“Well,” Stem said, and he exchanged a look with his father, and the subject was dropped.
What you do on New Year’s you’ll be doing all year long, people claim, and certainly Abby’s disappearance set the theme for 2012. She began to go away, somehow, even when she was present. She seemed to be partly missing from many of the conversations taking place around her. Amanda said she acted like a woman who’d fallen in love, but quite apart from the fact that Abby had always and forever loved only Red, so far as they knew, she lacked that air of giddy happiness that comes with falling in love. She actually seemed unhappy, which wasn’t like her in the least. She took on a fretful expression, and her hair—gray now and chopped level with her jaw, as thick and bushy as the wig on an old china doll—developed a frazzled look, as if she had just emerged from some distressing misadventure.
Stem and Nora asked Petey what had happened on the ride to his play date, but first he didn’t know what play date they were talking about and then he said the ride had gone fine. So Amanda confronted Abby straight on; said, “I hear you’re not driving these days.” Yes, Abby said, that was her little gift to herself: never to have to drive anyplace ever again. And she gave Amanda one of her new, bland smiles. “Back off,” that smile said. And “Wrong? Why would you think anything was wrong?”
In February, she threw her idea box away. This was an Easy Spirit shoe box that she had kept for decades, crammed with torn-off bits of paper she meant to turn into poems one day. She put it out with the recycling on a very windy evening, and by morning the bits of paper were lying all over the street. Neighbors kept finding them in their hedges and on their welcome mats—“moon like a soft-boiled egg yolk” and “heart like a water balloon.” There was no question as to their source. Everyone knew about Abby’s poems, not to mention her fondness for similes. Most people just tactfully discarded them, but Marge Ellis brought a whole handful to the Whitshanks’ front door, where Red accepted them with a confused look on his face. “Abby?” he said later. “Did you mean to throw these out?”
“I’m done with writing poems,” she said.
“But I liked your poems!”
“Did you?” she asked without interest. “That’s nice.”
It was probably more the idea Red liked—his wife the poet, scribbling away at her antique desk that he’d had one of his workmen refinish, sending her efforts to tiny magazines that promptly sent them back. But even so, Red began to wear the same unhappy expression that Abby wore.
In April, her children noticed that she’d started calling the dog “Clarence,” although Clarence had died years ago and Brenda was a whole different color, golden retriever instead of black Lab. This was not Abby’s usual absentminded roster of misnomers: “Mandy—I mean Stem” when she was speaking to Jeannie. No, this time she stuck with the wrong name, as if she were hoping to summon back the dog of her younger days. Poor Brenda, bless her heart, didn’t know what to make of it. She’d give a puzzled twitch of her pale sprouty eyebrows and fail to respond, and Abby would cluck in exasperation.
It wasn’t Alzheimer’s. (Was it?) She seemed too much in touch for Alzheimer’s. And she didn’t exhibit any specific physical symptoms they could tell a doctor about, like seizures or fainting fits. Not that they had much hope of persuading her to see a doctor, anyhow. She’d fired her internist at age sixty, claiming she was too old now for any “extreme measures,” and for all they knew he wasn’t even in practice anymore. But even if he were: “Is she forgetful?” he might ask, and they would have to say, “Well, no more than usual.”
“Is she illogical?”
“Well, no more than …”