A Backward Spring

It’s mid-September in Texas, and I’m stripping the dead leaves from our Caddo maple. I close my hand around the whippet branches and pull toward the tips; dry, coppery leaves crumble and fall to the ground. I keep their dust on my skin.

The Caddo maple, according to our local horticulturalist, is an ideal, much under-used tree for North Texas, but ours, planted in February, has yet to take hold. In spring, the buds swelled and green leaves opened but never matured. They drooped from the branches, tiny and wrinkled, like babies’ hands. Now the nursery owner has nicked a branch with a pocketknife and showed me the green heartwood. “There’s plenty of moisture in it,” he’s said. He’s told me to strip away the dead leaves so the tree won’t concentrate its energy on feeding them. “Water it a couple of times a week,” he’s said. “If it’s going to make it, we’ll know soon.”

My wife, Deb, tells this story to her mother the next time they talk on the phone even though she knows her mother won’t be able to recall it. My mother-in-law is losing threads of memory. People, places, episodes—all of them slip away from her as soon as they occur. She no longer has the ability to retrieve them. She’s sixty-four, and her neurologist suspects the onset of Alzheimer’s, a suspicion that so far we’ve kept secret from her. Already naturally prone to depression, she’s the sort that worries something to death. We’re afraid that if we told her about the illness, her condition would deteriorate more quickly than it will if she doesn’t know about it. “Do you know the date?” the neurologist asked her at their first meeting. “The day of the week? The president of the United States?”

“Al Gore,” she said.

The neurologist chuckled. “You’re a very smart lady, Mrs. Goss. You may know something we don’t.”

The first time Deb took me home to meet her mother it was eleven o’clock at night, and after an exchange of strained pleasantries, my future mother-in-law excused herself, went down the hallway to her bedroom, and locked the door. It would be years before she would finally decide that I was a decent sort and not the bogeyman she had feared that first evening.

Now her illness has accentuated her natural inclination toward paranoia. She draws the drapes around the corners of the rods and pins them to the wall; she makes sure the panels overlap in the middle, which she also pins together. She wants no gaps, no slivers of space where someone might be able to see into her house. She refuses to pick up the phone until she hears a familiar voice on the answering machine. If she’s alone in her house, all the windows and doors locked, and she wants to tell someone something private, she’ll come close and whisper, afraid someone might be lurking outside, trying to eavesdrop.

Deb tells me that she always remembers her mother being afraid, and there are hints of this in a few letters my mother-in-law wrote to Deb’s father when he was in the Army. My mother-in-law would have been nineteen at the time, working in town at the Weber Medical Clinic and living with her parents out in the country. “The folks are going to town for a little while,” she says in one letter, “and I don’t want to stay home by myself, but I haven’t told them yet.” In another letter, she talks about coming home from work one evening when she knew her parents had gone to visit friends. “I got the car in the garage,” she says, “and locked the doors.” Like now, she didn’t want anyone to know she was there.

Since my father-in-law’s death six years ago, she’s been lonely and eager for company. She has a few friends with whom she goes shopping...