is on the stool beside me because I’m saving it for someone who will be there any minute. I’m trying not to whip around whenever the door blasts open, then sucks closed. I go back to tracing the rim of my glass with a toothpick.

I’m pretty sure that if I wait long enough, he’ll appear and want to follow me home again. Or I could leave and lie on my ratty sofa where we first had sex, listening for the pop of his tires on the gravel rolling into my rocky driveway, engine cut, headlights out, incognito. All this sneaky late-night stuff, the never knowing, the if, the when. I tell him it’s thrilling. He says he doesn’t want anyone to see he’s parked at my house.

But when I come back out from my second or third trip to the bathroom, wiping my hands on the back of my pants because the paper towel thing is empty, I see him. He’s been there all along. His shaved head glistens under the ghoulish fluorescent lights, and he’s wearing the same shirt he wore that first night he sidled over to me, and when I got up to leave, he followed me home. He’s perched by the swinging kitchen doors, hunched over and leaning forward on his elbows, talking to a waitress whose name I forget. She’s plopping maraschino cherries and lemon peels into the drinks on her tray. They laugh. Throwing his head back, he downs one shot, then another.

But then he sees me. He’s sitting up with one elbow on the bar, the other hand tapping his thigh, watching two guys set up their drums and an amp in the corner. It’s standing room only since the band arrived, and people are pressing, two deep, yelling drink orders as the music starts.

He’s doing his usual scan of the room, smiling and tapping his fingers on the bar. That is until he gets to me. He does a double-take, then sends a blank, barely perceptible chin nod in my direction.

Hours later, I let myself in through my back door and turn the handle a couple of times to be sure it’s not locked, even though he’s got the spare key, which I’m always afraid I’ll find waiting for me on the kitchen table. I know when he’s been here, let himself in to do laundry and, why not, have a couple of glasses of wine while he’s at it, on his way somewhere else. I touch the dryer, and it’s cold. The level in the jumbo wine bottle I keep in the fridge for him hasn’t changed either. I check to be sure the porch light is on, my nightly Open sign, and as the furnace kicks in and the old pipes begin to bang, I lie down on the couch to wait.

If I had known all there was to know about this house before I bought it — mushrooms the size of elephant ears growing in a bedroom closet where a part of the roof is rotting away, the dead cat-sized rat I found behind the cast iron radiator in the kitchen, or the moldy fistfuls of wet plaster that disintegrated as I tried to strip the stained floral wallpaper in the hall, I might have seen it for what it really was. The single wooden support beam in the dirt cellar, the steep slant of the second floor where the house was sinking to one side, the knob and tube wiring that the building inspector warned me was a major fire hazard. There might as well have been police barricades blocking the driveway, but I would have ignored those, too, because I was sure that if I loved this house unconditionally, it would love me back.

I’m a player, he once said as he rolled off me, yawning and reaching for the wine glass under the bed. I had no idea what that was, but it sounded cool and might mean that by not asking where when he said he had to go all those times, I would be cool, too. A woman who didn’t need a man to stay after sex or know when she would see him again. A woman who could fuck a guy who followed her home from a bar just for the hell of it without caring whether she liked him or not. A woman who knew the jerk she was sleeping with was sleeping with other women, too, but thought maybe, just maybe, she was the One.

After all, he’d made me eggs, hadn’t he? I can see him cracking the shells with only one hand. Slipping the yolks whole into the spattering pan. Whistling with his back to me. Twirling the spatula and waiting for the right moment when the whites were white enough to slide onto a plate, kept warm in the oven, and placed it in front of me with a dishtowel over his arm and a tah-dah that almost made me cry.

The linoleum in the kitchen is only half-scraped. For more than a week, I’ve been trying to pry each square off with what might as well be a butter knife. I thought it would be easy, that each piece would magically come off. I chip away at it for hours on my knees, tiny piece after even more minuscule piece of pressed pine resin and linseed oil and probably asbestos, too, an inch at a time, trying to get to the wide pine floorboards I’m sure are there somewhere. But there’s another layer of dried black adhesive I hadn’t counted on. Sandpaper is useless.

