A forgotten language
Michael Tod Powers For the last twelve years of her life, my sister lived alone on an island a long way from the city that had always been our home and was mine still. Whenever I wanted to see her I had to drive six hours and then ride the final hour to the island on a ferry. We had never really been close, and by then she was close to no one. Our mother had her scandalously early in life, and me almost impossibly late. There were twenty-three years between us, and by the time of her last illness even I was what most people would call an old man, so it shouldn’t have surprised me that she was dying. Still, it didn’t seem right. Had I really come so near the threshold? I didn’t see her often. The physical distance between us was great, and even when she was healthy she never made that trip herself. The first time I saw her sick, she had already been sick for a long time. She sat upright as she always had, her body sunk into the couch cushions, an array of jewel-colored pills on her lap in one of those plastic trays with a separate compartment for each day of the week. “How’s what’s-her-name?” she said. She meant my wife, Mattie, who had been my wife for sixteen years and whose name she most certainly knew. “Sorry,” she said. “The medication makes me forgetful.” I had no way to know how true that was—whether she had really forgotten or whether she had pretended to forget in order to reiterate her non-recognition of my second marriage. She had