*   *   *

On the train home, I called my mother. I told her Grandma Lucy needed help. No problem, she said. We’d hire a nurse for visits.

“She doesn’t need help sometimes,” I said. “She needs it all the time.”

My mother was an immigration lawyer and a fearsome pixie beauty. She negotiated her daily schedule as a creature separate from herself, uncompromising, a force to be obeyed: client meetings, spinning classes, therapy sessions. “I call Mother all the time,” she said, hurt.

I knew if she’d been in the room, she would have pulled out her daily calendar to show me where she’d penciled these calls: little X’s tucked between names and telephone numbers, between appointments crossed through once, twice, three times, until the final hour perched uneasily in a hasty box of pen strokes. My eyes got lost when I looked at that book. It was a maze. I knew my mother was in there somewhere.

None of it made sense, I said, why Grandma Lucy was naked and fetching yogurt, and what about this bleeding? All this shivering? Maybe it was loose firing, her explanations—I had a nosebleed—just words that came into her head and seemed right.

Had she been lucid or not? my mother asked.

I didn’t know, I confessed. She veered.

I could hear background fuzz. This meant I was on speakerphone. It was still Christmas, even in the West, but I could tell my mother had returned to her office. I knew she liked to pace the length of her long windows, their panels stuck with skyscrapers like splinters.

“She’s probably not getting enough exercise,” she said. “She barely leaves the house.”

I thought of Grandma Lucy sprawled on the floor, hands flapping like birds. A mustache of blood had pooled in worm trails from her nostrils.

“I don’t think exercise is the issue, so much,” I said. “She’s just…”

“She’s what?”

“She needs help.” I paused. “Like I said.”

I knew grown children did this all the time—put their lives on hold to care for the failing bodies of their parents, to help them eat and smile and shit without making a mess. My mom wanted to look into live-in care options. It was no problem, she said. She had the money. “But Mother isn’t going to like it,” she said. “Not one bit.”

Strangers being nice never make anything better, Lucy had told me. They just make me feel alone. She’d rather wither away completely than make this final submission to a stranger’s care.

I suggested another plan. I could come up four nights a week. I’d cook and keep her company.

My mom said, “You’ll make me look like a terrible daughter.”

“Oh?”

“There’s always somebody falling, isn’t there? And you catch them.”

“She fell,” I said. “I didn’t make her fall.”

She stayed silent. So did I.

I said, “She told me about Matilda.”

Nothing.

“Mom?”

Finally: “I wanted to be the one to tell you.”