The moon is just a pinprick out the living room window now, but it’s enough to spook me. So does all the random furniture I’ve dragged around since my divorce and my father’s move to assisted living that I can’t bring myself to get rid of. It doesn’t help that a pack of coyotes, or what I’m guessing are coyotes, howl from somewhere deep in the stubby cornfield across the road. Long echoing atonal moans, punctuated with little staccato yips.

I want them to shut up. I want the moon to go away. I want to sleep, but I can’t. I don’t want to be drunk and queasy and sad.

We’d left the pasta water boiling on the stove, the colander in the sink, the dryer thumping happily with a last load of his clothes. Lucinda Williams on repeat. His sneakers weren’t waiting by the back door, and his good shirt was on in a heap on the floor. His keys were on my bureau. Emptied his pockets. Change, a matchbook, half roll of Certs.

Had I really said I love you?

The coyotes start up again, more of them, closer this time. The braying reverberates in the drafty dark as I shiver, still in my parka on the sofa, trying to get warm wrapped in an army green crocheted blanket my grandmother made me when I left for college.

How many mistakes I have made with this house. In the dark, it looks ok, but I have to acknowledge that I didn’t prime the red front door before I slapped on a coat of white paint, and now it’s pink. I tell myself I’ll do it right someday, but I know I won’t. Or the row of hydrangeas I planted along the north side of the garage so I could see them when I was at the sink, starved for sun and never blooming. I’ll have to live with the squirrels in the attic and a rotting foundation that is crumbling. The toilet will always run.

But still, I wait, wait for the crackle of his tires turning into the driveway, the chirp of his car door locking, the creak of the porch stairs, the catch and release of the kitchen door.

Headlights of a passing car sweep over me and are gone.

The Dawn Review Issue #5

She would go to Paris.

When this was all over, this is how she would start again.

But today she would go back to caring for him, undo the hook and eye they’d put on the outside of his bedroom door so she wouldn’t find him in the middle of the night peeing into the kitchen sink or looking for the knives she’d stashed in her car.

When she unlatched the hook in the morning -- she wasn’t sure how much longer it would hold, it was already loose -- she would find him dazed, poised like a prize fighter in the middle of a ring -- hands clenched in ready fists, feet in a ‘come get me’ stance, his eyes wild and frightened.

He didn’t recognize her until he did.

Sometimes, she felt noble and kind.

On good days -- hers, that is -- she became the person she wanted to be. Stoic. Sacrificial. Indifferent to the melted ice cream pint in the oven and the television remote he thought was his phone, a leg into the arm hole of his t-shirt, the car keys, his, gone.

Days of rage and calling out. But to who?

When he could still remember that the trash was Tuesdays, that the blue bin was for recycling, the green for everything else, she was hopeful. The neurologist called it “executive function.” Blue means this. Green means that.

Until the morning she found him kneeling on the front lawn, sorting through chicken bones, rank paper towels, rusty apple cores and frayed orange rinds, crusted yogurt cups, and greasy crumpled tin foil, staring at the array that lay all around him.

As children, they had fished for minnows on the Farm Creek bridge. String tied around the mouths of brown Borden’s milk bottles. Wonder Bread for bait. They threw crabapples at passing cars. He ran away before the car could stop.

He liked to confess things to her mother at the white Formica table in that split level Connecticut ranch with the sunken living room, next door and identical to his, after school.

Her mother drank Scotch and made him baloney sandwiches. She hadn’t known that.

These were the stories he could remember. As if she didn’t. Again and again.

Someday she would forgive herself for not loving him better. Wasn’t that what love was, really? Spoons didn’t have to be with spoons. So what if she had to tie his shoes?

Him. An empty bottle. Staring at the water as it seeped into the rug. As if it wasn’t too late to get it all back in.

WINTER 2022

Finalist, Cleaver Flash Nonfiction Contest

The photograph I’ve found could have been one we framed, one we came back to again and again as you grew older, one you even liked perhaps, smiled at in spite of yourself when Dad said where’s that picture...and then went rummaging around to find it.

