by J.M.C. Kane
My aunt Dorothy had Alzheimer’s. My mother Phyllis took charge of her care. This was not discussed. It was simply what happened.
Dorothy lost things—her ink pen, a half-finished crossword, the leash for her dog Jacques. She would stand in the middle of a room, turning slowly, her hands opening and closing on nothing. The confusion was bad enough. Worse was what followed—the flicker of fear, the awareness that something was wrong with her, the small collapse of confidence.
My mother could not reverse any of this, so she merely invented a solution.
“Dorothy, you told me you left your glasses on the kitchen counter.”
Dorothy would go to the kitchen counter. The glasses would be there. My mother had placed them five minutes earlier, but that was not the point. The point was that Dorothy had told her. Dorothy had known. Dorothy had simply forgotten that she knew.
The lie preserved something that the truth would have taken.
It became ritual. Dorothy would emerge from the bedroom, patting her pockets, scanning the room. “Phyllis, I can’t find my keys.”
“You told me you left them on the hook by the door.”
“Did I?”
“You did.”
And Dorothy would retrieve them, satisfied. The system worked. The self remained intact.
Later, the syntax shifted. Dorothy would find my mother in the kitchen, a different kind of confusion on her face—not panic, but something softer, almost sly.
“Phyllis. Where did I say I left my book?”
My mother wouldn’t miss a beat. “You told me it was on the front seat of my car.”
Dorothy would nod and go. The conspiracy was mutual now. I don’t know when she understood what my mother was doing. I don’t know if she ever fully understood. But she had learned the grammar of the lie, and she trusted it. She trusted her.
Toward the end, when Dorothy was feeble and the lost things no longer mattered, the ritual found its final form.
“Phyllis. Where did I leave my heart?”
My mother would pat her own chest, gently. “It’s right here, Dot. Right where it’s supposed to be.”
And my mother would ask it too: “Dorothy, I can’t remember where I told you I left my heart.”
My aunt, even then, even fading, would lift her hand to her own chest and hold it there.
“It’s right here,” she’d say. “Where it has always been.”
J.M.C. Kane is an autistic writer from England, though now claimed by New Orleans, who has spent most of his adult life trying to fit long stories into short boxes. He has worked as a paperboy, a contracting executive, and an amateur cataloguer of human regret—none of which he was formally trained for. He was formally trained as a lawyer, but he is, frankly, a better cataloguer. His fiction has appeared in almost three-dozen journals that appreciate compression—and his willingness to obey word counts.
Hawaii Pacific Review 