Her sorrow floods the house as she sinks down and sobs.

Her Grampa had been her biggest fan.

"That girl is as smart and talented as anyone you'll ever meet," he would p.r.o.nounce in his stentorian voice. Her face was on his screen saver. As a child it was her job to muss his dark hair and provoke his ersatz wrath. With Grampa she knew without any doubt that she was golden.

I hang onto her, but in truth, we can't stay like this for long. While my brothers are still here, we need to pack up my mother's apartment and get everything we can into storage. My mother has been approved for Medicaid, which means she will move to a nursing home as soon as I can find a decent place with a "Medicaid bed." In the meantime, if we don't want to pay April's rent I have to get her place emptied and cleaned out now. Once the Medicaid kicks in, Mother's Social Security will be gone.

So the four of us converge on my mother's apartment. I've already given away a lot of her things to other residents. Now we are packing and throwing away and cleaning.

Tears stream down Emmy's face as she packs. When we take a lunch break, Emmy cannot eat. She puts her head in my lap right there in the restaurant and weeps.

Her tears seem to speak for all of us.

The storage unit is packed to the brim with furniture, art supplies, and those old moth-eaten copies of the requiem stuffed into a box. Her requiem-the one thing I'm supposed to keep alive for her, but I've no idea how. It's one more thing that makes me feel guilty and inadequate.

My brothers are gone. Emmy's grief has abated and she's gone back to school. In the meantime, I have cleaned every millimeter of my mother's apartment. I scrub the bathrooms, wipe down the refrigerator inside and out, sweep the kitchen, and steam clean the carpet. I am stupidly under the impression that she can get her deposit back. Technically, she's not breaking her lease if she leaves for medical reasons, but technically, they've still managed to construct the lease so no one ever gets a deposit back. In fact, they send me a bill for sixteen hundred dollars for some stains on their cheap-a.s.s carpets. The evil that I wish upon these people is ugly. My Medea alter ego wants to send them lovely dresses, the kind that turn the skin to flame. Instead I throw their stupid bill in the trash and never hear from them again.

The perfect solution we thought we had found for Mom is not even close to perfect because I cannot find a "Medicaid bed" anywhere. The only option is a private-pay a.s.sisted-living facility that we had checked out a few times over the years. But even though the marketing manager agrees to give us a room at the incredibly reasonable price they had offered to me a few years earlier, Mom's Social Security check is still about $600 short; then there are all her other expenses. In the past few years I've been paying her credit card bills and taking care of things like eyegla.s.ses, a new television, help three mornings a week, and medicine. According to an article in the Charlotte Observer, the average cost of taking care of an elderly parent was approximately $5,500 a year in 2007, which is about what I've been spending. David was putting two kids through college and helped out when he could. Jo was on disability from his cancer and didn't have anything extra. Now I've got to get Emmy through college and so an extra $600 a month, plus another $300 or so for extras (phone, medicine, incontinence products, snacks, etc.) is just not doable.

The one ace I thought I had up my sleeve is gone. I always figured we could sell the piano, but David is adamant. That piano is not leaving the family. My father's piano is firmly lodged in his wife's condo. It is eventually supposed to come to us, but we all doubt that will ever happen. Another family piano was sold when my grandmother died. David is not going to let the Steinway go.

"I'm going to learn how to play the piano," he said after I'd already found a purchaser-a man with a ten-year-old girl who would have loved that piano as my own mother had. We went round and round, but in the end he wanted to keep it more than I wanted to sell it. And so I relented. I mollified myself with the fact that I had kept the bird-of-paradise plates and I wouldn't have given them up for any amount of money (not that they're worth all that much). Besides, I thought our financial problems were solved. I thought Medicaid was going to provide. I was wrong.

If it's this hard for the middle cla.s.s to take care of their elderly, I can't help but wonder and worry about the poor. Because my mother worked till she was eighty-six, she has a pretty good Social Security check, but I imagine there must be many out there who just can't make it. One woman I know had to quit her job to take care of her mother and they both barely subsisted on the mother's Social Security. How many people out there have given up their jobs or work two or three jobs to take care of their parents? What does someone without siblings or with crazy, unhelpful siblings do? A woman I work with said her sister stole $20,000 from their mother. I can't imagine. It would be so much easier if we could subsidize a.s.sisted living. We subsidize agribusiness and education and all sorts of things. But this is America, land of the $5.4-million tobacco CEO and the $86-billion invasion. What am I thinking? I should be grateful we have Social Security.

