What can I say now? My mother is sobbing in the room on the main floor, the room she had been sharing with my grandmother for the past few months. My grandmother’s bed is empty, taken away from us, body and spirit. I’m at the dining room table, studying the twisted black oak in the front yard. Its branches are empty, the leaves are still. It’s a relief, I must admit, but still, there is a part of me, a desperate part, that wishes she would appear, a figure in the branches, dressed in white, a vulgar smile on her lips (not her smile), a friendly wave like leaves in the wind. I wouldn’t be afraid now. I will never be afraid of anything again.
My grandmother’s name was Natalia, and she was ninety-two years old. An absolutely beautiful woman was my grandmother, from scalp to sole, and mind to soul. Inside and out. Together with my grandfather, she raised seven children, one of those being my mother. My grandfather was a working man, and I believe it’s important to mention that he was also a very kind and sentimental man, but he wasn’t much good at taking care of himself, so to properly give credit where it’s due, my grandmother took care of eight people while my grandfather supported them.
They were by no means a rich family, in fact the lot of them resided in a two storey apartment in a rather . . . not quite destitute, but close enough, part of the city. My grandmother did not work a paying job, but she worked the family kitchen, tethered to the stove at all hours of the day. She was the kind of cook that wasn’t aware of her gift, it was simply embedded in her, part of her nature, as easy and common to her as her smile, and just as winning. Cooking was an extension of her soul, so it became an ordinary part of her daily routine (the only part of her daily routine, really), and she did it selflessly. There was no desire on her part to be critiqued, or to impress. She did not do it for herself. I don’t think she even cared if her food tasted good, it just did, always. Whether it was her cottage cheese and Bolognese lasagna, or her famous panettone, everything she would serve would make you want to lick the plate clean and then kiss your fingers in gratitude. And there was no pride there either, none at all. For her, humility wasn’t a practice, but a precedent. All she wanted was to make sure that everybody, family, friend, or foe had a full stomach, at all times. That was her purpose in life, her ritual.
And so it only made her happier when her seven children began to have children of their own. As the family grew, so did her smile. She was always the very first to arrive at every family gathering, apron already wrapped around herself, the one with the brown flower petal design, and she would set the oven, ignite the burners, unstack the pots, rummage through the fridge to discover whatever spontaneous ingredients there was to find and get to work.
She would run the tap and fill a sippy cup with water and then hand it off to my little cousin, Joyce. She’d send Joyce away to water the plants, because even plants needed to be fed.
My mother and a few of my aunts had done a fantastic job in recreating certain dishes, but they were never quite the same. I regarded those dishes as honourable culinary pastiches, but my grandmother could have opened up a restaurant anywhere in the world and have made even the strictest of food critics shed a delighted tear.
My favourite was her breaded shrimp. Those tiny, curled, balls of shrimp, coated in breadcrumbs, and fried (or baked? Both?) to perfection. They would appear on the table and get snatched up by greedy, gluttonous hands instantly, and subsequently tossed into drooling, open mouths like popcorn. The empty plate was often still hot as it was taken away and replaced by another. And so on.
Seven years ago, my grandfather began to notice some odd behaviour. By then, all of their children were in their fifties, us grandchildren in our early to mid-twenties, and it was just the two of them in that two storey apartment in that not quite destitute area of town. Both retired (my grandfather from work, my grandmother from seven children), there wasn’t much for them to do. My grandfather mostly sat in front of the television watching soccer games, while my grandmother coloured her thumbs green in the vegetable garden out back or slaved away at the stove, cooking for the sake of cooking, just in case someone stopped by, always prepared.
My grandmother was not typically a woman of routine, but she would feed my grandfather a full meal three times a day, at the same times each day, for sixty years. So it was when she cooked him four meals one day that he lifted a curious eye. When she served him five meals the following week, that curiosity shifted to concern. Slowly, she began to forget what day of the week it was. She would get lost in the garden. She would leave a burner on. She would forget that they ran out of breadcrumbs the day before.
