Nan's Place

Today I’m heading to Nan’s place, my Nan of 94.

That’s 94 years we’re talking, which is no small feat. Since Gramps’s passing last week, she is officially the oldest person I know.

We are all proud of Nan for holding on this long, though most of us expected as much. This is Nan we are talking about - the same Nan who taught me to swim by hurling me half-naked into a mountain lake when she was nearly 70, and chased Mila’s unsavory ex-boyfriend out the back door with a fire poker almost a decade later. Nan was born a firecracker; she took her first breath with the fuse already lit. We always thought her body would blaze alongside her spirit, a harmonious slow-burn that bound body, soul and mind. Some things, unfortunately, do not turn out as we please.

While Nan’s spirit remains loud, her mind is now scattered, the two no longer in sync. Nan of 94, though shockingly able-bodied, is a product of this discord. Armed with haphazard passion and short-term memory loss, Nan is, as she always was, a force to be reckoned with. This is why I am heading to Nan’s place today. Mom has to work, and Nan is having one of her off days.

I attempt to maintain a positive attitude as I pull into Nan’s driveway despite the monotonous gray of impending rain clouds strewn across the sky. I park at the bottom, careful not to block Mom’s car in. Before I step out into the biting cold, I steal a quick look in the sun visor’s unobtrusive mirror. An equally unobtrusive pair of pale blue eyes, hinged by freckles and bags, stare back at me. I look away and step out of the car.

As I start up the driveway, I notice a commotion at the front door. Nan is barefoot, apparently indifferent to the frosty deck beneath her toes. Her fuzzy bathrobe billows in the wind, threatening to come undone. She clutches a metal tin of kitchen tools in her left arm, and shakes a rolling pin angrily with her right. Mom stands behind her, dressed in her work scrubs, trying desperately to coax Nan indoors. Nan is having none of it. I follow her pin with my eyes, and I soon see the problem.

The drone, approaching at a leisurely pace, is a sleek gray, fitted with four spinning propellers and six metal arms wrapped around a cardboard box. The whole contraption is about the size of a small washing machine, and certainly, it is a sight. This is a delivery drone, nothing that lucid Nan hasn’t seen before. This drone, however, is not approaching lucid Nan, but Nan in the throes of late-onset dementia, hell-bent on protecting her land and her family from whatever backwards reality she woke up in today. I watch a pizza cutter whizz past the drone. I turn and hurry to help Mom redirect Nan. Mom sees me first, her look of relief palpable. “Mama, look, we have a visitor!”

Nan seems to think Mom is talking about the drone. “A visitor, huh? I call ‘em intruders!” She emphasizes her point with an airborne spatula and a narrow miss. The drone continues forward, unfazed.

“No, Mama, I’m talking about Laurel.”

By this point, I am close enough to offer my hellos. This gets Nan's attention, though as I am greeted with a cheese grater to the face I realize I must have startled her. A tender sting and a pool of hot blood start to form under my nose. “Nice shot, Nan,” I acknowledge.

Mom shrieks and rushes to my side; by the grace of motherhood she has tissues on hand. She presses a few against my nose and tilts my head back. I stare into the sky, wondering whether it will rain. I hear Nan shouting, “Camille, that’s Mila! Is she bleeding?”

Mom takes this opportunity to divert the chaos indoors. She lets go of my head to offer Nan her hand. Nan brushes it away, and shuffles, slightly slanted, closer to me. We move into the kitchen and I take a seat at the familiar maple wood dining table. Mom hands me more tissues, and pulls up a seat behind Nan, who sits blindly, too distracted by my bloody nose to focus on anything else.

I smile, trying to hide how taken aback I am by how old she looks up close. Her watery eyes scan mine, clearly distraught. The mood shifts. Her countenance clouds over, and she draws back. “Did John do this?”

Thankfully, Mom intervenes before I have to answer.

“Look, Mama, somebody sent you a package.” The drone must have made a safe escape. Mom sets the package down, and Nan takes a moment to look it over.

“This is crap,” she determines.

I giggle, earning a shocked look from Nan and a reproachful one from Mom. The blood has slowed down by now, and I excuse myself to the bathroom to clean myself off. I leave the door open so I can hear their conversation.

Nan lowers her voice, but she has never been good at whispering. “Did you see that? Mila is bleeding.”

“She’s okay, Mama.”

“You don’t think that…what’s his name…that John guy she’s been hanging around with…”

“She’s okay, Mama. I promise. She’s safe now because we are all safe now.” Mom’s voice starts to crack. I look in the mirror, surprised by the pale blue eyes staring back at me, spilling over with tears. “Let’s just talk about something else, okay? Laur- er, Mila - is very curious about what could be in this box.”

Drawn to that cue, I stuff cautionary rolls of tissue paper up my nostrils and wipe my eyes with my sleeve. I smile at the eyes in the mirror, and they twinkle back at me. I return to the kitchen and sit down next to Nan.