I call my brothers with my news. Although the financial situation isn't good, I think we're all relieved that Mom isn't going to a nursing home. Even the nicest ones are pretty bad. And to my surprise, my mother's brain, after six weeks in rehab, seems to be functioning again. She no longer frets about whether it is day or night. She can form complete sentences. Her eyes, which were dull and empty, now contain a spark of light. One day at the nursing home, I wheeled her to a little crummy upright they had. As she sat in front of it, someone came by and asked if she could play Rachmaninoff. She lifted her hands, placed them on the keys, and magic happened. Rachmaninoff, Moonlight Sonata, Debussy poured from her fingers. I bit my lip to keep from crying.

One of David's kids has graduated from college, and Jo's symphony pension has finally kicked in, so between the three of us we figure out that we can do it. We can afford to keep Mom in a.s.sisted living instead of a nursing home. Hallelujah.

Between Mom's troubles and Hank going to the emergency room every couple of weeks, I decide not to teach for the spring term. This isn't the brightest idea I have ever had. For one thing, I need the money. For another thing, I am now faced with "gone child grief," which I'd been hiding from since September.

Empty nest syndrome. What a ridiculous idea. And yet this grief that hounds me, that sits on my chest and turns a crank, wringing my heart dry, is the direct result of Emmy's absence. I'm still not used to this adjustment in my life. Every day a new realization of something I'll never do again hits me. I'll never take her to choir practice or theater rehearsal again. She's not there to go on a walk with me and Merlyn. In the supermarket I drag myself like a bag of bowling b.a.l.l.s down the aisles. My stomach is an empty well. How do parents whose children have died ever survive, I wonder. I feel guilty, ashamed of this pain. My daughter has only grown up. A joyous event. But now I feel like I have no business in a supermarket, no reason to pluck a frozen Amy's spinach pizza from the frosty caverns, no heart to pick up a package of her favorite pasta.

Mom is now safely ensconced in an a.s.sisted-living facility. I don't have to go over every morning or every night. But I am not used to other people taking care of her, so I make daily visits. In my loneliness for Emmy, I am slowly beginning to understand my mother's constant yearning for my company.

Thursday morning I must go with Hank to the cardiologist. He's been to a sleep clinic and found out he has sleep apnea; he's also been to an endocrinologist. We're still playing with the blood pressure medication trying to get him on an even keel.

"Stop drinking diet soda. Take more walks," I tell him, but I'm not the kind of doctor he listens to.

Then the weekend comes. Hank and I drive halfway across town to find the movie Double Indemnity. Then we drive up to Winston-Salem to pick up Emmy. Everything is good. This time there are no boys kissing each other in front of the building-a sight which burned the corneas of my h.o.m.ophobic husband. There is only our girl with her long thick hair and her wide smile as she bounds out of the building and into our arms. Suddenly it's as if I've never been sad or lonely in my life.

Back home, Hank cooks refried beans and tortillas. Emmy grates the cheese and sets the table. I cut up the onions, lettuce, and tomatoes and chop cilantro. Emmy makes the guacamole the way her dad taught her to with cilantro, c.u.min, salt, and tomatoes. After we eat, we all clean the kitchen and then sit down to watch the movie. My mother is left to her own devices. I am with my family, and I'm thinking of the rainbow Hank and I saw in California when I was a couple months pregnant-one of those arching textbook rainbows. Our kid was the pot of gold.

"Your mother's wheelchair has got to go," the head nurse at the Sanctuary tells me. My heart sinks and my spirit turns a sickly yellow color.

"Are you sure?" I ask.

"Yes, the other residents are complaining. They're afraid of her," she says. "Not only that, she knocked the gla.s.s door at the front of the building off its rail. We've ordered a manual wheelchair for her."

I'm trying not to imagine a gla.s.s door shattering over my mother's head.

The next day I head up to her room on the third floor. She's got that frantic confused look on her face that is so common to her now. She's in a small black manual wheelchair, and I'm shoving the motorized wheelchair into her closet.

"I don't know why you have to take it away from me. I've been very careful, very careful," Mom says.

"Because you knocked the gla.s.s doors at the front of the building off the track and cracked one of them. Because you dragged a chair out of the activities room all the way to your bedroom, clearing everything in your path. Because the other residents are terrified of getting run over by you. Which you may recall happened to me not that long ago when you pinned me against a car," I tell her.

"But I've gotten better. I really have." My mother is frustrated to the brink of tears. "This one is so hard. It's so hard to push it with my arms. Can't we move somewhere else?"

"No."

"No?"

Now I am frustrated to the brink of tears. I want my mother. My real mother.

