It slips, now—I know it slips.

There are men in my parlor, in uniforms, crisp navy, badged. Police. Beyond them Eveline wavers in a yellow nightgown, hands clasped to her chest, eyes wide and worried—no, no, she doesn’t, she’s not here, I’m dreaming her, I’m dreaming. Where is Eveline? Why are these men in my parlor?

There is a tall one and a short one. Both of them have neat dark haircuts. The short one wears glasses and fiddles with a pen in his lap. They look at me with a blend of sympathy and wariness. Eveline. Her dreamed ghost returns, hallucinogenic and too-bright. She isn’t there. Not now, anyways.

“Where is Eveline?” I ask, tentatively.

“Why don’t you show us?” the tall one suggests.

Eveline yellow-dressed golden-hair. Eveline. She came to me four years ago. I think it was four years. Maybe five. No, no. Seven. Time passes so strangely now, after so long, the world drip-dropped now like honey, sticky and swimming. I was a different woman once. So bright and sharp. Now I have the dreaming sickness, a cruel twist of modern medicine, time coming unglued, the price we pay for longevity. If you can pay for all the treatment, you all end up like me in the end. Not the old kind of dementia, where you abandon pieces of yourself to time, no, we’ve cured that—this kind is new, I abandon nothing, all of it just as sharp and kept as ever within the cage of my mind. The dreaming sickness takes away its relevance, its place. I am, as Vonnegut said, unstuck in time.

I am two hundred and seventy-nine years old. Past and present move ever through me. Not everyone ends up like me; many die younger, reaching the end of their pocketbooks to pay for treatment or their ability to stomach the side effects. And yet there are others like me, many others. It’s a strange thing, the progression of science—we cure one thing, extend the lifespan, and discover a new illness we previously never had the time to reach, cure that, discover another, over and over. Today, medicine is extraordinarily adept at keeping people alive. It is less adept at keeping them in the present.

An affliction uniquely of this new and incredible age. 

Eveline. Yellow-dressed golden-hair. She came to me so beautiful. She was assigned my case by the agency I hired, years ago, knowing I would someday become this, would no longer be able to piece myself together. They provide for me, send Eveline, send people to garden the grounds and make repairs—near-wordless strangers in boots and t-shirts, polite and distant and insubstantial—send food when I forget whether mealtimes are past are present, send medical assistance when needed, keep me alive despite my entire body flailing forever to die. 

Eveline yellow-dressed golden-hair. Eveline. Eveline. Where is Eveline?

I married Henry on a summer rainshower day. Luck, he told me, to have rain on your wedding day. He called it the devil beating his wife. I thought that was a macabre way to put it, and I told him so. He laughed and he kissed me.

He wasn’t what you’d call handsome, or even charismatic, but he was mine. He brought me red wine, chocolate, adulation, dancing. We lived in a yellow house with a blue-tiled kitchen. Around us was a great yellow field, scattered with wildflowers that punched stubbornly through the dirt even in the very driest of California fire years. He was no great intellect or artistic mind. He worked with his hands, great rough hands with callouses and ever-bruised nailbeds. He drove a red truck with tires with worn-down rubber treads and one day he would leave me alone with the children after careening off the edge of a road in a rainstorm when those tires slipped and let him slide-punch through the metal railing. After they brought his corpse to the morgue the red truck was lifted from the ravine looking more sculpture than vehicle, a mangled tangle of metal, and in it I could still see blood, rust-red against rust-red, and I screamed so violent I felt I would never emerge from the noise.

The children—

Two blonde little will-o-the-wisps, blue eyed, a boy and a girl, little shadows in the high grass and wildflowers. The whole sky bursting a sunset so yellow you could die—

“Show you?” I asked, blinking confusedly at the policemen in my parlor. “I don’t know where she is. I don’t know.”

Her hallucinated ghost moves closer to the sofa, mouths fluorescent words, screams silently for my attention. 

“Okay, well,” the tall one replies measuredly, “show me where you last saw her, then.” 