My grandfather could not cook, nor could he clean a house, so when my grandmother’s dementia started to become more and more apparent, the only sustainable solution was for one of their kids to move them into their home with them. It was time for the scales of life to rebalance themselves, for the child to give care to the parents. In the end, It was my mother that took them in. Divorced from my father a decade prior, and with both my older brother and myself having moved out not too long ago, my mother happened to be suffering from empty nest syndrome. A large suburban middle-class home, and only her. She took my grandparents in; my room became theirs, my brother’s became the guest bedroom, the couch became my grandfather’s permanent place of residence, my mother became my grandmother – tethered to the stove as she was – and my poor grandmother pupated inside a reverse chrysalis, each day hatching into a new place, a new mood, a new person. She was a child again, yet older than she had ever been. She forgot how to cook, and our palates grieved.
We were all pretty shocked to see my grandfather pass away before her. It was last year that the cancer took him, and although the family opinion was split on the matter, my poor grandmother accompanied us to the open casket funeral. Almost unbearable to watch, I witnessed my grandmother grapple with fresh, confused, newfound grief each time her eyes scanned the room and fell upon the body. Every minute and a half she discovered that her husband had died. It got so intolerable that we ended up turning her wheelchair away from the casket and kept her distracted from her surroundings for the remainder of the service.
It wasn’t long after this that she started seeing people in the trees. I was visiting my mother at her newer (yet older) house. She had sold the one I grew up in and downgraded to a bungalow with an added second floor. In that house, the dining room table faced a window. The television was showing us a documentary on the elysia chlorotica, a slug that is able to survive through photosynthesis alone by stealing chloroplasts from the leaves they ate. We were all enjoying a pastiche dish that my mother prepared when my grandmother asked us why my grandfather was sitting in the tree. I gave my mother a sideways glance and then looked up at the large, deformed, black oak tree in the yard. It looked ominous in the dying light of the day, and its leaves quivered in a disquieting way, almost as if the tree acknowledged me and was waving hello. There was no one sitting in the tree, of course. My mother seemed to have not heard a word. She shoveled a forkful of pastiche into her mouth and stared at the wall.
“Mom,” I said. “She asked why grandpa is sitting in the tree. That’s weird, right?”
My mother waved a dismissive hand at me. “She says stuff like that all the time. She hallucinates.”
“Well that’s fucking terrifying,” I said.
“Why?” she said. “She sees your grandfather. It’s probably his angel watching over us.”
I looked at her as if she were crazy. “That doesn’t creep you out?”
“No. It’s comforting.”
When I left that evening, I walked passed the mangled black oak to get to my car.
I stood below it for a moment, each obsidian limb reaching out from half a dozen elbows, its leaves fluttering in the breezeless night, waving hello. That was the first time I saw what my grandmother saw. A man, no more than a silhouette, sat on one of the high branches, legs dangling and kicking at the air. He smiled down at me and his hand was raised, palm out, fluttering, quivering, disquieting my soul as it matched the movement of the leaves. I did not wave back. I looked away, walked as fast as I could on elastic legs, and found my car. I managed to fit a shaking key into the ignition and made the engine come to life. The headlights brightened the road ahead, but the tree remained dark on the lawn. I turned my head reluctantly, just to make sure I had truly seen what I thought I saw. Normally, in stories like this, I would say that I saw nothing. That there was no man, that my imagination must have gotten the better of me. Except this isn’t a story like that. This is real life, and in real life one’s imagination isn’t powerful enough to conjure up an image like that. And so as I stared at the tree on the lawn, backlit by the orange glow of my mother’s dining room window, a man, high up in the branches, stared back at me. His head was turned to a nearly impossible angle, his legs dangled and kicked, and he regarded me with a toothy smile, his hand dancing a greeting like the leaves. It was my grandfather, except it wasn’t. It looked like him, but those teeth were not his. He’d never had teeth like that, not even with his dentures on later in his life. And the shape of the body, well, It wasn’t quite right. It was my grandfather the way my mom’s cooking was my grandma’s. It was an honourable pastiche, but not quite the original.
And then I jumped, because someone else was waving at me from the glow of the window. It was my mother waving goodbye. A normal, human wave. I waved back, hoping the thing in the tree wouldn’t mistake my gesture as something meant for it. I was afraid to interact with the thing in any way whatsoever, lest I invite it into my world. Lest I open a formal line of communication. I decided it best to keep my eyes averted from that point on.
