"Don't worry," I tell her. "It won't."

For my little family, the masterpiece of the era is Harry Potter. Whenever a new Harry Potter book comes out, we clear the deck of all distractions, and each night Emmy and I retreat to Hank's lair with a bag of gingersnaps. I read as many chapters to the two of them as my throat can handle. I have perfected each character's voice so that taglines aren't even necessary, and we become completely absorbed in the Hogwarts world. Hank sometimes loses track and insists that we back up, whereupon Emmy and I berate him for not paying attention. Sometimes I take a peek at the chapters ahead and, if they catch me, Hank and Emmy give me h.e.l.l. I've done a few cool things in my life and been to some interesting places. But rarely have I been happier than when I am eating gingersnaps and reading Harry Potter to these two enraptured people-my husband and my child.

But this little family scenario is not my mother's idea of fun. She needs an audience and we aren't it. After my first Christmas with Hank's family back in the early nineties, I showed my mother a videotape that Hank had shot of Christmas Day with his mother, father, sister, brother, and brother's son. They were a group of ordinary people, and I liked them in spite of the Republican rhetoric that Hank's father spouted. He was always kind and generous with me and he was knowledgeable about history. Jean, my mother-in-law, was full of family stories, and Hank's brother and sister made me feel accepted. And they all adored Emmy.

I had spent so much of my life on my own that I had never expected to have a family. Not like this. When Hank and I broke up during my pregnancy, I thought I'd be a struggling single mom my whole life. Then one day I found myself in the sunny glow of Southern California with Ozzie and Harriet.

My mother dismissed the video with a sneer, and at that moment I hated her. I hated her groundless sn.o.bbery, her disdain for the ordinary pleasures that might, just might, have kept me from making some of the destructive choices I had made. Her pretensions filled me with rage.

My mother couldn't stand to be ordinary. When I was in my late twenties, I was one of five writers to win the Florida Screenwriting Award. I'd only had a few stories published, no books yet, so this was a big deal to me. And the Florida Film Bureau was treating it like a big deal. To give us our plaques, they had arranged a luncheon with certain state honchos in Tallaha.s.see. I invited my mother to come along with me. She was younger then and firmly attached to her image as an iconoclast, a rebel who didn't need a d.a.m.n cause.

We were all seated at a round table in a dining room in the capitol. One of the bureaucrats, a nice enough woman in a suit, stood up to say a few words to honor us. My mother was in fine form, poking fun at everything. The speaker was no great orator. These speeches are, by definition, ba.n.a.l. But the food was free and tasty, and they were recognizing me for my writing. I was even in the newspaper and it wasn't for committing a crime! I'd come a long way, baby, from the drug rehab to this fork-clanking event where the Secretary of Commerce, one Jeb Bush, was raising a gla.s.s of iced tea in my honor. I'd be getting a plaque, a trip to Hollywood, and a nice line for my resume.

The woman began by saying, "We're here to honor the winners. Well, we're all winners, aren't we?" Then Mom piped up in a fairly loud voice and said, "Not me. I'm not a winner. I'm a loser."

All these years later, it seems innocuous, but at the time I was mortified and angry. This was supposed to be my moment. Couldn't she just give me that?

She immediately looked sheepish, but it was too late. Mom just needed to have the spotlight. It's the smartest-girl-in-the-cla.s.s syndrome. Usually it wasn't a problem because she was also kind and generous and fun to be around. But as she got older, the need for attention seemed to overwhelm her. If she wasn't getting the attention, she literally couldn't breathe.

This facet of her personality derailed what seemed like a perfect plan. Once she got settled at the Landings, I figured I'd just bring my work over there and then she wouldn't be alone during the day. She always said, "Oh, just a warm body in the house makes all the difference." But it wouldn't be ten minutes before she'd be groaning and then gasping for air and I'd have to turn away from whatever I was doing to find out if she was dying. Sometimes I wondered why she didn't. If life was this difficult, this constantly nightmarish, was it worth the effort?

As my mother loses her past, I lose part of mine as well. Aspects of my childhood I simply can't remember. She doesn't remember either.

For two weeks at the beginning of July I teach at the Kaleidoscope Arts Camp for creative teenagers on the Winthrop University campus. This is my favorite two weeks of the year, but it's hard on my mother because I am gone all day long and late into the night.

