Page 22 of Too Old for This

My handbag.

I pull out my phone and lay it down on the counter like it’s a bomb.

That’s what it has turned into now, a little time bomb that tracked all my movements this evening. I could probably explain being near the police station and the yoga studio. But not why I was at Kelsie’s house on the night she slipped and fell. The phone knows exactly how long I was there.

That information is not only on my phone. It’s sitting on a server, and a backup server, and a backup for the backup server. Never to be deleted.

Without thinking, I picked up the phone, put it in my bag, and walked out of the house with it. I know better than that, and I did it anyway.

For a long time, I do not move.

Every cell in my body wants me to get up, to do something, to fix this. A flood of possibilities run through my mind.

Go back to her house, get rid of the body.

Find a way to erase the data.

Report the phone stolen.

Every idea has a list of downsides, starting with returning to her house. What are the chances I could enter twice without being noticed? Her neighborhood isn’t that quiet. It’s not like Bluebell Lane.

Find a way to erase the data? What am I, some kind of homemade hacker? Even I know the answer to that.

And if I report the phone stolen, who looks for it? Who looks through it? Is it the company that made the phone, the service provider, or both? Too many unknowns. That process is so foreign to me I’m afraid to get near it.

I push the phone away from me. It slides across the counter and right off the edge, landing with a thwack on the tile. The screen doesn’t crack.

If only my body was that durable and my mind worked as fast.

I let the anger and frustration break through, pouring into my body until it all blends together under one big umbrella:

Disappointment.

In myself, in who I’ve become. The younger me wouldn’t have made this mistake. Even five years ago, I would have remembered to leave the phone at home.

Eventually, I walk out of the kitchen and go upstairs. My bedtime routine is not long or elaborate; all those antiaging creams don’t help anyway. I put on my nightgown and get into bed, curling up in one of the two positions that don’t trigger joint pain.

When I close my eyes, I see my phone.

There’s no way to get rid of it, so I do the opposite.

I let that image sit right there, at the front of my mind, and refuse to fight it.

I also refuse to let it go further, imagining what might happen if the police get suspicious.

If I left a hair or fiber behind at Kelsie’s house.

If any of that leads them right to my door.

The phone. All I think about is the phone.

Eventually, sleep comes.

When I wake up, the first thing I do is reach for it, to click on the screen and see the time. The phone is always on my nightstand during the night, but this morning it isn’t there. It’s down in the kitchen, still on the floor.

I know what time it is anyway. Seven thirty or thereabouts, based on the light coming through the window.

This morning, pain is everywhere. In my knees when I walk, in my hip, even in my shoulders. That’s my normal pain, the baseline I feel in different degrees each day. But on top of it, my muscles are sore.

I go through my routine, starting in the bathroom and moving down to the kitchen.

As the coffee brews, I bend down to pick up the phone.

It triggers something in my back. A muscle, a ligament, a disc, who knows what.

Every second is a struggle today. I feel the strain in my arm while lifting a mug of coffee to my mouth.

And I throw it into the sink.

The mug shatters. Hot coffee and shards of porcelain spatter everywhere. I don’t have the strength, or the desire, to clean it up.

—

Giving in is a process, not a moment. It happens piece by piece, little by little, like the way my house has deteriorated over time. Some chipped paint here, a leak in the bathroom, then a loose floorboard, or two or three or ten. It takes a long time for a house to become run-down.

The same goes for people. It’s one thing to have all these aches and pains, but it’s quite another to forget something important. Something so crucial. It’s no longer a sagging porch or wiggly banister. My mind is deteriorating, and that’s like discovering a crack in the foundation.

I watched it happen to my grandfather. Then my grandmother. Little things at first, the kind you laugh off. It got worse and worse, and finally, it got dangerous. The cigarette left burning. The car left running.

The oven left on.

Sometimes I think it was a blessing my parents passed away before it happened to them.

They both died in the fire my grandmother started by mistake.

She should’ve been in a home. But the state nursing homes were full, insurance wouldn’t cover a private one, and my parents had no choice but to take care of her.

I had to stick around longer than I wanted to and help.

Things feel different now that I’m starting to arrive at the same place. What I felt about my grandparents is what I feel now. I remember the anger, the frustration, the rage .

They’re all by-products of the truth. I have run from it, avoided it, ignored it, because I refused to give in. Now I can’t.

It’s not momentous. There is no giant light bulb that goes off in my head, or a sudden earth-shattering realization. This is a slow, agonizing surrender.

I am getting too old, and too weak, to live the life I want.