by Lisa Genova
They’d been in Chatham for a week now. In years past, after a week away from the day-to-day concerns at Harvard, she would have been fully committed to the relaxed lifestyle that the Cape insisted on and already deep into her third or fourth book. But this year, Harvard’s day-to-day schedule itself, albeit packed and demanding, had provided a structure for her that was familiar and comforting. Meetings, symposia, class times, and appointments lay like bread crumbs that guided her through each day.
Here in Chatham, she had no schedule. She slept late, ate meals at varying times, and played everything by ear. She bookended each day with her medications, she took her butterfly test each morning, and she ran every day with John. But these didn’t provide enough structure. She needed bigger bread crumbs and more of them.
She often didn’t know the time of day or what day it was, for that matter. On more than one occasion now when she sat down to eat, she didn’t know which meal she was about to be presented with. When yesterday a waitress at the Sand Bar put a plate of fried clams in front of her, she would have just as readily and enthusiastically dug into a plate of pancakes.
The kitchen windows were open. She looked out into the driveway. No car. The outside air still held traces of the hot day and carried sounds of bullfrogs, a woman laughing, and the tide at Hardings Beach. She left a note for John next to the uncleared dishes:
Walk to beach. Love, A
She inhaled the clean night air. The midnight blue sky was punctured with backlit stars and a cartoon crescent moon. Not as dark as it would get that night, it was already darker than it ever got in Cambridge. Without streetlamps and tucked far enough in from Main Street, only lights from porches, rooms in houses, the occasional car high beams, and the moon illuminated their beach neighborhood. In Cambridge, that amount of darkness would have made her feel uneasy walking alone, but here, in this small seaside and vacationing community, she felt perfectly safe.
There were no cars parked in the lot and no one else on the beach. The town police discouraged activity there at night. At this hour, there were no screaming children or seagulls, no impossible-to-ignore cell phone conversations, no aggressive worries about needing to leave in time to get to the next thing, nothing to disrupt the peace.
She walked to the water’s edge and let the ocean consume her feet. Warm waves licked her legs. Facing Nantucket Sound, Hardings Beach’s protected waters were a good ten degrees milder than those of the nearby beaches that faced the cold Atlantic directly.
She removed her shirt and bra first, then slid off her skirt and underwear in one motion, and walked in. The water, free from the seaweed that normally tumbled in with the surf, lapped milky smooth against her skin. She began to breathe to the rhythm of the tide. As she treaded lightly, floating on her back, she marveled at the beads of phosphorescence that trailed her fingertips and heels like pixie dust.
Moonlight reflected off her right wrist. SAFE RETURN was engraved on the front of the flat, two-inch, stainless steel bracelet. A one-eight-hundred number, her identification, and the words Memory Impaired were etched on the reverse side. Her thoughts then rode a series of waves, traveling from unwanted jewelry to her mother’s butterfly necklace, traversing from there to her plan for suicide, to the books she planned to read, and finally stranded themselves on the common fates of Virginia Woolf and Edna Pontellier. It would be so easy. She could swim straight out toward Nantucket until she was too tired to continue.
She looked out over the dark water. Her body, strong and healthy, held her buoyant, treading water, every instinct battling toward life. Yes, she didn’t remember eating dinner with John tonight or where he’d said he was going. And she might very well not remember this night in the morning, but in this moment, she didn’t feel desperate. She felt alive and happy.
She looked back toward the beach, the landscape dimly lit. A figure approached. She knew it was John before she could identify any of his features by the bounce and size of his walk. She didn’t ask him where he’d been or how long he’d been gone. She didn’t thank him for coming back. He didn’t scold her for being out alone without her cell phone, and he didn’t ask her to get out and come home. Without a word between them, he undressed and joined her in her ocean.
“JOHN?”
She found him painting the trim on the detached garage.
“I’ve been calling for you all over the house,” said Alice.
“I was out here, I didn’t hear you,” said John.
