Whatever Held

My mother went looking for a window washer during the time of my treatments, which sounds like such a small, practical thing to need in the middle of everything else that was happening. She’d come
to stay with us mostly to hold the house together, three young kids under 5 who still needed feeding and driving and normal days, laundry, meals, all of it, while I was upstairs a lot unable
to do all of it by myself.

The house was large, and we lived rural enough that the nearest window washer wasn’t close, and somehow, amid three kids and everything else on her list, my mother decided the windows mattered too. Maybe she needed one thing on her list that had a clear, findable solution. Maybe she just wanted the house to feel cared for in a way that was still within her control. I don’t know. I never asked her that directly, and now I can’t.

She found someone eventually, a man willing to make the long drive out to a house he had no other reason to be near. I was upstairs that day, sick in the way that made the rest of the house feel very far away. I couldn’t have told you what floor I was on some days, let alone what was happening outside my window. I only knew someone had come.
I heard him moving through the house, working his way through window after window,upstairs and down, glass by glass.

At some point I heard someone come into the room. And I heard a voice, very quiet, almost not meant to be heard at all, say I’m sorry.
I don’t know who said it. I’ve turned it over so many times since. Was it him, stepping in to check on something and catching sight of me in a way he hadn’t expected? I don’t know what he was sorry for, or if sorry was even the right word for whatever he meant by it. I assume he meant for my condition. I just know I heard it, whispery and brief, and then it was gone, back into the sound of a house being cleaned.

When he finished, he wouldn’t take any money. My mother told me that part later. That he’d driven all that way, washed every window in the house, and then refused payment. He told her something had just told him he needed to come, distance or not. I’ve thought about that so many times since. What kind of pull moves a person to drive that far for a
house full of windows and a woman he’d never met, and then to leave without taking anything for it.

My mother died right at the end of my treatment, before I’d fully come back to myself, before I thought to ask her the things I now wish I’d asked while I still could. Who she called. What she said to him on the phone. Whether she knew, somehow, that the windows needed to be clean for a reason bigger than dust. I’ve tried looking for him since. I searched for window washers in that area, hoping something would click, a
name, a face, anything. There are too many. I don’t think I’ll ever find him.

So many windows in that house, and I only remember the one thing I couldn’t see, a stranger moving quietly from room to room, some private apology passing through the air near my bed, and then gone, the way so much of that period is gone now, except for the parts that decided to stay.