What We Keep Alive

The vitamin regimen was the one thing my father still controlled. Every morning at seven, he lined up the orange prescription bottles on the kitchen counter—B12, D3, the fish oil capsules that made him burp something briny and oceanic all day. He'd take them with water from the same chipped mug he'd used for thirty years, the one with the fading letters from some long-defunct bank.

"You're not eating," he said, not looking up from his pill sorting.

"I'm not hungry."

"Your mother would want you to eat."

My mother had been dead for six years, but in his mouth, she was still here, still judging my appetite, still keeping a running tally of everything I'd failed to become. The dementia had stolen most of his recent memories, leaving him stranded in the past like a swimmer who'd drifted too far from shore. But he remembered her. He remembered the way she took her coffee, the sound of her heels on hardwood, the particular shade of lipstick she favored on special occasions.

"Dad, we need to talk about the house."

He finally looked at me, his eyes clouded with that peculiar distance I'd come to dread—the gap between where he was and where I needed him to be.

"The house is fine."

"You can't live alone anymore. The stove—"

"I turn it off. I always turn it off."

"Last week you forgot. The fire department—"

"That was a misunderstanding."

We'd had this conversation six times in three weeks. It had become a ritual, a dance we both knew the steps to, neither of us willing to acknowledge the music had stopped.

In the corner, the goldfish bowl caught the morning light, sending tiny undulating rainbows across the ceiling. The fish—my mother's birthday gift to him seven years ago, named Orange for its improbable color—swam in endless circles, its mouth opening and closing in silent recitation. Sometimes I thought the fish understood the situation better than either of us. It had watched this house fill and empty, had witnessed the slow erosion of my father's mind from behind its glass walls.

"I can't keep doing this," I said, the words tearing loose before I could stop them. "I have a job. A life. In Chicago."

"Chicago," he repeated, testing the word like it was something foreign. "That's where you met what's-his-name."

"Mark. We broke up. Two years ago."

He nodded slowly, processing this information that wasn't new to him but that he'd somehow lost and found again. "Your mother didn't like him."

"Mom never met him."

"She wouldn't have liked him."

The goldfish surfaced, gulping air, then sank back to its circling. I wondered what it would be like to live in such a small world, where the same view repeated endlessly, where nothing ever changed except the quality of light.

"I'm sorry," I said, and realized I meant it. For everything. For leaving. For staying away so long. For returning only when things had fallen apart. For the mother he still spoke about as if she'd just stepped out for milk.

He reached across the counter, his hand shaking slightly, and patted my arm. "You should eat something."

And that was the thing about grief, about love, about whatever this was—the way it could hollow you out and fill you up simultaneously. The way the most important things could become both invisible and overwhelmingly present. Like vitamins, I thought. Or memory. Or the particular shade of orange in the scales of a fish that had outlasted everything that mattered.

"Okay," I said. "Okay. I'll eat."

Outside, the sun rose over the neighborhood, casting long shadows across the lawn he couldn't maintain anymore, the garden my mother had planted now wild with neglect. Inside, we sat together in the kitchen's quiet light, two people who had somehow failed to protect each other, doing the only thing left: pretending, for a little while longer, that everything was fine.