That evening she made Elias pancakes for dinner because it was Thursday and Thursday pancakes were their joke, and jokes felt like the only solid ground left. He ate with syrup on his chin and asked when Daddy was coming home, and she said soon, and he accepted soon the way five-year-olds accept weather reports. After bath and books and the stuffed fox, she sat at the kitchen island with a legal pad and wrote two columns the way she had been taught to think in nursing school: what I know, what I fear.
What I know: Ruth Brooks is sober six years. Ruth Brooks has early-onset Alzheimer's. Ruth Brooks has been meeting my son on Tuesdays and Thursdays. My husband arranged it. My son loves her enough to call her nice and wear her clothes. The cardigan is the one from my childhood. The lipstick is church mouth. The pouch is the one I bought her for her fortieth birthday with money from my grocery shifts, before the Thursday in March, before Del, before I learned that love without boundaries is just another way to disappear.
What I fear: That if I let her in, I will become the girl waiting by the window again. That if I keep her out, I will become the kind of mother who teaches her son that people are disposable when they are difficult. That Marcus and I will not survive this either way. That I already don't know which version of survival I want.
She stared at the columns until the ink blurred. Then she wrote a third heading: what I need.
Under it, after a long time, she wrote: to see her myself. Not through Marcus. Not through Elias's stories. Myself.
On Saturday she left Elias with Evelyn—Evelyn who opened the door in a flowered housecoat and took one look at Aaliyah's face and said, Go do what you need to do, I've got this boy—and drove south to the address Marcus had texted her without commentary: a one-bedroom apartment in a complex near Tigard with a courtyard fountain that did not work and a row of mailboxes with names in peeling tape.
Ruth Brooks opened the door on the second knock.