Passage

“I thought he was asleep,” Kit said as if she hadn’t heard Joanna and hurried back past her through the hall and up the stairs. “Excuse me a minute. I’ll be right back.”

Joanna looked into the kitchen, afraid of what she might see. An empty plate with some crumbs sat on the table. Next to it was a skillet and two saucepans, and, on the red-and-white tiled floor, more pans and lids and muffin tins, cookie sheets, pie tins, and a big roasting pan.

Kit pattered back down the stairs. “I’m sorry,” she said, her voice matter-of-fact now. She went into the kitchen and began to pick up the pans. “He is asleep now. He must have come down while we were in the other room.” She stacked two small saucepans inside a larger one and stuck them down in a cupboard next to the sink. “Taking things out of drawers and cupboards is a common behavior with Alzheimer’s,” she said, putting a skillet away.

And a nightmare for the people who live with them, Joanna thought. “Can I help?” she asked.

“No, I’ve got it,” Kit said, taking the lid off a Dutch oven and pulling out two books. She reached up and set them on the table. “Sit down. I’ll start the tea.”

She got two mugs out of an upper cupboard, filled them with water, and stuck them in the microwave, punching in the code. “The problem is he’s sleeping less and less,” she said, setting sugar and teabags on the table. “He used to sleep a couple of hours during the day,” she got out two spoons, “but now it’s hardly any, even at night. Now, the question is,” she said, looking around the room, her hands on her hips, “where did he put the cookies?” She looked in the refrigerator, the freezer, the wastebasket.

“Would he have eaten them?” Joanna asked, thinking, I can’t believe we’re talking about Mr. Briarley, who knew all about Dylan Thomas and Henry the Eighth’s wives and Restoration drama, like this.

“He doesn’t usually take food,” Kit said. “He has almost no appetite.” She opened drawers one after the other, and then stood looking speculatively around the kitchen. “There’s usually a logic in what he does and says, even though sometimes it’s hard to figure out the connection.”

She walked swiftly over to the oven and opened it. “Ah, here we are,” she said, pulling out the top rack, on which sat the cookies, arranged in neat rows on the wire rack. She grabbed the cookie plate and began putting the cookies on it. “Luckily, it wasn’t the dishwasher,” she said, setting the plate on the table. The microwave dinged, and Kit took the mugs out and handed one to Joanna and sat down opposite her.

“How long has Mr. Bri—your uncle been like this?” Joanna asked.

“Taking things out of the cupboards, or the Alzheimer’s? The cupboards, only a couple of months. The Alzheimer’s was diagnosed five years ago, but I started noticing things two years before that.”

That surprised Joanna. She’d thought from what Kit said before that she’d moved in with her uncle when they’d found out he had Alzheimer’s, but apparently she’d been living with him before that. While she went to school? she wondered, remembering the photo of Kit in front of University Hall. DU was only a few blocks from here.

“The memory loss probably started several years before that,” Kit was saying, dipping her teabag. “It takes a while for symptoms to develop, and Alzheimer’s patients learn to cover really well.”

Joanna thought about Mr. Briarley muttering, “Coleridge. Overrated Romantic,” the day before. She wondered if he even remembered who Coleridge was.

“I don’t know how much you know about the disease,” Kit said, offering Joanna a cookie. “The first symptoms are little things, forgetting appointments, misplacing things—Uncle Pat kept losing his grade book and a couple of times he forgot a faculty meeting—the kind of things you put down to age or stress.” She put sugar in her tea and stirred it. “It was funny, you mentioning the Titanic yesterday, because that was how I realized there was something really wrong. I went to see the movie, which, having listened to Uncle Pat talk about the disaster for years, I hated.”

“I did, too,” Joanna said.

“Oh, good, then you know what I mean. Well, anyway, I came home and told Uncle Pat how the movie made everyone look like cowards, even Lightoller and Molly Brown, and how they’d gotten all kinds of facts wrong—like Murdoch shooting a passenger!—and he was furious, just like I knew he would be. He said he was going to write a stinging letter to James Cameron in the morning, and when I went up to bed, he had all his Titanic books out, looking things up so he could quote them exactly.”

