I Don't Forgive You

low-rise condos and large homes chopped into apartments receded, to be replaced by the stately houses with pillars and porches that led up to the leafy campus of Overton. It took the entire ride to gird myself for the day and to put on my invisible armor. No one was overtly mean to me. No one mocked my off-brand sneakers, or sneered when I said I had never been to Martha’s Vineyard. It was all much subtler than that, and in a way that was worse. I didn’t even merit teasing. I was invisible.
I sat at the bus stop with my camera on my lap. The public buses ran sporadically on weekend evenings, and that meant I might be sitting in the cold and dark for an hour or more. I was fiddling with the lens cap when a rusted BMW pulled up.
The passenger-side window rolled down to reveal my photography teacher sitting in the driver’s seat, a lopsided smile on his face. Paul Adamson was almost thirty, but he still dressed like a prep school kid—worn-out chinos and beat-up Stan Smiths held together by duct tape. His hair was dark auburn; thick, spirited waves fell this way and that. He had green eyes and long lashes, and when he got really worked up about some brilliant photographer in class, his whole face would turn red, right down to his neck, where it disappeared in the V of his button-down collared shirt. He never wore anything but—sometimes an Oxford-blue one, sometimes white, and on rare occasion, pink.
“Well, well, well,” he said, smiling. “What have we here—my star pupil.”
I approached the car, my face flushing under his gaze. Without the buffer that other students usually provided, there was nothing between us but the cold night air.
“What in the world are you doing out here?” he asked. When he looked at me then, he ignited a small fire. No one had ever looked at me like that before, no high school boy, that was for sure. It was as if I had not existed until that moment. I burned red and hot then, even in the cold, and I was thankful for the cover of darkness.
Before I could answer, he shoved open the passenger-side door. “Hop in, Alexis. I’ll drive you home.”
I had always hated the name Alexis.
It sounded like I was trying too hard, overcompensating for our cramped apartment and lack of family money. It reminded me of my mother smoking menthols while poring over gossip magazines, as if wearing the same shade of lipstick as some actress would magically imbue her with class. My Overton classmates possessed carefree, almost dowdy nicknames—Kristen V. in my English class was known as Cricket. My year also had two Mollys, an Emsy, short for Emily, and even a Cookie.
As I climbed in the car, I improvised.
“Call me Lexi,” I said.

 7
“She’s trying to kill me!” I hold the phone a few inches from my ear, as the panic in my mother’s voice makes her sound more like a child than a fifty-seven-year-old woman.
“No one’s trying to kill you, Sharon,” I say and roll my eyes at Mark. He pauses, mid-flip of a pancake, and gives me a sympathetic smile. We’ve both become accustomed to these dramatic phone calls at all hours.
My mother received a diagnosis of early-onset dementia about eight years ago. For a while, I just attributed her cognitive problems to her drinking, and I overlooked her increasingly strange behavior. When you grow up with a mother who shows up at school in smeared lipstick and a leopard-print cocktail dress, it’s easy to dismiss her twenty years later when the neighbor calls to inform you she’s watering the roses in a negligee.
But then Sharon fell.
She was outside Westfair Fish & Chips, a three-table joint in a strip mall just outside Westport. Her version was that she went to say hello to a large dog, who jumped on her and knocked her down. But according to the dog owner, Sharon was teetering on high heels, clearly drunk, and collapsed of her own accord.
Sharon ended up in the ER with a concussion, a broken elbow, and a shattered shoulder. And most important—after a battery of tests—a diagnosis of early-onset dementia, alcohol-related.
A social worker and a neurologist got involved. We put together a “team.” But her health degenerated from there.
She refused to allow aides to enter the house, locking them out and calling the police when they tried to get in. But she couldn’t feed or bathe herself. She became paranoid, withdrawn. That’s when I moved her into assisted living, but it only accelerated her deterioration.
“That witch was here, Alexis,” Sharon insists. “She was in my room last night. Please come get me.”
From the corner of my eye, I see Cole, in his little chef’s hat, swatting Mark’s bottom with a spatula.
“No one was in your room. You’re perfectly safe, I promise.” I plug my earbuds into the phone and turn the volume way down so I can use my hands to help get breakfast on the table while talking.
“Oh, really?” And just like that, my mother has traded the little-girl wheedling for cold sarcasm. “Since when are you such an expert?”
“Sharon, be nice.” My mother has never let me call her Mom; it’s been Sharon since I can remember. “It was probably just one of the aides checking on you.”
“Don’t you think I know the difference between an aide and an assassin?” I can imagine the spittle flying from her cherry-red lips. Revlon’s Fire & Ice, of course, the same lipstick she’s worn my whole life. “You’ve always been naive. Book-smart yes, street-smart no. Now your sister. She’s another story.”
The internet is filled with articles on how to gracefully handle parents whose dementia has transformed their lovable, sunny personalities into cauldrons of paranoia and vitriol. But what about when your mother has always been this way? What if you don’t have reserves of good memories to call upon?
“If you’re rude to me, I will hang up.