Seldom If Ever

The girl has started meditating. Every morning between nine-thirty and ten she comes to the big window, folds herself down, takes three shallow breaths, and reluctantly begins relaxing. Judith watches her like the morning news. 

Catching her is easy because Judith is always up earlier than the girl. At New Haven the nurses wake the residents up at extreme hours, parting phlegm-coloured curtains and shredding sunlight into wrinkling eyes. This wake-up call was a mandate put in place a few months ago by the new Head Nurse. Gotta get ‘em up early, often preaches the Head Nurse—Carol? Judith never bothered to learn her name. Gotta keep ‘em fresh.

And fresh they stay. Breakfast in the dining hall is rife with complaints, low and constant like cicadas. Judith stays silent. Secretly, she really doesn’t mind it. She certainly doesn’t mind it more than how she used to wake up, back in the old house with that screeching digital clock, the one her husband Terry bought because by that time he was nearly deaf and could be roused only by its shrill alarm, the one that stayed perpetually on her side of the bed because that was where the outlets were and thus she was tasked every morning with turning it off, lest Terry roll over and trample her, still half-asleep as he pawed blindly for the snooze button. Yes, Judith often thinks now when she wakes, opening her eyes to pure, silent white. In many ways, this is preferable.

It was one of these early mornings that Judith first saw the girl. Actually, Rhea saw her first. Rhea is Judith’s favourite nurse. Rhea talks to Judith like she’s an adult, not an old person. Rhea laughs loudly at her own jokes so Judith never feels pressured to. Rhea wears thick purple glasses and scrubs patterned with alarmingly colourful cartoon characters and enjoys explaining the context and function of said characters to Judith. 

They’re minions, she’ll say. No, minions. From a movie. They’re evil. My kids love them. Oh, lemme show you what I saw on Facebook the other day.

And then she’ll show Judith some picture on her phone, one of these fat yellow pills with some incoherent text beside it, and Judith will shrivel inside, feeling so inevitably and predictably old. She is old, after all. She’s elderly; the new world confounds and evades her. Judith knows this is supposed to be horrific, but mostly it just feels like a relief. Judith never really got things when she was younger, either. She was never into the same bands as her friends, never got the hype. At least now people seem to expect a certain level of ignorance from her. 

Oh, Judith, Rhea will sigh, laughing, tucking her phone away. People say that a lot nowadays, to and around her: Oh, Judith. Even her own name sounds different.

The morning of the girl, Rhea woke Judith up with a soft, pleasant sound then went to open the curtains. Sunlight shocked the popcorn ceiling, and Rhea suddenly exclaimed Woah! Judith heaved herself from the bed and joined her. In the adjacent apartment building, through the window that faced Judith’s room, was a girl. She was young and alone. She was surrounded by cardboard boxes. She was wearing a big black T-shirt and nothing else. 

You forgot your pants, chica! Rhea said, giggling, as she turned to make Judith’s bed. But Judith remained at the window. The girl seemed so small all alone in that big apartment, boxes towering around her like city skylines. She just stood there, looking at the ground, one hand on her hip and (it seemed to Judith) not knowing where to begin. Judith felt a cautious excitement. At New Haven, rooms with a view of grass cost extra, so for two years Judith had been stuck with an underwhelming landscape of brick and glass, an empty apartment. But here, now, was something to look at. Something to see. 

The first morning was unremarkable. The girl just stood there a long time, unmoving, one hand to her mouth. After watching her for a moment, Judith turned and dressed and went down to breakfast like usual. 

Judith eats breakfast every morning with Cathy. Cathy is Judith’s best and only friend at New Haven. Cathy rarely speaks but when she does it’s to compliment Judith. Cathy used to be an acting agent and sometimes still thinks she is. You’ve got a good thing going for you, Judith, Cathy says at least once a week, gesturing vaguely to Judith’s body and face. Nice blond-hair, blue-eye thing going. Audiences really take to that. 

