by Julie Cohen
‘Have you talked about it with him?’ asked Sarah. She and Emily were sitting at her kitchen table, having lunch. Most Wednesdays they had lunch, sometimes out, sometimes at one of their houses. Sarah had made a chicken salad and iced coffee. Her eldest daughter, Dottie, was bringing a pecan pie later on, from the Clyde Bay General Store where she worked.
‘No. Not yet.’
‘Isn’t that sort of strange, in itself?’
‘But . . .’ Emily stirred her coffee. ‘There’s a lot we don’t talk about.’
‘You two are always talking. You talk all the time.’
‘Yes, but there are things . . . we’ve known each other so long, we’ve been with each other constantly. There are things we don’t need to talk about, because we know.’
‘I can see why none of my marriages ever lasted,’ joked Sarah. ‘I’m always asking the questions. Where were you last night? How many beers did you drink? When did you get home? Whose perfume is that on you?’
Emily laughed despite herself. By any logic, she and Sarah shouldn’t be friends; they were entirely different, from completely different backgrounds. There were nearly thirty years between them. Emily was a retired obstetrician and Sarah worked as a cashier in the supermarket up in Thomaston. Sarah was a native Mainer, and Emily, even after forty years in Maine, was what they called ‘from Away’. They had become friends, purely by chance, and then over the years their roots had intertwined. For a while, she’d been Emily’s daughter-in-law, though that hadn’t lasted long.
Sarah was the only person she could talk to about this. She couldn’t mention it to their family, not until it was something to actually worry about.
‘People are noticing,’ she said. ‘Pierre and Little Sterling, after what happened at the boatyard the other day. And Joyce at the pharmacy said he’d come into pick up my prescriptions twice in one day.’
‘That’s the thing about a small town. People notice. But they look out for you, too.’
‘Robbie’s such a proud man. He’s so self-sufficient. If he thinks that people are pitying him . . .’
She trailed off.
‘Or if they’re pitying you?’ said Sarah. ‘Are you worried about that, too?’
‘Of course not. This isn’t about me.’
‘I know you pretty well by now, Em. And I know you like helping people. It’s your role around here. How many people in Port Clyde have you delivered as babies?’
‘About eighty per cent of the population between forty and ten years old. There are quite a few families here where I brought both the parents into the world, and then I’ve delivered their children.’
‘You brought Dottie into the world. I wish you’d deliver her baby, too. She’s about ready to drop.’
Emily smiled. ‘Retired.’
‘Robbie has helped people too. He’s given people jobs, fixed people’s boats. He did all of that for William. I know he’s done a few jobs for people who couldn’t afford it. He did a lot of rebuilding after Hurricane Sandy came through here. You don’t need to feel bad about people noticing, or wanting to do something.’
Once upon a time, Sarah had taken help from her, and Emily had wanted to give it. They’d done each other many kindnesses over the years. But Sarah didn’t know everything. She didn’t know why Robbie and she needed to be self-sufficient, a completeness of two. No one knew now, except for her and Robbie.
‘My father,’ Emily said, ‘was the town doctor. Everyone respected him. He’d helped everyone in the village, at some point or another. All I ever wanted was to be like him.’
‘And what happened when he needed help? Because I’m sure he did, at some point.’
‘I . . . don’t know. We’d lost touch by then.’
Sarah touched her hand across the table. ‘It’s not a failure. It’s an illness. That’s what you kept on telling me, that time when you helped me.’
‘We don’t even know that it’s an illness yet.’
‘What if it is?’
‘Then, if it is, we’ll do what we always do. We’ll get through it, Robbie and I, together.’
Sarah got up and brought the bowl of chicken salad to the table, and spooned more on to their plates. ‘How’s Adam and the kids?’
‘They’re wonderful, as always.’
‘And William?’
‘He’s all right. You know what he’s like. He and Robbie are too alike to talk with each other, but he calls me, and he’s in touch with Adam.’
‘Same here. He called Dottie last week on her birthday. Not a word to me.’
‘I’m sorry, Sarah.’
Sarah shrugged. ‘He’s a better dad to her than her real dad was. How are his kids?’
‘He sent some pictures.’ She took out her phone and showed Sarah the photos of Brianna and John.
‘That girl is the spit of her father,’ said Sarah.
‘Yes, the Brandon genes are strong. Adam is more like me.’ It was an automatic response.
‘Is he back together with their mother?’
Emily shook her head. ‘He’s happier as a father than as a husband. As you know.’
‘Family is what’s important,’ said Sarah. ‘And we can find family in our friends, too. That’s what you taught me back then. You’ll let us all help you. All of us who you’ve helped. That’s what it’s about, being part of a place. And you’re part of this place now, whether you like it or not.’
‘I know,’ said Emily. And as good a friend as Sarah was, Emily didn’t add that being part of a place was one of the things that worried her the most. Because that was fragile, too.
A pattern is harder to break than almost anything, Robbie thought. Once you started it going, it had its own inevitability, its own momentum. You might as well try to stop the wind.
