The Morning Kitchen

The one they have sent for me is standing on the front step, turned away from the door so that I can see only her back. Is she taking in the view of the lawn just beginning to green after a long winter, and the neighborhood kids screaming down the sidewalks like brakeless trains? What does she think of it all? That it is quaint and comfortable, that it is dull and expected? That it is a slice of paradise, that it is a well-manicured netherworld?

My husband and I have been married for twenty-three years, six months, and three days. None of those numbers matter except to say that while there is a history there (a generation’s worth, actually), most of it doesn’t mean much right now. We met and dated and married, and sent our only child (a daughter, I think) off to college two years ago (maybe). There was...there is nothing special about us. We’ve had all the usual moments—anniversaries and first words and vacations and graduations—that make it to social media, and all the other moments—the groundings, the arguments about hanging toilet paper—that don’t. I don’t remember most of those moments now and cannot vouch for the truth of the ones I do remember.

One of the few memories that I trust is of a morning three months ago. Everything else aside, I remember that morning as if it is its own room in my head, a room that I can walk into whenever I want to touch and smell and taste. That morning is bright. I open all the shades. It is far warmer than it should be, and I think that later I will open some windows and get some fresh air into the house. I am doing what I remember doing (almost) every morning for twenty-three years, three months, and three days: making breakfast. Something for everyone. Eggs for me, bacon for my husband, pancakes for our only child. I set the table and start coffee and call down the hallway that it is time to wake up, that breakfast is getting cold. I can smell the bacon frying in the pan, I can hear the velvet hiss of pancake batter settling onto the hot skillet.

“Hot breakfast. What a treat!”

I think, when I hear my husband say these words from just over my shoulder, that he is being sarcastic, that he is trying to bait me for something...for something. We are not special. We bait each other sometimes. But I am in a good mood, so I nibble but don’t bite.

“Well, I can make something else, if you’d rather,” I say. “We have some of that vegan sausage and—”

“Absolutely not. I don’t get this treatment much, I’m not about to sully it with vegan sausage.”

Something snags in my brain, tugs at my smoothly running thoughts just enough that I feel it, but not so strong that I can’t ignore it. So I do.

“Where’s Jenna? Tell her I’m putting blueberries in the batter if she doesn’t answer.”

(Jenna. Jenna. Our only child’s name is Jenna. It comes to me whenever I step into that morning’s kitchen. Her face is sharp in my mind for an instant so fleeting that I don’t even understand what I am seeing, and already it is gone, leaving only the sense of a shape and the evaporating echo of her name. Jenna.)

This is it. Everything changes now. My husband of twenty-three years, three months, and three days pulls away from me and clears his throat.

“Oh, hon…”

The snag in my brain, the smooth tug, tears and stretches until all of my thoughts jumble and fade, and I am standing in front of my stove, cooking the type of hot breakfast that I only make on long weekends (when I have time), and here it is, a Wednesday, and I have to be on camera for a conference call in fifteen minutes.

My husband (his name, his name, it will be here soon) stands in the far corner of the kitchen, on the other side of the breakfast nook, his arms dangling at his sides like broken doll parts.

“What’s wrong?” I ask him.

He shakes his head. His mouth drifts open but nothing comes out.

“Kip?” (Kip, that’s it. My husband. His name is Kip.)

His chest rises as if he is preparing to speak. But this is where the door to that morning closes.