In a way, hanging out with these kids with their drama and their problems, their fears and their laughter restores to me my own lost teenage years. Emmy comes to the camp, but she is in the drama cla.s.ses and stays in the dorm with the other kids, so I don't see that much of her except in pa.s.sing.

Each year, I lead a little troop of seven or eight teenage poets around the campus, which is blanketed in the shade of magnanimous oaks. We visit the art museum one day. Another day we go to the dance studio. This year as the dancers rehea.r.s.e their routines, I remember my own days as a dancer. I was certainly no prodigy, but when you truly enjoy something you're bound to get fairly good at it. When I was in the eighth grade, after dancing for eight years, I was given a solo on pointe in the yearly recital. Now, watching these young women practicing their pirouettes, I try to remember anything about that solo. I can remember the lighted stage, the cool cavernous dressing rooms, and the enormous auditorium, but after that-nothing. I don't remember the music or my costume. Did my feet hurt? Was I nervous? Was I good?

It's as if it never happened. There's no movie I can go back to, rewind, and watch. I think of the stacks and stacks of pictures I have of Emmy in her various recitals and performances. There are none of me. I never before thought it odd. In my family, performing was simply expected. Why bother to record it?

I wish there were someone who could tell me, oh, you were so pretty in your satin toe shoes, twirling across the stage. I'm like the tree who fell in the forest and no one heard.

When I am not working, I try to get Mom out of her apartment as much as possible. We go to Jason's Deli for the salad bar. We go to see Emmy in her choir and theater performances. And there are all those nights of Scrabble playing.

Emmy gets jealous of the time I spend with my mother, but I don't know what else to do. She has no one else. Everyone at her retirement community shuts their doors at 7 p.m. to watch Jeopardy and then goes to bed when she's ready to party.

"I know I'm not smart like she is and I don't play Scrabble with you, but do you still like me?" Emmy finally asks me.

"You are number one," I a.s.sure her over and over. But she misses me and she isn't good at hiding her frustration.

On Sundays I take my mother to church with us. This turns out to be a disaster.

The church isn't so much a church in the traditional sense as a weekly session in cognitive therapy. The two ministers are a lesbian couple, whom I like a lot. One of them is a singer/songwriter who often plays her guitar during the service and leads us in feelgood folk songs. This is not exactly my mother's idea of church. As nonreligious as she is, she is a firm believer in the Episcopal hymnal and the beautiful, complex anthems that she arranged and/or directed over much of the past century and on into this one. These four-chord guitar songs are simplistic and can hardly be called music in her mind. Unfortunately, she feels the urge to explain this to anyone who cares to listen to her.

A friendly bunch of people comes to this church-a fairly intelligent, artistic crowd. But Mother can't relate to anyone there except for one of the ministers, whose troubled past has turned her into a deep soul, unafraid of exposing her wounds.

One Sunday morning Emmy, my mother, and I go to church. Emmy has been coming to this church since she was ten years old. She learned guitar from one of the ministers; she is always fussed over by the regulars. I like to hang around afterward and chat with various people. But my mother usually finds a chair somewhere and sits.

As we leave the church that day, Mother trudging through the crowd on her walker, one of the men jokingly says something to her. Mother spits out of the side of her mouth in fury, "Go to h.e.l.l!" Then she trudges out the door. Emmy and I glance at each other, perplexed.

"What?" I ask. "What happened?" I did not hear the comment which ignited her invective.

Outside, I help my mother into the car. She's crying and won't speak. Emmy explains that one of the guys told Mom not to get a speeding ticket with her walker. Could that possibly be the impetus for this tantrum, I'm wondering.

"Tell me what happened," I say as we drive away.

"He was mocking me!" she bursts out. "I'm going to kill myself!" She starts yanking at the door, but the door is locked so she futilely shakes the door handle.

Emmy gasps. She's in the backseat in utter shock. I realize that in spite of the occasional spats that Hank and I have, this level of high drama is brand-new to her. Bette Davis is in town, kid, so look out.

