Land of Last Chances

by Joan Cohen

  She tried not to think about Dr. Chu’s advice to euthanize Bricklin. He hadn’t used the word, but his meaning was clear. Jeanne’s analytical skills usually insulated her against ambivalence about decisions, but she’d begun to doubt herself, and doubt spawned doubt.

  The waiting room was packed with ailing pets and their owners, but the day she’d brought Bricklin in for his surgery, she’d paid little attention to them. Scanning the room, she was struck by the knit brows and drawn faces. She couldn’t remember such collective angst in any human doctor’s waiting area.

  They’re our children. She wondered if her attitude toward Bricklin would change after her baby was born. Were faces in pediatricians’ waiting rooms as full of consternation? No, the comparable setting would be a children’s hospital, where kids were being diagnosed with cancer. So much could happen to a child. A world of worry she’d never considered would soon be hers.

  “Ms. Bridgeton?” Jeanne didn’t see his face, only his heavy thighs struggling past each other as he walked, because her eyes were fixed at the level of Bricklin’s. She gulped before answering. Sensing everyone’s eyes on her, she went to him. “Let me help you out,” the vet tech said, giving her no time to embrace Bricklin or even assimilate his altered appearance. Bricklin’s head and chest rose and fell with each three-legged step. “Don’t worry. He’ll get used to it. He’s weak and dealing with some strange sensations besides.”

  “Pain in a phantom limb? Dogs have that?” She didn’t want to tell the vet tech she felt dizzy. When they reached her car, she leaned one hand against the cold metal before opening the back door.

  “Easy boy.” Bricklin eyed the seat, but the young man didn’t give him time to put his single front paw up. He hefted the dog into the car, and Bricklin lay down, exhausted from the short walk. “You have someone to help you at the other end? Don’t want him to tear his sutures.”

  “I’ll take care of it,” she replied, wondering how she would. After closing the door, she thanked the vet tech and settled into the driver’s seat. A quick look back at Bricklin confirmed her first impression. He was withdrawn, his eyes expressionless. Periodically, she would check her rearview mirror to make sure he was okay, and she drove home so slowly she felt compelled to keep her flashers on.

  Lionel Chambers, Jeanne’s neighbor, was a retired professor and often home during the day. He was fond of Bricklin and, when he received Jeanne’s call, readily agreed to help. Lionel was watching from his window when Jeanne pulled into her garage. Seeing familiar surroundings, Bricklin struggled to get up. “Stay down,” she begged more than commanded.

  When Lionel arrived at her side and saw Bricklin, he shook his head. “A grim sight, indeed.” As soon as the two of them pulled Bricklin out and set him on the garage floor, the dog limped forward. Jeanne rushed ahead to get the door while Lionel called after her to get in touch if she needed more help.

  Bricklin limped into the kitchen and lay down under the table. In an instant, he was asleep. Jeanne crouched and inspected him, the fingers of one hand pressed against her lips. The side of his body was shaved clean and horrifyingly concave where the shoulder had been excised. The area was bisected by a black-stitched red gash. Jeanne let her legs slip out from under her until she was sitting under the table with Bricklin. She wanted to cry, but her throat felt constricted, and no tears would come.

  She had planned to spend the rest of the day working from home so she could help Bricklin in and out of the yard. Although she didn’t need Scott, she’d asked him to come at his usual time so they could discuss Bricklin’s current needs. At the sound of Scott’s voice, Bricklin rose, tail wagging, and limped to the door. “Wow,” Jeanne said to the stubble-chinned young man. “I didn’t think he had the strength to greet anyone.”

  “It’s not me. He’s just feeling better. Aren’t you, pal?” He scratched behind Bricklin’s ears with his weathered fingers. “Bricklin’s not the first amputee dog I’ve cared for. He’ll adjust. Dogs don’t moan and groan, ‘Why me?’” He straightened up at the sound of barking from outside the condo. “Hear that, Bricklin? Your friends are in the van waiting for you to go with them for a run. Get better quick so you can join the party.”

  “Bricklin’s not the only one that feels better. Thanks for helping me feel less like a mutilator.”

