Previously…
Maren Cross runs a transparency nonprofit • She built her life on the principle that everything should be seen • Now everyone on Earth is slowly becoming invisible—they call it the Fading—and Maren is fading faster than anyone she knows…
GREENRIDGE smelled like lavender and something beneath it the lavender was meant to address. Maren Cross signed in at the front desk. Linda looked up from her crossword and said, “Hey, honey. Your Momma’s in the common room” the way she always did, as if Maren might have come to visit someone else.
“How’s she been today?”
“Good afternoon. Ate most of her lunch. She’s been watching the television, I think. Hard to tell.” Linda smiled. It was the smile of someone who had worked in a place where people visibly faded and had come to understand it was part of the job. “Go on in.”
The hallway was long and bright. Overhead fluorescents, no windows, linoleum that squeaked under Maren’s boots. Handrails on both sides now, added when the residents started fading enough that a hand on a railing was the best way to track someone moving through the corridor. The walls were painted the color of weak coffee. Framed prints of landscapes hung every ten feet, placed at a height that assumed everyone was standing, which most residents no longer were. A whiteboard near the nurses’ station listed the day’s activities. Someone had written HAPPY BIRTHDAY ELEANOR in blue marker, and below it, in handwriting that might have been Eleanor’s, the word Thursday with a question mark.
Maren passed a room with the door open. A bed, a nightstand, a photograph in a frame. The bed was made. The clothes in the open closet were arranged on hangers. There was no visible person in the room, but the bedside lamp was on, and a pair of reading glasses sat on the nightstand next to a book held open with a rubber band. Someone lived here. Someone who forgot to dress, was—possibly—in this room right now, sitting in the chair by the window. Or the room was empty. There was no way to know without entering and asking, and you didn’t enter rooms that weren’t yours, so the room remained a question Maren walked past every Wednesday.
The Common Room was at the end of the hall. Six chairs, a couch, and a television playing something with the volume low. A jigsaw puzzle on the corner table, half-assembled. A countryside scene, green hills, a red barn that Maren had never seen anyone working on. The puzzle had been at the same stage of completion for three months.
Two residents sat near the window. One was almost entirely gone: a cardigan and slacks arranged in a chair, a faint suggestion of shoulders beneath the fabric. The other was Arthur, who was further along than most. Maren could see the window light passing through his skin in a way that made him look like a photograph left in the sun. Arthur was looking toward the corner of the room, or through it, what was left of his expression patient and vacant.
June was in the chair by the bookshelf. The orange shawl.
That was how Maren quickly found her now: By the shawl. In a room where half the residents had faded to arrangements of fabric in chairs, gray cardigans, and beige slacks, the muted palette of women who had dressed practically for decades, the orange was unmistakable. June’s own clothes were visible beneath it: the pressed slacks, the cardigan she would have chosen herself. But those looked like anyone. The shawl said ‘this one is June’.
June had pulled it off one shoulder. It hung down the arm of the chair like a flag at half-mast.
“Hi, Mom.”
June’s face turned toward the voice. Her face was the part of her that had held on longest. Faces were among the last things to go, the doctors said. But the edges were softening. Her jawline had gone translucent. The skin around her temples had thinned to the point where Maren could see, in certain light, the shape of the skull beneath. Her eyes were still there. Brown, focused in the way dementia eyes sometimes focus: not on what’s in front of them but on something behind, or beside, or twenty years before.
“Sit down,” June said. The teacher’s voice was still structurally intact even when the teacher was not.
Maren sat in the chair beside her. Close enough to touch, far enough that June wouldn’t startle. She’d learned the distance. Fourteen months of Wednesday visits had taught Maren things no one explains beforehand: how close is too close, how a hand on the arm can alarm or anchor, how to read the quality of a silence and know whether it means peace or confusion or the slow gathering of agitation that precedes a bad hour.
“Did you eat lunch?” Maren asked.
“They gave me something. I don’t know what it was.”
“Marcus said you ate most of it.”
“Marcus,” June said, and her mouth moved around the name as if testing it. “He’s too tall. He blocks the window.”
Maren smiled. This was June—or a version of June that surfaced on medium days, when the disease had loosened its grip enough to let her personality through but not enough to let her organize it. The observations were sharp. They just didn’t connect to anything before or after.
“I’ll tell him to crouch,” Maren said.
“Don’t be smart.”
Maren’s breath caught. Don’t be smart. The phrase June had used on students, on Maren at fourteen, on anyone who confused cleverness with substance. It came out reflexive, aimed correctly, weighted with the authority of a woman who had spent decades in a classroom distinguishing between intelligence and showing off. June didn’t notice she’d said it. She was already looking at the television.
“What are we watching?” Maren asked.
“Something about a house,” she said. “They keep changing it.”
It was a home renovation show. Maren watched it with her mother for a few minutes.
June commented on the paint color. "Too bright. That's a selling color, not a living color." On the host's shirt: "Stripes make you look wider. Someone should tell him." On the kitchen layout: "The sink is too far from the stove. You'd spend your whole life walking."
These were opinions June had always had. The Fading hadn’t touched them. June’s taste, her certainty about surfaces and structures and how things should be arranged, was bedrock. The disease had eroded everything above it and left the bedrock exposed, and the bedrock was a woman who had opinions about kitchens and wasn’t afraid to voice them.