“When do you leave for the conference?” she asked.
“Monday.”
He was going to Philadelphia for a week to attend the ninth International Conference on Alzheimer’s Disease.
“That’s after Lydia gets here, right?”
“Yes, she’ll be here on Sunday.”
“Oh, right.”
Following Lydia’s written request, the Monomoy Theatre repertory company had invited her to join them as a guest artist for the summer.
“Are you ready to run?” asked John.
The early morning fog hadn’t yet lifted, and the air felt cooler than she’d dressed for.
“I just need to grab another layer.”
Inside the front door, she opened the coat closet. Dressing comfortably on the Cape in early summer posed a constant challenge, with temperatures on any given day beginning in the fifties, soaring up to eighty by afternoon and boomeranging back down into the fifties, often paired with a brisk ocean wind, by nightfall. It required a creative sense of fashion and a willingness to add and subtract articles of clothing many times a day. She touched the sleeves of each of the hanging coats. Although a number of them would be perfect now for sitting or walking on the beach, everything in there felt too heavy for running.
She ran up the stairs and into their bedroom. After searching through several drawers, she found a lightweight fleece and put it on. She noticed the book she’d been reading on her nightstand. She grabbed it and walked down the stairs and into the kitchen. She poured herself a glass of iced tea and walked out to the back porch. The early morning fog hadn’t yet lifted, and it was cooler than she’d anticipated. She set her drink and book down on the table between the white Adirondack chairs and went back into the house to retrieve a blanket.
She returned, wrapped herself in the blanket, sat in one of the chairs, and opened her book to the dog-eared page. Reading was fast becoming a heartbreaking chore. She had to reread pages over and over to retain the continuity of the thesis or narrative, and if she put the book down for any length of time, she had to go back sometimes a full chapter to find the thread again. Plus, she felt anxious over deciding what to read. What if she didn’t have time to read everything she’d always wanted to? Prioritizing hurt, a reminder that the clock was ticking, that some things would be left undone.
She’d just begun reading King Lear. She so loved Shakespeare’s tragedies but had never read this one. Unfortunately, as was becoming routine, she found herself stuck after only a few minutes. She reread the previous page, tracing the imaginary line below the words with her index finger. She drank the entire glass of iced tea and watched the birds in the trees.
“There you are. What are you doing, aren’t we going for a run?” John asked.
“Oh, yes, good. This book is making me crazy.”
“Let’s go then.”
“Are you going to that conference today?”
“Monday.”
“What’s today?”
“Thursday.”
“Oh. And when does Lydia get here?”
“Sunday.”
“That’s before you leave?”
“Yes. Ali, I just told you all this. You should put it in your BlackBerry, I think it’d make you feel better.”
“Okay, sorry.”
“Ready?”
“Yes. Wait, let me pee before we go.”
“All right, I’ll be out by the garage.”
She placed her empty glass on the counter next to the sink and dropped the blanket and boo
k on the slipcovered chair-and-a-half in the living room. She stood ready to move, but her legs needed further instruction. What did she come in here for? She retraced her steps—blanket and book, glass on counter, porch with John. He was leaving soon to attend the International Conference on Alzheimer’s Disease. Sunday maybe? She’d have to ask him to be sure. They were about to go for a run. It was a little cool out. She came in for a fleece! No, that wasn’t it. She was already wearing one. To hell with it.
Just as she reached the front door, an urgent pressure in her bladder announced itself, and she remembered that she really had to pee. She hastened back down the hall and opened the door to the bathroom. Only, to her utter disbelief, it wasn’t the bathroom. A broom, mop, bucket, vacuum cleaner, stool, toolbox, lightbulbs, flashlights, bleach. The utility closet.
She looked farther down the hall. The kitchen to the left, the living room to the right, and that was it. There was a half bath on this floor, wasn’t there? There had to be. It was right here. But it wasn’t. She hurried to the kitchen but found only one door, and it led to the back porch. She raced over to the living room, but of course, there wasn’t a bathroom off the living room. She rushed back to the hallway and held the doorknob.
