Some things, you couldn’t imagine they would ever disappear, like the memory of your own baby. But they did disappear, apparently, to use the Life Care Committee’s favorite word. And the fact that they disappeared made other things that you wanted to do, like show your mother the photograph and ask her about it, impossible. My heart leaped off the tracks again, began again its jolt and shudder in my chest. Twice in the space of one hour? That had never happened before. Tamar was still looking at me with that frown, waiting for me to tell her who Daphne was, but I put my hand to my chest and her eyes followed.
She pushed herself up. That unsteady gait, no aluminum walker for balance, hands stretching toward me. She put her hand over mine, over the beatbeatbeatbeatbeat that made our fingers and palms quiver. Her hand stayed on mine and I lay down on the couch and looked at the ceiling, at the ugly acoustic tile, until my heart caught mid-sprint and again returned to a steady beat.
“There,” she said, as if my heart had gone missing and was now returned. She was right. I sat up.
We stayed there on the couch for a while, my mother and me, her hand resting on my hand. Twenty years ago would have seen me asking her about my father, about my dead twin sister, about my grandparents, and her silent in the face of those questions. Now I was asking again, and again, and again, about all manner of things that I knew now must have felt to her back then the way rain felt when it was near freezing and driving horizontally into your skin. Cold needles pricking all the exposed places. Did my questions still hurt her? Or was she beyond them?
* * *
“It’s an outpatient procedure,” the electrocardiologist said. “What we do is thread catheters up your femoral veins into the heart, then we provoke an episode so as to get the lay of the land and see where exactly the misfire is happening.”
“Episode?” I said. “Provoke?”
His office was in Utica, down the block from the doctor that Tamar and I had met with. It was just the two of us in the examining room, dusk falling over the Mohawk Valley outside the single window.
“Yep,” he said. “In at seven, home by five. It’s the slam dunk of the cardiology world.”
Slam dunk. Just the way the other cardiologist had described it. Was that the way the cardiology textbook described it? He must have seen a look on my face. “What, you’re not an NBA fan?”
My mother’s voice sounded inside my head. Bullshit. Decide you’re going to be your real self and then be your real self.
“Don’t try to make this a small thing,” I said. “Don’t joke about this.”
He was looking down at his desk, shuffling through the forms they had printed out for me, but at that he looked up sharply. The air between us was different. That was what happened when you cut away the banter underbrush to behold the sparkling river.
“This is my heart we’re talking about here,” I said. “My one and only heart. So give it to me straight. Once you see where the misfire is happening, then what?”
“Then we’ll cauterize that spot.”
“Burn my heart?”
“Cauterize it.”
“You’re going to burn my heart. Say it.”
“Ms. Winter, in order to permanently cure your paroxysmal supraventricular tachycardia, yes, we will burn your heart in one tiny, precise place.”
He pushed the stack of papers over to me and I signed on the lines he pointed to. “It’s good you’re doing this,” he said. “You’ll get your normal life back again.”
After the appointment was scheduled and the nurse went over all the pre-op notes with me and the receptionist stamped my parking ticket and I kicked the automatic door opener with my boot because I could—I could walk and run and hike and kick things as much as I wanted—I drove to the place where my mother lived now, where once again she was pacing the halls with her walker looking for the little bird who flew away.
“My daughter,” she said. “My daughter.”
“I’m right here, Ma.”
It was still hard not to use the word remember, as in “Remember me? I’m her. I’m your daughter.” But it was no longer impossible. She had been roaming farther afield this past week, Sylvia had told me on the phone, trying to get outside. Now her daughter was here, walking up and down the halls with her, the two of them and the tennis-balled walker, but she was still searching.
“I can’t find her,” she said. “She’s out there”—we were at the doorway of the Green Room and she jutted her chin at the wide black swatch of paint in front of the locked French doors—“but. But.”
“But,” I agreed, because it seemed right to agree. “You know, Ma, maybe she’s right here.”
She shook her head. No. No, she was not right here. We moved on down the hall to the juice station. Dixie cups only. Because of the remembrance—apple juice is good—and because of the forgetting—but I drank a cup of it just five minutes ago.
“My daughter.”
“Right here, Ma.”
“My daughter.”
Distract. Redirect. Put a stick in the spokes.
“Hey, Ma? I came to tell you that I’m going to get it fixed,” I said. “My heart.”
I expected her to frown and shake her head, to look down the hall and set the walker in motion again. But my mother surprised me. She reached up and touched my collarbone, traced it down to my heart.
“Good,” she said.
* * *
Talk to Chris, Sunshine and Brown said. Stop trying to imagine your way into his head. Stop trying to predict the way he’ll react. You’re not him, are you? Your name is Clara, not Chris. Stop trying to think your way through all the scenarios, all the what-if-thises and what-if-thats. He’s a grown-ass man; let him think and talk for himself. Stop putting off the conversation. Whether you have the gene or not, it’s a conversation that has to happen.
Variations on sentences spoken by them on various days or nights when my fear of the PSEN1 gene spiderwebbed itself into my thoughts about Chris.
Did they urge me to get the test or not get the test? No. What they urged me to do was talk to him.
Get in the goddamn car and drive up to Inlet and get out of the goddamn car and walk into that bar and Talk. To. Him.
That last one was me. Hell and damn were as far as Sunshine and Brown would go. I breathed in and breathed out and breathed in and breathed out and then into the car I got and up to Inlet I went. It was early evening but the bar was nigh-on deserted. That was what happened in the land of winter, this north country land of dark-at-five-p.m. Chris was making his way around the room with a bucket and a sponge and a towel, scrubbing the tables and drying them. Gayle must have left early. He looked up and smiled when the door scraped open. He never seemed surprised to see me.
“Can I help?” I said, and he handed me the towel. I copycatted his movements, compensating for lack of arm length by leaning over farther. Talk to him, Clara.
“So here’s the thing,” I said. We were on the third table now, and in a rhythm. It was like a dance. “I don’t just have a weird heart condition. It’s more complicated than that. Because my mother was officially diagnosed with early-onset Alzheimer’s, there is a fifty-percent chance that I carry one of the four genetic mutations that cause it, with PSEN1, which stands for presenilin-1, being by far the most common of the four.”