This I feel I can do. I rise from the sofa, awed as ever by the smooth flow of my joints and muscles, even after all this time. It’s strange, so strange, living like this. When I was a child, before the medical revolution, we died at a hundred at best, and when we went, we were a shattered wreck of ourselves. But since then, there has been cure and cure and cure again. Arthritis, heart disease, osteoporosis, all of it. And all the plastic surgery, to boot—injections, poking, prodding, knives—to keep you preserved in amber, everything but our minds. In the tall glass of the living room window, I see my reflection. I am awed as always that I look no older than my mother was when she died at fifty-three. Awed and immensely lucky. I suppose. I suppose I am lucky.

“Where is Eveline?” I ask weakly. “She was just right here. Or no. I see her. She’s right here right now.”

“Show us where you last saw her,” the tall one says again. “Please.”

The short one rises from the sofa, his eyes just below the line of my gaze. I turn towards him and see the flickered echo of my husband, his wide capable hands, the blood on metal. I do not know where Eveline is or was and I feel a bit silly for thinking for a moment that I could try. I see a thousand versions of her, a thousand echoed flickers. Eveline at the window, silhouetted in salmon sunset. Eveline in the pool, submerged and blurry. Eveline sleeping in the late-afternoon sunlight. Eveline.

“I don’t know,” I mutter. “I knew once. I don’t know.”

“Do your best,” the tall one prods gently, also rising, but behind the gentleness is an order, and I will try, I have to, I am somehow far past the point of choosing. His gaze is above mine, but he looks down to meet my eyes, as certain as fire in summer.

Eveline came to me so beautiful, and it was raining.

I live so high above the city now. I live in a glass house designed by an architect long-dead. Beyond the windows Los Angeles glitters lovely through the thick brown sheet of smog that hovers over the city like a blanket. She arrived in a yellow dress carrying a badge from the agency, a nervous fidget in the way she stood, the way she couldn’t stand still.

“Marie?” she asked—asks—will ask.

“Yes,”

“I’m from the agency,” she said, is saying. “I’m here to be your home aide. I’ll be here as often as I deem it necessary, to help you. I may spend overnights sometimes. Is that alright?”

“Do I need you now?”

“The last few well checks raised some concerns. With food intake, hygiene, that sort of thing.”

“Oh.”

“I’m here to be a friend, mostly. You’re capable of self-care. People with your condition generally just need a little reminding. And you don’t do well with stims or AI-holos or all that, they’re a little divorced from context and time. And too impersonal, anyway. We’ve found that a human touch works better.”

“A friend.”

“Yes, Marie.”

“Did they tell me you were coming?”

“Well, they should have.”

“I may not remember. Or actually, I probably do, but it’s all out of order. It’ll come to me, I’m sure. You know.”

“That’s quite alright. I understand.”

It is was will be has always been raining. Summer rain, the kind we started getting a few decades ago, the torrential kind that sends floods down the avenues. It washes over the smog basin like a blessing. Whenever it clears—weeks days months—the sky will be bright and brilliant blue. For a while, at least, until the smog cleared again. Clears again. Will clear again. Eveline sat sits will sit in the rain on my doorstep drenched even beneath her blue raincoat, blinking rapidly to keep the water out of her eyes. It took me too long to realize I should take pity, invite her across the doorstep. Vacantly, I did.

In the foyer, Eveline removed her raincoat and hung it to drip on a hook near the door. Beneath it, her yellow dress was dry and bright, save the bottom hem that hadn’t been covered by her raincoat. She slipped off her wet practical loafers and moved towards the living room, the high glass windows shielding us both from the rain and beyond that the lambent blurred glow of Los Angeles down in its low long cat stretch.

“You have a beautiful home,” she said.

“Thank you.”

“How long have you lived here?”

“I’m not sure.”

“Oh. I’m sorry, that was the wrong question to ask.”

“It’s quite alright.” I hesitated, focusing my mind as best I could. “Maybe a hundred years now. Give or take.”

My daughter sits in my living room and she is old.

