View From a Kite by Maureen Hull

because one of us might pick up a card and keep it. He has to gather them up all by himself and count them over and over and over to make sure he has all fifty-two. Once I slipped in an extra card, for a joke, and he kept getting fifty-three no matter how many times he counted. I thought he was going to have a stroke. I didn’t do that again, it was kind of mean, although I admit I’ve been awfully tempted.
    On Mama’s good days, when she can respond to your questions, she’s trapped somewhere in the past, when she was young, before there was me. If you don’t talk to her, she can’t say anything at all. She doesn’t move much, either, unless you get her started. If you take her arm and start walking she’ll walk with you. By herself, she sits all day and doesn’t move a muscle, except for her fluttering hands, which don’t seem to belong to her at all.
    I used to obsess about her last few minutes. What did she see? What did she think? Did she know? Did she see him coming, see the raised gun? Was terror her last state of mind before grey limbo? I’ve run the scene over and over in my head. I have him come up behind her, so she knows nothing, so she is walking down the hall, thinking about folding laundry, or weeding the petunias, or making pork roast for Sunday dinner, and then there is nothing. My version has to be what happened.
    Nothing, is where she is.
    Nowhere, is where she is.
    I believe, someday, somehow, brain cells will grow, or a new drug will resurrect her lost memory, or a clever surgical twist of a knife will switch on a light and her mind will click back into focus.
    She’ll open her eyes, a little perplexed by her medical surroundings, but only peripherally distracted. She’ll open her eyes wide and she’ll see me, she’ll see her Gwen. She’ll give her head a little shake.
    â€œGwennie,” she’ll say, reaching for me with steady hands, “when was the last time you combed your hair?”

CHAPTER 18
    All my mail this week, except for record club offers and threats, comes from the residents, past and present, of the San. Whiny Mrs. Charmichael sent me a huge photograph of herself holding her new grandson at his christening. She’s crocheted an elaborate gown and stuffed him into it. It’s hard to tell what he looks like, there’s sort of a little blob that might be his face buried under a heap of lace. He’s probably passed out with the weight of it. Mrs. Charmichael, a bolster of lime green brocade with a tea tray of fuchsia blossoms on her head, is the proverbial cat with the proverbial canary. If she hadn’t got sick and ended up in the San, Perfect Leander would never have had the time or the nerve to mess around with a girl and there would be no perfect grandbaby for her to rhapsodize about (with the photograph came a seven-page letter detailing the infant’s virtues; evidently it’s the Second Coming).
    OFN scribbled me a note to say Sister Clare is now so depressed they are talking of moving her to a home for the genteelly disturbed. Cranky old Mrs. Cyr is dead, choked on a pickle. Joe Paul, who got out for good a month ago, came back to visit in a brand new pick-up. He’s got new teeth, lost them at his coming-home party but found them again the next day. OFN says he looks just grand.
    Mary wrote to say she’s completely redecorated her bed - room and has enrolled in a secretarial course, but has yet to meet a man suitable for framing. She sounds all right.
    I suppose I am too. This is not exactly the Left Bank or a beach in Majorca, but it is an experience and all experiences are of value to a writer. That’s what I tell myself.
    I still hold out some hope that I can plug the hole in my lung before they cart me off to the butcher shop at the Royal Alex. To this end, I am being wonderfully good. No late nights, lots of good healthy food. I sleep with the window open, even in the driving