  “The way I see it, you gave him a shot at life. Not everyone would have done that.” He scowled. “You wouldn’t believe what I’ve seen owners do with their dogs.”

  He promised to look in on Bricklin a few times during the day and walk him in the yard. When he turned to leave, Jeanne had to hold the dog’s collar to keep him from following. “That’s a good sign,” he said, giving Jeanne a thumbs-up.

  Bricklin seemed to be mastering the three-legged walk, although Jeanne hated seeing him sink each time he needed to put down the fourth leg that wasn’t there. Exhausted by Scott’s visit, he returned to his spot under the kitchen table and fell asleep. Jeanne set up her laptop on the surface so she could keep watch.

  By the next morning, Bricklin’s energy level and Jeanne’s spirits were improved. He was eating, a good sign, and managing his three-legged gait better. She hated to leave for the office but said a silent prayer of thanks to Scott and turned up the collar of her coat. While the calendar showed over a month until the official start of winter, the wind was brisk, the sky overcast, and the air smelled as if the promised rain might be snow.

  The first email in Jeanne’s inbox was a company-wide message from Alberta. She had decided Salientific needed a Christmas contest to celebrate the holiday and was urging everyone to provide a childhood photograph. The picture could be an individual portrait, a funny snapshot, or, at the very least, a team or class photo with the appropriate face indicated by an arrow on a Post-it note.

  All employees were encouraged to submit a list of guesses as to the identity of the people in the numbered photos. The person with the most correct answers would receive a holiday turkey. Jeanne thoroughly approved of humor as a morale builder, only now it was her own morale that needed the uplift. She remembered seeing some loose childhood photos in Mother’s time capsule. She’d look again.

  Jake had agreed to a morning meeting on the kickoff, so Jeanne grabbed the folder Mariana had left, still parked on the exact corner of Jeanne’s table, and detoured to get a cup of decaf before swinging past Jake’s office. She wasn’t sure which Jake she would find, the pre- or post-crash version, but perhaps enough time had passed for his PTSD relapse to have subsided.

  He was at his desk looking serious but steady. He motioned her in and gestured toward his table and chairs before closing the door. Jeanne’s antennae were up. There was a tension in Jake’s body that worried her.

  “Thank you,” he began, “for helping me the day those disturbing sirens passed our building.” Easier for him, she thought, to reference the external stimulus and not his cowering under his desk. “And thank you for your discretion.”

  “You’re welcome,” she said with a quick nod. She wanted him to consider a leave of absence to get himself together but was afraid if he left, he would open the door wide for Parker. If he stayed, Parker’s budding mutiny might succeed. Either way, he was screwed, and so was she, if she continued as his defender.

  Habitual expressions etch lines in people’s faces even before aging deepens those lines. Perhaps because Jake’s face was so thin, his eyes stood out. His crow’s feet and the furrow between his brows conveyed his earnestness, and Jeanne could always read the words he had yet to speak from the expression in those eyes. At that moment, his eyes foretold pleading. Jeanne’s hands, folded on the table, felt clammy, and she unfolded them.

  “I know we agreed not to discuss last summer, but . . .” Her heartbeat seemed audible as she bent the tab of Mariana’s folder back and forth. He leaned forward and put his hand over hers. A tremor ran through her, part anxiety, part another kind of physical response altogether. Not again, she thought, this is no good, but she didn’
t pull her hand away. “Jeanne, I keep wondering, doing the math. Your baby, is it mine?”

  She wanted to hold him, right then in his office, yet she didn’t move. Did she want the baby to be his or Vince’s? She reminded herself that at the moment there was no Vince. What to say? Could be yours, could be another guy’s? No disputing how that would sound. She knew what she would do if she had a business problem and no good alternatives—cut her losses.

  His fingers remained on hers as she disengaged until their tips grazed her nails. “I used a sperm donor.” There, that extinguished the fire, for her anyway. It wasn’t a lie, not exactly. She just didn’t know which donor. Feminist guilt flooded her thoughts. Now who was an object? At that moment, she fervently wished never to know who the father was, but Maggie had called her a coward. Had Jeanne’s mother felt the same agony over concealing the truth about her father?