"Where did they take it? Will I get it back? When do you think I'll get it back?" she queries.

"Mom, it's here in your closet. I don't know when you can use it again."

Right then, in my imagination, my real mother, handsome and vibrant, enters the room.

"h.e.l.lo. Who are you?" my fifty-year-old mother asks.

I feel such relief. I want to fall into her arms, but she doesn't know who I am.

"It's me, Pat. Your daughter."

"Pat? What are you doing here?"

"Taking care of you."

"Taking care of me? Are you still taking heroin?"

"No, Mom. I cleaned up more than twenty-five years ago. I'm a mother. I'm a college teacher. But I had to take a leave of absence when you went in the hospital. When you got out of the hospital, I had to bring you here."

"Well, that's wonderful. I thought you'd be dead by now. You made it. I won!"

"Yes, you did. And now you are exacting your revenge. You're whacked out on pain medication most of the time. You whine and complain constantly. You call me three, four, five times a day. No, Mother, I'm not dead, and you aren't either."

"G.o.d, how awful. How old am I?"

"Ninety."

"Ninety? Impossible."

Reality breaks in on my imagined conversation with my mother. My real mother.

"I have to go to the bathroom," my impostor mother says, "but I don't know what I'm supposed to do. It's in there, isn't it?"

I miss my fifty-year-old mother right now. I miss her so much. She never complained about anything. She was the life of the party. We talked almost every day. We laughed even when things were awful. She always said she felt so lucky that she didn't just love her children, she liked us, too.

I allow myself a moment of bitterness, thinking of my two brothers, far away with their new girlfriends.

"I really need help. I can't figure out how to move my feet. I need to go to the bathroom. Pat, what are you doing?"

"Talking to you," I tell her.

She was always afraid that I would die. Now I understand why it was so important to keep me alive. She must have known.

I get the walker and help my mother transition from the wheelchair to the walker. Then I pull up her dress and pull down the disposable underpants while she balances precariously before falling backwards onto the toilet. I go into the bedroom and wait for her to call me when she's done. My phantom mother waits for me by the window, looking out into the parking lot below.

"I'm sorry about all this," she says. "Terribly sorry. But I do love you."

"I know. I love you, too," I tell her. "I always love you even when I think I don't."

Then she's gone, and I hear my mother calling from the bathroom.

"Pat? Pat? I'm ready."

THREE.

SUMMER 2008.

The biggest favor the universe has done me is putting my mother at the Sanctuary, where there are people to help her, listen to her play the piano, talk to her, and eat meals with her. My life is about to crack wide open.

Emmy has decided she won't go to college right after high school. She wants to work with an experimental theater company for a few months and defer college for a semester. I like this plan. I was never in favor of going straight to college. As a university professor, I've watched many eighteen-year-olds flounder in their first year, taking pointless cla.s.ses, flunking out, getting depressed, getting drunk, spinning around completely clueless. At the theater company she'll be working with adults on a professional level, and when she isn't doing theater, she'll be doing farmwork.

But when Hank hears about this scheme, he explodes. Hank is not a halfway kind of guy. He's the sort to pull out the cannons when a water pistol might do.

I start throwing things in a suitcase. My MO is always to disappear. When I was about three years old and my drunken father came home, I took off for the woods behind my house. My brothers had to go out and find me. I may have been just three years old, but I knew danger when I saw it.

But Hank knows this about me, and he reins in his anger enough that we don't bolt. It's only a temporary truce, however. This is a fight to the death. It isn't about whether or not Emmy goes to college in the fall or sometime later. There's something deeper, more fundamental going on. Twenty years worth of resentments and disagreements boil to the surface.

Hank and I battle like t.i.tans.

"Why can't you be on my side?" he asks.

"Because I think your side is wrong," I tell him.

No matter how many times we get in the ring to duke it out, neither of us wins. We just get bloodier.

Emmy has become a zombie. Neither of us can eat. We live on smoothies. I decide she's got to get out of this toxic atmosphere while I figure out what to do, so I send her to New York to visit a friend.

That night I lie in my bed in the dark and push into the pliant flesh below the curve of my belly, an inch or so above the ridge of my right hip bone. My body reports back to me in a language I don't understand. What is it telling me? Hank is in his room, asleep. Now that he has a machine for his sleep apnea and a prescription for Ambien, he sleeps at night like the rest of the world.

I contemplate the demise of my marriage as I lie in bed. Most marriages break up because of infidelity, substance abuse, someone going wild with the credit cards, or just plain boredom. But in our case none of the above applies. Are we really breaking up because of an eighteen-year-old's possible career choice? I can't help but wish he'd had me for a kid. Then he'd have something to be p.i.s.sed off about.

