Land of Last Chances

by Joan Cohen

  A coward who never tells her child. How those words stung. Was this the way Jeanne’s mother had started? Jeanne would be perpetuating a wrongheaded family custom, aggregating secrets to keep from yet another generation. Ashamed and miserable, she offered to get the check and leave Maggie to finish her lunch in peace.

  “Peace is what I get in my empty apartment. What I want is for you to wake up.”

  Jeanne rubbed her temples with her fingertips. “I’m not sure I can. I’m turning into her.” She leaned back in her seat and closed her eyes.

  “Turning into whom? Open your eyes, Jeanne, and get a grip.”

  “My mother. This is just history repeating.”

  While Jeanne detailed the letter from her father’s neurologist, Maggie picked at her burger and nodded encouragement. At Jeanne’s retelling of the newspaper stories, Maggie’s hand flew to her chest. “What a shock you must have had. How old did you say he was?”

  “Only fifty-one—not much older than I am now. Do you see any reason why my mother would keep the story from me as an adult? I mean, yes, it’s disturbing, and she probably felt guilty, but I’m telling you, that woman was wired to keep secrets . . . and, apparently, so am I.” Jeanne waited for Maggie to chastise her for blaming biology.

  “Shouldn’t you learn more about Alzheimer’s disease? I hear you that your father died in 1965 when less was known, and maybe you’re right that he was misdiagnosed, but it would be worthwhile to educate yourself. Maybe you’d understand your mother better too.”

  Though Jeanne’s first instinct was to research Alzheimer’s on Google, Maggie had in mind a more interactive setting. A professor from Fenway University School of Medicine was coming to Dawning Day the following Tuesday evening to give a talk on the differences between Alzheimer’s and normal aging. The audience would be residents’ families and some Dawning Day staff, but Jeanne was welcome.

  “If I can escape from work at a reasonable hour Tuesday, I’ll be there.”

  “Jeanne, do me a favor and make it a priority.”

  Jeanne shifted in her seat. “Ow.” Her hand was on her waist, where the rubber band holding her pants closed had snapped.

  “You have some big issues to think through, but, unfortunately, your big waistline has become a priority. Let’s shop.”

  When they arrived at MomChic, Maggie suggested checking out jeans and tops first. She gestured toward a rack of casual clothes. Jeanne reached into her bag for the spreadsheet she’d created. “I jotted down a few things—just to ensure we made good use of the time.”

  “On a spreadsheet?”

  “You said to make a list. How else do you keep track of things?”

  Maggie rolled her eyes and beckoned a salesperson.

  The perky young woman took the list from Jeanne’s hands. “This will be quite helpful,” she said with a dimpled smile. “Half my job is done.”

  “Be careful,” Maggie warned. “She’ll be running the business by the time we leave.”

  “Then I’ll teach her what she needs to know.” She held out her hand to Jeanne and Maggie in turn and introduced herself as Sara. “Do you have clothes at home from previous pregnancies?”

  “Uh, no, this is my first.”

  Sara moved on quickly to cover her faux pas. “Great, then you’ll need everything. May I suggest a few modifications to your list?” Jeanne nodded, suddenly noticing how much younger the other shoppers appeared. Glancing into a mirror, she peered at her face. There was no denying the lines around her mouth and across her forehead and the shadows under her eyes. Worn, more than old, was how she looked. But wasn’t that the same?

  Feeling as out of place as the only overripe banana in the bunch, she was happy to let Sara do the browsing for her. “I can’t do the T-shirt stretched over the big belly look. I don’t have that kind of job.”

  “I never would have guessed that.” Sara winked at Maggie. The next two hours were more pleasant than Jeanne had expected as she modeled for Maggie and Sara tailored slacks with expandable panels and coordinating tops. Maggie started hunting for a few things Jeanne could use just to hang out in.

  She handed Jeanne some stretchy jeans and a roomy sweater, then held up a T-shirt that said, “Does this baby make me look fat?”

  “Great, I can wear it to Weight Watchers.” She shook her head at the royal-blue winter coat Maggie brought to the fitting room, but Sara concurred. Jeanne would never be able to zip up her existing one when the winter blizzards arrived. By the time they got to underwear, Jeanne was too tired to stand and flopped down on an armchair near the register.

