The Roommate's Mother Was Never Sick

The knock pounded at 9:14 in the morning, and I sensed trouble immediately, because nobody hammers on a fresh dorm room door like that unless they need something heavy taken off their shoulders. I was balanced on my mattress in my socks, stretching to pin a string of warm fairy lights across the curtain rod, my shoulders already burning with cramps. My mother had dropped me off barely two hours earlier, squeezing me tighter than she had since Nana passed away, repeatedly telling me to call if anyone caused me grief. I had laughed it off then. Now I was silently cursing myself for not begging her to stay through lunch. Mackenzie got the door. She was the only one of us who had already unpacked her entire life, and she looked like she belonged on a catalog cover, all coordinated pillows and a white noise machine humming on her nightstand. When she pulled the door open, her face did the thing where it stayed polite but the light behind her eyes went out. "Hi," said the girl in the hallway. She was small and bright-eyed and wore a cropped cardigan over a dress that probably cost more than my laptop. Her hair was curled. Her nails were done. She had the kind of soft, open face that made you want to trust her instantly, and I remember thinking, before any of it happened, that she looked like a girl who had never been told no. "I'm Cate," she said. "Cate Landry. I'm sorry to show up so early, but I brought my mother, and we need help." That was when I noticed the woman behind her. She was in a wheelchair, slumped slightly to one side, a thin blanket over her knees even though it was eighty-one degrees outside. Her eyes were closed. Her mouth hung open just a little. I climbed down off the bed. Mackenzie stepped back, just a fraction, and her hand found the doorframe like she needed something to hold onto. "Our mom has a degenerative brain condition," Cate said. Her voice cracked on the word mom, and she let it c***k. My chest tightened before I could stop it. "Cerebellar atrophy. She can't be alone. The dorms won't let her stay with me in family housing because we're not married and she's not a dependent, and I can't afford an apartment off campus, and I can't leave her at home because there's nobody there, and I've been trying to figure this out for months and I just..." She stopped. She pressed her knuckles to her mouth. "I'm not asking for a long time," she whispered. "Just until I can get us into assisted living. Two months. Maybe three. I'll do everything. I'll take care of her. You won't even know she's here." The third roommate, Priya, came out of the bathroom with a towel wrapped around her hair. She looked at the woman in the wheelchair, then at Cate, and then at me. The silence stretched. Here is the thing they don't tell you about being nineteen: you still believe that being kind is free. You do not yet know that sometimes the most expensive thing you can do is let a stranger in, and that the bill comes due in a currency you haven't learned to recognize yet. Cate looked right at me. Her eyes were wet. "Please," she said, and then she went down on her knees. On the hallway tile. In front of all of us. She put her palms together like she was praying, and the sound her knees made against the floor was small and sharp, and the woman in the wheelchair did not react at all. Mackenzie made a wounded noise. Priya dropped her towel. And I, who had watched my own mother kneel like that once, in a hospital corridor, begging a doctor to please just look at my grandmother again, I said yes before I had time to be smart about it. "Okay," I said. "Okay. Get up. We'll figure it out." It is the easiest lie in the world, we'll figure it out. It means I have no plan but I want you to like me. Cate got up. She hugged me first. She smelled like vanilla. "Thank you," she said into my shoulder. "Thank you thank you thank you." The woman in the wheelchair opened her eyes. Just for a second. Just long enough to look at me. I told myself it was nothing. I told myself her mouth was slack because of the disease. I was wrong about almost everything then. The first week, it was fine. That's the part people never believe, the part where I keep having to say but it was fine, it was actually fine, because if it hadn't been fine I would have said something sooner, and nobody wants to hear that you let something go on for weeks because you were embarrassed to admit you'd been played. Cate was a good roommate. She was louder than I preferred and she left wet towels on the floor, but she also brought us coffees and offered to run to the dining hall when it rained and called me "roomie" in a way that made me feel chosen. Her mother's name was Delia. She didn't speak. Cate said the atrophy had taken her voice six months ago. She spent most of the day in the corner of the room by the window, wrapped in that blanket, and in the evening Cate would roll her down to the lobby and read to her from a paperback with a cracked spine. Priya cried the first time she saw it. Mackenzie bought the woman a small lap blanket