When Judith first arrived at New Haven, they flocked to her. The women. So many of them, all Judith’s age or older, so talkative, so interested in Judith’s life. Did she have family? A husband? Dead? Sad. A daughter? Katie? Would she be coming to visit? When? This Friday, maybe? Would they get to meet her this Friday? 

Judith tried, but she didn’t last more than a week. She became distant, then quiet, then silent. The women cooled. The women got bored. The women began thinking that she was one of those ones. Ones like Cathy—not all there. That’s what they would say, honest to God. Poor thing, she’s not all there. Judith was all there, but she didn’t correct them. 

The men were worse. Often, Judith must shoo a man away from Cathy’s chair at breakfast. Sometimes she receives folded notes at her door that she throws away unopened. Once, a young nurse named Bethany approached Judith and informed her that Charles, a vet in a wheelchair, would like to ask her on a date. Bethany did this with Charles hovering a mere few feet behind her, hiding, almost, like a child peeking out from behind his mother’s legs. Judith felt laughter bubble up—it was like being six again and having playdates arranged for you—but she hid it and politely declined, first to Bethany, then, louder, over Bethany’s shoulder, to Charles. It was all so absurd. Not only had Judith lost any interest in romance after Terry’s death, she also just found it so exhausting. All of it. The pleasantries, the conversations, the questions. Every day an interview for a job she did not understand nor particularly want. 

It worries Katie, Judith knows. Her apparent lack of friends. But Judith can’t bring herself to care. She long ago realized that she possessed a certain kind of loneliness that could not be solved. And this realization—initially comprehended in her thirties, refortified in her sixties—was a massive relief, and rid Judith of any pressure she felt in her younger years to find a cure. Better to not grieve. Better to accept and just exist. Judith tells herself that she has all she needs, really: she has her room, she has her audiobooks, she has Cathy. And now, in many ways, she has the girl. 

The girl started meditating only days after moving in. It was intriguing, if only because it was not initially clear what she was attempting to do. The visual was recognizable enough: she had her legs crossed, yes, her thumb and forefinger pinched at knees, yes, but—there was something wrong about her face. She looked pained. She'd sit there for a few minutes—spine awkwardly concave, eyes clenched closed, stiff like she was trying to lay an egg—before giving up, shaking herself out, and huffing away into the unseen depths of the apartment. 

But each day, she would go a little longer. Three minutes, five minutes. By then Judith had pulled her armchair into the middle of the room and was watching each morning, charting her progress. The girl’s steadfast commitment to this practice was, Judith thought, admirable. Or perhaps stupid. It was something, at least. It was certainly something. 

After a week, the girl began wearing thick white headphones while she meditated. The difference these headphones made was astounding and immediately visible. The girl softened, like an ice cream cake left on a counter. She lasted longer. Her breathing (Judith imagined) smoothed out. Across the road, Judith would watch and feel a pride that was not hers, did not belong to her, but was there nonetheless. Judith wondered what the girl was listening to through the headphones. Wondered if the girl had ever heard of audiobooks.
‍
It was Rhea who got Judith started on the audiobooks, too. She must have thought Judith was bored, or friendless, or maybe the Head Nurse had something to say about her antisocial tendencies. Either way, one afternoon Rhea knocked on Judith’s door and handed her three things: an audiobook copy of The Lake House by James Patterson, a pair of thick black headphones, and a portable pink CD player. 

It was my daughter’s, Rhea said, not apologetically. It works fine if you hold it a certain way. 

Judith took the machine and turned it over in her hands. It was covered in dust and gemstones and stickers of those fat yellow pills.

