Janine A. Willis
Ice Cubes That Remember Champagne
My mother's brain is a book with pages turning themselves.
Tuesday. She calls. Do I know where she put the Mediterranean? Not the sea—the idea of it. Azure and sun-struck yesterday. Now? Gray space. A parking lot where Santorini used to be, where olive trees once stood, tall and silver-green in the wind.
“Check the junk drawer,” I say, my voice too bright, too helpful.
So long without sound, I think the line went dead. Then: “I already looked there.”
“What about—”
“I looked everywhere.” Her breath catches. “It's just... gone.”
***
Under the Febreze that can’t quite mask it—the smell of panic sweat and lapsed meals. A fish tank burbles in the corner—three goldfish swimming endless circles, their memories reset every seven seconds. Lucky them.
When I visit, her apartment has become an archaeological site. Grocery lists written in languages that don't exist. Shopping for: dream salt, three pounds of Tuesday, batteries for the loneliness—written in purple ink on the back of an electric bill. The refrigerator holds containers labeled with dates from decades that haven't happened yet. In the freezer: ice cubes from her wedding day. Forty-seven years ago.
“Special ice,” she explains. “They remember what champagne tastes like.”
***
Dr. Alexandria spreads MRI films across the lightbox like tarot cards—which is exactly what this is.
The images: my mother's hippocampus, seahorse-shaped and shrinking. A creature that sees two worlds at once, eyes moving independently—one fixed on the present, one drifting toward some distant current.
“Mild cognitive impairment.”
Coordinates for a country—a destination we’d travel together.
***
But forgetting isn't absence. It's presence turned inside out. My mother doesn't lose memories—she transforms them. That summer in California becomes the summer we spent on Mars. Red sand exactly like Red Rock Beach. Two moons hanging low like paper lanterns at the Chinese restaurant in Sausalito.
I want to correct her. Who am I to say Mars isn't real when she's been there?
The forgetting spreads. Days accordion into each other. I find her holding a photograph, turning it like she's trying to solve a puzzle.
“Who are these people?”
“That's you and me.” I sit beside her on the couch, close enough to smell her Ivory soap—the same bar soap from my childhood—distant as a country whose language I’m forgetting.
She studies my face in the picture, then looks at me. Back to the photo. “We look so young.”
“We were.”
“What were we so worried about?” Her finger traces my graduation cap in the image.
I watch her hands—steady, the same hands that braided my hair and packed my lunches, now forgetting which drawer holds the spoons. “I can't remember.”
She laughs, sudden and bright. “Well, that makes two of us.”
***
The support group meets in a windowless room where extinct butterflies hang in a glass case. Carol speaks in hushed reverence about sundowning, wandering, exit-seeking behavior.
“Grief,” she says, “isn't always about death. Sometimes it’s about watching someone become a stranger frame by frame, like a projector running out of power.”
I practice introducing myself to my own mother in the bathroom mirror, just in case. Last week she asked if I was the nice lady who brings groceries. Yesterday she knew my middle name but not why she was crying.
Every forgotten street name, every misplaced decade, every conversation that starts in English and ends in the language of dreams. I keep a notebook now—Tuesday: forgot neighbor's name. Thursday: asked about Dad (dead twelve years). Saturday: made coffee with salt.
***
Weeks pass. She calls at 3 AM.
“I found it.”
“Mom?” I'm already reaching for my clothes. “Found what?”
“The Mediterranean. It was in the medicine cabinet, behind the Tylenol.” Her voice is wonder and relief. “It's blue as I remembered, but smaller. About the size of a pill I forgot to take.”
I pause, one arm through my sleeve. “Should I come over?”
“Should I put it back?”
“Put what back?”
“The sea, honey. Keep up.” A cabinet door closes. Water runs. “Where does it belong?”
“I don't know anymore,” she says before I can answer. Sugar in the medicine cabinet, pills in the sugar bowl. Car keys nest with tea bags.
***
“I'm coming over.”
“It's three in the morning.”
“I know.” I'm already grabbing my keys. “I'm coming anyway.”
When I arrive, she's waiting by the door in her nightgown, holding something that catches the motion-sensor light that clicks on and off, on and off, as if the hallway itself is forgetting we’re here—a snow globe I've never seen before. Not snow inside, but silver confetti that moves like liquid starlight.
“I made this today.” She places it in my hands, warm from her grip. “It's a memory I'm going to forget tomorrow.”
Heavier than it looks, solid in a way that makes me believe—the globe sits between us. She takes it back, shakes it once. The silver pieces don't fall—they dance, suspended like thoughts looking for somewhere to land.
“Do you know what I've learned?” She watches the light scatter and reform. “Forgetting isn't the opposite of remembering.”
“What is it then?”
“It's just remembering differently. Sideways.” She tilts her head, studying the patterns. “Like how fish swim through water instead of on top of it.”
The silver pieces settle into patterns that could be constellations or just scattered light.
She presses the globe into my palms again. “This one's yours now. I'll make another tomorrow.”
“What if you forget how?”
She smiles, touches my cheek with fingers that still know my face even when her mind forgets my name. “Then you'll remind me.”
***
And in the morning, when she calls to ask if I know where she put the ocean, I tell her the truth.
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Image by Cottonbro Studio from Pexels
Janine A. Willis is a writer and painter based in Northern California. A Pushcart Prize nominee, her work has appeared in Chicago Story Press and is forthcoming in Beyond Words Magazine. She is currently completing her first collection of stories.
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