Four

My grandmother was sitting alone in the living room, watching a Bobby Flay cooking show. That was Noreen’s doing. My grandmother had never watched TV during the day in her whole life. Before she began to have dementia, she would have been gardening, volunteering at the art museum, reading, or writing her memoirs.

“Hi, Gram,” I said, giving her a big hug.

“Hello, Eloise,” she said, smiling.

I nearly corrected her, but I didn’t. I wanted her to have a moment where she believed Eloise was still with us, still on this earth.

“Where have you been?” Gram asked.

“I’ve been with the birds,” I said. “Studying nests, and flight, and migration.”

“Flying north or south?” she asked.

“North, of course,” I said. “Because it’s almost summer, and that means I’ll be heading up to the Canadian forest to see them.”

“Of course,” she said.

My grandmother, Ida Gibson, had started writing her memoirs a few years ago. She had led a fascinating life, full of adventures to Machu Picchu and the Galápagos Islands, Tierra del Fuego and Patagonia, Baffin Island, Corfu in Greece, Juan-les-Pins in France. She had taught at American schools in France, Canada, Chile, and Greece, and used those locations as jumping-off points for her travels. She had lost her only son—my dad—when the boat he and my mom were on went down in a gale. She had raised her granddaughters, Eloise and me. She had buried my sister, and now the only place we could visit everyone was the graveyard.

I wondered if Gram would be able to write again, or whether the clouds in her mind would forever keep the words from coming. Whether the trauma she felt would keep her memories locked inside forever.

Was trauma the reason the girl upstairs had lost her memory, too?

The TV droned on. My grandmother began to doze. I went into the kitchen, where Noreen was heating up some soup.

“How is she today?” I asked. “Anything different?”

“She’s fine,” Noreen said. “No changes. You don’t have to worry, Oli. I take good care of her.”

I had my doubts about that. Noreen was also a dog trainer, and she brought her incredibly adorable golden retriever puppy, Zoey, to the house. I saw her playing with Zoey more than she paid attention to my grandmother. But, then, I had the mentality that I was supposed to take care of everyone. It was the older-sister, girl-with-too-much-responsibility syndrome.

When my parents died, it was a huge shock, one that had dulled slightly but never really went away. Losing them, and not having them anywhere in the world, had, well, unhinged me.

In the early years following their deaths, I found myself doing things that were very un-Oli. I faked sore throats and missed a lot of school. Before we moved into Gram’s cottage full-time, I would sit in our basement, in my dad’s woodworking shop, just so I could smell the sawdust—it reminded me of him. Or I’d sit in their old room and rummage through their drawers. I’d go through my mother’s side of the closet and stand in there, between her dresses and jackets, and pretend she was hugging me.

Those were comforts, but as I got older, I also tempted danger. I’m not sure why, but sometimes I think it was because death had touched our family and I wanted to prove it wouldn’t touch me. I climbed onto our roof to peer into the brick chimney to look for chimney swift nests. I swam nearly a half mile out to North Brother Island—farther than was safe, with my muscles aching and lungs burning—to count the gulls’ eggs and hatchlings.

I guess it was about families: parents and chicks. Eloise and I were baby birds whose mother and father had abandoned the nest. Not by choice, obviously, but still, they were gone. I tried to be more than an older sister to Eloise. I tried to be her parent.

And now, as Gram regressed, our roles were reversing, and I knew I was trying to be her parent, too.

I helped myself to a cup of soup and stepped over Zoey, curled up on a rug next to the stove. I hadn’t realized how hungry I was. I sat in a chair facing the yard. The sun had set, night was falling, but light from a streetlamp illuminated our border of bright blue hydrangeas.

The sight of the flowers, combined with the lingering scent of that Molton Brown shampoo from upstairs, brought memories of last summer suddenly flooding through me.