Judith was wary—she did not like, initially, how the headphones constricted her head, how they flattened her mostly already flat hair—but as soon as she had settled into her chair and the disc started whirling, the rest of the world dissolved before her eyes, became secondary. Something within her snapped into place. HarperCollins Audio presents…

Judith started by listening to authors from her past—Alice Munro and Iris Murdoch, old stories recolourized by the crisp voices of the narrators. When she exhausted all of those, she tried new stuff: romances and thrillers and sci-fi fluff and political autobiographies, stuff she would have never read before. It was all magic to her. Judith favoured one narrator in particular—Harrison Foster—whose voice was deep and smooth like expensive and intricately patterned wood. One whole week she spent listening to his delicious British cadence, holding his syllables in her mouth like a hard candy she didn’t want to bite down on. Sometimes she liked to imagine Harrison narrating her everyday activities and innermost thoughts. Judith got up from her bed, dreading the trek down to the cafeteria. Judith didn’t typically fancy old films, but she’d make an exception for James Stewart. 

Occasionally, as Judith sits and listens, the girl will come into view again. Judith never listens to her books while the girl meditates, but she enjoys the juxtaposition of watching her do chores against the waterfall of unrelated narration. The girl folding laundry against vivid descriptions of the Hiroshima bombings; the girl mopping the floor to Michelle Obama’s childhood. There is something immensely comforting about being able to witness her in this way, without being witnessed herself.

Since that first morning, Judith has never approached the window for fear of being seen. It is very important, for a reason she cannot quite articulate, that she remains hidden. To reassure herself, Judith tries to imagine what limited view the girl has from her side. Shadows. A slice of undecorated wall. Beige folds of the blinds. Empty windowsill. Well, mostly empty. Empty except for the cat.

The cat was a gift from Katie for Judith’s 84th birthday—the first birthday she spent at New Haven. After stunted conversation and a grainy gluten-free cake, Katie placed a big wrapped box on Judith’s lap, smiling a bit too wide. Judith peeled it slowly. Inside was a realistic fake grey cat from a company called Ageless Innovations. An insultingly cheerful old woman was pictured on the box, marveling at the toy, which sat like roadkill in her lap. BRINGS COMFORT AND COMPANIONSHIP boasted bubble text. The price tag had been half-scratched off but Judith could see it had cost at least a hundred dollars, something she would have protested had she not been so in shock. Katie’s smile faltered slightly.

Look! Katie said, pointing to the grey mop of fake fur. It looks like Thimble! 

It was not lost on Judith that it looked like Thimble—that was the only possible reason Katie could have thought this was a good idea. Thimble, Judith’s cat of 14 years. Thimble, best friend and probably the love of her life. Thimble, deceased. And though Judith had never explicitly blamed her daughter for Thimble’s death, this dry hairball Katie had coughed up was proof that she clearly blamed herself. 

Judith had found Thimble years ago in a cardboard box beside the road while driving back from her sister’s house in Ottawa. He was alone, sopping wet and sad-eyed, an abandoned runt. Without thinking Judith claimed him and drove back home with him in her lap. That first night she swaddled Thimble in a microwaved hand towel, cupping him until his shivers slowed and his wet little eyes peeled open. He blinked up at her—it was suddenly so quiet she could hear his eyelids opening and closing again—and then, miraculously, he had licked her outheld finger, gently, just once, and in that moment she felt such a rush of sugary adoration for him that she had to hold her breath in her cheeks, scared that if she let it out she might startle him or make him cold or blow him away like a wish she no longer needed to make. 

As a kitten, Thimble slept pooled in the palm of her hand like water. When he was older, he slept with his head nudged against her shoulder, like a human. He only ever sat in her lap. When he developed intestinal issues, Judith fed him medicine from an eyedropper while he gazed up at her, eyes droopy and trusting.  Friends would gift her things—notebooks, oven mitts, tea towels—that bore illustrations of cats resembling Thimble. When Thimble turned ten, Judith splurged and commissioned a local artist to do a photo-realistic oil portrait of him. Judith knew that Terry and Katie didn’t comprehend her love for Thimble, or they found it amusing, or were maybe jealous of it. But she could never bring herself to care or explain. The purity of her love for him, and his clear, even purer reciprocation of this love, left no question. He was hers. She was his. How could she ever be ashamed of that?

