By Lilah Webb
He’s wheeled in and he screams. If you didn’t know any better, you’d think he was afraid. But you do. He’s happy to see you. Even if he doesn’t know who you are.
“James,” he says. You pretend not to know why he’s taken to calling your father by his middle name. The thought lingers in your head for a minute too long and the weight on your foot shifts.
Your dad and sisters go around the room, smiling, pretending to ignore the pissy nursing home air that seeps inside your bodies with every breath.
“Poppa,” your little sister says. “We missed you.”
She’s eight years younger than you, so you think that the visit must be easier for her. She doesn’t look at him and see the man who carried you on his shoulders every morning on the way to P.S. 63. Or the man who crossed state lines to bring you to see your father for the three and a half years he was in prison. But you do.
Poppa looks different now. The stroke that took parts of his voice a few years ago took his memories not long after. His teeth are mostly gone and his eyes, once the gentlest part of his six-one frame, are bugged out on a body shrunken with time and a life he can’t remember.
It isn’t fair to be angry, you remind yourself the third time you tell him you go to City College.
“Oh, that’s great,” he says like it’s the first time he’s said it today.
You peek at your sisters, twins, who are on their phones. Behind them is a wall a third of the way full of pictures. You see yourself in three and them in five. How is it, you think, that they managed to be up there more than you? That after all Poppa has done for you, he has less to remember you by? You push the bitter thought away as you step closer to his wheelchair.
He loves Hostess cupcakes. The ones that come two in a pack, in blue packaging with the white swirls on the top. You did too, when you were smaller, missing teeth, and having court-mandated stays at his Coney Island apartment every other weekend. You grab it from the nightstand beside him and he smiles when he sees it. He screams too, and you think about how lucky he is to not have the mind to care about social cues.
You hold the cupcake next to his mouth and he cranes his neck to take a bite. Bits of chocolate stick to his lips.
“What grade are you in?” He asks through the sweetness. Much of the chocolate falls out of his mouth as he talks.
You tell him (again) that you’re getting your master’s in fiction writing and he says (again) how great that is and that he’s very proud of you.
Your visits have been sporadic. They happen every few weeks, when your dad is not drunk, in a bad mood, or tired from a twelve-hour shift hurling garbage into a truck. You’ve said that you’ll come by yourself, that you don’t need your father (you say this and you think it applies to more than just these visits) but the trip to Crown Heights from the East Village is always too far, too long, too out of the way to do it without him. Guilt rattles your chest.
You stand in silence as your Poppa takes more bites of the chocolate cake and you shift your eyes to the tiled floor, trying to see what shapes appear when you let them go out of focus. You see a dog. A tooth. A face. A beard. You think of Shakespeare. You suppose it’s because of the face and beard, though you can’t be sure you even know what Shakespeare looks like.
When you first learned your Poppa had dementia, a long time before you knew your great-grandmother (on your mother’s side this time, so there’s no relation, just pure luck) had it too, you watched videos of a woman taking care of her father, each one ending with her saying it didn’t matter if he knew who she was because she did.
There was another video. It was one of the Green brothers, maybe, a man with short brown hair and round glasses and a soft voice. He told the camera about Shakespeare’s best quotes on aging. You skipped most of it, the recording exceeding your nighttime attention span. Near its end, though, with only a minute and a half left, he said something about a second childhood. You let the rest of the video play.
Here in his room, you think of your dad pushing Poppa around the facility like a baby in a carriage, like you know your Poppa once did for him. You think of his loud cry and his need to ask questions over and over.
You stare at what’s left of the first Hostess cupcake, reduced to bits and crumbs, and you can’t remember the last time you ate one.
Your sister taps your hip; you’ve been lost in thought, motionless.
“Poppa wants another bite,” she says.
He smiles as he chews the second cake and his eyes crinkle around the edges
“Thank you, Melody,” he says to you. “You’re my favorite.”
You do not tell him you’re not Melody. That she’s been dead as long as you’ve been alive. It’s hard, but you smile. You nod. You offer him another bite.
Lilah Webb is a writer and fiber artist from New York City. She’s currently pursuing an MFA in Creative Writing at the City College of New York and spends most of her free time rewatching comfort shows with her cats. With much of her work engaging in memory, she uses her writing to disentomb truth. She can be found on Instagram and TikTok @mothcup.