It’s you on the old pier, barefoot, in cargo shorts and that baseball cap of Dad’s you always wore. Behind you, the west branch of the Westport River is pulsing, the current coursing towards the shore in this black and white picture your father took that day, a day in late July, summer just turning to its unstoppable descent into fall.

That summer. That house. That day. That divorce.

The shoreline, the distant tree line, crystalline blue sky, but here as weathered as the splintered boards of the dock where you stand.

You’re looking straight into the camera, straight into your father’s eyes it. It’s just you, one foot slightly back for balance, the other in front as if you want to move closer to him and through the cold shiny metal of his Nikon, the one he always wears around his neck that keeps him at arms-length from the world, from us.

I can’t look at your face. It’s too painful, too visceral, even after all these years. You’re smiling, just like he’s told you to – SMILE – and so you do, wide, hopeful, proud of the fish you’ve just caught, of the fishing pole standing at attention that’s taller than you, and the fishing line you’re holding with its tiny fish, too small to keep but you won’t throw it back either because you think if you keep it he will stay.

There’s an old iron cleat behind you riveted to the crooked pilings. He’s framed it perfectly, all squares and angles, because composition is everything for someone who does this for a living, someone who will memorialize that day in this way, the day he came to visit us as if nothing had ruptured, as if in this black and white photograph he could rearrange it all, pretend that your little, innocent, pleading, face was a happy one.

Just a boy gone fishing with his father on a perfect summer day.

One Tree, Three Times

That year the Christmas tree fell down three times.

It should have been funny, but it wasn’t, in the way so many things my parents made fun of in those days weren’t funny to me, and when the tree came crashing down for the last time, obliterating the few ornaments we’d managed to salvage the first two times and crushing the one intact candy cane into pieces not worth eating, I didn’t laugh, and so they made fun of me, too. You take things so personally, my mother said, rolling her eyes at my father and taking an exasperated drag on her cigarette, as if there was any other way for my twelve year old self to take anything.

We’d gone to buy a tree at the last possible moment. It was already Christmas Eve, late in the season even by my parents’ standards, for whom getting a tree at all was just another in a long list of chores my mother resented, like picking up my father’s suits at the dry cleaners.

It was the only tree still standing at the back of a windswept Boy Scout lot next to the gas station, left for dead in the snow that was coming down hard, leaning against a makeshift wooden rack under a string of drooping full-sized yellow lightbulbs swinging in the wind. I felt sorry for it, all alone and left to fend for itself. It was mangy, and when my father stood it up and shook it off, its spindly branches looked anorexic, not worth the effort to tie on to the top of anyone’s station wagon. Good enough, he said, chortling to himself as he yanked the disheveled tree from the rack, the way he always did when he knew something wasn’t funny at all, but laughed at it anyway.

There was no one around, not a scout or a troop leader in sight. My father stuffed a five dollar bill through a slit in the plastic lid of an empty Martinson’s coffee can on the ground. I took one end of the tree, he took the other, and we dragged it to his old Triumph Spitfire convertible, which wasn’t a convertible any more, in fact there was no roof at all, ever since he’d forgotten to clamp the detachable metal roof in place one day and it had flown off onto the Connecticut Thruway and been run over by a tractor trailer.

We wrestled it into the Triumph. As my father tried to wipe the snow off the steering wheel and driver’s seat with the sleeve of his ratty ski sweater, I climbed over the trunk and wedged myself in against the branches. Get a good grip he yelled, grinding the car that had no muffler into gear. The tree, saved from certain death, rode happily home sticking out of the back.

It lost even more of its needles when we forced it through our front door and dropped it onto the orange shag rug in the living room. My little sister was on her hands and knees looking under the ugly uncomfortable fake leather sofa with its chrome legs and no arms that my mother thought was unconventional and stylish, for her pet turtle that would miraculously reappear six months later. A banged-up cardboard box with Xmas scrawled in red magic marker waited next to a tangled pile of colored lights and an old extension cord.

Fleure, our black standard French poodle, was eating her way along a homemade garland of cranberries and popcorn that my sister and I strung every year, the only tradition I remember us ever having. The sewing needles drew blood and what was supposedly heavy duty black thread kept breaking. We always had to start over. Cranberry. Kernel. Cranberry. Kernel, my mother looming over the card table until we were done.

