For exactly one month, Mother lived as a dementia patient.
Sometimes, her mental state appeared to be completely normal. She got up at the start of the day. She cooked our rations. She washed our laundry. She read books. She smiled, too, though rarely.
But something had changed. The person I'd known all my life as my beloved mother was beginning to slip away.
She fell into the same, nearly insane states daily, states of uncontrollable shaking and terrified, agonized screaming. She pointed out things the rest of us couldn't see. Sometimes it even felt as though she couldn't even recognize her own daughters.
We never voiced it aloud, but it was evident that we were all thinking the same thing: that Mother, too, had fallen sick to what had already taken a shocking number of our citizens.
Days passed with the Mother's same odd behavior continuing. One day I found her on her knees in the kitchen, tears dripping down her face. I stood in the doorway, hesitating, as she raised a trembling hand to the side of her face, almost as if to check that she was solid. She was breathing quickly and rapidly, whispering my father's name in between gasps.
It shamed me, but out of plain fear I backed away. I knew she wouldn't tell me what was bothering her even if I asked. It was like she couldn't; sometimes it seemed as though she was trying to, but each time she failed to get the words out and changed the subject. I didn't know what was stopping her—perhaps it was fear, too?
Only a few days into her strangeness, Mother shut herself away completely.
It was the day Lia and I came downstairs to find her usual seat in the dining room empty. Her bedroom door was locked, and even as I pounded on the wood, she refused to let me in.
"Mother." Thump. "Mother, how come you're not letting us in?" Thump. Thump. "Why are you doing this, Mother?"
I banged on the door louder, pleading, confused. Lia stood by, biting her lip, on her face the same expression she always wore after an outcome she'd privately expected turned out to be true.
"You'll understand, darling," said Mother's muffled voice. She was hiccuping and sniffling, and it struck me suddenly that she was crying. "It's all for your own good."
"Mother," I said impatiently. "I don't care. Just me let me see you . . . please."
I heard her inhale a deep, shuddering breath, collecting herself together.
"Lia, dear," she said finally, "take your sister and explain this well to her, why I'm doing this."
Lia swiped the back of her hand across her face and nodded. Mother couldn't see her from the other side of the door, but it seemed she took my sister's silence for a yes.
"Good girl. Go on, now. I'll be fine."
Lia took my hand and dragged me up the stairs, pulling me aside into her room. Her metal leg met the floor with a loud clank with each step.
"What's the matter?" I wrenched my hand from her grip, angry and confused. "What are you and Mother keeping from me?"
I was momentarily stunned at the blaze in my sister's eyes. I had never before seen her look so determined, so hard and unfeeling. But the moment passed, and her gaze softened.
"Cricket . . ." She breathed in sharply, then released it. "You're a smart kid. I know you should have figured out what the situation is like by now. And I think . . . I think Mother has, too."
An ice-cold breeze enveloped me, squeezing the air out of my lungs. This was exactly what I'd dreaded.
"No." I stepped backward. "I don't know what you're talking about."
"This can't all be a coincidence," Lia went on, like she hadn't heard me. "The illness's symptoms were clearly stated in the paper. They match almost identically with whatever Mother's going through, Cricket." Her tone was desperate—begging me to understand. "And haven't you noticed Mother acting more clumsy than before?"
"What's that got to do with anything?" I asked sharply, though I knew what she was talking about.
One day, we had found Mother clutching a burning pot in both hands, her eyes blank and cloudy. It wasn't until Lia knocked the pot out of her hands that Mother had looked up—almost like she hadn't felt the steaming sides of the pot burning her palms raw until we mentioned it.
That wasn't all. Mother, who had always minded each step and walked so carefully everywhere she went, had returned limping to the house after spending the previous morning on the deck supposedly hanging laundry. She'd claimed to have tripped on the front steps, even though the story didn't quite match the severity of her injuries.
"I think we've reached the point where Mother can no longer control her symptoms."
Lia's words whacked me like a slap to the face.
"Then what are we going to do?" I snapped. "We're just going to keep her in her quarantine and wait until she dies, then until we start showing symptoms ourselves?"
"There's some talk that the illness doesn't spread it's progressed a couple of weeks," Lia said slowly, shrugging weakly. "I don't know if there's anything we can do. We'll just have to hope for the best."
"What does it matter if it hasn't spread to us?" I said, my voice rising. "You're just going to leave Mother to die?" I felt a sudden surge of anger, and something in me finally snapped.
"What, because you've got that boyfriend of yours to live with, it's not so hard to give up on a lost cause? Do you not need Mother and me in your life anymore?"