  She had in no way considered if she was going to nurse her baby and, if so, for how long. Who knew there were so many choices for bras that would double for maternity and nursing?

  “You’re cooked,” Maggie said. “I’ll handle getting your stuff rung up.” Jeanne wondered how anyone could be so solicitous, especially after Jeanne had insulted her. If this was how Maggie treated her patients, Jeanne was ready to move into Dawning Day.

  Bricklin spent Saturday night curled up behind the bed in the upstairs guest bedroom, a place he never went. Sick and dying dogs hide, and it broke Jeanne’s heart to find him there. Vince thought a quiet evening at home would help Jeanne cope, so he brought takeout Chinese, including General Tso’s Chicken, her favorite. He even remembered to make sure it had no MSG.

  Jeanne wondered how her stomach would react to the well-sauced Americanized version of Chinese cooking. “I guess this is when we find out if the baby likes Chinese food,” she said, after raising her filled chopsticks to her lips.

  “Kids come preprogrammed to like every kind of takeout. It’s a modern mutation.” After dinner, Vince popped Ocean’s Eleven into Jeanne’s DVD player. She’d never seen it, and he promised it would divert her. They cozied up together on her couch, and when the movie was over, he stretched his arms wide. “Ready to turn in?”

  Jeanne sat up. “Can we talk for a minute?” Vince yawned an unidentifiable answer.

  “I know I should have brought this up earlier, but the evening was so pleasant, it sort of slipped away. I’m showing a lot for how far along I am in my pregnancy. Water retention, they say.” She laid her hand on her stomach.

  “I noticed.”

  “So, I told everyone at work I was pregnant, and I—uh—told them I used a sperm donor. I know when we were in the park, you dismissed my concerns about the career implications of going public with our relationship.” Vince jumped up and walked to the window. “I thought about it, really I did.”

  He ignored her and stood close enough to the window for Jeanne to see the fog his breath made on the glass. A full minute went by before he turned back to her and spoke. “Do we have a relationship? I mean, where do I come in the pecking order—after your pissant job and your aging dog? After the kid is born, are you going to tell him who his father is so long as he promises not to tell anyone in the industry?”

  “Honestly, Vince, you’re comparing yourself to my dog?”

  “I don’t know who to compare myself to when you make unilateral decisions that affect both of us, as well as our child. It’s not as if we haven’t been seen in public together. You think no one knows?” He strode across the living room and yanked his jacket off the banister. “Don’t worry. I’ll slip out the back door, so nobody sees me.”

  Jeanne jumped up from the couch. “Vince—” A cold blast swept into the room. The door Vince slammed was ajar, caught on the corner of the doormat. He didn’t bother to stop, and she didn’t go after him.

  CHAPTER 7

  A Monday morning nor’easter did nothing to relieve Jeanne’s anxiety as she prepared to take Bricklin to Angell Memorial for his amputation. The word alone made her heart hammer like the rain striking her kitchen skylight. Bricklin came in from the yard with his coat soaked, but he was so unsteady that toweling him off was a delicate process. After drying his head and ears, she kissed his forehead. “I’m so sorry, sweet boy. If only there were another w
ay.” There was another way, the way Dr. Chu had suggested, but that was even harder to contemplate.

  The lobby of Angell Memorial smelled of damp fur and wet boots. Handing Bricklin’s leash to the vet tech, Jeanne had an urge to hang on. As the ridged nylon lead slipped from her hand, the young man spoke reassuring words, none of which Jeanne heard. She hurried from the lobby, hanging on to her composure.

  Falling apart was not an option when the whole work day stretched before her. She managed to hold it together till she was inside her car, where she wept into her hands till tears ran down the insides of her cuffs.

  By afternoon, the temperature had dropped enough for freezing rain to glaze the roads. Jeanne observed the gloomy scene from her office and ignored the calls that came to her cell until she saw Angell Memorial on her caller ID. She picked up before the first ring finished. “Bricklin came through the surgery just fine,” said the impossibly young-sounding vet. “We removed the leg and entire shoulder joint to be sure we got the whole tumor. The margins were clean.” Bricklin was still recovering from the anesthesia, but Jeanne could call the next day to see how he was doing. Bricklin—with no leg and shoulder—she closed her eyes to make the picture go away.