We manage to get home without my crippled mother throwing herself out of the moving vehicle. But by now I am in a rage. I never forced my mother to come to my church. She wanted to come. Of course, if I were as self-sacrificing as I should be, I would take her to a nice Episcopal service somewhere and suffer through the Nicene Creed and all the kneeling and standing. But the church I go to is where I get my mental health. I can't afford a therapist. "Think about what you want, not about what you don't want. Believe that you are worthy. Love yourself." These are the messages I get every Sunday, and after a lifetime of self-loathing I am finally becoming acceptable to myself.

But here I am with the original self-loather herself, her face gone sour, roiling emotions swirling around her like deranged demons. And she does what the children of alcoholics are all experts at doing: she starts burying the issue as quickly as possible.

I pull into the driveway of my house.

"I don't want to talk about it," she orders as if that is enough.

We go inside, and I make sandwiches for us in the kitchen as Emmy watches the two of us warily.

"This," I say, "is why I became a drug addict." I place a cheese and tomato sandwich in front of my mother. I am not sure if what I am saying is true, but it feels true. We bury pain in our family. My mother always said that if something bothers you, you put it in a little black box in your mind, lock the box, and then drop it off an imaginary cliff and it goes away. So why wouldn't I have buried my pain under a blanket of drug-induced oblivion?

I grill a cheese sandwich for Emmy and then sit down across from my mother.

"Tell me," I say. "Tell me what is going on with you. No hysterics."

"He was making fun of me," she says. "I hate it. I hate being a cripple." Well, of course she does. And immediately I sympathize. An image forms in my mind: my mother in a tight-fitting red evening gown with a gold dragon design along the skirt, walking onto the stage of the Civic Auditorium in Jacksonville. I remember her regal bearing as she sat down at the grand piano and began to play. She looked gorgeous; she looked like power. She had the world at her fingertips.

"Mother, can you see that he wasn't making fun of you, that he was just trying to be friendly. Perhaps rather ineptly, but still . . ."

She acknowledged that as a possibility.

"I'm sorry your feelings were hurt," I tell her.

"I'm just crazy," she says.

"Maybe. A little. Sometimes. But it's okay."

We eat our sandwiches. I smile at Emmy who hasn't said a word the whole time. Emmy smiles back. It's not the end of the world when someone goes a little crazy.

After that Mom stays at the Landings on Sundays and plays the piano for the "dreadful" church service there, and Emmy and I go to church by ourselves until eventually Emmy's too busy with her friends and I start seeking my spiritual sustenance elsewhere.

SIX.

AUTUMN 2006.

In 2006, the dice land in my favor. I am offered a teaching job with insurance benefits and a real salary. Not only that, but I have enough freelance writing work over the summer to pay off my old car and put a down payment on my dream car: a gray Prius. A quick search on the Internet and I find the perfect car-right color, right options, right price-just one town over from Charlotte.

A full-time teaching job is going to make things difficult. My mother is getting less and less able to take care of herself. With the extra money I make I can afford a little help, but it won't be a lot.

Once school starts I develop a routine. Now every morning Emmy takes the Blue Monster to school, and I drive over to my mother's. I scramble eggs with cut-up tomato and cheese. I make toast and lightly b.u.t.ter it. We sit at the table and eat. I don't usually want to talk much. I peruse the New Yorker, gobbling up the cartoons. Then I put my mother's compression hose on her, leave out some food for lunch, hug her goodbye, and dash off to work. Sometimes she looks at me with desperation before I go. Her depression, when it's on, is like mustard gas filling the room. I'm afraid to breathe it in.

In the evenings while Emmy is at rehearsals, I go over to my mother's. When Emmy is home, I try to be home as well. Hank spends most of his time working. He occasionally joins me on some obligatory parental outing, and we still go out to eat as a family or watch a movie on the weekends, but increasingly we are isolated units. Our differing political points of view have become sharper in recent years, our arguments a little more bitter. I know it's not healthy, but I don't know how to fix things. I'm doing the old one-day-at-a-time trick.

And Emmy is growing up. One night I dream of her as a little girl. How I sweep her in my arms, coddle and kiss her, nostalgia flooding my veins. I know even as I dream that she is no toddling child. I know I will never again feel that small body in my arms, heart beating like a rabbit. I ache to remember the way she would turn to face me and drape her small arms over my shoulders. Then I wake from the dream, rise and stumble into my teenager's room, slip under the covers and cradle her long, lanky body in my arms.