We dug ornaments out of the box and started hanging. My mother was in the kitchen warbling the descant parts of the Messiah along with the radio, and my father was whistling Jingle Bells, proud that he had unscrewed the rusted bolts of the green metal tree stand with a pair of garden shears. My sister and I were doing what we always did, throwing fistfuls of shiny, carcinogenic tinsel at the tree and each other just to get rid of it and be done. And my mother did what she always did – stormed out of the kitchen and made us take it all off, every single staticky piece, and re-drape it, strand by strand on each scrawny bough all the way around the beleaguered tree, saying what she always said — God sees the back! — which seemed like a ridiculous thing to say since we never went to church.

The first time the tree toppled over it was kind of funny. We caught it before it hit the floor, and we got it back up, only knocking over one lamp, fast enough that my mother, crooning again in the kitchen, missed it. It wasn’t straight, and the headless wax angel topper was crooked but still there, even though the whole tree was now listing to the left. Tip top, my father said, looking very pleased with himself.

But then it fell over again, missing Fleure by inches and sending her bounding up the stairs. We tried to brush the smashed ball splinters under the sofa. The colored lights, finally working, flickered a couple of times and then died for good, no matter how many times my father kicked the socket.

My sister and I stood on either side of the tree while he hopped up onto the sofa. Get me a coat hanger, he said, kind of hissing, bracing himself against the wall with one eye on the kitchen. Sort of straightening it out, he twisted one end around a high denuded branch then reached for the curtain rod above his head. Hah, he said, as if he were the kind of father who could actually fix things, but he’d begun to wobble and tried to steady himself flapping his arms out to the side, balancing on one shaky foot just long enough to loop the hooked end over the rod.

But then he fell. Backwards. Onto the sofa.

And then the tree fell on him.

Fleure began to growl at the tree as if it were another dog and my mother appeared out of the kitchen. She stopped at the top of the landing, glaring at the three of us and wiping her hands back and forth on her apron the way you’d sharpen a knife.

She would embellish the saga of what happened that night, a story she loved to tell, adding new stuff every time that never happened, like the dog devouring her standing rib roast or having to rush my father to the emergency room, for dramatic effect. She’d hold forth, waving her arms like Carmen Miranda, a cigarette in one hand, a glass of Dewar’s with the other. My father liked to say that she could make a story out of walking to the mailbox and I guess that was true.

My sister had gone back to looking for her turtle and my father was picking needles out of his sweater, almost tripping over the string of now defunct lights still plugged into the wall. Buck up, he said impatiently, annoyed to find me still standing in the middle of it all, and shooting one of his here she goes again conspiratorial eye rolls in my mother’s direction.

They’d already forgotten about the tree, lying there on its side, helpless and sad, wilted tinsel still holding on for dear life, the unpainted underside of the metal tree stand now exposed, too. Even my mother, having thundered out of the kitchen when the tree crashed for the last time, snorted with laughter, and surveying the wreckage said, Too bad. We don’t care about Christmas anyway, do we?

For a moment I thought I could hoist the wounded tree back up by myself, nurse it gently into the corner where the two plate glass windows, steaming against the cold outside, would protect it. I could wrap an old sheet around the bottom like the tree skirt we’d never had, could find an unbroken ornament or two in the bottom of the cardboard box, and somehow stick the headless angel back where she belonged.

But there was no way to fix it. By now, the tree had given up and so had I.

The tree would be the butt of my parent’s jokes, long after we’d dumped it by the side of the garage where it would stay at least until Easter. It lay there all winter. I felt ashamed every time I saw it, ashamed of how I had burst into tears when it fell over for good, and ashamed of whatever it was inside me that was broken, too.

Maybe one day, I’d be able to laugh right along with them, to laugh at myself. Maybe one day, whenever my mother said I couldn’t take a joke or that I had “such a thin skin” I’d be able to laugh that off, too. Or maybe, I’d find a way to accept myself as I was, like the tree, not perfect, always listing a little to the left, and be okay with that, not caring whether anyone found that funny or not.

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