  Tuesday morning, Jeanne emailed Maggie to confirm the time of the Alzheimer’s presentation at Dawning Day. She still believed her father had been misdiagnosed, but even if that were true, her reading on the Internet was hardly comforting. If her father’s dementia had a different cause, most of the alternative conditions would have been—and still were—as untreatable as Alzheimer’s. She Googled the neurologist who had signed the letter to her mother, but all she found was his obituary.

  Bart had set up a ten o’clock meeting with her to review plans for the sales conference. Jeanne wanted to include Mariana, but Bart said they didn’t need her yet, and Jeanne found out why when Bart closed the door of his office. She had only to hear the words “Parker and I” to know the rest of Bart’s sentence would disturb her. The words “had a drink together last night and talked about Jake” confirmed her intuition. “You know Parker wants to go to the board, don’t you?”

  “Yes,” she replied, “and I’ve already told him I don’t agree. I imagine he told you that, so why are we having this conversation?”

  Bart leaned back and swiveled his chair from side to side. “I thought my persuasive charms might get you to change your mind. We sales types are optimists.” He smiled, confident she would appreciate his attempt at humor.

  “I’m not as easily mollified as Alberta, you know.”

  “Ouch! You have nails for breakfast? You can’t honestly think Jake isn’t in over his head, can you?” Jeanne was silent. “I have the best handle of anyone on the revenue we’re likely to bring in over the next couple of years, and the good news is Jake would have to manage a growing operation. The bad is he’s already maxed out. At least that’s what Parker and I think.”

  “What happened to your enthusiasm for having our inspiring leader pump up your sales troops at the kickoff?”

  Bart cracked his knuckles before replying. “We talk to the board now but keep Jake long enough to do his military thing. Parker hasn’t met with Lou yet, but I’m sure he’ll go along. You saw how Jake reamed him at the last staff meeting. Don’t be the holdout, Jeanne. You don’t want to be the one who spoils this for everyone else.”

  Jeanne felt her cheeks flush. “Is that a not-so-veiled threat?”

  He put up both hands. “I wouldn’t think of threatening you. I know how much Salientific means to you, but if you want the company to have a future, you’ll do the right thing.” Bart’s manipulative appeal to her company loyalty was as irritating as Parker’s had been. They were sharing the same playbook. There was no escaping the fact, though, that “the right thing” for Salientific might well be replacing Jake. She left Bart’s office without committing to anything and resolved to speak with Lou as soon as possible.

  That evening, she arrived at Dawning Day preoccupied with work and regretful she’d agreed to attend. Maggie didn’t seem her cheerful self either, but she came out to meet Jeanne and showed her eagerly into the dining room, where the speaker was focusing a slide projected from his laptop onto a screen. He had wiry gray hair and a trim gray beard and mustache. Jeanne judged him to be close to seventy.

  Several tables were already occupied by Dawning Day staff, and Jeanne guessed, from the jackets draped on the backs of chairs, the remaining attendees were residents’ family members. Maggie ushered Jeanne up to the front of the room and introduced her to Lucas Menton. “I’m looking forward to your talk, Professor Menton.”

  “‘Luke’ is fine.” He shook Jeanne’s extended hand.

  “Jeanne is the friend I mentioned to you,” Maggie said, “the one with family history.” She and Luke exchanged looks. Jeanne was puzzled, but there was no time to ask Maggie why she’d told Luke about her ahead of time. He withdrew a business card from his pocket and offered it to Jeanne, urging her to follow up with him if she had questions.

  Luke was an excellent presenter, and Jeanne’s standards for speakers were high. He made complex concepts understandable yet didn’t talk down to his audience, most of whom had firsthand, if not scientific, knowledge about Alzheimer’s.

