The Yellow Room
The room is as decorated as we were allowed. No amount of photographs, stuffed animals, flowers can contain the insipid yellow of the walls, the pocked grey linoleum floor. The room is a skeleton, you see, and we're permitted to flesh it out, to cover its institutional nakedness with skin, clothes. And when we smile in hopes of lifting your spirits, it supplements the rude fixtures, but we know the room with its skeleton grin will conquer us in the end.
After Dad died and you started forgetting things, we thought it was your grief distracting you, distancing you. And because grief is selfish, we missed him without realizing that you were becoming a stranger to us.
But that's not true, is it? We were the strangers. We, your children, the imposters. Who were we who had keys to your home? Who fastened your seatbelt in the car to take you God knows where?
The police found you one day, lost. Lost on the streets you have known over seventy years. And my heart broke to see you waiting on that bench in the police station. Not because you were hurt or confused but because you were cheerful in your helplessness, sharing a bag of candy with the sergeant, telling him why the green ones taste better.
You were moved into the yellow room within the week.
Sometimes I bring my children to see you, but they don't like it much. It isn't just the room, Mom, it's you. They don't exist for you; my sister and I barely exist for you, but we're at least in some of the pictures with Dad. You live with him, I think, and your parents, in the shriveling world in your head. But my children are a null entity, just faces without names or relevance. I hate it, and I hate myself for hating it, for hating you even a little. I look at them and wonder: is there truly not some primal link between us? My mother and I, myself and my children, some tidal wave to sweep outraged nature clean and leave us, the very nucleus of love?
I waited. For so long, I waited to have you back. To walk into the yellow room with its stuffy smells of disinfectant and undiscovered crumbs, and the photographs curling away from the walls as if in revolt against the painted concrete. But none of that matters because you know me again, and I've known you all along. You're sitting up, your hand willfully tracing the scraps of fabric in the crazy quilt you made for the bed you shared with Dad, years ago.
And you greet me by name. Suddenly we're no longer strangers. Except of course, we are because I can't find the words to tell you what these last years have done to me, to my family, to you. I tell myself those things don't matter; we bridge the distance with the photographs, with laughter. You hold my hand, and I try not to remember the many times you shook it away as the grasping impertinence of a nobody. My sister, across the bed from me, holds your other hand and we don't look at each other for fear of breaking the spell.
After nearly four hours, our luck has run out. But as you leave us you press our hands, you look at us, and we know you see us. Not just faces, looming and unfamiliar. Us.
The yellow room fixes us with its naked skeleton grin, but somehow, we find ourselves smiling with it.