This is before Eveline, long before. It isn’t raining now. The Los Angeles sky is low and brown, the smog-clouds a heavy summer sweat. She sits on the sofa with her hands gnarled with wrinkles, the bags beneath her eyes sagging, her hair a pale washed blue. She doesn’t meet my eyes. I ache with premature grief. My son is long-dead, taken by a self-inflicted gunshot wound. My daughter has taken a more natural path, but she had the option to live longer than she will, I have the money to give her that option—she is taking a longer, slower suicide.

Don’t leave me alone like this, I’d begged. Please, just a little longer—

But she didn’t listen. And now she is dying, even now the cancer spreading through her like the spores of a fungus. She will take no more treatment. She is here to say goodbye. She knows I won’t be able to bear to go to the hospital to watch her go.

“You’ll be alright, won’t you?” she asks quietly, staring out at the brown city, the speckled wilting palm trees and the broad stretches of concrete. “You won’t let them take too much advantage of you?”

I shake my head. “No,” I say. “I promise.”

She’s never understood. She thinks I am being used by volunteering for these medical trials, subjecting myself to every doctor’s knife and needle. She doesn’t understand it is the only way I’ve known how to be since Henry died—take every medical chance, extend my life again and again, take the settlement money when they give me a tremor or cancer or infected wound, live and buy more non-trial medical treatments off the proceeds, proceed. It hasn’t always been easy. I was blind for a while, and twice I was given a treatment so painful and botched it left me bedridden for a year. And yet I am happy as their guinea pig. I am haunted by the memory of that truck, red blood on red paint. I am always running from it. I will not die. I will not die.

She was such a beautiful little girl. Even now I can see her echo. Blonde hair and ribbons, laughter in the grass, even after her father died. In some ways my children escaped the worst of it. She and her brother were so young, too young to remember all of it. Like me, now, the image of their own history was fragmented.

Me they remember, remembered. Me, in my agony. In my neglect. In my nest of blankets on the bed, hair unwashed, eyes crusted with tears. In my desire, for a while, to die, before deciding that Henry would have wanted me to live at all costs.

I will not die.

She sits on my sofa and I feel from her the inexorable pull of grief. Not my grief—hers. I’m not sure whether she’s mourning her own death, or mourning what my life has become. Either way, I am shattered. Either way, I love her.

“I love you,” I tell her. She turns towards me, meets my eyes at last. She has Henry’s eyes, even in her old age. She smiles.

“I love you too,” she says. “Take care of yourself. No one else will.”

Eveline settles herself in quickly, and her presence is balm on a hot wound.

She wears yellow like it’s a religion, or a requirement, and for a while I wonder if it’s some arbitrary directive given by the agency, something about how certain colors are proven to have positive impacts on the elderly, or something. After a while I decide it isn’t important, and stop wondering.

She settles herself into the guest bedroom at the end of the hall. True to her word, she is more friend than nurse, only rarely providing medical services and more often providing the services of a maid. One of the first things she does is clean the house top to bottom. It isn’t as if I was messy, or hoarding, but she purges the house of dust and clutter I hadn’t even known was there. I have so many things, remnants of other lives I’ve lived. Empty picture frames, once filled with the photographs of old lovers. Shoes too small for me—one of the treatments I’ve taken bumped me up, a few years ago, to a larger size. An obsolete early-model stim, long-forgotten, which I used for a spell ninety years ago to show me the ocean when I was bed-bound and sinking in despair. She takes all of it and bags it and brings it to the curb, and after that is done the world feels brighter, lovelier, lighter.

Besides the cleaning she makes sure I wake up at a reasonable time, that I shower regularly, and that I eat meals that are well-balanced and suitable. Before she came my eating was chaotic, alternating between produce I always let sit on the counter for slightly too long, until it went soft and almost-rotten, and preservative-heavy packaged foods. All of it delivered, of course, since I no longer leave the house.

Now she cooks for me, casseroles and roasts and puddings and skillets and sheet-pans. She serves me like a waitress at my kitchen table by the window, and then she sits down and eats with me, and she asks me questions, and I answer them as best I can.

I tell her about the long grass and the wildflowers. I tell her about my children. I tell her about being blind, the fear that comes with being so suddenly in the dark. I tell her about the agony. I tell her about Henry. I tell her about loss. I tell her about the long hours in this house, my mind falling to pieces, the past and present coming together like melting crayons. I tell her about books I’ve read. I tell her about love. I tell her, I tell her, I tell her.