But Emily knew something was wrong. And he knew, too. It had been months, now. Maybe even years. There was a fog clouding a part of his life: a different part every day. It moved in without warning and left him lost. And she knew that he knew, and he knew that she knew, and yet neither one of them had said anything.
It was a pattern they had laid down at the start of their relationship: not right at the start, but later, when they had discovered that their love could only last if silence held it together in certain places.
Friday was always his night to make dinner and he usually made chilli or phoned out for pizza. Tonight he did neither. He waited until six o’clock and then he went outside to where she was digging weeds in the garden, her head shaded by a broad-brimmed straw hat. He knelt beside her on the grass.
‘Oh,’ she said in surprise. ‘Are you helping me?’
Her voice was pleasant: she was happy to see him, she loved him and she was the same, but there was a small wariness in her eyes. Because any variation from the pattern was cause for concern, now. The variations were what was wrong.
‘It’s Friday,’ he said, ‘but I haven’t cooked dinner. Do you know why I’m saying this?’
‘So that I know we’re having pizza?’
‘So that you know that I know what day it is, and what time it is. Because I don’t always, do I?’
She didn’t reply.
‘This is something we have to talk about. It won’t go away if we ignore it.’
‘Nothing goes away,’ she said.
‘Are you frightened, sweetheart?’
She nodded. He put his arm around her shoulders, kneeling beside her in the grass.
Chapter Four
August 2016
Portland, Maine
The hospital in Portland was bigger and more specialised than Pen Bay Hospital where Emily had worked all those years, but she knew one or two of the people working there. Sometimes when she went up to Portland she arranged to meet them for lunch, or coffee.
Today she sat in the waiting room with Robbie amon
g other patients and their families, waiting to see the neurologist. In her hospital career she had seen mainly pregnant women and young mothers; it was slightly shocking to see so many elderly people in this waiting room, and even more shocking to realise that she and Robbie were also elderly.
‘I always picture us as young lovers,’ whispered Robbie to her. ‘I still see you as you were when we first met. Does that mean I have a memory problem?’
He had good days, and he had bad days. Today was a good day. He’d got ready, taken care of the dogs, talked about their mutual friends, joked about where they were going, chatted about what restaurant they should go to in the Old Port for lunch after his appointment. He’d let her drive, but that was normal when they took Emily’s car. He didn’t misplace his keys or his wallet or forget to tie his shoes.
Emily had worried about it being a good day: what if the neurologist failed to spot the symptoms that had become apparent to her?
But she would have worried if it had been a bad day, too.
He called it a fog. Fog was a part of daily life in coastal Maine. The chill of the water met the warm southerly wind and produced condensation. You could be inland, in a clear blue summer day, and as soon as you came within half a mile of the coast, maybe even a mile, the fog would billow in around you. Some summers they had fog every single day. She could look out of the windows of their house and think that she was floating in a cloud.
‘That’s not a memory problem,’ she whispered back to him. ‘That’s being a softy romantic.’
The neurologist, Dr Calvin, was reassuringly aged. He had no hair on his head but a surprising amount growing from eyebrows, nostrils and ears. Emily had researched, of course, and knew what to expect; she’d asked Robbie if he wanted her to explain the tests to him, but Robbie had said he didn’t want to know.
What is today’s date? What day of the week is it? What is the season? What state are we in? What city? What building are we in? What floor are we on? I’m going to name three objects and I want you to repeat them back to me: street, banana, hammer. I’d like you to count backwards from one hundred, by sevens.
She sat in the spare chair and watched and listened to the doctor and the man she had loved for most of her life. She listened to the answers he gave. She watched him trying to draw a simple clock.
It was a good day. A good day, today.
But as he drew, horror crept over her, cold and insidious as fog.
Chapter Five
Afterwards, they didn’t go for lunch at the restaurant they’d chosen. They didn’t have to say anything to know they agreed; Emily drove them back up the coast and back to Clyde Bay, where she didn’t go home, but parked in town, instead. They took the dinghy out to the boat and wordlessly climbed aboard and got her ready to sail.
They’d done this so many times together. They each had their allotted tasks and their bodies performed them automatically. It was like a piece of music, the notes the same every time even though the performance was slightly different. It was a pattern that ran its own way.
They could be silent about this new knowledge if they chose. He knew they could. They had ignored bigger things.
The bay was calm and when Emily was poised at the mooring line, ready to cast it off, he switched on the motor so that they could get more quickly out into open water. He enjoyed it more when they sailed off the mooring and the wind was light, and they could just about do it today, if they wanted. But the engine made noise. It put off the point of conversation for a little while longer.
He cut the engine when they rounded the point past Marshall Lighthouse and they raised the mainsail together. Emily unwound the jib. It was her boat; he’d built it for her. A twenty-four foot sloop, small enough to handle easily alone, big enough for the two of them to take out for overnight trips. But she’d named it for something that had significance for both of them, and out of habit he generally took the helm when they were together.
This time he gestured for her to take it. He sat on the side of the cockpit, on the bench where Emily usually sat.
