The Weight of Wool

The silence in the house wasn't empty; it was full of teeth. It chewed the air, making it dense, rancid, with that particular smell things have when they stop being useful.

Elena sealed the last cardboard box with a screech of packing tape that sounded like a gunshot in the empty room.

She wiped her hands on her jeans, leaving a trail of gray dust on the blue fabric. Dust. It was the only thing this house truly possessed now. Not furniture, not paintings, not Persian rugs worn by the sun. It was dust. Dead skin. Pulverized time that refused to leave.

She looked at the wall clock. Three in the afternoon. The sky through the large window was bruised, swollen like a fresh blow. A storm was coming, one of those that make history, that rip away roof tiles and fears. She should go. She should have taken the keys, left them under the doormat for the real estate agency, and started the car an hour ago.

But her feet seemed made of lead.

"Coward," she whispered. Her own voice frightened her.

She walked toward the hallway. The marks of the taken-down paintings were pale rectangles on the flowered wallpaper, like bikini lines on old skin. Ghosts of a life that no longer existed.

She entered the study. His study.

The mahogany desk was still there, too heavy to move alone, too chipped to sell. She ran her fingertips over the surface. She could feel the grooves, the scars of a thousand pens pressed with fury, of whiskey glasses slammed in frustration.

Her father was not a man of soft words. He was a man of storms, just like the one approaching outside. And in his final years, when Alzheimer's began to devour his brain like a hungry termite, the storms became constant.

Elena opened the center drawer. It was empty, save for a rusted paperclip and a ten-cent coin.

"Who are you?" he had asked her two weeks before dying. Not with fear. With suspicion. As if she were a thief coming to steal his silverware.

"I'm Elena, Dad. Your daughter."

"You're not my daughter. My daughter is six years old and is in the garden. You are old. You have the eyes of a tired woman."

Elena closed her eyes at the memory. A cruel metaphor, but accurate. She had the eyes of a tired woman because he had taken it upon himself to exhaust her.

A thunderclap rumbled in the distance, a deep vibration that shook her sternum. The house creaked in response. The house knows I am abandoning it, she thought. And it is angry.

She went to the kitchen. The fridge, unplugged and with the door open so it wouldn't grow mold, looked like a yawning mouth. There, on the granite counter, was a coffee stain she had never managed to fully remove.

She remembered the cause of it. He had thrown the cup. "I don't want your damn coffee! I want to go home!"

"You are home, Dad."

"Lies! This is a prison."

Maybe he was right. Maybe memory is the only real house, and when you lose the keys to your own mind, any physical place becomes a cell.

Elena took a bottle of warm water from her purse. She drank a long swig. The water tasted of plastic and resignation.

Why was she still there?

She was looking for something. She didn't know what. Forgiveness? No, that was asking too much. A sign? Too mystical. She was looking... to close the circle. But her father's circles were downward spirals, and she had been falling through them for forty years.

She returned to the living room. The wind began to howl, whistling through the cracks of the old windows. The branches of the oak tree in the garden scratched the glass, begging to enter.

The screeches sounded as if they were made by long fingernails on a chalkboard.

She sat on the floor, her back against the wall, next to the stack of boxes marked "DONATIONS".

She reached into one of them, almost by instinct, and her fingers grazed a rough wool texture. She pulled. It was the green cardigan. The one he always wore. The one that smelled of pipe tobacco and mint, even after washing.

She brought it to her face. Inhaled.

Just like that, she was ten years old again. It was raining (it always seemed to rain in her sharpest memories). He was sitting in the armchair, reading. She had approached, frightened by thunder. He said nothing. He just opened one side of the cardigan, like a bird's wing, and let her curl up there. There were no words of comfort. There was no "it will be okay". Only the heat of the wool and the rhythmic, solid beat of his heart.

Thump-thump. Thump-thump.

A hot, lonely tear escaped Elena's eye and made its ways down her chin.

"Damn old man," she said, clutching the garment to her chest. "Damn you for leaving me only the bad parts at the end."

Alzheimer's is a curious thief. It takes names, dates, even logic. But sometimes, it leaves the most primitive emotions intact. Fear. Anger. And on rare, very rare occasions, tenderness.

Elena remembered the last night at the hospital. He didn't speak anymore. He just stared at the ceiling. She had taken his hand, that large, veiny hand that had slammed the table so many times. He turned his head. His eyes, normally veiled by the fog of the disease, had a second of terrifying clarity.

He squeezed her hand. Hard. And whispered "It's raining."

It wasn't raining. It was a radiant sunny day. But now, Elena understood. He wasn't talking about the weather. He was talking about inside. He was talking about the flood he felt, the water rising, drowning what remained of him.

A raw white flash briefly brought the empty room into sharp relief, casting the boxes as dark outlines against the light.

The thunder came almost instantly. CRAAACK.

The light went out. No, the light didn't go out, because it had been cut off days ago. It was the meager clarity of the afternoon that died suddenly under the weight of the black clouds.

Gloom erupted from every corner, filling the space.

Elena stood up. Her knees creaked. She folded the cardigan carefully, not to donate it, but to take it with her. She put it in her purse. It was a useless burden, she knew. But it was hers to bear.

She walked toward the front door. Her steps echoed hollowly on the wood. Every step was a goodbye. Goodbye to the coffee stain. Goodbye to the marks on the wallpaper. Goodbye to the shouts and the silences full of teeth.

She put her hand on the brass doorknob. It was cold.

"Goodbye, Dad," she said to the darkness of the hallway.

No one answered. Only the wind. And that was fine. For the first time in years, the silence demanded nothing.

She opened the door.

The world had become liquid.

It wasn't a normal rain. It was a dense, vertical, violent curtain. The sky had split open to purge the earth. The smell of ozone and wet earth hit her like a physical slap, clean and fresh.

Elena took a step. And then another.

She stepped out from the covered porch.

The water soaked her instantly. Her clothes stuck to her body, her hair plastered against her skull, water ran down her face, mixing with the salt of tears she didn't even know she was still crying.

It was cold. A cold that soaked to the bone. But it also felt... real.

She lifted her face toward the lead-gray sky. She closed her eyes and let the rain hit her, let it wash away the dust of the house, the smell of old age, the fear of forgetting and the fear of remembering.

She stood there, motionless, a statue in the middle of the deluge.

There was no longer a house to protect her. There was no longer a wool cardigan to hide in. There was only her, Elena, standing on her own feet, weathering the storm.

And for the first time in a long time, she knew she wouldn't drown.