And I am less lonely.

So when her mask of professionalism begins to slip, when she begins to take long dips in the pool—her body slick and youthful in a yellow bikini, her eyes closed and sleeping on a floating raft—when she begins to wear my clothes, when she begins to—only sometimes—wear my diamonds, I close my eyes to it, I pretend I am elsewhere, I let myself leave the current moment and drift aimlessly through history.

In short, I ignore it.

After a while there is no escaping the fact that living this long leaves you alone. Everyone begins to look young to you, even the ones who look older on the surface. You watch your daughter and a thousand others die as shriveled wrecks of themselves and you become violently aware of how much longer you have lived than those around you, how little they have seen, how much history you hold.

I lead the policemen down the hallway towards my bedroom. Eveline dances ghostly in front of me, shimmering between the light of afternoon, morning, night. She wears yellow. She does not turn around to look at me. I think she is here.

Everything was fine until Eveline began to vanish.

I am not sure how long she was with me before it began to fall apart. It could have been months, or years, or even decades. Time, of course, was a malleable concept to me. All I really know is that everything was lovely until it wasn’t.

The first few times, she wasn’t gone very long. A day or two at most, and she’d warn me beforehand, even if her warning was difficult for me to remember consistently. She’d tell me in gentle tones, and she’d leave me notes on the kitchen counter for me to look at in case I forgot. And then she began to stop leaving the notes, and then she stopped telling me she was leaving, and then she began disappearing for days and days and days at a time. When she came back she’d smell of cigarette smoke and her eyes were twitchy, faint, distracted.

And yet I tolerated it.

It made me feel lost, of course, unmoored. I’d grown used to her consistency and depended on it now, so when it was yanked away from me it left me in worse straits than I’d begun with. Instead of eating poorly, I didn’t eat at all. I slept during the twilight hours only, or in the afternoon, or between the hours of two to eleven in the morning. Time became even more abstract of a concept. I missed doctor’s appointments and didn’t bathe. I swam deeply in the water of memory.

It wasn’t sustainable, but it might have gone on for a good deal longer had she not come back drunk.

It was late at night and it was raining again. Her face was keyed to the front door lock, now, so she let herself in. I was sitting in the living room when I heard it, the smash-bang of the front door coming open and slamming against the wall, then muffled cursing, and the stumble of her wobbled footsteps across the threshold. I stood and turned towards her. She was wearing a short yellow dress, shorter than I’d ever seen her wear, and her hair was wild and lion-like, and her eyes did not seem like her own.

“Eveline? Are you okay?”

“Am I—am I—” she paused, laughed a short, barking laugh. “I’m okay. Are you okay?”

Am I okay? No, not particularly. I looked back at her feeling glazed, distant. History intruded. careening off the edge of a road in a rainstorm when those tires slipped and let him slide-punch through the metal railing

“You’re drunk,” I said.

“Maybe,” she slurred.

“I’ll get you some water.”

I went to the kitchen and drew her a glass from the sink. When I returned she had slid to the floor near the door, her legs akimbo and her hair dripping. She had no raincoat this time. 

“What happened?”

“I’m drunk. I got drunk. For fun.”

There was a little snarl in her voice, something unpleasant and new. I handed her the water; her hands wobbled as she took it. I withdrew from her, crouched at a slight remove on the balls of my feet. My hair was slick and greasy, my nails too-long. I wondered how long she’d been gone this time. I wasn’t quite sure. She was wearing emerald earrings that had once been my mother’s.

more sculpture than vehicle, a mangled tangle of metal

“Do you need food?” I asked. “I can get you some.”

She shook her head limply. “No. It’ll make me sick.”

“Okay.”

The rain lashed violent, so violent, at the windows. I looked out at the weather and when I looked back at Eveline the glass of water had sunk into her lap and tilted sideways, spilling across her legs and my front hallway. I plucked it from her hands and set it upright on the floor next to her.

“Come on. I’ll help you get to your room.”