“Please God, please God, please God.”
She swung the door open like an illusionist revealing her most mystifying trick, but the bathroom didn’t magically reappear.
How can I be lost in my own home?
She thought about bolting upstairs to the full bath, but she was strangely stuck and dumbfounded in the Twilight Zone–like, bathroomless dimension of the first floor. She was unable to hold it in any longer. She had an ethereal sense of observing herself, this poor, unfamiliar woman crying in the hallway. It didn’t sound like the somewhat guarded cry of an adult woman. It was the scared, defeated, and unrestrained crying of a small child.
Her tears weren’t all she wasn’t able to contain any longer. John burst through the front door just in time to witness the urine streaming down her right leg, soaking her sweatpants, sock, and sneaker.
“Don’t look at me!”
“Ali, don’t cry, it’s okay.”
“I don’t know where I am.”
“It’s okay, you’re right here.”
“I’m lost.”
“You’re not lost, Ali, you’re with me.”
He held her, and rocked her slightly side to side, soothing her as she’d seen him calm their children after innumerable physical injuries and social injustices.
“I couldn’t find the bathroom.”
“It’s okay.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be sorry, it’s okay. Come on, let’s get you changed. The day’s already heating up, you need something lighter anyway.”
BEFORE JOHN LEFT FOR THE conference, he gave Lydia detailed instructions concerning Alice’s medications, her running routine, her cell phone, and the Safe Return program. He also gave her the neurologist’s phone number, just in case. When Alice replayed his little speech in her head, it sounded very much like the ones they had delivered to their teenage babysitters before leaving the kids for weekends away in Maine or Vermont. Now she needed to be watched. By her own daughter.
After their first dinner alone together at the Squire, Alice and Lydia walked down Main Street without talking. The line of luxury cars and SUVs parked along the curb, outfitted with bike racks and kayaks bungeed on roofs, crammed with baby strollers, beach chairs, and umbrellas, and sporting license plates from Connecticut, New York, and New Jersey in addition to Massachusetts signaled the summer season officially in full swing. Families ambled along the sidewalk without regard for lanes of pedestrian traffic, unhurried and without specific destinations, stopping, backtracking, and window-shopping. Like they had all the time in the world.
An easy ten-minute stroll removed them from the congested downtown. They stopped in front of the Chatham Lighthouse and breathed in the panoramic view of the beach below before walking the thirty steps down to the sand. A modest line of sandals and flip-flops waited at the bottom, where they’d been kicked off earlier in the day. Alice and Lydia added their shoes to the end of the row and continued walking. The sign in front of them read:
WARNING: STRONG CURRENT. Surf subject to unexpected life-threatening waves and currents. No lifeguard. Hazardous area for: swimming and wading, diving and waterskiing, sailboards and small boats, rafts and canoes.
Alice watched and listened to the relentless, breaking waves pounding the shore. If it weren’t for the colossal seawall constructed at the edges of the properties of the million-dollar homes along Shore Road, the ocean would have taken each house in, devouring them all without sympathy or apology. She imagined her Alzheimer’s like this ocean at Lighthouse Beach—unstoppable, ferocious, destructive. Only there were no seawalls in her brain to protect her memories and thoughts from the onslaught.
“I’m sorry I didn’t get to go to your play,” she said to Lydia.
“It’s all right. I know it was because of Dad this time.”
“I can’t wait to see the one you’re in this summer.”
“Uh-huh.”
The sun hung low and impossibly big in the pink and blue sky, ready to plunge into the Altantic. They walked by a man kneeling in the sand, aiming his camera at the horizon, trying to capture its fleeting beauty before it disappeared with the sun.
“This conference Dad’s at is about Alzheimer’s?”
“Yes.”
“Is he trying to find a better treatment there?”
“He is.”
“Do you think he’ll find one?”
