“It’s not what I’d call fun.”
“Hadley made a neurology appointment for you for next month,” I said. She’d called the referral from the ER doctor even before my mother had been discharged from the hospital. “The doctor might have some answers for us. Medication, maybe. A procedure.”
She shook her head. “I know what the doctor will say—there’s nothing to be done. You girls will have to put me into an infirmary.”
I didn’t correct her. “Not right away, Mom. Maybe not at all.”
“Oh, Laine, let’s not pretend that won’t be the end. It’s where the mind goes to die.” Before I could respond, she added, “My mother . . .” Her voice trailed off.
“But Nana had Parkinson’s,” I said. “Do you think that’s what you have? Have you had any tremors? Stiffness or trouble moving?”
She glanced around the room, and I wondered if she’d gotten confused. Then she said, “Laine, would you go get a pen and some paper? Maybe a notebook if you can? I’d like you to write a few things down for me while I’m fresh.”
“Of course,” I said, already on my feet. I had no idea what she had in mind, but if she was finally opening up to me, I was not about to question that.
I dashed to my bedroom—I hadn’t packed a notebook, but I had a feeling I’d find one in one of the desk drawers. Sure enough, there were several spiral notebooks, each with just a few pages used, in the bottom drawer.
“Thank you, dear,” she said when I came back. “You’ve always been such a good writer, and I was hoping you might help me remember a few things. This will be good for you and the girls to know, too. So, where were we? Oh yes, your grandmother. So, the thing is, Laine—are you getting this?”
“Yep,” I said, holding up the pen.
“Good, good. As I was saying, it wasn’t Parkinson’s, Laine. Nana Meyers had Alzheimer’s. And I do, too.”
THIRTY
SALLY
My mother asked me never to tell anyone—not even Hank, and certainly not the girls. “Take it to your grave, Sally,” she’d said, and I’d sworn that I would.
But now that Laine was at the end of my bed with her notebook in hand, I knew I owed her the truth. So I took a deep breath and said what I’d kept locked inside me for decades.
“Nana and Gramps were ashamed, love. They thought what was wrong with her was some kind of shortcoming. The doctor had suggested Parkinson’s as a possible diagnosis at first. For some reason, that sounded better to them, so they logged on to it.”
Laine glanced away momentarily, almost like she was embarrassed, and I realized I’d used the wrong word.
“I mean latched—that’s right,” I corrected myself, and I saw her nod. “They planned to keep it a secret, but when your grandfather had a heart attack, I had to take over my mother’s medical care for a few months while he recovered. That’s when I found out everything.”
Her pen was moving furiously across the page, but she barely took her eyes off me. “What happened then?” she asked.
“Well, by then, my mother was mostly too far gone to talk about it. For years, I prayed I wouldn’t get the same thing. But, Laine . . . I’ve known I had the same problem as her for a long time.”
“Mom,” she said gravely. “You don’t know that for sure.”
“I do,” I insisted. “I’ve known longer than I’ve been willing to admit to myself. As for when, exactly, it began—well, it’s a tricky thing, trying to remember when you stopped remembering. There were always . . . lapses,” I recalled. Why, I’d been scrambling words since I was a child; my mother even had me checked for a learning disability. My tongue just couldn’t keep up with my brain, they determined. Sounded true to me. Over time, I came to notice that other people did the same thing. Not Hank—when he chose to speak, every sentence was on purpose. But my friend Nettie got her children’s names confused all the time. And Mary would often use the wrong word. Even Reggie, as clever as he was, got tongue-tied with me. What bliss—there’s no feeling quite like flustering the man you love. I’m sorry if it’s hard for you to hear that, Laine, but it’s true.
“Mom?” said Laine, and that’s when I realized my thoughts had wandered off on me.
I cleared my throat. “Right. When you girls were young, I wasn’t worried about my brain, but rather my heart—I knew that’s what was making me so forgetful. How much space one person could take up in one’s mind! Bills, appointments, meal planning—all trivial matters compared to the matter of Reggie. I thought surely after the first year or two, the rush would subside. It never did. Just to see him was to feel alive, deep in my bones, in my soul. The smell of him, the feel of his hand on my skin. His gruff laugh. His smile, which seemed to me an unexpected gift each time it appeared. All of it was a delight.” I looked up suddenly and saw that Laine was blushing. “Do you want me to continue?” I asked.
“Yes and no,” she admitted. “But mostly yes. What happened then?”
If I was going to tell her the truth about my mother, I figured I had to do the same about Reggie. “Well, not all of it was a delight,” I admitted. “Reggie wanted me to leave Hank, for us to start afresh. Laine, you didn’t know how I had to decide, again and again, to make a choice for our family and not for myself. Then, your junior year of high school, Reggie said he couldn’t go on this way.”
Her mouth hung open.
“Don’t be so surprised—those details stay with you. He would always love me, he said. But he wouldn’t carry on with the lie anymore.”
“Oh, Mom,” she said, reaching for my hand. I squeezed it quickly, then indicated for her to keep writing; it felt important for me to have a record, something I could read later if—no, when—things got worse with my mind.
“I couldn’t see him anymore after that; it hurt too much. Even seeing Ben pained me. I knew you’d fallen for him, even if you didn’t know it just yet. What was harder still was that Ben was equally besotted with you. His eyes trailed after you; he couldn’t sit still when you were around.”
Her cheeks were pink. “Mom . . .”
“I’m sorry, Laine. I see now that it wasn’t right at all for me to tell you not to get involved with him, but I thought I was protecting you. I thought if you were romantically involved, at some point the truth would come out. And it has, although not the way I ever imagined it would.”
“It’s okay,” she said softly.
“It isn’t,” I said, “but I’m glad that we’re finally speaking honestly about this. How many days I avoided you and your sisters so you wouldn’t see my swollen eyes and ask why I’d been crying! Unlike your father, you and Hadley, especially, never missed a thing. How many afternoons I spent walking Brooklyn by myself, in the worst possible pain, as I accepted the inevitable: Reggie and I would never be together.”
“I’m so sorry,” she said.
“Oh, me, too, Laine. I do wish things had been different, but there you have it. We were supposed to be talking about my memory, though.”
“When did you know for sure, Mom?”