I drove off into the bright lights of the city and climbed the stairwell to my apartment with haste, afraid of the echo of my own footsteps, because it sounded like something was following me. In my bed I stared silently out the window toward the scraggly maple tree across the street. It sat fully illuminated under a street lamp, and I could very plainly see that there was no humanoid sitting there. Regardless, I drew the blinds and felt better for it.
A couple of weeks went by, and I had mostly gotten over the spookiness of what I had encountered at my mother’s house. I was invited back over for lunch one afternoon, so I made my way to the suburbs and parked my car beside that haunted black oak. I stayed true to my promise and kept my eyes away. Head down, I marched right up the driveway to the front door and let myself into the house.
Lunch was more of a parody than a pastiche this time. My mother looked tired, exhausted even. She looked old beyond her years. My grandmother asked her where my grandfather was, and my mother said that he was visiting his sister. Not a minute went by before my grandmother asked the same question. My mother began to cry.
“Mom?”
“I can’t do this.”
“What’s wrong?”
“It’s the same thing over and over and over. It never stops.”
“What is that family doing in the tree?” That was my grandmother.
My skin turned cold. My mother’s eyes widened and for a moment she looked genuinely afraid.
“Mom?” I said.
“It’s fine. She hallucinates.”
I craned my neck and stared out at the gnarled black oak. Unmistakeable in the piercing bright light of the day, there was, in fact, a family in the tree. Wearing only white, two young boys sat on the lowest branch, smiling at us and waving their tiny, veiny hands. But no, they weren’t quite veins, they were leafy venations, branching off of a midrib that ran from the middle of the wrist right up to the knuckle of the middle finger.
Higher in the tree, and standing, were three middle-aged women and a young man. All of them wearing the same ivory attire, all of them barefoot, all of them smiling detestable smiles, all of them waving. Each of their hands had those leafy veins, the motion of them like leaves in a soft wind.
Higher still, sitting in the same position as before, was my grandfather.
My grandmother giggled, her eyes affixed to the tree. “What are they doing up there?” she said, and giggled again. She lifted her old, weak arm and waved at the family in the tree. My mother never looked once. Her eyes were glued to her plate, seemingly uninterested in her food, but even less interested in looking out the window.
“Mom. . .” I began.
“Don’t say it,” she interrupted.
A knock came at the door. My mother flinched and closed her eyes tight. I felt a finger trace its way down my spine, but it was really just a bead of sweat from my perspiring scalp succumbing to gravity. A few more fingers tickled my back before the knock came again.
“Who is at the door?” my grandmother said, and tried to stand without her walker.
My mother’s eyes shot open, fear becoming concern. “Ma, you can’t. Sit down, you’ll hurt yourself.”
I slowly rose to my feet.
“What are you doing?” my mother asked me.
“I’m going to go answer the door.”
“There is no one at the door. Sit down.”
“Mom. . .”
“Please. Believe me when I say this. There is no one there.” Her eyes pleaded with me.
I shook my head and went into the hallway. I heard her shout my name in protest, but I was already committed. I needed to at least look through the peephole. I needed to know if maybe it was just a normal person, a delivery man, or solicitor. I needed it to be a normal person, or else I thought I would have lost a little bit of my mind, if I hadn’t already.
The hallway was dark despite the bright day. The windows around the door were opaque, so the small amount of light that found its way in was harshly diffused. I stood before it for a moment, afraid to go further. The knock came again and I jumped from the sound. I almost lost my nerve, but I clenched my teeth and approached the door.
I felt like I was in a state of fugue. Everything seemed animated and preternatural. The peephole watched me like the glistening eye of a predator. My mother’s voice came to me from another dimension. It called my name like a question. My grandmother giggled somewhere far away. In a trance, I touched my forehead to the wood, placing my eye around the eye of the door, meeting my predator head on and looking into its soul.
What I saw on the other side was not a person. What I saw on the other side was a beautiful day, an empty stoop. . . and a plate of shrimp. Another knock did not come. Still outside of myself, I slowly opened the door. I stared down at the plate incredulously, sweat still pooling at the nape of my neck and around my temples. The day was hot, the sun was bright. I was beginning to feel the oncoming of a headache. I picked up the plate in surprisingly steady hands. It was hot to the touch, although I wasn’t quite sure if that was a product of the sun overhead, or if it was because it had come straight out of hell’s oven. Regardless I brought it in and walked back to the dining room.