“Your father could fix that cabinet,” June said, pointing at the screen.
“I know.”
“He fixed ours. The one above the stove. The hinge was wrong.”
“I remember.”
“He used the wrong screws the first time. I told him. He didn’t listen. Then the door fell off and he used the right screws.” She paused. “He always came around. It just took him longer than it should have.”
Maren didn’t know if this was a memory or a construction. The cabinet above the stove had existed. The hinge had been wrong. Whether David had used the wrong screws first was a detail she couldn’t verify and didn’t need to. The story was June’s, and in June’s story, David was a man who came around, and the coming-around was worth the wait, and this was the truest thing June Cross knew about love, and the dementia couldn’t take it because it wasn’t stored in the part of the mind that forgot. It was stored somewhere deeper, somewhere structural, somewhere the disease hadn’t reached.
June went quiet for a moment. She looked at the television without seeing it. Then she looked down at her own hand, which rested on the arm of the chair. The hand was significantly faded. Maren could see the fabric of the chair arm through June’s palm. June held it up, turned it slowly, and watched the light pass through the spaces between her fingers. She did this sometimes. On bad days she didn’t notice. On medium days she noticed and was fascinated, the way a child is fascinated by a prism or a shadow puppet, something beautiful happening to her body that she couldn’t name and didn’t need to. She was the only person Maren had ever seen who looked at the Fading without fear.
“Look at that,” June said, almost to herself.
Maren looked. Light from the window filtered through her mother’s hand, casting a faint shadow that was incomplete, the palm’s shadow solid in the center, dissolving at the edges, the fingers barely registering on the chair arm at all. It was, if you could set aside everything it meant, extraordinary. A human hand becomes a lens.
“It’s something,” Maren said, because she didn’t know what else to say, and because the thing June was seeing and the thing Maren was seeing were likely not the same at all.
June lowered her hand. She looked toward the corner of the room where Arthur sat, or where Arthur’s cardigan sat. She seemed to track him for a moment, then lost him, then found him again. She reached one hand out in his direction—a small gesture, fingers extended, as if testing the air for the presence of another person.
“Where’s David?” June asked.
There it was. The question that came every visit, sometimes twice, sometimes five times, arriving without context and carrying more weight than June could know it carried.
“He’ll be here soon,” Maren said.
The lie. Maren told it every time. She’d tried, once, in the first month, to say the truth. Dad died, Mom, he died twenty years ago. And June’s face had crumpled, and she’d wept as if hearing it for the first time, because she was hearing it for the first time, and then ten minutes later she’d asked again, and Maren had understood that the truth was not a kindness you could deliver once. It was a wound you’d have to inflict every time she asked. So she stopped. He’ll be here soon. The lie that let June keep the one thing dementia hadn’t taken: the certainty that David was coming.
“He’s always late,” June said, and smiled a smile was so specifically her mother—one side of her mouth pulling up before the other, an expression Maren had seen ten thousand times across a kitchen table, across a living room, across the front seat of the car on the drive to school—that Maren had to look away.
She fixed the shawl. Pulled it back over June’s shoulder, smoothed it down. June tolerated this without resisting, without acknowledging, the same way she tolerated the aides adjusting her chair, or Marcus bringing water she hadn’t asked for.
They sat for a while.
June talked about a student—someone named Paulson, or maybe it was a book she’d taught, or maybe it was a thing that had happened last week that she’d filed in 1994. Maren listened for rhythm, not content. The words moved through topics without transition: the student, then something about the price of gas, then a sentence about her sister Carol that might have been a memory or a dream or something Carol had actually said forty years ago in the kitchen of the house in Pennsylvania.
Maren checked her phone. Two emails from Dara about the facilities audit. A missed call from a number she didn’t recognize. She put the phone back in her pocket and felt the small shame of having checked it.
June went quiet. The television murmured. Arthur’s chair creaked when he shifted. Outside, a car door closed in the parking lot, and the sound traveled through the window and landed in the room with the weight of an ordinary Wednesday.
Then June reached for Maren’s face.
Her hand came up slowly. Not the reaching-toward-Arthur gesture, not the prism fascination. Deliberate. Her fingers found Maren’s cheek. They were cool and dry and partially transparent, and where they pressed against Maren’s skin, Maren could feel the bones in them — the individual knuckles, the working structure of a hand that had held thirty-one years of red pens and chalk and students’ essays and David’s hand across a dinner table.
“There you are,” June said.
Two words. Delivered in a voice that was not the dementia voice, not the looping voice, not the medium-day voice that observed without organizing. This was the other voice. The one underneath. Clear and specific, aimed at Maren with a precision that June Cross, the real June Cross, the teacher who believed every sentence should be crafted, would have recognized as her own.
Maren didn’t breathe.
June looked at her. Through the fading, through the disease, through whatever corridor of collapsed time she was navigating, she looked at her daughter. Her fingers stayed on Maren’s cheek.
Then her hand dropped. She looked toward the television.
“Who are you?” she asked. The medium-day voice. Curious, but unattached to the question. Already moving on.
THE SEEN & THE GONE
New Chapter Every Wednesday