“What do you have here?” I ask, tapping the top of the cardboard box with my finger. “Looks like a package addressed to Jo Mare Jones and family. That’s you, isn’t it?”

“No, ma’am,” replies Nan.

I giggle again. “It’s not?”

Nan stares back at me, unflinching. “How am I supposed to know?” She slams her hand down on the package with surprising force. Her spectacles slide to the edge of her nose. “There’s not even a damn return address on this package!”

“Well, she’s right about that,” Mom notes. “I must say, I do find all of this a little strange. Maybe this is from someone who couldn’t make it to the funeral…though why they wouldn’t include a return address is beyond me. I suppose there could be a note inside.” Mom’s phone starts to buzz, and she gasps. “I’m supposed to be at work!”

She jumps up from the seat and rushes to another room to take what I can only assume is a call from her boss. I giggle yet again, and this time Nan joins me; we keel over, hysterical. Nan tires quickly, so we have to slow down, but it feels good to laugh like this and I am reluctant to stop. I am reminded of the days when I would come over after school and Nan would fill me up with homemade cookies and reruns of that old sitcom, Modern Family. I sat cross-legged on the couch while she rocked back and forth in her rocking chair, both of us cackling at the antics of a world behind the screen. Those were the days before delivery drones replaced the mailman, the days when it was Nan and Laurel against the world. Though even in those days, Nan always asked about Mila. She was worried about her. We all were.

Nan is looking at Mila now; I can tell by the stress in her eyes. Nan never looks at Laurel that way. These days, it is getting rarer and rarer for Nan to remember Laurel at all.

“Mila, honey, is everything all right?”

With Mom otherwise occupied and unable to redirect Nan, I am forced to play Mila. I give Nan my best smile. “You are sweet to worry, Nan. I am plum as a peach.”

I feel a pang of guilt using Mila’s signature catchphrase, or perhaps it is just a pang of guilt in her memory. This past week has stirred up a lot of confusing emotions with Gramps’s sudden funeral and Nan’s notable decline. We all knew she had dementia, but none of us realized the extent to which she leaned on Gramps. Then one day his heart gave out, and he left Nan without a human curtain to shield her from the world.

Nan is a fantastic Nan and loves both of her granddaughters accordingly. I arrived nine years after Mila, a shock to all parties, but welcome nonetheless. Mila took the longest to warm up to me, Nan informed me years later. “But once she got a taste of you,” she’d said, “she couldn’t get enough.”

By the time I was nine, and Mila 18, I was spending more and more time alone with Nan. While we played checkers and made gingerbread houses, Mila played teenager and made increasingly terrible mistakes. It was around this time that Mila met John, local cashier. I don’t remember where he worked, and I’ll never ask - we don’t talk about John. Only Mila.

“You are plum as a peach,” Nan repeats. I watch her wrinkles work; I can feel her fighting the confusion. “He is good at playing nice. Bad men are tricky like that.”

I change the subject. “What do you think is in this package, Nan?”

Nan looks at the package, alarmed. “When did that get there?”

I shrug. “Let’s open it.”

“No!” Nan shouts, pushing the box out of reach. “No, no, no, no, no!”

Before I have time to process Nan’s extreme reaction, Mom returns. She looks sheepish and murderous at the same time, the effect almost comical.

“Do you have to go to work?” I ask.

“No,” Mom answers. “They are not happy about that, but I don’t care. I don’t think any of them have a mother with dementia or a father who died last week.”

“I agree,” I say in solidarity. “We need you to help us focus, anyway. We still haven’t figured out who sent Nan this package.”

“Hold on, who has dementia? And who died?” Nan looks from me to Mom, then back to me. “Hey! What’s up your nose?”

I draw my fingers to my nose instinctively. I remember the tissue swabs, probably dry by now. I pull them out and throw them away.

“Are you bleeding?” Nan asks. “Are you wounded?”

“No ma’am,” I reply. “This is old blood. I have no wounds.”

Nan chuckles, shaking her head. “Oh, we all have wounds. Good thing you have a Gramps who knows just what to do.” She sighs, looking suddenly exhausted. “Honey, honey, honey. That’s all you can do.”

I shoot Mom a confused glance, only to find her silently shaking, tears streaming. As quietly as possible, I scoot across the chairs between us until I am sitting right next to her. I rest my head on her shoulder. We sit there a moment, three generations suspended in time. I save the empty seat beside me for Mila, our missing warrior.

Nan yawns, and begins to nod off to sleep. Mom kisses my hair and shrugs me gently off her shoulder. She touches her mother’s arm with kindness, and smiles at her sleepy eyes. They are so pale, cataract-adjacent, but every once in a while they shoot off a striking blue gleam. “Do you want me to help you to bed, Mama?”

