Mum's Favorite

WARNING: Subject of Dementia

William has always been cold. I never liked playing chess with him. He always had to win. I beat him once, and he refused to speak to me for a week. I forget if we ever played again after that.

He loved history, not only the bits about tactics and tanks, but also the snippets about the first sewage systems and false accusations pinned on French-Austrian Queens and Konrad Adenauer's favorite sports. I remember he used to wear glasses, but now he only wears contacts which make his face appear too thin. But he thinks they look better with his uniform, which he always wears when he meets with the Prime Minister. He does that quite often now, since he started working for the government. I think he enjoys it, they are calling him the finest military genius of the century. They don’t know he makes the best red currant scones, which are fabulous with Earl Gray on a rainy afternoon. They taste best after bad days, when nabbed hot from the pan before supper.

My sister Lydia used to borrow books from the library. “Gray’s Anatomy”. “Scholar’s Dictionary of Biology”. “Advanced Medicine”. Father bought her a used microscope for her fifth birthday, and she filled scraps of paper with crayon sketches of microbes, erythrocytes, onion skins and algae. I remember she used to dissect rats she caught in our garage with the help of old boxes and Father’s traps. She graduated at fifteen and was accepted into every medical school in the country. I heard she's working on her third cancer treatment now and is going for another nobel prize. She invited us all when she won her first, they had fancy sandwiches and champagne. They called her brilliance a miracle. She gave me a green sweater last christmas, she says it matches my eyes. She had to buy it, she admitted. She has no more time for knitting these days.

I remember the twins were always better in sports than me, Rachel better than Michael. They always dreamt of being astronauts. Pity they are both tall, lanky and half blind. Yet they made the best of it. It was always difficult to understand what they were saying, they made up three different languages by the age of ten and spoke each one fluently. Rachel once hacked the school network to change my grade when I failed algebra. She said it wasn’t a big deal, she liked the challenge. Both work at NASA now, and collaborate with ESA and Roscosmos, developing a new method for locating planets fit for terraforming. Rachel says it’s alright that she’ll never see the planets herself. Michael would like to go some day, but I don’t think he ever will. He would never leave Rachel behind. Michael wrote a book once, a science fiction novel about the stars. It sits well worn and signed on my bookshelf. I’ve read it three times.

And me? I won a spelling bee once, in fourth year. I played “Villager Number Three” in our secondary school musical and received an armful of roses from Mum. The holidays were always my favorite time of year, and I went caroling with Lydia one time and never again after she came home with frostbite on two toes. I once saved a little dog from being run over, before it bit me and I cried until William carried me home. I had to get a rabies shot after that. I liked origami once, and made hundreds of tiny swans and ships and horses that still show up to this day, at the bottom of storage bins and from the pockets of jumpers I swore to give away years ago and never did.

I never skipped a grade, or won an award with sandwiches or champagne, or was able to hack into Russia’s military base at the age of sixteen.

But in truth, I never minded all that much. Not really.

I still love holidays the best, when Lydia shows up with sweaters and William with his traveling chess set and the twins with their tablets, and I make coffee and wheel Mum’s chair in with them all and she smiles. And Lydia and William bicker over which Christmas film to put on and Michael eats too much pudding, and Rachel scolds him, tipsy on mulled wine. The collective IQ between the four of them sails over 800, yet the effect had never been accumulative, as Father used to joke when he was alive and we would lounge around the flat in hand-me-downs, arguing petty things that had once meant the world to us, such as when the first snow would come and if Father Christmas wore red or green and who could eat more mince pies before boxing day.

All the memories in this house are like an old record, put on replay. Each year, scratchier and fainter and I wonder if the quality has changed, or if I am just getting older?

I hold Mum’s hand and she smiles again. Those smiles are not rare, she smiles all the time. At birds in the window, the postman arriving with my newspaper, the old cat Molly who sits on her lap as she watches the telly. They are empty, though. Not as full of life as they once were. Her all too knowing gaze is lost somewhere in time, I don’t know where. If I could find it and wash it with the Sunday laundry and give it back, neat and folded, I would.

Sometimes I close my eyes and pretend I am a general who could fight and win this battle for her, with clever tactics and artillery. A doctor, who could research and find some way to heal her, and win the prize of her not confusing me with the others. A programmer, who could reach into her mind and find what had been lost, like a far away star in some distant galaxy that was just out of sight, its existence all but forgotten.

But I cannot.

I am not a military genius, or a nobel prize winner. I will never send people to other planets, and that is alright.

I am Mum’s favorite.

I squeeze her hand, and she smiles. I smile back.