  Jake’s face fell. “I understand.” What did he understand? That she was telling the truth or that she wouldn’t admit he’d fathered the baby. Maybe all he understood was that she wouldn’t allow any further physical intimacy. He fell back in his seat, his torso drained of its energy, his face blank.

  Jeanne looked down at the folder in her lap and wondered how to segue to the sales meeting. Jake spared her the awkwardness. He straightened up. “You came in to ask me about . . . ?” She pulled out Mariana’s notes on his role in the sales conference agenda. It wasn’t the agenda he’d hoped to discuss, but it was all she could offer.

  Luke’s calendar was packed, but he offered to meet Jeanne for breakfast two weeks after his presentation at Dawning Day. Morning traffic made Baker’s Sweet Shop inconvenient for Jeanne, but she was too grateful for the chance to ask her questions to object. Parking in Newford Highlands was scarce, so she ended up several blocks away in front of one of the area’s “painted lady” Victorians.

  Tugging her maternity coat tighter across her swelling bump, she walked west into the raw wind. In her bag was a new spiral notebook, dedicated to her research into Alzheimer’s. She didn’t want the information on her laptop, her tablet, or her phone—paranoid perhaps, but she wanted no digital record of her concerns.

  Luke had already secured a table in the bright, cheerful restaurant and had a large cup of coffee before him. He was texting when Jeanne walked in but looked up and smiled. “Hope you don’t mind, I started without you.” She eyed the line at the counter and sat down across from him.

  “Think I’ll wait. I don’t have the same feeling of desperation as I used to before my first cup of coffee. My obstetrician threatened bodily harm if I didn’t switch to decaf.”

  “You must be very excited. First pregnancy, right?” He put away his phone and sat back in his chair.

  “I was, but now . . .” As she described the safety deposit box’s contents, she withdrew from the front pocket of her notebook the letter from her father’s neurologist to her mother and handed it to Luke. “How could that doctor know it was Alzheimer’s? Was there even a way to diagnose it in the early sixties?”

  “How old was your father?”

  “Fifty-one at his death.”

  “The sixties were when scientists figured out that the disease-causing brain changes in the relatively young were the same Alzheimer’s disease diagnosed in older people. They didn’t know the genetic underpinnings, however, till the nineties. Your father’s Dr. Kingman could have reasonably concluded, given your father’s age, that the clinical symptoms indicated Alzheimer’s.”

  Jeanne’s mouth went dry. “Do you mind if I get that coffee after all?” She jumped up and hurried to the counter, where the line had diminished. It felt good to have something hot between her hands, and she started sipping even before she returned to her chair.

  His voice softened. “It’s frustrating to learn things about your parents after they’re gone.”

  She looked into his kind eyes. She was used to frustration, even game changers. In a technology business, you had to expect them. “Since my mother’s death, I’ve discovered my past, my future, even my attitudes were never my own. They were predetermined. I was engineered.”

  “I doubt that. You’re too smart a woman. We do have a way of internalizing, though, allowing our parents’ admonitions to haunt our thinking, even into adulthood. We don’t even realize what we’re doing in the absence of a good psychiatrist to point it out.” Jeanne wondered if that was an oblique suggestion she needed a shrink.

  “I imagine your mother thought she was doing you a favor, concealing your father’s illness. She probably thought it was hereditary and found that a frightening prospect for you. She wouldn’t have wanted you to worry about dying prematurely. Tell me about your father’s family history. It’s important to know if anyone else showed symptoms of dementia.”

  “My mother said he was an orphan, adopted by a childless older couple, the Bridgetons. Not terribly helpful, I know.” Her hand fell heavily on the table. “There’s got to be a way to find out if early-onset Alzheimer’s ran in my father’s family.”

  “Well, let’s see. First, you’d have to track down the adoption records. If they’re sealed, and your father’s biological parents are deceased, you’d have to get them unsealed, a difficult, perhaps impossible, task.” Jeanne took a quick swallow of her coffee and burned her tongue. “There are probably websites you could use, although I’m not familiar with them. I’m afraid by the time you got your answer, you’d be past your twenty-fourth week, with abortion no longer an option. Without a genetic analysis, we have no way of knowing if your father carried a mutation in the presenilin 1 or 2, or the amyloid precursor protein genes. If he did, you had a fifty-fifty chance to inherit the gene, assuming your mother was free of it.”

