Back in junior high, while I was furiously practicing scales with the band, my father fell into a long period of unemployment. All my life he had worked on oil rigs, and the company he’d been with since before I was born had laid him off after a downturn in the industry. After a rough year and a half of looking for work, he found a job, only it was in Saudi Arabia, which meant uprooting our family and moving us there at the beginning of my ninth grade year. This was the story Ross knew, how his best friend moved to the Middle East for a while. What he didn’t know was how that move fractured my sense of self and sent me reeling through a series of rebellions. The school on the company compound went only to ninth grade, and after completing the year in a haze of culture shock, I was shipped off at age fifteen to a boarding school. Away from the anchoring presence of my family, I sank into a deep depression, started experimenting with various drugs, and was subsequently expelled just past the midway point of my tenth grade year. I spent about six weeks in a sort of limbo, being fretted over, medicated, and shuffled between various living situations until it was arranged that an uncle on my mother’s side would come and live with me in our family’s mostly empty house in Texas so I could salvage the rest of the tenth grade back at Georgetown High School, where I would have ended up if we’d never moved to Saudi Arabia in the first place. My mother and brother arranged to move back to Georgetown as well, scrapping Doug’s plans for some other boarding school. And there we all remained for the rest of high school, leaving my dad in Saudi Arabia until my senior year, when he finally found another job in the United States that would allow him to move back home.
Ross took all of this in with the occasional, quiet “Holy shit.” He had the unnerving habit of maintaining intense eye contact while we talked, a move that made it feel like he wasn’t just listening but learning me as he did. He could relate to some of my story—at least, more than most people I’d known in high school or college—because it turned out he’d had his own similarly timed uprooting and reshuffling away from Georgetown and back again. Ross’s dad was a soil chemist who worked at several different national labs and research firms over the course of his career, and when Ross was in ninth grade, his family moved to Las Vegas, Nevada, a city he’s hated ever since, and where he had to walk through metal detectors to get into school. After one year, during which he learned a mean game of pool by spending all of his free time with his dad, Ross’s parents became worried about him and it was agreed that the best plan was to move him back to Georgetown, where he would live with the large and lively family of one of his friends, people he still maintains a connection to—he refers to the friend’s parents as “Mom and Dad Simek.” Ross’s parents eventually moved back and he also finished high school in his reconstituted family. The coincidental timing of those moves gave us a lot to talk about—missing family, being the “old/new kid” in a weird living situation that required frequent explanation, feeling painfully conscious of being a logistical headache for other people, and the awkwardness of trying to reclaim old rhythms and relationships after significant interruptions.
The difference between our experiences, though, other than a whole lot of global miles, was that my passport bore the stamps from a crossover into the territory of “known fuckup” while Ross stayed firmly within the boundaries of honor student and Eagle Scout. This was important because explaining the true course of my sophomore year to someone I intended to become close to had become something of an obligatory disclaimer I had to deliver with the proper gravity—I have the proven potential to screw up massively and be a problem and liability for everybody close to me. Do you accept the risk in investing in me? It wasn’t the kind of leverage I was fond of giving away.
By the time of our conversation at Doug’s birthday party, Ross and I stood on the other side of college holding on to big dreams—his to be a fighter pilot and mine to be a writer—but grudgingly pursuing other, humbler short-term plans with no idea how or even whether the bigger stuff would work out. Soon after we began dating, Ross found a job as a billing analyst at a check printing company in San Antonio and moved into a tiny one-bedroom apartment. A hundred miles north in Austin, I left my reception job and started working as a scholarship administrator at the same university, where my desk held a framed snapshot of us tethered to climbing ropes on a cliff in Colorado, the kind of action-packed, REI catalog stunt I never would have undertaken before dating him. Our outlooks improved. We traded off cities on the weekends, and I worked hard for the approval of his dog, Abby, who started off eating my shoes and muscling me out of the bed and then grew to anticipate my hugs so much that she would rocket up the stairs to my apartment and leap into my arms.
It was on one of these afternoons, when Ross had driven up from San Antonio with Abby for the weekend and we had both finished recounting the horrors of the week in our office jobs, that Ross took a deep breath and said, “I have something I need to tell you.” We were sitting on my couch and the light coming in from my small balcony was thick and golden red as the sun began to set.
“You were so honest with me about what happened with you in high school,” he began, “and now I need to tell you about the worst thing that ever happened to me. Actually, it’s still happening, and it will be for a long time.” Then he told me that during his senior year in college, his parents broke the news that his father, at age fifty-five, had been diagnosed with a particularly virulent form of early-onset Alzheimer’s disease, one that was inherited genetically.
“Before they even knew what to call the disease, my dad’s family had it. We’re part of some genetic study, and they’ve traced the roots of our particular mutation all the way back to somewhere in Russia.”