But then Terry’s heart problems. Then Terry’s death. Then the hospital, then the spiral, then home, then hospital again. Then New Haven. Which meant no pets. Which meant Thimble will just come live with us, Mom. Which meant Thimble dying a year later—Katie citing the intestinal issues, Judith not believing her. Which, somehow, meant this uncanny thing sitting in Judith’s lap with fur like cheap carpet and a mechanical body so cold and still and weirdly silent because Judith didn’t have AA batteries and they weren’t included. 

No, Judith thought quietly. It does not look like Thimble.

Katie left, and then it was just Judith and the toy. After staring at it for a while, she pried the batteries from the TV remote and shoved them into the cat’s velcroed underbelly. She sat with it on her lap. She closed her eyes. After a moment, she began to touch its fur. Then she began to stroke. The cat made a small, barely audible noise (was there a way to adjust the volume?) and then, to Judith’s surprise, it began to vibrate, to quiver. To purr. It was purring. It would purr when she stroked it.

Cautiously, Judith lowered her hand once more to the trembling machine. She ran her fingers through its fur. She squinted until it blurred at the edges. She found that in doing this, she could imagine a feeling that was so much like comfort, so vividly similar, that imagining the feeling was almost the same as feeling it. 

She brought the cat to bed. She propped him up next to her on the pillow, with his head nudged against hers, and went to sleep. 

That night, she dreamt of Thimble.

She dreamt she was in a high-rise apartment so tall she couldn’t see any buildings when she looked out, only clouds. One of the windows was huge and wide open. She dreamt that Thimble kept running towards the window and jumping out of it while she tried and failed to capture him. Every time he jumped he reappeared at her side, but this did nothing to lessen her anxiety when he inevitably jumped again, slipping through her fingers endlessly.

When she awoke, breath-caught and sweaty, she was staring directly into the glassy, dead eyes of the toy cat. It was still and cold and awake and so brutally and undeniably inanimate. All at once, Judith felt a great energetic rage towards this toy, this toy which was, at that moment, nothing more than a gross imposter, a sickening and offensive imitation of Thimble. In her sleep-soaked state her anger grew, blossoming, bleeding through reason, indiscriminate. This, this is what they offer her? This flimsy piece of foreign manufacturing? In exchange for a house and a best friend and freedom they offer her this, expecting her to be so listless, so apathetic, so decrepit and desperate that she won’t even care—no, won’t even be able to tell—that it isn’t real? Well, screw that. Judith blazed from her bed, grabbing the toy by its ear and lobbing it against the window where it landed on the sill, its glass eyes reflecting more glass. Judith left it there, and has not touched it since.

She understands the implications, of course. What the girl must think of the unseen crazy cat lady across the road. She’s considered simply removing the cat from the sill and throwing it away—or giving it to Cathy, who would adore it—but something always holds her back. Fear, perhaps. Or laziness. Either way, whenever Judith catches the cat out of the corner of her eye, she feels a fragmented jolt of rage, a stale slice of the emotion that had gripped her that night. It makes her smile. Perhaps this is why she doesn’t remove the cat: that minuscule fury. The most exciting part of her days.

It’s months now that the girl has been meditating. She’s up to nearly 20 minutes; Judith knows this without counting. She can also predict when the girl will open her eyes. The last few days, Judith will be watching, then out of nowhere she’ll think: now. And within seconds the girl’s eyes will open and she’ll return to the world, stretching, peeling off a sweater. She’s been wearing flowy pastel clothes recently. Very proper. Judith is glad for her modesty. Good girl, Judith thinks. Good to be smart. There could be creeps watching. 

Judith remembers telling Katie this, when Katie moved out. To be careful, to always have her blinds drawn. Katie never listened though. She did not often listen to Judith, or seemed to only do the opposite of what Judith said. Not out of spite; Katie genuinely appeared to be biologically hardwired to want the opposite of what Judith wanted. The sleeping, for example. As a baby, Katie had been a horrible sleeper. Judith would sit for hours rocking her, mumbling low church hymns and syllables of songs snatched from the radio. Nothing helped. Katie was always wired; Judith was always near-catatonic. Even blinking could trick Judith into sleep back then, so she counted how long her eyes could be closed: One, two, three, open. One, two, three, open. 

