MAYA C
Ellie steps over the threshold of her father’s home and breathes in the buttery scent wafting from the kitchen. A faint song is playing over the radio, and her father’s gruff voice is singing along to it. Her shoulders loosen for the first time all week as she follows the sound.
‘Ellie? Is that you?’
Harry turns to smile at her, and she pretends she doesn’t notice the deepening lines of his face, the white of his hair and the curve of his back. She still remembers him swinging her up into his arms and throwing her over his shoulder.
Ellie buries herself in his arms and lets him press a kiss to her hair. ‘Where have you been, huh? It’s been ages.’
Laughing, Ellie replies, ‘I saw you last Sunday, Dad. I see you every Sunday.’
A flicker of emotion passes over his expression for a moment before the smile is back in place. ‘Ah, it feels like forever though, doesn’t it?’
They find themselves at the table, a plate of warm cookies piled between them. She picks one up and takes a bite, pretending she doesn’t notice the way Harry’s eyes linger on the third, empty chair.
‘This might sound silly,’ Ellie begins tentatively, ‘but my coworkers were talking about celebrating Mother’s Day last week, and I realised I don’t really remember anything about my mum.’
Harry blinks, eyes going distant the way they always do when her mother is brought up.
‘I was— I’m hoping you can tell me about her,’ she continues, stumbling over her words in her haste to get them out. She’s never brought her mother up before, not really. Harry had been so torn apart that she had never wanted to make his heart any heavier. But it’s been twenty years now, and Harry’s sorrow has only worsened, like each day spent without her chipped away at him.
Slowly, Harry meets her eyes. He sticks his jaw out slightly, the way he does when he’s trying to be brave.
‘My Eloise,’ he says, almost to himself. ‘Of course I’ll tell you about her. She would have wanted me to. I should have never stopped.’
Ellie places a hand over his own, squeezing tight, even as relief stills the thrashing worry in her chest. ‘You were grieving, Dad. I don’t blame you.’
He makes a small sound, a mix between a scoff and something sadder. ‘That’s no excuse.’
Ellie waits, watching as he fiddles with the ring on his left hand, swivelling it around and around.
‘Eloise was like the sun,’ Harry says finally. ‘She was so bright, so full of light, spreading that joy to everyone she touched. Every morning, she would put on a sundress, a wide-brimmed hat and some gardening gloves and spend hours in the dirt, pulling the weeds in her vegetable garden. We’d use the tomatoes and the zucchinis and the herbs for dinner. Your mother was the farmer, and I was the cook. Not that I’d let her near the kitchen anyway, not if I wanted a dinner I could chew.’
Ellie laughs, startled to find it comes out a bit hoarse. Harry squeezes her hand, his smile slipping into something soft, tinged with regret. ‘Is this helping?’
‘It’s helping,’ Ellie replies. If she ignores the grief-carved lines on Harry’s face, she can pretend her mother is only a room away instead of a lifetime.
*
Ellie spends every week counting down the minutes until Sunday. Some weeks, they spend the day bustling around the kitchen, Harry teaching her the difference between dicing and slicing and how to know just what seasoning the sauce bubbling on the stove needs by swiping her finger along the spoon. Other days, they’ll curl up on the lounge with a book or compete against each other in boardgames neither of them understand the rules to. And throughout it all, Harry tells her stories of her mother.
Sometimes, Harry pulls out photo albums and points to her mother in every picture, telling elaborate stories about the countless adventures they’d experienced together. Ellie stares at her mother’s splattering of freckles and auburn eyes, and mourns that she never got to know her. She’s almost the same age now as Eloise was when she died.
Sometimes, Harry can’t seem to find the answer to her questions, arms wrapped around his thinning frame as if he’s trying to hold himself together. It’s as though a thickening fog is weaving its way through his mind, clouding his memories until there’s nothing but the deep ache of mourning. Ellie doesn’t push on those days, instead rambling on about her coursework or her job or her awful neighbour until he loosens his grip. And if his eyes turn vacant as she updates him, she attributes it to his grief.
But today is Sunday, and she can’t find Harry anywhere.
‘Dad? Are you here?’
A sinking feeling begins in her stomach and makes its way up to her throat. She glances into the kitchen, noting the TV remote sitting by the microwave and the toothbrush on the dining table. Lately, things have ended up in the last place you’d expect them to be.
A dull thud echoes from upstairs, and she bolts towards it before she even makes the decision to move. She barely catches herself from tripping on the last step, desperate and terrified.
A breath is punched out of her at the sight of Harry, safe and staring out the window. Ellie moves to stand beside him, peering down at the empty stretch of road. The only car in the driveway is her own beat-up Toyota. Everything is shimmering with residual rain, reminding her of the sour lollies Harry used to buy.
The distant hum of traffic and the quiet bird chatter are the only sounds as Ellie murmurs, ‘Dad?’
‘Eloise?’
Ellie’s lip trembles. She gently takes his hand and turns him so he can see her face. ‘I’m not Eloise, Dad. It’s Ellie. Your daughter.’
‘Ellie,’ Harry mumbles. ‘Where is Eloise? Do you know when she’ll be home?’
She helps Harry into the armchair across the room, gripping his elbows to keep him from slipping to the carpet. It’s only now that she lets herself see the outline of Harry’s bones through his skin, like a cloth draped over a skeleton.
How could she have not seen this? How could she not have let herself see this?