“Who is that?” my grandmother asked my mother.
“That’s your grandson,” my mother told her.
“The son of who?”
“The son of me.”
“Your son?”
“Yes, mama.”
“I haven’t seen him since he was really little. Is he sleeping here?”
I put the plate on the table and re-seated myself.
“You were right,” I said. “No one was there.”
My mother watched as I reached for a shrimp and placed it on my tongue.
“I thought one of your aunts had left it there the first time,” she said. “It was a lasagna.”
I chewed on something I hadn’t tasted in years, at least not to that quality. It was my grandmother’s breaded shrimp, authentically, a matching signature.
“Do they know?” I said, placing another shrimp into my mouth. “The family?”
My mother nodded. “They think it’s a blessing. They think they’re her guardian angels.”
“And you?”
“Serpents,” she hissed. “And you, my son, are eating the forbidden fruit.”
I swallowed another of those delicious shrimp and then wiped my hands on a napkin. I took my phone out of my pocket. “I’m calling the police.”
“No point,” my mother said.
My grandmother asked where my grandfather was. My mother patiently told her that he was visiting his sister.
“What do you mean?” I said.
“No one else can see them. Just our family.”
“Then you’re moving.”
“They’re in other trees! Wherever she goes.”
“Who are those people?” I asked, staring out at the family in the tree, seeing but not truly believing. “The others. The kids. . .”
“Your grandfather and his sister. Sometimes his brothers. Sometimes your grandmother’s siblings. There are different people that come and go. I’ve matched them all to photographs.”
“You told me it was his angel. A few weeks ago.”
“I believed that then. A few weeks is a long time.”
I looked away from the tree and met my mother’s eyes.
“No,” I said, matter-of-factly. “I don’t believe it. We’re suffering from some sort of group hysteria. This is not real, Mom. It’s impossible. I read somewhere that in the middle ages an entire town started dancing together, four hundred people, all of them dancing in a craze. They didn’t stop for thirty days, some of them dancing themselves to literal death. They used to think that the devil possessed the town, but today we attribute it to severe stress. The bubonic plague was running rampant through Europe at the time, and people were experiencing a collective grief. They all just snapped a little bit. Grandpa died. Grandma requires your constant attention and care. All of you are constantly reminded of death because she asks about him every five minutes. So when she sees angels in the trees, so do you.”
My mother looked like she really wanted to believe me, but she spoke out loud the loophole that I was trying to suppress. “Then why do you see it? And what is it you swallowed two minutes ago?”
I took a long drink of water, my hands no longer so steady. I burped and my mouth filled with the aftertaste of my grandmother’s breaded shrimp.
That night I slept in the guest bedroom, not wanting to leave my mother alone after all that happened.
My grandmother slept on the main floor, a convenient room because it had been a long time since she was able to march up the stairs. Lately, my mother slept in there with her, in a portable bed on wheels adjacent to my grandmother’s. Over the past few months, my grandmother’s dementia had escalated substantially, no longer affecting just her past memory, but affecting her present reality. Her cognition was corroded and corrupt, and at night she would act out fever dreams, while being attacked by phantom pains. “Once,” my mother said, “while she was complaining about how the mattress was breaking her spine, she suddenly said that she felt better after a shadow on the wall tipped its top hat in her direction and sprinkled her with magnesium.” Of course, the dementia was responsible for distorting her reality, and all the wild things she saw or felt – for the most part – were no more than hallucinations. “But now,” my mother admitted, “when it’s well past midnight and grandma tells me that Patrick is trying to get into the room, I half believe her.”
“Who’s Patrick?” I had said.
“Patrick was my oldest sibling. A stillborn.”
The guest bedroom was on the upper floor, and, to my immediate displeasure, I remembered that the window faced the lawn. The lawn with the tree. Without looking in that direction, I felt for the string and pulled the blinds.
An hour later, I was wide awake, staring up at the old paint on the ceiling, letting the silence of the house and all its tiny sounds rinse over me like a slightly opened tap. I heard the seldom sound of a car passing outside. I heard the low frequency hum of the refrigerator downstairs. I heard the squawk of springs as my mother shifted in her portable bed. I heard the vague mutterings of my grandmother’s voice, and the calming responses of my mother’s. I heard a persistent tapping at my window.
