Elinor S. Laurier

Flip

You won’t remember how the inky shroud of night wrapped around our teenage bodies as we curled together on your bed, your breath hot against my cheek. Santana played in the background, your fingers seeking mine as you whispered something was wrong with your dad. He had been acting weird lately, had been forgetting his keys and even the names of some friends he had known for years. Your mom said he was just tired and stressed. You didn’t believe her.

You won’t remember the first time your mom had to tell you the truth. Your dad had taken to walking the dog, a frizzy-haired mutt called Sadie, in his underwear and nothing else. Sometimes there was just a leash and no dog at all, the cold metal clip clanging on the sidewalk behind your dad’s 6’4” frame as he waved at the neighbors before your mom rushed out and led him gently back home.

You won’t remember the visits to Mayo, shivering in sterile waiting rooms. The countless white-coated doctors. The cruel veneer of Muzac piped through walls thick with desperation. The look on your mom’s face when she was told there was nothing they could do.

You won’t remember your mom flipping burgers at McDonald’s, working three jobs because, finally, she couldn’t afford to keep your dad in diapers and how once at nineteen we left a hundred-dollar bill on the table so she would find it because she was too proud to accept it otherwise. How later she called us crying and simply said “thank you.”

You won’t remember how when your dad was at the end—the very end—you missed his forty-seventh birthday. You said you just couldn’t do it, and he wouldn’t remember you anyway. Instead, you spent your time drinking whiskey sours in crowded Arizona bars, music pulsing, your glass sweating alongside the slick heat of all those bodies pressed against you, as alone as you had ever been.

You won’t remember how you asked me if I was sure and I said yes, in sickness and in health, and even though we were just twenty-three and didn’t know much, we already knew what that might mean. And what kind of person would I have been had I not said yes when I had already loved you for years?

You won’t remember the birth of our children. How, when our first daughter arrived we were scared we would lose her, and then me— so much blood. I passed out for hours and it was your chest she was lying on when I woke. How you stayed day and night in a rocking chair holding her, never once leaving us. How you became the kind of dad who changed diapers and sang lullabies and brought me lilies every year on her birthday, their thick perfume as sweet as our girl. How when our second daughter was born I was already becoming a single mom.

You won’t remember my obsession with flipping coins. A fifty/fifty chance like you had. How I’d rub my thumb like a mantra over the smooth silver curve of the face, the coin landing heads up an omen that you would be ok.

You won’t remember the trips to Pittsburgh, the medical studies. The countless pictures of objects you were to recall by memory, year after year— house, child, dog, woman, heart. Doctors making notes on charts never seen, chirping “good job,” their eyes slipping past ours. How I held your hand in the MRI machine while you shook, rubbing circles with my thumb until it turned red. It will be ok, it will be ok, it will be ok.

You won’t remember when I answered the phone at midnight and another woman asked for you.  How I learned that we had died, too. How you told me she understood things I never would. That our end, it turned out, was inevitable, the synapses between us as stealthily coated and tangled as your brain would become years later.

You won’t remember the space between then and now. How you slipped away, became a stranger long before Alzheimer’s won the final flip of the coin. The years lost to dive bars, whiskey, the odds of the Roulette wheel. How the dealer took your chips again and again as you desperately doubled down.

You won’t remember how hard I tried, how hard I’m still trying, for our children. Trying to explain the inexplicable. And I pray. I pray that for them—please, god, please—it lands on heads.

Elinor S. Laurier (Twitter: @ElinorLaurier) writes mostly short non-fiction works and enjoys travel, long hikes, and spending time with her loved ones. Often, you can find her at her favorite local bookstore, where she gobbles up carrot cake and books in equal measure. She and her husband call Arizona home.