Nan nods an affirmative, and Mom helps her rise from the table. As their footsteps soften down the short hallway leading to Nan’s room, I hear something wonderful. Nan is calling my name.

“Laurel! Laurel! Camille, where is Laurel? I love that sweet little angel, you know I do. Will you please bring her with you next time you and Mila stop by?”

“Yes,” Mom promises, “I will.”

As their voices fade, I am left staring at the package, intrigued by the mystery. I am grateful for the commotion this small brown box has caused, and a part of me doesn't want to know what’s inside, or even who sent it. If Mila were here, she would have already opened the box. Mysteries never fazed her.

Upon further examination, the package appears official. It is boxy, beige, and adorned with postage and a printed label. I pick it up and shake it a little, hearing the muffled clunk of something solid. I wonder if Mom is right and this is a gift from someone who couldn’t attend the funeral. Perhaps, though when I picture the faces in attendance, I can’t think of anyone missing. Gramps was beloved, a pillar of the community, and more people than expected had shown up to the cemetery chapel to pay their respects. I turn the package over in my hands, thinking.

“You can open it if you’d like.” I turn toward the sound of Mom’s voice. Her mouth is turned up into somewhat of a grin, but her eyes are in another world entirely. I feel a knot of sympathetic exhaustion twist in my chest.

“Isn’t it illegal to open other people’s mail?” I joke as Mom sits in the chair beside me.

“Yes,” she replies.

We sit in silence for a moment, catching our breath. The absence of Gramps weighs heavy on our hearts. His big, goofy mustache beams down at us from the framed photographs on the wall, his eyes dancing in every picture. Nan is by his side, elated in each one. The two of them had been quite the pair: twin flames, intricately bound. For as long as I can remember they did everything together: grocery shopping, doctor’s appointments, haircuts. This continued even as Nan’s dementia progressed; they both found comfort in their old routines.

When I look at Mom, I see Gramps. She shares his stature - tall and slight, with uncharacteristically broad shoulders. She has his dark hair, which collapses down her back in tangled waves. She has her mother’s eyes, though, the eyes she also gave to me. She catches me staring and raises a perfectly arched brow. Mila used to raise her eyebrow that way. I feel a sharp, stabbing ache.

The day Mila died, everything changed. Mom pulled me out of school early and packed me in the car. We drove for at least an hour. It was snowing, Mom was sobbing. She refused to tell me where we were going, regardless, I felt something dark in the pit of my gut. I yearned to seek comfort in Mila, though I think I knew I had already lost her. By the time we reached the hospital, I was frozen in time. I don’t remember how I got from Mom’s car to outside Mila’s hospital room, though that is what occurred. I remember the doctors blocking the door; they wanted to protect the last memory I had of my sister.

“Laurel, you’re crying.” Mom’s gentle voice guides me back to the present. I am not surprised to feel hot tears sticking to my cheek. “What’s on your mind?”

“Do you think it was an accident?” I ask.

Mom heard Nan call me Mila and ask about John. She knows what I mean when I ask that question, though she doesn’t know the answer.

The police concluded that John Alvorst lost control of his vehicle in the early morning hours of December 26th, on a winding, snowy road, and rolled down a fairly steep cliff. He was killed instantly, while his passenger, Mila Alexander, was airlifted to the nearest hospital, where she remained on life support for three days before she passed away.

The police considered it immaterial that Mila and John were supposed to be broken up. They shrugged off his criminal record, which included violation of a restraining order of a previous girlfriend and trespassing. They only briefly reviewed the threatening messages found from him on Mila’s phone. They ruled it an accident without any further investigation. She was in the car with him, after all.

“I’m not sure,” Mom answers eventually. “I know she was done with him, afraid of him. If she got into that car voluntarily, there must have been no other option.” Mom starts to sniffle and clears her throat. “I’m sorry you lost your sister, Laurel. She really loved you.”

I am crying, practically weeping. Everything hurts. “I do have wounds,” I announce to no one in particular.

Mom hugs me, pulling me as close as she can. We cry together. After a moment, she brushes a loose curl out of my eyes. “You know, Nan reminded me earlier of something Gramps used to do. When I was a little girl and I wasn’t feeling well, he’d sit me on his lap and scoop a big spoonful of honey into my mouth. He believed in the healing power of honey and thought it could cure any wound. He used to order us the finest Manuka honey in the world, shipped from New Zealand. What I wouldn’t give to have a taste of that honey now.”

“He ordered honey in the mail?” I look at the package. Mom gasps slightly. We freeze, each trying not to wish too hard for something that might not be true.

When I can no longer stand the suspense, I pull the box toward me. With a nod from Mom, I shimmy my finger underneath the tape, and pull. Inside the box is a jar of Manuka honey, accompanied by an invoice with a date of sale. Exactly two days before he died, Gramps submitted his last order to his favorite Manuka company.

He must have known we would need his honey to heal our wounds.