My heart stopped dead in my chest for a moment, and then sped up tenfold. There it was, a steady tic-tic-tic, like the branch of a tree, or a fingernail. Now it was heavier and less patient, a tac-tac-tac. All the saliva in my mouth vanished in an instant, and my teeth were clenched as if to hold in my breath, as if to not let a sound escape. My feet, sweating a moment ago in the humid heat of the summer, were cold; anxiety forcing my body to relocate the blood from my extremities to more useful parts of my body, like my rapidly beating heart, for instance.
And then, CLACK-CLACK-CLACK, and I jumped out of bed and hurried to the far wall, where I stared at the window with wide, unhappy eyes. My mind was a mortified jumble of supplications, a silent prayer to the universe to make it all stop.
When the doorbell rang, I heard my mother let out the most pathetic sound of despair I’d ever heard. A sound I would have made too, if I could have made a sound at all. More tapping at the windows, all around the house. A defeated, repeated set of “no’s” from my mother downstairs, who was surely on the floor, with nowhere to go. I had in my hand a fistful of my own hair. I tried telling myself that it was mass hysteria. That my brain was somehow overworked, or that I was suffering from some belated unknown grief that I held locked away somewhere. The doorbell rang again. I swallowed my dry tongue, I chewed on my lips, I opened my mouth and shouted. “What do you want! Go away from us!”
It was no use. The tapping continued, and the doorbell was as unrelenting as my mother’s sorry objections. But what really broke my heart was my grandmother’s screams. The sound of her confused, agonized wailing was enough to level me out. I let go of my hair and strode to the window. More angry than afraid now, I lifted the blinds, prepared to confront the perpetrator of those perpetual taps, and immediately regretted it. I was greeted by the smiling face of a young man. It was only his face, because he was holding himself up by the window sill. One veiny hand held the ledge of the window in a death grip, while the other tapped on the glass with inhuman speed. His eyes regarded me with joy, and he would never blink.
I turned away and sleep walked toward the door. As I reached for the knob, I heard the squeal of the window sliding open. Uncaring, now that I knew the world was chaos, I turned my head around in time to see a gangly arm reach into the room. Attached to that arm was a young man, dressed in white, climbing blindly through the window, wide, joyful eyes targeted on me, never leaving, never blinking. His smile widened when he saw that I had acknowledged him and he waved at me.
Meanwhile, my mother was sobbing, and my grandmother was shouting that she didn’t feel well, that she needed to go to the hospital. All around, like a percussion band from the deepest depths of hell, came the constant rhythm of the window tappers, accented every so often by the jangling ring of the doorbell.
I turned away from the man crawling through the window and walked into the shadows of the hallway. As I walked toward the stairs, I remember thinking for a brief moment if perhaps hiding in the shadows on the wall was a man with a top hat. A man who might sprinkle magnesium into the mouth of the thing that was surely following me down the hall; to enhance its toothy grin, to reinforce the bones there, to make them stronger. What did it eat, to need such large chompers? Leafy greens, I thought, and let out a maniacal chuckle.
I made my way down the stairs, and as I walked to the front door I made sure to unlock every window I passed by. I just wanted the tapping to stop, so I let them in. When I arrived at the door, I did not look through the peephole, because I no longer cared about what I would find on the other side. Of course, when I turned the lock and pulled the door ajar, there was no one there. On the stoop, in a round plate with a brown flower petal design around the rim, was a panettone. My grandmother’s famous panettone, with raisins and cranberries lodged in the dough like someone had used it for target practice with their dried fruit gun. Its shape was the tell-tale sign, slightly lopsided and resembling a large muffin. I stared down at it with impatience.
“Did you ring the doorbell?” I asked it.
It didn’t respond.
I left it there.
Inside the house, a ceremony had begun. A crowd of figures in white surrounded my grandmother’s bed. She was still crying, but softer now, less urgent. I glimpsed my mother on the floor, and witnessed something spectacular. Despite all that was happening, my mother and my grandmother fell into the rehearsed rhythm of their everyday lives. First, my grandmother asked where her husband was. Then, like one of Pavlov’s dogs, my mother said that he was at his sister’s. My mother stared at the intruders with languished eyes. I casually walked in and lifted her to her feet. She asked me what was happening, and I shook my head in response. Together, with our arms around each other for comfort, we left the room, and made our way to the couch. I sat her down and told her that it will all be okay. By now I knew it would. By now I understood that they were not here for us. They would not hurt us, touch us.
