Before I Forget by Tory Henwood Hoen - 7

It is easier to leave New York than I would have thought. The city I grew up in seems to spit me out with disconcerting ease. Even those with whom my life is most intertwined don’t put up a fight. After her initial shock, Gemma wishes me well and sends me off with yet another linen tote bag full of free samples, including a vial of snail mucin (a fancy term for slime) that she swears will “change my life.” Dylan says he’ll miss me and we should leave things “open.” He also reminds me that his lease is ending and asks if he can take over my room as soon as I vacate it. Olivia and Tasha do an appropriate amount of pouting, but eventually they accept my decision and cede my room to Dylan. (“We’ll evict him if you ever decide to come back,” Olivia assures me.)

The only person who kicks up a fuss is my mother, and I should have seen that coming.

“Why in the world would you do that?” she asks when I call to break the news. These days, she lives in London with her second husband, George. At sixty-two, she is still working full tilt at a major management consulting firm. “After everything you went through in that godforsaken town? Besides, you’re a city girl. You have ambitions . Not to mention a fabulous job, finally.”

When I landed at Actualize, my mother seemed to let out a breath that she had been holding ever since I quit school. Not only is she a fan of the company’s face-tightening serums and plush bath towels, but she thinks Gemma is a visionary who I would do well to emulate. “That woman is going places” is a refrain I’ve heard more times than I’d like.

“Nina did it,” I say. “She took care of him for years.”

“Yes, but Nina is…” She pauses, and I wait to be offended. “Nina is on a clear track. You have yet to establish yours.”

“Maybe my track leads back to Locust.”

My mother sighs. “You have no obligation to Arthur, you know.”

“It’s not about obligation,” I reply. “I just feel … called.”

“ Called? To what? To eschew civilization?” Her distaste for Catwood Pond has only grown in the years since she left it once and for all. Despite my father’s abiding love for the camp, my mother never warmed to it. She always found it too rustic and remote. She prefers cities, action, movement, noise. After growing up in a gray Midwestern steel town, she always wanted a big, busy life—the kind that is always just out of reach, but keeps you grasping nonetheless. For the past few years, I have tried to live the life she always encouraged. But now, I want the opposite.

“I don’t understand,” she says.

I don’t expect her to.

A month after making my decision to leave, I drive north in the Raisin with two and a half suitcases and room to spare. It’s mid-May, one of the most beautiful times of year in Manhattan and, as I’m only remembering now, the start of black fly season in the Adirondacks. Not ideal. But as the grimy outskirts of the city give way to more rural surroundings, I begin to breathe again. Hours later, when I finally take our exit and turn onto the route that leads to another route that eventually bends toward Locust, the forest engulfs me quickly. Green is the obvious word for this landscape, but it is not adequate. Without taking my eyes off the road, I can spot at least ten different greens; if you go searching with intention, you will find dozens more. The bright ferns, the deep firs, the pale lichen, the vibrant moss—enough shades to constitute an entire palette. As I pull into our driveway and get out of the car, I am met by a final shade of green: Dominic’s eyes are luminous in the late-afternoon sun as he lazes atop the woodpile by the back door.

“I’m home,” I say, approaching him to scratch him under the chin. This time, he seems to recognize me. He stands, stretches, and then rams his fluffy head into my shoulder, as if to say, Finally .

I have one month to learn the ropes of caregiving before Nina leaves for Stockholm in June, and she approaches the handoff as if she is leading a presidential transition—no box left unchecked. In the four years that she has taken care of my father, she has established firm routines and protocols: wake at 7:00 A.M. , nap at 2:00 P.M. , bed at 9:00 P.M . He plays piano every afternoon. Outings are on Saturdays. Grocery runs are on Mondays. Nina sticks closely to this schedule to minimize surprises and stress. Her thinking is that if she can keep our dad’s routine consistent, she can slow his cognitive decline. It all seems overly rigid to me, but I know it’s easier not to question Nina’s policies. At least, not until after she leaves.

I anticipated some of my new responsibilities (giving my dad his morning and evening medications, scheduling and attending his doctor appointments, managing the household) and some I did not (getting him to floss his teeth properly, disposing of the diapers that he wears overnight). The hardest part, however, is the monotony. The conversations that repeat; the sense of a momentum-less existence. Groundhog’s Day, Nina calls it. She was right to warn me that I was taking on a lot, and there are moments when I second-guess my ability to handle this new role. On the other hand, it feels good to be needed. It feels good to no longer be selling luxury snail slime to people whose faces look just fine.

