Shared Time by Scardavino

Two brothers visit their ageing mother who seems no longer to be able to tell them apart.

Image generated with OpenAI

The door to my mother's house always creaked the same way, a sad groan announcing my arrival. Inside, time was different. It smelled of medicine, of boiled chicken, and of a heavy silence.

Three hours. That was my share every Friday. Marcos, my brother, came on Tuesdays. At first, Mom got confused. She called me by his name, asked about things I hadn't lived. At first, we corrected her: It's me, Mom, I'm Javier. Marcos visited you on Tuesday.

But seeing her face in that moment of confusion and disorientation was like giving her an invisible slap. Her eyes, once so alive, clouded with infinite sadness. Until one day, Marcos called me.

"Javi, what if... we stop insisting she recognize us by our names?" His voice was tired, broken. "What if we just become the son? It'll be easier for her. And we'll spare ourselves that... painful moment."

I hung up and cried. Cried for what it meant, for the miserable comfort that idea carried. Accepting that my mother had forgotten me forever.

The following Friday, when she smiled at me from her chair and said, "Son, it's so good to see you," I just smiled back and kissed her forehead.

"I've missed you too, Mom."

That was how our arrangement was born, our guilty relief. Marcos and I stopped existing as individuals in that room. We were one son, a part-time consolation. I told her how work was going (Marcos's work, he's an architect), and she nodded, content. I promised that next time I'd bring the cookies she loved (the ones Marcos baked well). It was a beautiful lie, a patch thrown over the abyss.

But the burden didn't vanish; it transformed. Now I carried not only the sadness of seeing her like that, but the weight of representing two people. Sometimes, when leaving, I'd sit in the car and for five minutes couldn't start the engine. Who was I? Javier, who had just pretended to be Marcos? Or Marcos, who had pretended to be Javier on Tuesday? Our identities were dissolving into hers.

The real fracture came one Tuesday night. My phone rang. It was Marcos. All I could hear was his breathing, broken by sobs.

"Javi... today she called me Javier. And I said yes."

His voice carried the exhaustion of the whole world. Nothing else needed to be said. On the other end of the line, I felt his defeat exactly as I felt mine. We weren't two brothers organizing care. We were two castaways, taking turns clinging to the same small lifebuoy that was slowly sinking.

That Friday, everything was the same. The creak of the door, the smell, her smile.

"Son, you're here."

I approached, took her hand, and told her the truth, the only one that mattered in that room.

"Yes, Mom. I'm here."

And for once, I wasn't pretending. Because in that moment, I wasn't Javier or Marcos. I was simply her son. And she, simply my mother. And in that necessary lie, for three hours a week, we found a consolation as fragile and real as the pulse of her hand in mine.

The end began, like so many things with her, with a whisper. "I'm cold," in the middle of June, while the sun filled the room. The light poured over her, illuminating the blue veins of her closed eyelids. Her hand in mine weighed less and less, as if little by little it were turning to air.

The shifts continued. Marcos on Tuesdays, me on Fridays. But The Son was no longer a convenience. It had become an act of desperate love, the last gift we could give her: the illusion of a constant presence, of a single devoted child who never left her side. The lie had transmuted into truth.

The last time I went, I knew it was the end. The nurse looked at me with that professional pity that hurts more than hatred. "She doesn't let go of this," she said, pointing at an old photo on the nightstand. The photo was of Marcos and me, seven and five years old, perched on an olive tree in our grandparents' field. We were wild creatures, knees covered in mud, faces split by smiles too big for our cheeks. Sometimes she held that photo, running her thumb over the plastic frame as if caressing a precious memory.

That day I didn't talk about work or cookies. I sat down, held her hand, and told her about the olive tree. I described how the sun warmed the bark, the smell of thyme and dry earth, the scare when Marcos slipped and scraped his knee, and how, not wanting to cry in front of me, he laughed, saying the tree had tickled him.

I don't know if she heard me. Her breathing was faint. But a tiny smile, just a crease at the corner of her lips, appeared. And I knew, with a certainty that pierced my chest, that she wasn't with The Son. She was with us. With her two children, with the memory of that afternoon, with the echo of our laughter in the fields. In her confused mind, she had managed the impossible: to merge us not into one, but into the very love she held for us.

She passed that night, peacefully. The nurse said she didn't suffer.

Now, months later, Marcos and I meet for lunch on Sundays. At first it was awkward. We were two ghosts who had taken turns inhabiting a concept, and now we didn't know how to be two again. Until one day, he brought a box of cookies. They were terrible, burnt at the edges. He had baked them himself.

"It was supposed to be my turn next week," he said, his voice breaking. "I was going to bring them to her."

We looked at each other and, for the first time in years, we didn't see a substitute, the administrator of a merciful lie. We saw the brother who had climbed the olive tree with me. We saw the two boys we'd been when she was young and strong and her love was an unbreakable wall against the world.

The guilt never fully left. The wear had changed us forever. But in the silence of that Sunday, breaking a bad cookie made with love, we understood. We hadn't shared an identity out of convenience. We had shared the weight of a farewell. And in that act of carrying the burden together, we had found, at the end of the road, not hypocrisy, but the purest echo of her love: that we were, and always would be, brothers.

The house of our childhood is empty now. But sometimes, when I walk past it, I swear I still hear, faintly, the creak of the door. And it's not a sad sound. It's the sound of a shift ending, and of a love that, in the end, needed no schedules to be infinite.