Moments later, my grandmother fell silent. One of the figures in white turned toward me, it was the one who had climbed through my bedroom window. His grin was the same, it had never faltered. He smiled happily at me, while the others crouched toward my grandmother’s bed and lifted her in their arms. But this one, he looked at me, and he waved. “Hello, hello, hello, hello, hello,” he said through his teeth.
“Will you come for me one day?” I said to him.
His mouth opened, his teeth unclenched. What came out was a laughter so absurd, so hysterical, that I had wished I were deaf. My mother blocked her ears, and fresh tears dripped from her closed eyes. I took her hand and walked her outside to stand by the road, away from that horrible sound, and those horrible people.
It wasn’t long before the succession pushed through the door. My deceased grandmother was their burden, but they all shared the weight. An awful sound of dissonance came from between their unwavering smiles. It took me a second to realize that they were singing. An elegy, perhaps, but there was no mark of lament on those happy faces.
When they reached the tree, a few of the members broke off from the group and climbed the branches. The others lifted my grandmother’s corpse and the ones in the branches pulled her up and placed her gently in the tree. The one that was my grandfather climbed down from his perch near the top of the tree. I wanted to scream at him not to touch her. I wanted to protest against this grotesque sacrament. But I didn’t. I watched with horrified eyes, and held my mother fast while she wept.
My grandfather, or rather the devilish pastiche of his likeness, wrapped himself around my grandmother and put his lips to hers. The kiss of life? The kiss of death? She sat up, confused, but also not confused. She was confused the way a person is after coming out of a coma, but the dementia-related confusion was no longer in her stare. Her eyes finally found their way to my grandfather’s uncanny face, and she beamed at him. She clawed at him, and pulled him close, and then she saw the others and gathered them in around her. Her new family was found. And then they were gone. Just like that. Vanished.
After awhile, I took my mother back into the house and she fell to her knees beside my grandmother’s bed. The body was there, mouth slightly open, her final breath lingered, perfuming the room with a smell like vinegar.
When the ambulance arrived, the paramedics announced her death and the coroner removed the body for storage until my family could arrange with a funeral director.
The next day, the family arrived, all of my mother’s siblings, my brother, my cousins. Together we mourned, and we planned the funeral, and we ate pastiche in celebration of a life that was lost, a life we held dear to us. The panettone was given to the coroner as a thank you for his grim work. But there were still desserts, like cannolis, and biscottis, and apple crisp, and, best of all, grappa, which I had the most of.
The day after that I stayed to console my mother, and to keep her company. I took the week off work with the excuse of bereavement, so I decided that I would stay here with her. We experienced something together, something that forever would separate us from everyone else in our family. We needed each other to recover from that. But I don’t think we ever will. Whatever it was that happened defied all logic. The world as I thought I knew it has become as lopsided as my grandmother’s famous panettone. All I could hope is for time to heal me, to maybe one day think back without clarity. Maybe dementia would make me forget, or maybe it would just bring them back.
I walked for miles yesterday to try to clear my head, and I came across a salt marsh. It was beautiful and sad, and when I finally looked away I saw something on my shoe. A leaf, I thought at first, but it was moving, crawling. It was a rare species of slug called elysia chlorotica. I had seen a documentary on them. They looked exactly like a leaf, and they can survive for weeks off of the chloroplasts from the leaves they eat through photosynthesis alone. Big chompers, I thought. Leafy greens.
But what can I say now? My mother is sobbing in the room on the main floor, the room she had been sharing with my grandmother for the past few months. My grandmother’s bed is empty, taken away from us, body and spirit. I’m at the dining room table, studying the twisted black oak in the front yard. Its branches are empty, the leaves are still. It’s a relief, I must admit, but still, there is a part of me, a desperate part, that wishes she would appear, a figure in the branches, dressed in white, a vulgar smile on her lips (not her smile), a friendly wave like leaves in the wind. I wouldn’t be afraid now. I will never be afraid of anything again.