  Jeanne was surprised to learn that everything she thought she knew about Alzheimer’s was wrong. Just because aging was a significant risk factor didn’t mean Alzheimer’s was normal. It was a disease, one that afflicted 44 percent of the population between seventy-five and eighty-four years of age. The ramp started earlier than she had realized too, because between sixty-five and seventy-four, about 16 percent had Alzheimer’s. With fifty in Jeanne’s line of sight, sixty seemed perilously close.

  When Luke put up a slide listing Alzheimer’s symptoms, many in the audience nodded and murmured their concurrence. Not just a cause of memory loss, the disease led to cognitive problems and could induce personality changes like hostility, depression, and paranoia.

  He took pains to distinguish the changes of normal aging from dementia, the set of symptoms that usually signaled the presence of Alzheimer’s. Many of the residents’ family members around Jeanne sat forward in their seats so as not to miss a single word. Worried, she thought. They’re afraid they’re going to get it themselves. Will they? And if they will, could I be vulnerable?

  Luke seemed to read her thoughts. She felt as though he were looking at her alone when he segued into known risk factors and their relative influence. Scientists had identified some of the predisposing genes, but those genes could tell one nothing for certain. Genes that actually predetermined, rather than predisposed, though rare, were sure-fire predictors of early-onset Alzheimer’s, at forty, fifty, or sixty years of age. As horrifying as it was to consider, some victims were in their thirties. “Remember,” Luke continued, “early-onset cases make up a very small percentage of the total. When the disease is caused by a predetermining gene, it will usually occur throughout a family.”

  Jeanne froze in her seat. If Thomas Bridgeton had Alzheimer’s, he might have had the early-onset familial kind. He’d died at fifty-one. She told herself it couldn’t happen to her. She was sharp—at the top of her game. Was it possible intellect didn’t matter? Jeanne’s mind raced forward in time. Alzheimer’s meant no career. Forget becoming CEO of a startup, capitalizing on all her experience. Experience lived in memory, and without memory . . . Who would care for her child if she developed Alzheimer’s? What if her baby had already inherited the gene from her?

  The audience was applauding. “Are you okay?” Maggie asked. “You’re pale. Don’t you have questions?”

  Jeanne wondered if Maggie’s thoughts tracked her own. No, Maggie was way ahead of her. “You knew, didn’t you?” Jeanne whispered. “About the chance I had one of the genes?”

  “I’m no geneticist, just a worrier. I get paid to worry and anticipate.”

  A rueful smile flickered across Jeanne’s face. “Yeah, me too, in a different way—whole lot it di
d for me.”

  Maggie pointed at the many hands in the air. “Luke will be leaving soon. You might want to jump in.”

  Jeanne looked around. So many people in their fifties and sixties with parents, she guessed, in their eighties. Suddenly she felt young, too young to ask questions about early-onset Alzheimer’s without everyone knowing she was asking for herself. Couldn’t they all see her pregnant belly under her forty-eight-year-old face? “I wouldn’t know where to start—better to follow up with Luke offline.”

  She pulled on her coat and gave Maggie a hug and a whispered thank-you. As she passed through the lobby, she avoided looking at the door to the Alzheimer’s wing. Living on the other side of it was unthinkable.

  Walking across the parking lot, Jeanne groped for her phone. Once seated behind the wheel, she flipped on the overhead light and pulled out Luke’s business card. His email address was listed, so her thumbs flew across the surface as she requested an appointment. It seemed a puny gesture against an incurable disease. Her mother hadn’t settled for puny gestures. She’d made a career of preventing Jeanne from conceiving a child.

  Bricklin was ready to leave Angell Memorial. Jeanne was ecstatic, or so she thought, until she approached the glass entrance doors, when her stomach did a flip-flop. She took a deep breath to steady herself and prepare—for what? The scary part was not knowing exactly what to expect or how much help she might need with Bricklin. She hated depending on anyone, but she would have felt better if Vince were with her. Vince’s allegation that she cared less about him than Bricklin had precluded her calling.

  The hospital lobby smelled antiseptic with none of the wet dog smell of her previous visit. The desk clerk handed Jeanne the discharge instructions and pointed her toward the cashier’s office. The charges were substantial, and Jeanne wondered how many people could afford to make the choice she had.