Recursion - Blake Crouch Page 0,46

a television showing a nature program.

The door to 117 is ajar, and she eases it open.

By Helena’s math, it’s been five years since she last saw her mother.

Dorothy is sitting in a wheelchair with a blanket over her legs, staring out the window toward the foothills of the Rocky Mountains. She must have seen Helena in her peripheral vision, because she turns her head slowly toward the doorway.

Helena smiles.

“Hi.”

Her mother stares at her, unblinking.

No sign of recognition.

“Is it all right if I come in?”

Her mother lowers her head in a gesture that Helena takes for assent. Moving inside, she shuts the door after her.

“I like your room very much,” Helena says. There’s a muted television showing a news channel. Photographs everywhere. Of her parents in younger, better times. Of her as a baby, as a child, as a just-turned-sixteen-year-old sitting behind the wheel of their family’s Chevy Silverado, on the day she got her driver’s license.

According to the CaringBridge page her father made, they moved Dorothy into memory care after last Christmas, when she left the stove on and nearly caught the kitchen on fire.

Helena sits down beside her mother at the small, circular table by the window. There’s a bouquet of flowers that’s old enough to have shed a carpet of leaves and petals around the vase.

Her mother’s frailness is birdlike, and the late-morning light that strikes her face makes it look as thin as paper. Though only sixty-five, she looks much older. Her silver hair is thinning. Liver spots cover her hands, which still look remarkably feminine and graceful.

“I’m Helena. Your daughter.”

Her mother looks at her, skeptical.

“You have a really nice view of the mountains.”

“Have you seen Nance?” her mother asks. She doesn’t sound anything like herself—her words coming slowly, and with considerable effort. Nancy was Dorothy’s older sister. She died in childbirth more than forty years ago, before Helena was born.

“I haven’t,” Helena says. “She’s been gone a while now.”

Her mom looks out the window. While it’s clear over the plains and the foothills, farther back, black clouds have begun to coalesce around the high peaks. Helena thinking—this disease is some sadistic, schizophrenic form of memory travel, flinging its victims across the expanse of their life, tricking them into thinking they’re living in the past. Cutting them adrift in time.

“I’m sorry I haven’t been around to see you,” Helena says. “It’s not because I didn’t want to—I think about you and Dad every day. But these last few years have been…really hard. You’re the only person in the world I can tell this to, but I was given a chance to build my memory chair. I told you about it once, I think. You were the reason I built it. I wanted to save your memories. I thought I was going to change the world. I thought I’d gotten everything I ever dreamed of. But I failed. I failed you. And all the people like you, who could’ve used my chair to save a part of themselves from this…fucking disease.” Helena wipes her eyes. She can’t tell if her mother is listening. Maybe it doesn’t matter. “I brought something awful into the world, Mama. I didn’t mean to, but I did, and now I have to spend the rest of my life in hiding. I shouldn’t have come here, but…I needed to see you one last time. I need you to hear me say I—”

“It’s going to storm in the mountains today,” Dorothy says, still watching the black clouds.

Helena lets out a deep, trembling breath. “Looks that way, doesn’t it?”

“I used to hike in those mountains with my family to a place called Lost Lake.”

“I remember that. I was there with you, Mom.”

“We would swim in the freezing water, and then lie out on the warm rocks. The sky was so blue it was almost purple. There were wildflowers in the meadows. It doesn’t seem that long ago.”

They sit in the silence.

Lightning touches the summit of Longs Peak.

Too distant to hear the thunder.

Helena wonders how often her father comes to visit. Wonders how hard it must be for him. She’d give anything to see him again.

Helena brings all of the photos over and takes her time showing each one to her mother, pointing to faces, saying names, recalling moments from her own memory. She starts to pick out memories she thinks her mother would count as her most special and important, and then realizes it’s far too intimate a choice to make for another person.