Page 4 of Gone Tonight
5/10: Called ice cubes “water squares.”
5/12: Forgot what month it was.
Dr. Chen asks my mom a few more questions, then closes his folder. “There are some tests we can run.…”
My throat is so tight I have to clear it before I can speak. “Cognitive tests, or do we go straight to brain imaging?”
My mother leans forward and even now—standing alone in the path of what must feel like a great onrushing cement wall—pride fills her voice. “Catherine’s going to be a nurse. She just graduated cum laude and she’s about to start work at Johns Hopkins Hospital. She’s moving to Baltimore in two weeks.”
“Congratulations,” Dr. Chen tells me. “Hopkins is an impressive place. What’s your specialty?”
“Geriatrics. I work part-time at a nursing home.” I watch as the irony hits him. He may be the expert in neurology, but when it comes to my mother’s presenting symptoms, I’m no novice.
I’m assigned to the Memory Wing, the section of our facility where people with dementia or Alzheimer’s or traumatic brain injuries reside. I see symptoms like the ones my mother is describing nearly every single day.
I refuse to assume the worst, though. I know my job could be shaping my fears, and there might be a simple reason for my mother’s confusion and memory lapses.
My mom is petite, but there’s nothing soft or weak about her.
She’s a fighter. Indestructible. She has to be.
We talk with Dr. Chen about various testing options, but my mom resists scheduling a CT scan. I assume it’s because of the expense. We’ve got a bare-bones health care plan, and after the cost of this appointment our savings account will be one car breakdown away from being demolished. Then something happens that makes me feel as if I’ve plunged into ice water.
My mom stands up and paces between her chair and the wall. My stomach coils tighter with every step. The longer her pacing, the worse the news. It’s as pure a formula as a mathematical proof.
My mom paced when I was in the tenth grade, shortly after I began dating my first boyfriend and was enjoying the best school yearof my life—right before she announced she’d lost her job, we were being evicted, and we were moving from Lancaster to Harrisburg, Pennsylvania.
She paced at Christmastime, when I was four, and then she told me Santa’s workshop had had a fire and I wouldn’t be getting any presents.
She paced just before she told me why her conservative, religious family had cut her off, why I’d never met any grandparents or aunts or cousins and never would: She got pregnant in high school, her boyfriend denied I was his, and they threw her away—every single one of them did. But she didn’t care because I was worth all of them put together.
The wall clock’s needle-thin red hand sweeps in relentless circles. It strikes me as unbearably cruel that, as they sit in his office, Dr. Chen’s patients are forced to confront the dwindling of the very thing they desire most.
My mother reaches the wall and turns for another lap.
The swelling pressure closes in on me, and my voice sounds as high and panicky as it did when I was a child and awoke from a nightmare: “Mom!”
She stops pacing. She meets my eyes for the first time since we entered the office.
The news she delivers isn’t bad.
It’s catastrophic.
“There’s one thing I didn’t put down on the forms. Maybe I just couldn’t deal with having to write the words.… My mother and I were estranged, but she passed away right before she turned fifty. An old friend tracked me down years ago to let me know.”
This is the first I’ve heard ofanyof this.
I’m still reeling as my mom continues, “She died from early-onset Alzheimer’s.”
CHAPTER FOURRUTH
It turns out there’s yet another way to disappear. Your mind can begin to erase itself.
Catherine is driving us home, one hand gripping the steering wheel, the other tucked in mine. I know the look on her face, the set of her jaw. She’s holding back tears.
I’m sorry, baby.
I don’t say the words because they will send her over the edge, and I’m just barely keeping it together myself.