As the days tick by, we do our best to prepare our father for the upcoming transition. But as my sister cedes more of her duties to me and spends more time out of the house, my father’s most-asked question is, “Where’s Nina?”

She assures me that this is to be expected, that he just needs time to adjust to the new normal. But I worry about the void she will leave.

As her departure for Stockholm approaches, I begin waking earlier and earlier. Today, it’s only 6:00 A.M. when I decide that sleep is a lost cause. I creep downstairs, and when I enter the great room, I see that Nina is already there, perched on the couch and much more awake than I am.

She glances up from her laptop. “Come look at this.”

I plop down next to her and peek at the image on her screen. It is a riot of color—iridescent blues and greens, punctuated by streaks of magenta and a repeating pattern of red orbs.

“What do you think that is?” She grins expectantly.

It could be anything: an oil spill, a piece of contemporary art, the glittery remnants left on the dance floor after a rave. But knowing Nina’s field of study, I make an educated guess: “Bacteria?”

“Some of it is!” She pauses for dramatic effect and then says, as if delivering a punchline: “It’s a colon.”

I look more closely, still lost in the explosion of psychedelic color.

“An extremely thin slice of a colon, and each color is a different biomarker.”

“Are you getting into the digestion game?” I ask.

“I’m looking at different inflammatory mediators to see whether gut microbiota interacts with endometriosis.” She realizes she has lost me. “But seriously, isn’t it beautiful? These images are just so…” She shakes her head in awe. She’s not wrong: there’s something otherworldly about the blobs and swirls on the screen. It turns out a sliver of colon is an entire galaxy unto itself.

I envy Nina for having found her calling and doggedly pursuing it. I don’t know many people who have this kind of conviction—and derive this kind of joy—from their work. But thanks to Nina, I know it’s possible.

She closes her laptop. “Let’s go swimming.”

I hesitate. The sun isn’t even up. “I need coffee.”

“No, you need a sunrise swim.”

She’s right, of course. This is the best time of day to be by the water: before anything has stirred, when the pond is an unbroken sheet of glass and the light creeps over the eastern tree line, revealing the world, one detail at a time. We change into our swimsuits and throw on our tattered “pond robes.” These bathrobes are older than I am and have hung in the closets of this house since the seventies. Nina’s is red-and-white striped, while mine is beige, or perhaps a yellowed white. They have thinned in places, but my father never believed in replacing things just because they were worn. “Perfectly good” was always how he described our possessions, no matter how stained or rusted or out-of-date we girls deemed them to be. His philosophy has cast a distinct patina over this house and its collected objects.

Nina and I scamper down the path and reach the dock, where the gentle thud of our footsteps cuts the silence. I lean over the edge to look down into the water, which is clear enough to reveal the rocks piled on the floor of the pond eight or nine feet below. A silver fish darts one way, then the other, its movements sharp but indecisive. On the near shore, a fallen birch lies half submerged in the sapphire water as if living a double life, its pearly bark blue and ghostly beneath the surface. Unlike river-fed waterbodies, which absorb whatever floats their way from upstream, Catwood is replenished solely by springs that filter up from the bottom of the pond, infusing the water with a mineral quality that leaves the skin feeling silky and renewed. In the summer, the house shower goes mostly unused, it being no match for the type of purification you feel after a swim in the pond.

“Ow!” I slap my arm where a black fly has just left a bloody streak. “You little butthead.”

“Yeah, they’re bad right now. Only one way to save yourself,” says Nina, swinging her arms and diving from the edge of the dock. She breaks the surface in a clean line and disappears, barely making a splash. I drop my robe and follow her, clenching as I am swallowed by the icy water. By the end of summer, the pond will reach an acceptable temperature of seventy degrees. But now, in these early summer days, it hovers closer to sixty. Some call it bracing; some call it torture.

Nina and I pop out of the water and scream, as is our custom, cracking open the quiet of the morning. For a moment, I forget that I’ve been away. It feels like we are just kids again, flipping around like otters, churning up the water to keep the pond monsters at bay. I can hear my mother telling us we’re too far from the dock; I can hear my father telling her to let us be.

My parents were married for twenty-seven years, and my mom used to joke that they fell in love in the New York City sewer system. When they met in 1988, my mother, Tish, was a twenty-six-year-old management consultant and my father was a thirty-eight-year-old engineer who worked for the NYC Department of Environmental Protection. A work project brought them together: my mother’s firm was tasked with streamlining my father’s department, and my father was called in to help inform where cuts should be made. In the end, he made such a compelling case that my mother’s firm recommended the city expand his budget, and somewhere along the way, he and my mother struck up a flirtation.