#

I will get into my car with the one they have sent for me. I will think I’m driving, but really, it will be some fresh college graduate—a friend or acquaintance of my only child’s, maybe—behind a keyboard on the other side of town who will be monitoring my car, making sure its computer stays on course, making sure I don’t suddenly find myself. Once I slide behind the wheel, I won’t have any more questions or doubts. They’ve already treated the vents and upholstery with a lightly sedative and gently hallucinogenic compound, so that every breath I take will sigh away my last wispy ties to the world, even as I bend to the subsonic suggestions that will play under all of my favorite songs. I will believe that I am driving to the beach, because that is where I told them I wanted to go. (I think. There are so many pictures in this house of the beach that I have to assume that it’s my favorite place.) Really, I will be going to the basement of the same building where the fresh college graduate who has been guiding my car sits behind a keyboard twenty floors above. Then...then…

We all know what happens then. I know better than most. My failing mind has lost the brightest pieces of my life but has held onto the knowledge of my fate with a frightened child’s grip. My quiet and certain annihilation will be objectively kinder than years of liminal madness devouring me and whatever dim memories I manage to retrieve from the chaos. I know how that goes. It happened to my mother. She forgot my name, and then my father’s name, and then her own name. She forgot what shoes were for, and she forgot how to open doors, and finally, she forgot how to breathe. I was the same age as my only child is (I think) now, and I knew the odds against me out to seven decimal points. I began then the work that would consume my career: a better journey out. There is no cure. There is only what’s next.

Right now is the worst time. Right now, knowing what is coming, without having the benefit of precisely-mixed compounds. Right now, this terrible and absolute clarity.

#

I went into that morning’s bright kitchen one last time, to say goodbye to my husband of twenty-three years, six months, and three days. One more time to remember his name, and our only child’s name. One more time to say both with absolute faith in the rightness of my world. I went through the house one last time, once more into each room, trying to bring up a memory for each. I have two now, though even as I recall them, their edges fray. The first is of sitting on the edge of the tub in the master bathroom with my husband, while he explains the new shower he plans to install. The colors are dimming, his words are becoming thick and slow, but I can see his eyes, and I can hear his voice. The second is of standing in the door of my only child’s darkened night room, the soft light from the hallway peeking over my shoulder just enough to describe a huddled lump of sleep under a thick gray comforter. The shadows are growing deeper around the bed, but the shape of my only child under the comforter stays there, certain. I smile at this one because my only child is sleeping. My only child is safe.

I realized, as I started for the last time down the hall of the house that has been my home for half a lifetime, that for all the pictures of beaches and boats and my husband and I in various stages of our lives, there are pictures of no one else. No one. Not even the child that I know I have, whose room I know I just visited. This means one thing, one thing that I know, because the protocol, after all, was my life’s work: those pictures that should be there were there once, but after my condition manifested, those pictures were taken away, replaced with beaches and boats. And they had been taken away because something happened to my child, to my only child, and the constant reminders—the pictures, the eyes, the fresh pain with each turn of the head—would be the fuel of a violent decline. The pictures were moved out of love, out of the hope of giving me comfort without risking pain. I wish they hadn’t been moved at all. I think I would have appreciated that pain. More than this flat blankness, anyway. And now that I know, I will spend these last moments of lucidity wondering how that knowing will grow in my subconscious and wrap my chemical dreams in long-forgotten sadness.

This is it, then. I’ll open the door. I didn’t know who it would be, but now I do. I’m sure of it. When the one they sent for me turns around, it will be her, my daughter, my only child—or rather, a reasonable facsimile thereof, close enough to trick my wilting brain. She’ll walk with me to my car and watch me think I’m driving, and by the time we turn at the end of the block, I’ll remember her name. That is, I’ll be convinced that I have remembered her name. We’ll share memories (the drug cocktail of course will not affect her) which she will prompt from me based on things my husband has told her programmers, things stitched together from pictures and notes, the smallest physical scraps of my life. By the time we get to the building on the other side of town, I’ll be happy. I’ll have forgotten there was ever a reason to be otherwise. And then, it will all be over.

At least, that’s the plan.

END

Author’s Biography

Jean Jentilet's writing has been featured in The Monsters Next Door (Critical Blast), Cry Baby Bridge: A Collection of Utter Speculation (Speculation Publications) and parABnormal Magazine. You can keep up with Jean at jeanjentilet.com and at linktr.ee/jean.m.jentilet.