And then, even after Katie fell asleep, there would be the ordeal of getting herself away, of creeping out of the room, inching the door closed, laying her head against the wood. That vivid moment of waiting, vaguely praying please please please please please. Sometimes Katie would stay asleep. Other times a screech would tear open like a wound from the other side of the door and Judith would internally collapse and want to cry, then want to die, if only for its uncanny resemblance to sleep, then pull herself together and sniff, and then re-enter the dark room that was allegedly motherhood.

But then again—how could she forget?—there were moments, weren’t there? Moments where Judith swore she was doing it right. Sometimes Judith would hold Katie and find that their breathing was perfectly synchronized. Sometimes, in the night, Judith would blink herself awake mere seconds before Katie started crying from the other room. Judith felt—Judith knew—in these moments that she was a good mother. A really good, really real mother. Even if otherwise, it seemed impossible to convince herself, or Katie, of this fact. Of this flickering truth, as elusive and undeniable as a bird taking off into the air.

It had happened yesterday. No one had told Judith. No one thought to. Judith had gone down to breakfast like usual and waited for Cathy, but Cathy had not come. Judith went up to the Head Nurse at her desk in the lobby. When the Head Nurse saw Judith her face crumpled like the fake cotton serviettes they gave them at dinner. She folded her hands on her breast, slouched her shoulders down, down, down. Oh, Judith, she said.

They had taken Cathy’s body out during the night to not alarm the other residents. Judith found this covert operation very disturbing, but she didn’t say that. She didn’t say anything. Instead she just stared at the Head Nurse’s cracking foundation and tried to remember the last thing Cathy had said to her, but couldn’t. She couldn’t remember. She stayed silent for a long while, long after the Head Nurse had stopped talking. Then she’d simply turned and gone back upstairs. To her room. To her chair. To watch the girl meditating.

Outside, now, a bird outside her window. Outside both their windows. The bird is black but the sun is so bright today that it glints gold, fire-bright. Momentarily it distracts her, but Judith does not take her eyes off the girl. She’s been doing so well today. What has it been now? 15 minutes? 17? Judith feels the countdown like her own heartbeat. The girl seems so far away, so indistinct. If Judith could see better, her count could be more accurate. But it is so bright outside today. So bright it is hard to see anything at all, from this distance. 

Slowly, Judith walks to the window. She doesn’t bother with her walker so she stumbles the last few steps, catching herself on the sill. Her breath yanks itself from her lungs in a thrilling way. Judith feels momentarily fearful—or rather, feels her body make room for fear, but fear does not arrive. Instead it is just her, at the window. Her and the girl. The girl, now so bright and clear, breathing deeply. Judith shuts her eyes and breathes along with her. One, two, three, out. One, two, three, out. 

When she opens her eyes, Judith is no longer looking through the window but at it, at the mirror-crisp reflection of everything behind her. There is her room. Her faded chair. Her hospital-neat bed. And there she is—or rather, there is the thing people now call Judith, Oh Judith, staring back at her. Wrinkles in her brow that she cannot uncrease. Lips she can no longer lick moist. Her knuckles, paper-white on the sill. She is alone. But—no. She’s not. Beside her is the cat. He is still here. He has not moved. His eyes two perfect absences, his body auraed by dust, his fur sun-bleached to feeble white. The two of them there. The two of them, returning their eyes to the girl. 

She really has gotten so good. Her brow is unfurrowed. Her posture is perfect. Her hands open towards the sky. Beneath her, Judith sees that the girl has even gotten a yoga mat, light pink. And even after she’s finished meditating, even when she’s gone, she’ll leave it there at the base of the window, unfurled, like a welcome mat.