"I'd rather see her be a prost.i.tute than an actress," Hank says bitterly.

When Hank thinks "actress," he thinks bankruptcy, drugs, suicide. But Emmy is not even sure she wants to act. She has no cotton-candy movie-star dreams. She's interested in theater as a means of communication. And she's interested in a lot of other things, too-politics, art, music, history. But Hank won't hear of it. In his narrative, I have corrupted his child, infusing her with illusions of glory to make up for my own rotten childhood.

History is filled with such stories. St. Francis's father rejected him when he became a monk. Gay friends tell me of being turned out of their parents' homes. My own father preferred a mediocre piano student to his own children.

As I lie there poking around my belly at the source of this mysterious pain, I wonder if there's more at work here than this eruption over Emmy and her desire to live her own life. I realize I've been living in a comfortable cage for a long while, and now suddenly it looks like the door is open. And maybe that's what Hank is thinking too, deep in the far reaches of his subconscious. We are both so dependent in this relationship. We have become each other's drug. And we are stagnating. I wonder, is Emmy the sacrificial lamb that allows us to break free of each other? The one point on which neither of us will budge?

The next day the "gone child grief" overwhelms me.

"Let's go to the beach," I tell Hank. I've got to get out of this house with all its memories cascading over me. Maybe at the beach, Hank and I can talk. Maybe we can find a way out of this hole we've dug for ourselves.

We pack up some things and throw them in the car.

Just as I'm pulling out of the garage, I notice that odd little phrase coming from inside my body. What the h.e.l.l is it?

I turn to Hank and ask, "Where is the appendix located?"

"In your lower right abdomen," he says. "Why?"

"I have a pain there. In fact, I've had a pain there for a few days."

"It could be appendicitis," he says.

"It could be gas," I reply, remembering once when I was a child, my aunt taking me to the doctor because I had stomach pains which were nothing more than gas. Besides, I don't get things like appendicitis. I'm the healthy one here, the nonsmoking vegetarian yogi who doesn't consume alcohol or caffeine.

But we decide not to take a chance. So instead of going to the beach, we wind up in the emergency room for eight hours. At one point I have to drink a few gallons of some orange c.r.a.p and go into a little room where they inject me with stuff that makes me feel like I have to pee and then we wait some more. Fortunately, I have brought along a copy of War and Peace, which I read aloud to him while we await the results of my CAT scan. We don't mention Emmy or the ongoing battle. Instead we're friends again. But I get tired of reading and tired of waiting.

"f.u.c.k this," I say. I get off the gurney and demand a nurse come unhook me from the diabolical machines. I hate hospitals. I am determined never to be like my mother, never to obey these people who act like demiG.o.ds. They barely manage to placate me until a friendly doctor with a gray beard comes into the curtained room where we wait.

"It's not appendicitis," he tells us. "You have a tumor on your appendix."

He shows us the CAT scan, which Hank is able to read but which looks like abstract art to me. "You'll need to have an operation to remove it. The surgeon will probably want to take out a third of your colon as well to check the lymph nodes for cancer."

There it is: the C-word. Hank and I look at each other. His heavy eyebrows are raised as if to say, I knew it. I knew the worst was yet to come. He has lost his sister and his father, and now they say that his wife might have cancer. I want to hold him, comfort him, but we've crossed some invisible boundary in our relationship. We can be friends, but we can't be lovers. We cannot touch each other.

I don't tell my mother that I might have cancer. I simply tell her that I have to get my appendix removed.

Emmy comes back home. At this point, she's like a refugee. She's numb to the news. She's lost her father and now she might lose her mother. She finds a little summer job and mostly stays with friends at night. I worry about her being at loose ends, not having a place where she feels safe, a place to call home. I think about moving out, getting an apartment somewhere, but now is obviously not a good time.

A few days before the operation I dream that I am in the ocean. My body is rigid like a piece of driftwood as I twirl out to sea. I am just past the breakers when I hear Hank's voice calling me back to the shallow water. So I begin twirling back, back through the waves toward the sound of Hank's voice. When I get to sh.o.r.e, I climb a set of stone steps and sit next to Emmy.

On June 24, Hank takes me to the hospital. I am put into a hospital gown, laid on a gurney, and told to start counting. The next thing I know I am floating, pleasantly drifting. I am conscious of worried voices, but I am not worried. I hear the voices as if they are on the other side of a thick curtain of fog.