They were an unlikely couple from the outset. Armed with an MBA, my mother had come to New York brimming with ambition. As the only female in her division, she was determined to both play the game and beat the odds, and she approached the early years of her career as if she were storming a fortress. Along the way, she had a tumultuous relationship with a fellow consultant who was not her boss but not her professional equal. A pinstriped yuppie, he found unending ways to remind her of his relative superiority. Sexism was so rampant in her workplace that she took it for granted, and when she met my father, she was jolted by his sense of egalitarianism. As she put it, “He wasn’t trying to be a hotshot”—and she liked that about him. Much later, she would come to wish he were more financially ambitious, but at first, she was comforted by what seemed to be his innate sense of integrity and balance.

For his part, my father was taken by my mother’s moxie and curiosity. Known to his colleagues as the “water whisperer,” he could troubleshoot anything from a faltering dam to inadequate storm-surge systems. His work could be dry, but Tish absorbed it with interest, asked creative questions, assessed the challenges that faced his department, and then gave what amounted to a meticulously researched and fair recommendation. He was as impressed as he was smitten.

They began dating, and soon after, my father sold his first patent. Their lives appeared to be opening up, and within a year, they married. It was the late eighties—my mother was energetic and irreverent; my father was warm and witty. Her hair was permed; his khakis were pleated. As newlyweds, they settled on the Upper West Side, not far from where my father had grown up in Morningside Heights, but a considerable distance from the small Midwestern town that my mother had left behind. For a few years, they tore around the city like it was their own personal playground. But my father’s favorite thing was to take her up to his camp in the Adirondacks, where he taught her how to paddle a canoe, scale a fish, and identify the Big Dipper and Orion’s Belt. It wasn’t her comfort zone, but at first, she did her best to summon enthusiasm for the deep-woods life that he loved so much. She considered the camp a quirky addendum to their real life in the city.

A few years later, Nina was born. My father loved parenthood right away; my mother was more ambivalent. Her maternity leave made her feel claustrophobic, and when she finally returned to work, she found that her position had been downsized and her path to promotion all but blocked. Outraged, she left the firm and resolved to find a new job, but doing so with an infant proved harder than she thought. A year passed, then another. She promised herself she would return to work when the time was right, and in the meantime, she tried to embrace her role as a stay-at-home mother.

In the following years, my father sold a few more patents, and my mother was heartened by their expanding financial horizon. Six years after Nina was born, I came along, and a few years after that, my father secured a licensing deal for his latest invention: the nanofiltration membrane. At this point, my mother suggested moving into a bigger home—a townhouse, at last. But my father thought our original apartment was adequate, and he preferred to put any extra capital into the maintenance of the camp. He hoped to retire early from his job with the city, explaining that they could live off his patents, as long as they lived within their means.

“What more do we need?” was my father’s outlook.

“Where do I begin?” was my mother’s.

When it came to material wealth, my father had already achieved what he thought necessary; my mother was just getting started. But more importantly, my mother was perpetually frustrated by her own unrealized earning power. My father was happy to provide for her, but she had never wanted to be reliant on him financially. She still clung to the idea that she would restart her career; she resented that my father seemed to have forgotten she ever had one.

When I was seven, my father retired early in order to spend more time at the camp and more time with us. That same year, my mother finally landed a job that would put her squarely back on the corporate path she had abandoned a decade earlier. As my father’s career wound down, my mother’s ramped up. He wanted to spend more time in the Adirondacks; she wanted to spend less. He wanted to give his daughters large swaths of unstructured time in the woods; my mother wanted to give us the resources she believed would lead to conventional success (good schools, high-paying jobs). It wasn’t long before my mother’s income far exceeded what my father’s had ever been. As the financial power balance shifted, their divergent values came to the fore, and cracks began to form. At first, they were determined to make it work, despite their conflicting priorities. Summer remained my father’s domain. We spent the whole season at Catwood Pond, with my mother visiting for just one week each August before returning to work in the city. Conversely, during the schoolyear, my mother called the shots and set the schedule. This divide-and-conquer approach worked well enough, but eventually, it was clear that it wasn’t just a parenting strategy. My parents were leading separate lives. The unraveling of their marriage happened over time, as it often does, until the winter I was sixteen, when the tenuous thread binding them together finally snapped.