"No, that's not it, I—"
"I know it's easy for you to just forget Mother and move on, but I can't be like that, okay?" My shouts reverberated across the room, emphasizing my words. "I really don't know what it's like, being in this so-called love. It might be different for you, but for me, she's the only one I have! She's the only—the only one—"
My voice broke. Before I knew it I was sobbing, my knees giving way. Lia threw her arms around me, holding me in a hug so tight it hurt.
"No, Cricket, you've got it all wr to waver. "Don't say those things just because you're angry at me. It's going to be all right. We'll do everything we can. The Consonarists, our relatives—they can help us."
I began to push her away, then gave up and wept into her shoulder. I wanted to believe her—I truly did.
Perhaps self-possession really was just one of those traits that followed like shadows behind people like Lia, given, at birth, the difficult lifelong duty of being the older sibling.
･･･⛧･･･
Mother's symptoms, of course, didn't just subside with her self-quarantine. For hours straight I sat by her door, trying to make cheerful conversation, vacating my spot only when she began screaming again, or calling for her dead husband—another symptom she developed in the later days.
To make things worse, the last weeks were filled with the most inexplicable, unpredictable natural disasters. On the Fivesday of the third week, half of the ceiling in Mother's room suddenly caved in, collapsing at the foot of her bed. If she had been sleeping a couple of feet closer, she would most likely have been killed.
And barely two weeks later, during an unexpected storm, the large glass window in her bedroom was torn from its hinges by some strong gust of wind. The window was pushed forcefully into the room, where it collided with Mother and sent her flying to the wall.
After hearing the bang of Mother crashing into the door and sliding to the floor, I ran, breathless, to her door.
"Mother! Are you all right?"
"Yes . . ." Her voice sounded faint. Mother let out a tiny gasp of pain, then exhaled slowly. "I'm all right, sweetie. The window just came flying at me and . . ."
"Why would the window come flying at you?"
"I don't know, darling. But I'm"—she let out a soft moan—"just fine."
I turned my eyes skyward in disbelief, then tried the locked door of her room.
"Let me in, Mother. You're hurt. I'll help you."
She refused to open the door.
And the lie insisting that she was fine, spoken in a soft, weak voice strained in agony, would remain the very last time I would ever hear my mother outside of a dream or memory again.
Because for exactly one month, Mother lived.
And then, drained and exhausted from her lovesickness, she left us to join our father in the sky.
･･･⛧･･･
I would never forget that crash.
It was four in the morning.
The first Fivesday of a new month.
I was reading up in my room, my eyes straying from the book. After a moment, my gaze landed on the calendar pinned on my wall.
Wait.
I stopped in place.
It can't be.
How long had it been since Mother first started acted odd?
One . . . two . . . three . . . four . . .
Five weeks ago. One Premus month.
But that meant . . .
And there came the thunderous, unmistakable thud of a body hitting wood.
Silence. I sat still, transfixed at what I'd just heard.
Then—
"Lia!" I screamed, breaking out of my trance. I threw open the door and flew down the stairs, colliding into the side of the staircase with a gasp. I reached the bottom of the landing and skidded to a stop.
In front of me stood my sister, one hand on the doorknob to our mother's bedroom. Lia held the back of her hand to her lip, trembling head to toe, crying silently. I walked slowly up with her, each step chilled with dread.
"Is she . . . is she . . .?" I stammered.
Lia shook her head, tears flowing down her cheeks.
"I don't know," she said. "She won't respond, and she's not making any noise, either." She looked at me for guidance, as though I was the one in charge. "W-what do we do, Cricket? I'm s-so scared to open the door . . ."
I swayed. The world blurred before my eyes.
Finally I said, "Carson. I'll get him; he'll know what to do."
By the time I dragged him over, Lia's eyes were puffy and red from crying. She didn't make any effort to greet Carson with excessive familiarity or excitement, despite the fact that it had been weeks since they'd last seen each other. We waited as Carson took out a small and sleek metal object from his pocket. A lockpick.
At last, after several tries, the door swung open with a click.
But I couldn't look. I didn't keep myself facing in that direction long enough to see what was behind the door. I turned instead and smashed straight into Lia. Instead of moving away, I pushed my head against the soft fabric of her tunic as she held me there, stroking my hair and sobbing.
Carson's silence as he bent down to check Mother's body temperature confirmed the worst.
We could only imagine what had become of our mother, how her body might look and feel—lifeless and cold, the warmth sucked out of her in the way it had been from our world.