with sheep on it. I texted my mother: You would be so proud of me. My mother texted back: I'm always proud of you. Call me if anything feels off. I didn't call. Things started to feel off on a Tuesday. I came back early from my statistics section because I had a migraine and the fluorescent lights were making it worse, and I let myself in quietly so I wouldn't wake Delia, who was asleep in her chair by the window with the blanket up to her chin. I went to my desk to get my medication, and I noticed my drawer was open an inch. Not the drawer with my pens. The bottom drawer, the one where I kept my wallet and my passport and the small velvet box my grandmother left me. The drawer was open an inch and the contents were shifted, and the box was still there, and the wallet was still there, and the cash inside the wallet was not. Eighty dollars. I counted twice. I stood there with the Tylenol bottle in my hand and the afternoon light coming through the window, and I felt the cold, awful certainty of it, and I turned around. Delia was awake. She was looking at me. Not blankly. Not the way she looked at everyone else. She was looking at me the way you look at someone who's just caught you doing something. Then the expression slid off her face like water off glass, and she was slack again, and her eyes drifted shut, and if I hadn't been watching I would have sworn she'd never opened them. I did not say anything. I want to be honest about that. I counted, I knew, and I said nothing. Because it was eighty dollars, and because she was sick, and because if I said something and I was wrong, I would be the girl who accused a dying woman of theft. I would be cruel. I would be the villain of the story, and Cate would look at me with those wet eyes, and I could not stand it. So I put my wallet back and closed the drawer and went to lie down, and I told myself I had miscounted. That evening, Cate made us a playlist and we all danced in the tiny space between the beds, and Delia sat in her chair with her chin on her chest, and Priya laughed so hard she cried, and I thought: this is worth eighty dollars. It was not. It was worth everything I had. The camera was in a phone. I found it on a Friday night in October, three weeks and two days after Cate Landry knelt on our hallway floor and begged. I had showered late because I'd been at the library until it closed, and when I came back to the room wrapped in my towel, the bathroom door still fogged, I reached for my robe on the hook and knocked the phone off the shelf. It wasn't my phone. It wasn't Priya's or Mackenzie's, and I knew that immediately because the case was pink and covered in tiny plastic flowers, and Delia's chair was two feet from the bathroom door. The screen lit up when I picked it up. There was no lock code. There was a photo app open, and the photo app was in the middle of a twenty-two second video, and the video was of me. In the shower. Three weeks and two days of me, and Priya, and Mackenzie, and a bathroom door that had never fully closed, and a woman in a wheelchair who had been parked just outside it every single time. I don't remember dropping the towel. I remember the sound I made. It started low and ended high, like an animal, and it brought Priya running in from the hallway with her key still in her hand. "What." She started, and then she saw the screen, and her face went gray. We didn't scream. That's the part I'm proudest of, and it cost me everything later. We didn't scream and we didn't hit and we didn't do anything the camera could have used. Priya took the phone. I got dressed with my hands shaking so badly I couldn't work the clasp on my bra. Mackenzie came in six minutes later with her laptop and her face already composed, and she played the video on mute, once, and then she closed the laptop with a soft click. Delia was awake. She was watching all three of us from her chair, and there was no doubt in my mind now, none at all. She was not sick. Her eyes were bright and calm and entirely present, and when I looked straight at her, she smiled. A small smile. A little private one. The kind you give someone when you both know something. Cate came back at eleven and we told her. We were calm. I want to put that in writing because of what happened later. We sat her down on her bed and Priya did the talking and I stood by the window with my arms crossed so I wouldn't shake, and we said: Cate, we found a phone with videos. We need you and your mother to leave. Cate cried. Of course she cried. She cried for twenty minutes and begged forgiveness and said her mother must have found the phone and been confused and didn't understand what she was doing, and we said, gently, we know, but she has to go. She said she understood. She said she'd make calls in the morning. She hugged Priya. She hugged Mackenzie. She tried to hug me and I stepped back, and something flickered across her face, quick as a fish turning in dark water. "Of course," she said. "I understand. I'm so sorry. I'll fix this." She didn't fix it. At 6:40 the next morning, I woke up to my phone screaming.