  Fifty-fifty—that’s what it all boiled down to. A coin toss. Even money. “You need to understand,” he continued, “those genes only account for a tiny percentage of cases, less than 5 percent. Maybe a few hundred families in the world have these genetic mutations. It’s the e4 allele of APOE that raises the risk for late-onset Alzheimer’s. Two copies of APOE-e4, rather than one, can raise that risk and increase the likelihood that late-onset Alzheimer’s will appear somewhat earlier. APOE-e4 is estimated to be the primary cause of 20 to 25 percent of the cases. There are a few other genes, like SORL1, that have mutations that also increase the risk for Alzheimer’s.”

  “Isn’t APOE-e4 the one you said was only a predisposing allele?”

  “Everyone inherits a form of APOE from each parent. One can inherit the e4 version and not develop the disease. One can develop the disease and not have the e4. There may be other genes involved we haven’t discovered yet.”

  She gazed longingly through the glass door to the street, wishing there were a physical exit out of her dilemma. “I get it. Even if my father did have early-onset Alzheimer’s, he might not have had one of the rare predictive genes, just two copies of the bad susceptibility gene, or even a gene that scientists don’t know about. The net of it is—no guarantees.”

  “I’m afraid so.”

  This was her worst nightmare—lack of clarity. The right thing was to have an abortion. She owed it to her unborn child to spare it the curse of inheriting early-onset Alzheimer’s or enduring the heartache of growing up without a mother.

  “I know your friend, Maggie, was concerned for you, but you need to realize it’s extremely unlikely you have one of the genes that would ensure the early onset of Alzheimer’s disease. Your father’s dementia could have had a different cause. I would suggest you see a genetics counselor, and perhaps a therapist,” he added gently.

  Jeanne sat up straight in her chair. “A genetics counselor, yes, but I haven’t got time for therapy.”

  “I understand, but given the impact the results can have, you might want to reconsider.”

  “Trust me, I can handle it.” Even as she spoke the words, she wondered if it was time to abandon her standard response to a challenge.

  “What kind of support network do you have? Who can
help you sort through the issues?”

  Jeanne hesitated, hoping to appear less discomfited by his question than she was. “Friends, colleagues . . .” The baby’s father was a conspicuous absence.

  “Has your doctor recommended a genetics counselor? I imagine, given your age, you’ve seen one already.”

  Every conversation had “given your age” embedded in it somewhere. Pregnancy should make her feel fertile and youthful. Instead she felt like a brontosaurus preserved for the ages. “I’ve been meaning to make an appointment at the Maternal Fetal Medicine unit. Just so busy . . .”

  “Newford Wellman?” She nodded. “I don’t know if they handle genetic tests for Alzheimer’s. They send some of their tests to us. If you need my help again, please let me know. Happy to put you in touch with a resource.”

  No need for now to ask the rest of her questions. She was already overwhelmed by the magnitude of the issues swirling around the miniscule being growing inside her. It was hard to imagine how her baby could float serenely in a sea of amniotic fluid when there was so much turmoil on deck.

  That evening, Jeanne began refilling her mother’s carton with the contents of her time capsule. She checked for photos that might have lodged between the pages of books. Bricklin, who was making steady progress, lay down on the living room floor beside her. Hard to believe she’d reverse engineered the entire contents of Mother’s house, only to be stymied by a box of mementos. What to discard, what to keep, whether to chuck the whole thing or keep it as the physical embodiment of who her mother really was . . .

  Jeanne stroked Bricklin’s head. “I guess when people talk about the elephant in the living room, this is what they mean.” Bricklin wagged his tail along the floor, agreeable, as always. Jeanne leaned over and rested her head on his. “I love you so much, boy, and I’m so proud of you. Don’t leave me. Please don’t leave me. You’re my whole support network, although I couldn’t tell that to Luke. You’re enough.” Bricklin lay quiet, unaware of the tears wetting his fur.