She stays with Harry for as long as she can before she is fired from her job, sleeping on the fold-out bed downstairs and jolting at every sound Harry makes, heart desperate to escape the cage of her ribs until she reassures herself that he’s alright. Now that she’s here, it’s impossible to ignore the truth. His mind isn’t clouded by a fog so much as it's blocked by a solid wall of vapor. Every so often, she’ll catch a glimpse of her father through the mist, but it’s always obscured again, the way a storm rolls in — quick and impossible to see through.
It was selfish of her, she now knows. It was so selfish to pretend that everything was fine, that his slipping memory was just his old age, that his mood swings and his clumsiness were just the products of a long day.
She spends every waking moment cooking and cleaning and making calls. She organises their finances on a spreadsheet while her phone sits jammed between her ear and shoulder, pleading for urgent care. Her hair is frazzled where she’s run her hands through it.
‘Cardiovascular dementia,’ Harry’s doctor announces one morning, sliding the images across the table to her. ‘We found evidence of a few TIAs in his scans, as well as blocked blood-vessels. It’s not uncommon, with his medical history.’
Harry sits next to her, but his eyes are wandering like he can’t understand the words coming from the doctor’s mouth. He’s been living under carers for the past few months now, and each day she notices another piece of him slip away, obscured by that fog. Ellie watches him for a moment, eyeing the slow-healing cut on his temple from when he slipped on the bathroom tiles, the bruise blossoming on his elbow from a fall at the bottom of the stairs. He can hardly hold himself up anymore.
‘What do I do?’
The doctor gentles her voice. ‘It might be time to think of other options.’
Ellie squeezes her eyes shut tight. She can’t let herself tremble apart. She owes her father that, at least.
*
Her hair is dripping with rainwater as she finally ducks into the building, breathing hard. Ellie pulls her jacket tighter around her and makes her way down the hallways, a route she has memorised by now. She punches in the code to the ward, shuts the door behind her and finds her father sitting at a table, flipping through the newspaper she brought for him last time she visited. Gentle music echoes from further down the hall, something from the 50s, maybe. Across the room, another family is visiting their grandmother, and they send her a reassuring smile as she sits: We’re here together, it says. You’re not alone.
The nursing home isn’t the prison she imagined it to be. It’s a nice place, with wide windows and kind staff. They have activities every morning for the residents, craft and sing-alongs and games. Harry, when he still had the capacity to think about things like this, would have liked it.
When Harry looks up at her, he smiles. It’s the kind of smile you give a stranger when you’re trying to be polite.
‘Hello,’ Harry says amicably.
‘Hi, Harry. Is it alright if I sit with you for a bit?’
Harry gestures to the empty chair.
‘What are you looking at?’ she asks, resting her chin in her hands. She subtly glances to the page open in the paper, an article about a home break-in committed last week.
‘My wife,’ he replies, ‘Eloise. She normally comes to visit, but I haven’t seen her today.’
This, the nurses had explained to her, is a common symptom of dementia. False memories, fabricated to fill the gaps in his actual memory. Ellie is glad they are happy, at least. If Harry doesn’t remember Eloise’s death, that’s the only mercy this disease has offered him.
‘She sounds lovely,’ Ellie says. ‘Is that her in the photo there?’
Harry traces a finger over the picture in the newspaper. It isn’t Eloise, not even close, but sometimes Harry can’t process what he’s looking at. It only distresses him if somebody tries to tell him the truth, so she plays along.
‘Yes,’ Harry says, and launches into an elaborate story about the time they supposedly spend together. It’s all made up, of course, but Ellie smiles and nods along all the same.
Eventually, he says, ‘She loves her garden, and I love to cook,’ and Ellie has to breathe slowly for a moment to keep the tears from spilling over. It’s so rare for Harry to remember something true.
‘You sound like a perfect match,’ Ellie replies shakily. ‘I’m a bit like her, I think. I can barely boil water, but I do love my plants.’
‘She would have loved you,’ Harry announces. It takes everything in her to keep still, digging her nails into the soft flesh of her palm.
‘I would have loved her too.’
The nurse arrives with a tray of lunch, saving Ellie from having to find something else to say. She helps Harry eat, spooning the mashed potatoes into his mouth because his hands shake too bad to do it on his own anymore.
It’s beautiful, Ellie thinks, that although Harry has forgotten almost everything about his wife, he still knows her like his own heart.
She’s often thought about what she will remember of her father after he passes. She’s already lost her mother, and the thought used to fill her with a dread so thick it threatened to suffocate her. But now, after seeing this, she knows that even if she forgets the sound of his voice, the colour of his eyes or the taste of his cooking, she won’t ever forget the way he made her feel. She will always remember his love, the way he made her laugh, the comfort she felt sitting pressed against him as a child, his heavy arm draped over her shoulders.
She will always remember that he is her favourite person in the world. She’s learning that that is enough. The rest is all cloud cover.
When the sky inches towards black outside the windows, Ellie presses a kiss to her father’s hair and says, ‘I have to head home now, but I’ll see you next Sunday, okay?’
She turns to leave, but Harry says, ‘What’s your name? I must have forgotten.’
‘My name is Ellie,’ she answers.
‘Ellie,’ Harry replies. ‘Like my Eloise. She always loved that name. If we ever have a daughter, I think that’s what we will call her.’
Maya is an emerging Australian writer living in Sydney on the traditional land of the Dharug people. Currently studying Arts and Education at Macquarie University, she loves losing herself in the pages of a story, particularly a fantasy novel. She is currently writing her own fantasy novel and hopes to one day make someone feel seen through the characters in her stories.