Alice watched the tide coming in, erasing footprints, demolishing an elaborate sand castle decorated with shells, filling in a hole dug earlier that day with plastic shovels, ridding the shore of its daily history. She envied the beautiful homes behind the seawall.
“No.”
Alice picked up a shell. She rubbed the sand off, revealing its milky white shine and elegant ribbons of pink. She liked its smooth feel, but it was broken on one edge. She thought about tossing it into the water but decided to keep it.
“Well, I’m sure he wouldn’t take the time to go if he didn’t think he could find something,” said Lydia.
Two girls wearing University of Massachusetts sweatshirts walked toward them, giggling. Alice smiled at them and said “Hello” as they passed.
“I wish you’d go to college,” said Alice.
“Mom, please don’t.”
Not wanting to start their week together with a full-blown fight, Alice silently reminisced while they walked. The professors she’d loved and feared and made a fool of herself in front of, the boys she’d loved and feared and made an even bigger fool of herself in front of, the punchy all-nighters before exams, the classes, the parties, the friendships, meeting John—her memories of that time in her life were vivid, perfectly intact, and easily accessed. They were almost a little cocky the way they came to her, so full and ready, like they had no knowledge of the war going on just a few centimeters to their left.
Whenever she thought about college, her thoughts ultimately bumped into January of her freshman year. A little over three hours after her family had visited and left for home, Alice had heard a tentative knock on her dorm room door. She still remembered every detail of the dean standing in her doorway—the single, deep crease between his eyebrows, the boyish part in his grandfatherly gray hair, the woolly pills budding all over his forest green sweater, the low, careful cadence of his voice.
Her father had driven the car off Route 93 and into a tree. He might have fallen asleep. He might have had too much to drink at dinner. He always had too much to drink at dinner. He was in a hospital in Manchester. Her mother and her sister were dead.
“JOHN? IS THAT YOU?”
“No, it’s just me bringing in the towels. It’s about to pour,” said Lydia.
The air was charged and heavy. They were due for some rain. The weather had cooperated all week wit
h postcard sunny days and perfect sleeping temperatures each night. Her brain had cooperated all week, too. She’d come to recognize the difference between days that would be fraught with difficulties finding memories and words and bathrooms and days that her Alzheimer’s would lie silent and not interfere. On those quiescent days, she was her normal self, the self she understood and had confidence in. On those days, she could almost convince herself that Dr. Davis and the genetic counselor had been wrong, or that the last six months had been a horrible dream, only a nightmare, the monster under her bed and clawing at her covers not real.
From the living room, Alice watched Lydia fold towels and stack them on one of the kitchen stools. She wore a light blue, spaghetti-strap tank top and a black skirt. She looked freshly showered. Alice still wore her bathing suit under a faded fish-print beach dress.
“Should I get changed?” she asked.
“If you want to.”
Lydia returned clean mugs to a cabinet and checked her watch. Then she came into the living room, gathered the magazines and catalogs from the couch and floor, and piled them into a neat stack on the coffee table. She checked her watch. She took a copy of Cape Cod Magazine off the top of the pile, sat down on the couch, and began flipping through it. They seemed to be killing time, but Alice didn’t understand why. Something wasn’t right.
“Where’s John?” asked Alice.
Lydia looked up from the magazine, either amused or embarrassed or maybe both. Alice couldn’t tell.
“He should be home any minute.”
“So we’re waiting for him.”
“Uh-huh.”
“Where’s Anne?”
“Anna’s in Boston, with Charlie.”
“No, Anne, my sister, where’s Anne?”
Lydia stared at her without blinking, all lightness drained from her face.
“Mom, Anne’s dead. She died in a car accident with your mother.”
Lydia’s eyes didn’t move from Alice’s. Alice stopped breathing, and her heart squeezed like a fist. Her head and fingers went numb, and the world around her became dark and narrow. She took in a huge breath of air. It filled her head and fingers with oxygen, and it filled her pounding heart with rage and grief. She began to shake and cry.