First there were the small things: the misplaced phone numbers, the three days a week she needed my help to turn on the TV, the day she couldn’t remember how to start her car. A week after she started covering all the windows with cardboard, I found the first assemblage. I told my friends dryly that Grammie wasn’t losing her mind—she was just developing a penchant for conceptual art. After coming home from work, I would check to see what had been added to the pile of items looted from the other rooms of the house and carefully arranged in front of the sliding glass door. In the center of the assemblage, like a talisman to ward off evil, was a foot-high concrete statue of a pigeon.

Every day I had to take out the things that were in the refrigerator that should be in the cabinets and throw out the things in the cabinets that should be in the freezer. It’s astounding all the things we know that we take for granted—the ability to tell which set of silverware a fork belongs to, the ability to recognize your family members a hundred percent of the time, the ability to tell which of the hundreds of items in a house belong to whom.

Eventually, even her speech was affected. It doesn’t take a linguist to notice an increasing trend of verbal imprecision: “car” instead of “truck,” “that man” instead of “your dad,” “dish” instead of “frying pan.” It was always almost the right word, but just almost. A month later, nearly every noun was “that thing.” Soon after that, the only topic of conversation was “the robbers” that were taking everything.

“All my money is gone! It’s all gone!” she would scream while walking up and down the hall at 2 a.m. After living there for a year, I had abandoned my bedroom and started sleeping on a couch in the den that was somewhat hidden. I consoled myself with the fact that there was but another month in the semester, and then I’d be on the East Coast starting my junior year in college. She would wake me up anyway, yelling into the bright red Bell System phone in her bedroom, which we later discovered was sometimes unplugged when she spoke on it. “He took it! Art took all my money! I paid for everything! It’s gone now!”

Three weeks after we found bottles of bleach in the refrigerator and two weeks after she’d wandered away from the house for the third time, my dad made the eight-hour drive down from Northern California.

The residents saw us with the furniture, and they knew we were committing a crime. My dad and I carried Grammie’s night table, her TV stand, and her lamp into the blank white room inside the assisted living facility. The residents eyed us shiftily, knowing exactly what was happening. The building, a plastic-on-particle-board imitation of a mansion, smelled like a mélange of lemon-, orange-, and pine-scented ammonia.

After unloading the furniture, my dad and I drove back to Grammie’s house in his pickup truck. We approached the cul-de-sac and started to turn down it, seeing the familiar houses that, according to my dad, hadn’t changed in forty years. Gliding the truck to a halt as we rounded the bend, my dad slammed his hand on the steering wheel.

“Shit,” he said under his breath. We saw Grammie walking slowly across the lawn, the door of the house wide open. She looked like an octogenarian astronaut carefully exploring an alien planet. Noticing us, she walked down the driveway, short gray wig askew on her head, and my dad pulled the truck up to the curb. He got out of the truck and shot an annoyed glance at Orrin, Grammie’s boyfriend, who had promised to keep her out of the house all morning. He still had his keys in his hand, and stood stiffly on the porch in one of his eggshell cardigans with matching slacks, looking like a wax statue of himself. Through countless years of family events, Orrin had always worn the same clinical expression borrowed from his long career as a plastic surgeon. We knew nothing of the motives bubbling behind his saurian gaze, other than that this was an all-to-familiar episode to him. His wife was institutionalized years ago, when he had started dating Grammie. The unnamed wife had only actually passed away last year.

“YOU!” she yelled at my dad. “You are not allowed in here! Go back where you came from!” she yelled, her voice hoarse.

“Come on, mom,” my dad said in an impatient but deliberate tone, “it’s time to go.”

“Where? Where are we going?” She looked over at Orrin with desperation. A pregnant silence passed as we all guiltily looked at my dad to make the next move.

“We’re going to the rest home,” he said with finality.

She straightened up and looked each one of us over with her full measure of contempt. Her gaze fixed on me.

“You. Even you. You’re with them. After all I did for you.” She was slowly backing away from us, using Orrin’s taupe sedan as a shield. “Do you know what he did? He took all my money!” She shook her head in anger. “No. No. I won’t go.” She turned away from us and walked briskly towards the other end of the cul-de-sac. “He stole all my money!” she yelled, as if shouting out the winning answer on a game show. “You’ll never take me away and have all my money! He killed our whole family!” she yelled to no one in particular, walking deliberately up the neighbor’s front steps. Like exhausted parents in charge of an errant child beyond our control, we looked on powerlessly as she knocked frantically on the neighbor’s door.