“Oh, stop it. I’ll be fine. I’m fine. I will be. I’ll get there on my own.”

“You’re not fine.”

“I am.” She shook her head. “I promise.”

“You’re not—”

“Oh, come off it, will you,” she snaps, each word furred with liquor. “I’m fine. I’m fine-r than you. I probably won’t remember all of this tomorrow but at least that’s not my whole fucking life, going in loops—loop-de-loops—at least I’m not—” she hiccupped. “At least I’m not some sad fucking old lady in a pretty house on a hill all by herself cause her family killed themselves—sorry—” Her head bobbed forward into her lap. “Sorry. Sorry. I didn’t mean it.”

A cold misery began to spread in my chest.

“Fuck you,” I said softly. “He didn’t kill himself. He wanted to live.”

Henry, my Henry. A great tall man in an old truck, so worshipful and sad-eyed and wonderful. I loved him, I loved him. He was going too fast in that storm. He took that turn too reckless. He was not a reckless man. He was measured, careful, risk-averse. I didn’t even know why he was out in that storm. I didn’t know. I must have at some point told that to Eveline. I must have at one point brought my wonderings to voice. I hadn’t meant to. I didn’t know when.

“Don’t lie, it’s a bad habit,” she replied, and her voice was venom, and I was afraid of her, and I loved her just the same.

I took her to bed, tucked her in, and left her there. Time passed with the careless stretch-and-condense of an accordion, and suddenly it was night again, and I was alone. I wasn’t sure if it was hours later or days, but it was no longer raining. The house echoed cavernous. I was drinking whiskey in my living room, staring out at the glitter of the world.

I wasn’t much of a drinker. Never had been. But Henry and I used to drink, sometimes, in the kitchen after the kids went to sleep, drink and dance and sometimes even sing softly, and in those days, I imagined a brighter world than the one I’d ended up with. My mind blurred a little unpleasantly now, the walls swimming. I hummed loosely, and I couldn’t name the tune.

I told the house, quietly, to call the agency. It did.

“Hawthorne Home Agency,” a crisp voice on the other end answered, words bleary through the nearest speakers and the whiskey moving thickly in my blood. “How may we help you?”

“My name is Marie,” I said.

“Yes, Marie, hello. How may we be of assistance?”

“The home aide you sent. I’m sorry, but I’ll need you to send a different one.”

“Excuse me.”

“We aren’t getting along, me and her.”

“Did you say home aide?”

“Yes. Why?”

“Is she there right now?”

“I—ah, I’m not sure. Maybe. Probably. Sometimes.”

“How long has she been coming to see you?”

“Shouldn’t you know that?”

“I, ah. Well. Yes. Excuse me a moment.”

There was the sudden hum of hold music. I suppose I should have felt some alarm at this point, but I didn’t. I don’t. I will not. I was am will be alone in my living room. I stare at the city, and I drink. I imagine Henry’s arms around me. I couldn’t save him. No matter how much I love him, I will never be able to. The center cannot hold.

The rain falls, and it doesn’t fall. My children live, and they die, and they live again. I spiral helplessly through time, forever at its cruel mercy, unable to let go of it, unable to die.

The hold music ends and the voice returns. “Marie, the agency never sent a home aide. She’s an impostor. We’ve called the police, and they’re on their way. They’ll be there soon. Stay safe, okay? It’ll all be fine.”

It’ll all be fine. If I live it enough times, it’ll all be fine. There will be another ending. It’ll all be fine. At the end of the hall, I feel a pair of dark eyes watching me, but I cannot say for sure if she is there.

I lead the policemen into Eveline’s bedroom. Inside, the bed is made and the closet is open and empty. It is as if Eveline never existed. My head swims with drink. Eveline’s shadow hovers over my shoulder, dripping wet, in yellow.

The only sign of life is a pair of small emerald earrings on the bedside table, and the fact that the sliding glass door stands open. A soft wind blows inwards, puffing the curtains up ghostlike. Eveline was here, I know she was. She is gone. Has always been gone. Will be.

“She was here for a long time,” I say. “More or less.”

© 2024 Katherine Ewell