In early 2020, I was asked to be part of a collaborative art show called Fem-Fusion: Visual Art + the Written Word that would pair female writers with female artists for a collection of call-and-response creativity. The pandemic put our project on hold for a year, but this month the art show finally had a two-week run at a local gallery, and now other gallery spaces will be showing it in the future. My artist partner, Wendy Snetsinger, was asked to create a painting inspired by something I’d written — to her credit, the essay I gave her was a very specific scene involving my parents. I wasn’t sure how she’d manage to translate the love and loss that had been on my heart into a touching piece of visual art, but wow did she ever come through.

Make Believe

“Let’s go for a drive.”

Driving is different than the endless sitting, they agree. He opens the car door
and waits while she edges into the passenger seat, hoisting her purse and plastic
water bottle with her. The doctor keeps telling her to drink more, but she already
feels like she’s drowning.

He shuts her door carefully and climbs behind the wheel. He’s restless, eager to
stretch his wings. They are snowbirds who did not fly south this winter. They
recalibrated, begrudgingly, because of state mandates and worried kids. Instead,
they spent the year with their hands chapped from sanitizer, without hugs from
grandchildren. But masks don’t protect brains, they know. They know. Theirs have
both been scanned in recent months and given different diagnoses: Alzheimer’s for him, brain cancer for her, like the matching Mickey and Minnie sweatshirts they once had. They rarely utter these medical terms to each other, though. They prefer to talk about their next trip south — but only after their daughter has dropped off the groceries and left.

Now they are on a small trip, and it feels right. Maybe this is a trial run!
Sometimes when they’re headed to a familiar destination, he gets all turned around
and she has to remind him. She uses her tired voice laced with a hint of fake
surprise. “Tom, it’s left!” He knew that, of course, he sighs. He knew.

But today they are driving nowhere in particular, and that is his favorite place
to go. This route he knows by heart. Winding roads and easy turns, the engine hums
just as it should and he is in control as she looks out the window and leaves lipstick
prints on her plastic straw. How many miles have they covered side by side like this
over the last 50-some-odd years?

They pass the outlet stores she couldn’t shop in last Christmas, and drive by
motorists with masks draped around their chins. They pass clusters of businesses in
this Adirondack lakeside town, some with signs that read “Closed for Season.”
Others are just closed.

She tries to remember what the doctor said that morning about a side effect of
the … what’s the word? She loses words these days, squinting and sighing to get
them back, which almost always works. What’s the word?! Pine trees and mountain
lodges blur by. A degenerative eye disease clouding her vision has grown more
aggressive in recent weeks. Flames of fear lick at the edges of her mind, but she
refuses to feed them. She leans toward the window and feels the sun on her face.

He wonders what she’s looking at. “Can you hear that cardinal?” he asks as they
come to a stop.

What? her brain stutters back to the ride. She listens. “Yeah,” she says. She thinks she hears it, anyway. She definitely hears a bird.

“There it is, up on that pole,” he points. Nine out of 10 things he shows her —
flowers, squirrels, birds — she can no longer bring into focus. He is their designated
driver now, always pointing out things that she pretends to see. For him.

“Ohh, yeah,” she says, well-rehearsed. In her mind’s eye, she sees a cardinal. It’s
red, a male, looking into the distance. Or maybe at them.

He presses his foot on the gas pedal, happy to have made a moment, and she
closes her eyes, the persistent fatigue and the drone of the wheels on the road taking
over. Chemo! Her brain reveals the missing word like a magic trick. A side effect of
the chemo. She relaxes then, satisfied, as they move through the afternoon. A few
minutes later he notices her dozing, and smiles. He takes an extra-long way home.

Later, she’ll tell her daughter about the cardinal they saw on their drive.