“This is Karen, I’m a night nurse from Seaview. Your mother is extremely distressed. She’s in an agitated state. I can’t get in contact with your father. I thought you would want to come down.”

32.

Oliver lingered in reception as Karen ushered me down the hall to Mum’s room, telling me matter-of-factly that Mum was being aggressive and violent. It happened sometimes. It was when she seemed least like the Mum I knew.

A month or so before she went missing, Dad was in Dublin at a meeting with clients and he’d promised to be back by five. I was home with Mum, making dinner. I mean I’d put frozen burgers under the grill, but that counted as cooking to me. Mum was getting in my way, though, fussing around the kitchen, trying to help. I had to leave to meet Hannah in half an hour and Dad wasn’t back yet even though he was the one who was meant to make dinner.

“No, Mum, give me that.” I tried to take a chopping knife out of her hand, but she had a tight grip on it.

“NO,” she shouted. “I can help, you know.”

“Yeah, I know.” I sighed, frustrated. This was why Dad was meant to be back already. It was getting harder and harder to be with Mum and do anything else at the same time. If you left her alone you risked her trying to wander out of the house.

“I don’t need anything right now, Mum. Why don’t you go sit down?”

She stamped her foot and didn’t budge.

I took several deep breaths and reminded myself that she was more frustrated by the situation than I was.

“Look.” I tried a more soothing tone. “Why don’t we have a cup of tea? If you give me two minutes we can go into the living room together and I’ll put on music.”

I wondered if I should take out the baby doll. She would hold it and feed it and pace up and down winding it. But it was one of my least favorite “therapeutic tools.” It creeped me out to see Mum thinking a lump of plastic was a baby when she couldn’t even tell the person next to her was her daughter. So I put on some of her favorite music and when I got her settled on the sofa and distracted her with her photo album, she let the knife drop. I picked it up and returned to the kitchen to flip the burgers over. They were a bit burned on one side.

I called Dad, my third call so far, but there was no answer. I was pouring boiling water into a pot with some broccoli when Mum returned to the kitchen.

“I need something,” she said.

My phone dinged with a text from Dad.

DAD