“Does she even know the neighbors?” I asked Orrin. He was sitting on the porch across from us staring off into space, determined to be a spectator in this low-budget Passion play.

“No, I don’t think so.” He spoke and moved in excruciating slow motion, and today was no exception. “They haven’t seen her since before the dementia set in. I think we went to a dinner party there, but it was years and years ago. I don’t even know if the same people live there.” He suddenly rose and walked as if through waist-deep sand in the direction of the neighbor, seized by a sudden need to diffuse the situation. We could see a man who had opened the door, and could see him pointing at us. My dad had had enough.

“I’m calling the home.” He looked defeated as he walked inside. As I waited for him to emerge, I could see Orrin beginning to lead Grammie reluctantly back to the house.

The director of the assisted living facility, a plump, jovial, and thoroughly insincere blond in her mid-forties, soon arrived in a large white sedan driven by a thin orderly. She got out of the car and walked up to the door, giving a loud courtesy knock on the front door that was still open.

“Hello, Barbara!” the director addressed Grammie in a sunny tone. Instantly warming to this stranger—a skill she’d picked up early on as her faculties wore away—Grammie invited the woman inside. The director feigned interest as she began to spout a litany of “missing” items stolen by “the robbers.”

Once the door closed, every moment of silence beat down on this treeless slice of suburbia like a silent scream. My dad and I exchanged nervous pleasantries as we leaned against the truck. The orderly sat in the driver’s seat of the sedan, fixing a stray hair as she looked in the rearview mirror. No one was outside, and no one drove by.

“She’ll probably put some Vicodin in her coffee, that’s how we have to do it sometimes,” the orderly suddenly remarked, staring off into space. My father wore the same outfit he’d worn since I’d known him: a pair of brown work boots, a pair of blue jeans, a t-shirt with a pocket, a large white beard, and, usually, an improvised bandage somewhere on his body made from duct tape and paper towels.

“Really,” he responded distantly, “Vicodin.” The orderly slowly nodded her head, looking nervously in the direction of the house. All three of us continued to stare at the house, absorbing its every detail in the hopes that there would be some clue as to what was going on inside it.

The house, a stage for madness and confusion that I had been a veteran of for longer than any of them, sat idly by, quite content to show us its cheery white siding and garage door, sensibly shut. Azalea bushes and some low shrubs, which were growing out of control ever since the gardener had stopped coming, nestled where the lawn met the house. From the tiny kitchen window, which we all were all making a show of not staring at intently, we could see no one. The colossal energy of the twentieth century, enough to propel the planet into the orbit of a more rational star, was being expended to maintain this immense pause.

The door opened. Grammie, the director, and Orrin all walked over to the director’s white sedan. The orderly started the engine with the same degree of urgency as if she were about to flee from a bank robbery. Grammie had a foolish smile on her face as she got into the back seat with Orrin. I studied her body language. There was a vulnerable, almost childlike quality of this woman sixty years my senior, a bony, sickly thing straightening her wig in vain. The orderly began to quickly back out of the driveway. Grammie looked out the car window, not making eye contact with any of us. Under her frequently used mask of geniality, her face was a kaleidoscope of confusion. Did she even recognize us?

My dad and I sat across from each other at the booth of the IHOP off of the freeway, and it was nearly empty. Outside the window, the sky was cloudless and blinding. Waitresses moved to and fro between the tables carrying plates of waffles and carafes of coffee.

“So I guess you murdered our whole family, huh,” I dryly remarked. For a moment, a smile spread across his face, then he thought better of it, pausing for a morose moment before taking a sip of his coffee.

“It’s the pits,” my dad started, “to have her survive the cancer just to end up a nutcase.” He looked out the window towards the highway. “If I ever end up that way, just pull the plug.” I joined him in watching the unending flow of cars down the off-ramp, people pulling in and out of the restaurant’s parking lot.

“Yeah, me too,” I said distantly. “I couldn’t go on that way. I’d rather be dead than not know who I am.” The silence was so thick I could barely breathe.