Looking

I just want the searching to end. I want this strange, unnerving woman who is occupying my mother’s house, sleeping in her bed, wearing a same few of her pajamas and clothes over and over, to go away so that I can wash the dishes, make the bed, launder and fold the clothes. So that everything is in order when my mother returns.

I come across mundane visual reminders that she must be near—American and Portuguese passports with the extra strip of headshots tucked in a red plastic sleeve, driver’s license set to expire in two years, a work ID—while I’m pawing for bank statements, receipts, citizenship papers, birth, marriage and divorce certificates, medical bills.

The photos jar me because, despite my wait, I’m not ready for my mother’s return just yet. Everything in the house is still upside down, a mess, and the strange woman is still here, asking, pleading, cajoling for a help I am unable to give, whose pangs my feeble attempts to find documentation, run errands, grocery shop, make calls, are inadequate to satisfy.

The woman speaks in half growl, half whisper. Sometimes to me. Sometimes to someone only she can see while “looking inside,” as my mother used to call it. (This woman sometimes says things that remind me of my mother’s expressions.) When her eyes are open, she says she sees me, sometimes one, sometimes two of me. But she can’t find me, she says.

And I think, how ironic, because I’m looking too.