*
One Sunday, deep into the fall of my senior year of high school, my mother adds something new to the script.
“Lila’s applying to Harvard,” she tells my grandmother.
“Oh!” Gran’s lips part to show her teeth, the closest she ever gets to a smile.
“I wish you’d wait until we know if I get in,” I say.
My mother shrugs. “She won’t remember anyway.”
On our way out, my mother tells the nurses, too. They glance up from their paperwork at the nurses’ station and smile patiently. “Sure you’re proud of her, Miss Rendi,” one says.
My mother grabs my hand, which feels performative precisely because she only ever does this around strangers. “I sure am. She’s my only baby.” She tries to catch my eye.
I feel self-conscious about how much taller than her I’ve grown, physical evidence confirming how much better my childhood has been than hers. “I haven’t gotten in yet,” I clarify.
“You never know if you don’t try,” the same nurse says.
It’s my job to enter the code on a keypad mounted on the wall at the end of the hall. The doors click, and the red light blinks green. We walk down the long corridor of the regular care unit in silence. Most of the doors to the rooms are propped open, but I avoid peering inside, afraid of what I might see. Collapsed skeletons hung with loose, mottled skin. Dust bunny nets of thin, gray hair. This hallway unnerves me more than the Alzheimer’s unit because most of the residents here recognize where they are and why. John Everett is probably here somewhere, too, the kid I barely knew from Quiz Bowl who perforated his frontal lobes with a spray of twenty-two caliber snake shot in the high school parking lot at the end of my sophomore year. Though, from what I’ve heard, it’s uncertain whether he knows he’s anywhere.
“I wish you’d stop telling people,” I say when we reach the car. “I might not get in.”
“Of course you’ll get in,” my mother says, shaking out a cigarette from the pack in her purse. “You have all of my gifts and none of my hang-ups. You’re who I could have been.”
She presses in the lighter and stares at the nursing home entrance while she waits for it to heat. “At least I’ve done right by her,” she says. “Even if she never did right by me.”
This is her way of telling me what she wants from me, too.