"Is everything okay?" she asks.

"Yes," I tell her. "I just want to cherish this moment." But already it is fading like a dream.

One night in early November, I am playing Scrabble with my mother at her apartment; I almost have the word vizier. Emmy has been gone for about ten minutes; the dishes from our spaghetti dinner are still in the sink. When the phone rings, I know it isn't good. I know it is her. I am already standing, looking for my coat, reaching for the phone.

"Mom," her voice shakes. "I'm not hurt." She knows those are the first words she must say. "I've been in an accident. A bad one."

"Is anyone else hurt?" I ask.

"I think so."

"Where are you?"

She tells me, and I fly out the door.

It takes seven or eight minutes to get to the accident site. I keep calling Hank on the way over, but he doesn't answer his phone, so I call the neighbors and ask them to go over and tell him to call me. Red and blue lights pulse through the chilly air, and I can see the Blue Monster in the intersection, front axle broken, wheel turned on its side like a broken leg and another car with a pancaked front end next to it, ambulances on either side. I park my car and dash across the busy four-lane street to get to my child.

"I'm here, baby," I say, but she is surrounded by emergency workers, putting a neck brace on her, strapping her to a board. They explain that they are taking her to a hospital to have her checked out.

"What about the other driver?" I ask.

"He's going to another hospital. We think he's okay."

The whole night seems to sigh with relief and the air gets a little softer, a little easier on the throat.

"Mom?" Emmy says, panic rising in her voice. I reach out and place a hand on her shaking legs.

"Breathe," I tell her.

At the hospital I learn that a couple who stopped right after the accident took care of her and let her use their cell phone to call me, since hers was lost in the battered, liquid-leaking car. I also notice that she's wearing my leather jacket. The jacket was given to me when Emmy was just a baby by my friend Mike Gearhart, who had once told me that Emmy was the closest thing he'd ever have to a child of his own. I was a single mom and he'd just received some insurance money from an accident. He bought Emmy baby clothes. He stayed up nights with me when she was sick. Even after Hank and I got back together, he was still a part of our lives. Emmy loved him. She was only five years old when he died of heart failure, but she never forgot Mikey.

At the hospital she has the jacket draped over her like a blanket. The X-rays show no broken bones. The CAT scan shows no internal injuries. We spend about four hours in the emergency room. The other driver turns out to be okay, too. After the doctor signs the release papers, my daughter slips her arms into the leather jacket and we leave the hospital to go home.

Except for briefly visiting my mother in a hospital, I haven't been in one since sixteen years earlier when the doctors cut me open to remove my daughter from my womb. I have no idea that this environment will become very familiar in the near future.

But tonight I have remained calm as a lily in a summer lake. In the morning, I will lie in bed and weep, thinking about what I might have lost.

A week later I hear a yelp and a thud come from Emmy's room. She stumbles into my room, ashen-faced, holding her finger. She has just put a sewing machine needle through it.

"Go wash it off," I tell her and rush downstairs to get ice. I find her a few minutes later, pa.s.sed out on the bathroom floor with Hank lying beside her to keep her warm. We head back to the emergency room, where they remove a half-inch worth of needle from her finger. I am so thankful that she didn't have this pair of accidents back when I didn't have health insurance.

Emmy recovers but my mom gets worse. The bad days keep coming. She cannot stand to be alone. She is nearly always in pain. She forgets where the bathroom is. I have become her lifeline. I go over to take care of her seven days a week, once or twice a day, and it never seems to be enough. When I am not teaching, I am taking her to doctors or going to the store for her, or just taking her out in my car to get her out of the debilitating depression that swallows her like Jonah whenever she's inside four walls. We can't quite afford a.s.sisted living unless we sell the piano that she has had since she was eight or nine years old, and that's something we're not willing to do yet.

On the afternoon of November 27-my birthday-I check my voice mails. In one of them from earlier in the day, my mother screams "Help me, help me!" over and over. She had fallen that morning and the paramedics had come and lifted her up, but it's my number she called, my recorded voice she begged for help. As I listen to her screaming message, something inside me turns hard and sour. Perhaps I am thinking of how I looked forward to this decade in my life. As my child-rearing duties lessened, I thought I would have more time for travel, friends, reconnecting with my husband, writing all those books in my head that are clamoring to be written. But now, I can see no end to this, and my heart feels like a shriveled peach.