‘So,’ he said, once they were well under way and there was no other sound except for the snapping of the sail and the crying of the gulls. ‘Tell me what you know, doc.’
‘I’m an obstetrician, not a neurologist,’ she said, her eyes on the horizon.
‘But you know anyway, don’t you?’
‘You know too.’ Her voice held so much barely concealed pain that he was tempted to let it go, to talk of something else. But that wasn’t why they’d come out here on the water. The place where they were the most truly alone together.
‘I want your opinion. The doctor wouldn’t tell us anything. He said to come back next week.’
‘He wants to wait for the results of the blood tests.’
‘But we don’t need to, do we?’
‘The tests he gave you showed that you have impairment of short-term memory. You have some aphasia – that’s difficulty in recalling or understanding words – and some psychomotor difficulty.’
‘I messed up drawing that damn clock, didn’t I?’
She nodded. He hadn’t really been frightened, but now he felt something cold touch him. Because he’d thought he’d drawn that clock fine. Just fine.
‘There’s no sign of a stroke on the scans,’ said Emily. ‘And it’s come on gradually, not all at once. It could be vitamin deficiency, or an infection.’
‘But you don’t think that’s what it is.’
‘No. I think it’s most likely Alzheimer’s.’
She was brave. Her voice didn’t waver at all when she said it. It made him proud of her.
‘I think we’d better tack,’ he said. ‘If we want to avoid Mosquito Island.’
The wind was stronger at this point of sail. Robbie secured the main sheet and leaned back against the side of the cockpit, which was tilted at nearly a forty-degree angle.
‘So tell me what to expect,’ he said. ‘Alzheimer’s works backwards, doesn’t it? It erases the most recent memories first?’
‘I don’t think it’s so methodical,’ she said. ‘I think it takes what it damn well wants.’
‘But in general, the newer the memories, the sooner they go. Like Perry. Before he had to go into that home, he used to sit in the general store and insist it was 1953.’
‘You won’t go in a home,’ said Emily. ‘You will stay right in our house with me. We’ll live together as we always have, no matter what happens.’
‘I don’t want you to have to take care of me, Emily.’
‘Too bad. Because I will.’ She said it fiercely, and he was proud of her for that, too. ‘I’ll take care of you, and you’ll take care of me, for the rest of our lives. That’s what it’s all about.’
He watched the water rushing by. ‘There’s more to it than that, and you know it.’
‘I don’t know that there is.’
‘What about if there’s a time when I think it’s 1962?’
‘1962 was a fine year.’
‘You’re deliberately misunderstanding me.’
She went quiet for a few moments. Finally, she said, ‘You won’t.’
‘I most likely will, Emily. And it won’t matter to me, by that time. But it will matter a great deal to you, won’t it?’
‘We’re going too fast. Can you loosen that sail?’
He loosened it.
‘It doesn’t have to matter,’ he said. ‘We’ve been here in Maine for a long time. We raised our family here, and we worked here. Everyone here has only known us as we are now. They don’t judge us. And everyone who ever did or would, is gone.’
‘We said we’d never talk about this.’
‘Things have changed. We could let people know, in a way that we controlled. Then we could deal with it, together, while I’m still . . . while I’m still myself.’
‘What about Adam?’
‘Adam is old enough. He’s happy. He could handle it. He’d understand.’
‘No. I won’t put him through that. One of the things I’ve always loved best about Adam is that he’s sure of himself. He knows who he is. He’s like you, that way.’ He’s like the way you used to be, before this. She didn’t say that. ‘Telling him would take that certainty away from him. He’ll question everything he thinks he knows about his life.’
‘It wouldn’t have to. Think about it. I know you don’t want to, but think about it. We wouldn’t have any secrets any more. There wouldn’t be anything to be afraid of. We’d be free.’
‘You said we were free now. After Christopher died.’
‘Isn’t it a better freedom if everyone knows, than if no one does?’
She didn’t answer. He didn’t press her. He knew her well enough to be sure that she’d heard him.
They didn’t have any particular destination. They sailed where the wind took them. It was Robbie’s favourite kind of sailing, if he were honest: without aim, without schedule, meandering back and forth where the wind took them, sometimes fast, sometimes slow. This was the kind of sailing they had done their first time together, when Emily hadn’t known port from starboard. Back in 1962. On the water, all their time merged together. It was one time, and their love was always as fresh as it had been the day they had met.
He looked up, surprised to see they were passing Mosquito Island again, on their way back to Clyde Bay. He recognised all the landmarks: the cluster of buildings around the general store, the town dock, the big white house owned by summer people on the point. He hadn’t thought about . . . what was it they were thinking about? Something awful. Something terrifying.
‘Are you all right?’ Emily asked him, and he nodded.
‘I understand what you’re saying, Robbie,’ she said. ‘But I can’t do it. I can’t do it to Adam.’
He frowned, and was about to ask, What can’t you do to Adam, when he saw the launch heading towards them. ‘That’s Little Sterling,’ he said.
Little Sterling was waving his big arm at them. Emily altered their course to come alongside.