But not all days are bad. At Christmas, my mother becomes concerned about all the other residents who have nowhere to go and nothing to do on Christmas Eve.

Perhaps she is remembering that bleak Christmas six or seven years earlier when she was all alone. Since she made her livelihood as a church organist and music director, she'd always worked on Christmas Eve and bah-humbugged the whole thing. That Christmas, however, except for the spa.r.s.ely attended Christmas Eve service, she found herself with nothing to do, nowhere to go. No one had invited her for Christmas dinner. I was in California with Hank and Emmy. Both my brothers were spending the holidays with their own families. I remember calling Mom to wish her Merry Christmas and hearing a lonely pang in her voice when she said, "I haven't seen a soul all day."

When my mother gave up her church job and came to live near me, I wondered how she would function without her ident.i.ty as a musician. The ideal death for her would have been on a Sunday morning while she sat at her organ during yet another boring sermon. When it was time for the anthem to begin, the choir would look expectantly over at her, but she would not move. She would not lift her hands this time. The grande musical dame would be gone.

Now she is no longer the grande dame; she is just another addled old person with a walker. And yet, since she's been at the Landings, she's managed to start a chorus. Of course, at first, the management loved the idea but refused to pay for music or even move the piano around so she could see the singers while she played for them. My mother tried to explain that the piano had wheels on it so you could move it, but our old nemesis-that statuesque blonde in her perilously high heels who had an alarming resemblance to Glenn Close with a dead rabbit on the stove-wouldn't hear of it.

So instead of buying music, my mother handwrote arrangements for the group of twenty or so singers. Her trusty a.s.sistant, Sylvia, took it to the copier to make copies for everyone. When they put on a show every few months, the great room was packed. It wasn't the best singing around town by a long shot, but it was definitely the most appreciated.

My mother's idea for Christmas Eve is a little different. She doesn't want to put on a concert. Instead she decides to throw a big sing-along party. Everyone who hears the idea loves it. Except the management. They tell her she can only do it as long as they don't have to do anything. They won't even publicize the event among the residents.

She asks if it would be okay for Sylvia to deliver flyers to the apartments. Absolutely not. Jeez, I'm thinking. I got better treatment in jail.

Christmas Eve comes. At six thirty Emmy and I go over to help her prepare. Hank is in a huff because we're deserting him on Christmas Eve.

"It's just for a couple of hours," I tell him. "You're welcome to join us."

But Hank doesn't want to come. He doesn't like being around old people. So we go without him, and he stays home and stews.

When we get to my mother's apartment, she is wearing a glittery white vest, looking most festive. By now she can no longer walk as far as the great room, so she gets in her brand-new motorized wheelchair, which took weeks of wrangling to get, and we parade behind her, carrying punch and cookies.

We walk into the large room where a crowd of fifty to sixty old folks mingle around the tables laden with drinks, pumpkin bread, cranberry bread, m.u.f.fins-all brought by a few volunteers. Word of mouth is a fine method of communication in a retirement community.

"h.e.l.lo, everybody!" my mother yells as she comes in.

The life of the party has arrived. Mom takes command of the evening. Tom, a POW in World War II, sings "Oh, Holy Night." Emmy sings "White Christmas." The whole place sings "Jingle Bells" and "Joy to the World." Mom's makeshift chorus sings a few songs. She then whips out a few cla.s.sical pieces. The happiness in the place is almost palpable, like a cat that leaps unexpectedly onto your lap. As I gaze at my mother in her sparkly holiday sweater, her body coaxing sound from that crummy little piano, hundreds of images of her doing this same thing in different places with different people reverberate through my mind like the infinite reflections you see of yourself when you stand between two mirrors.

My mother's eyes shine as she makes that pitiful little upright roar. I look around at these people. They are having a wonderful time, and I can't remember a better Christmas Eve.

Before we leave, the residents fawn over Emmy.

"So lovely, so lovely," they say. My tall, willowy daughter in her pristine youth smiles at them.

As we leave to go mollify my unhappy husband, Emmy tucks her arm in mine and says, "Being with Grandma Roz is like being with a rock star."

We can still hear them singing as we walk out the door.