She took a sip of tea. “The next morning I asked him if he’d written the letter yet,” she said, and all the despair of Amelia Tanaka and Greg Menotti was in her voice. “He didn’t have any memory of the letter or our conversation, not even of my having gone to the movie. He didn’t even know who Lightoller was.”

And yesterday I came blundering in, Joanna thought, not only talking about the Titanic, but asking Mr. Briarley if he remembered what he’d said in class. “Kit, I am so sorry,” she said. “If I’d known—”

“Oh, no, it’s okay. I just wanted you to know that was why I acted so peculiar yesterday, asking you if my mother had sent you and everything. My mother and I have a difference of opinion regarding Uncle Pat’s care. She’s always sending people over to try to talk me into putting him into a care facility. She thinks taking care of him is too much for me.”

I can see why she thinks that, Joanna thought, looking at Kit’s painfully thin collarbones, her shadowed eyes. She had said Mr. Briarley wasn’t sleeping. Joanna would bet she wasn’t either.

“I know Uncle Pat will have to be institutionalized someday,” Kit said, “but I want him to be able to stay here as long as he can. He was very kind to me, and—anyway, when you said you worked at Mercy General, I assumed —what do you do at Mercy General?” she asked curiously.

“I’m a cognitive psychologist,” Joanna said and wondered if she should let it go at that, but Kit reminded her of Maisie in more ways than one, and Maisie hated not being told the truth. “I’m working on a research project involving near-death experiences,” she said. “You know, the tunnel-and-light phenomenon?”

Kit nodded. “I read The Light at the End of the Tunnel. My cousin made me read it after—” She stopped, her cheeks red with anger or embarrassment.

And what could be worse than discovering your uncle had Alzheimer’s? Joanna thought. Having your cousin comfort you by inflicting Maurice Mandrake on you.

“You don’t work with Mr. Mandrake, do you?” Kit asked challengingly.

“No,” Joanna said.

“Good. I thought it was a horrible book. ‘Don’t worry, the dead aren’t really dead, and they aren’t really gone. They can still send messages to you from the Other Side.’ ”

“I know. I work with Dr. Wright. He’s a neurologist. We’re trying to figure out what near-death experiences are and why the dying brain experiences them.”

“The dying brain?” Kit said. “Does that mean everyone has them? I thought they were something only a few people had.”

“No, about sixty percent of revived patients report having a near-death experience, and those are concentrated in certain kinds of deaths—heart attacks, hemorrhaging, trauma.”

“You mean like car accidents?” Kit asked.

“Yes, and stabbings, industrial accidents, shootings. Of course there’s no way to tell how many people who aren’t revived have them.”

“But they’re pleasant, for the ones who do have them, I mean?” Kit said. “They’re not frightening?”

Joanna thought of the young woman, standing out on deck, asking the steward, “What’s happened?” her voice filled with fear. And Amelia, saying, “Oh, no, oh, no, oh, no.”

“Are they frightening?” Kit asked. “Uncle Pat has hallucinations sometimes. He sees people standing at the foot of his bed or in the door.”

In the door. Joanna would have to tell Richard that. Alzheimer’s was caused by a malfunctioning of neurochemicals. Maybe there was a connection.

“…and sometimes the things he’s saying seem to indicate he’s reliving past events,” Kit was saying.

L+R, Joanna thought. “Most people who’ve had near-death experiences report feeling warm and safe and loved,” she said reassuringly. “Dr. Wright’s found evidence of elevated endorphin levels, which supports that.”

“Good,” Kit said and then shook her head. “Uncle Pat’s are almost always upsetting or frightening things. It’s like he can’t forget them and can’t remember them at the same time, and he goes over and over them. It’s like he’s trying to make sense of them, even though his memory of them is gone.” She put her hands over her face for a moment. “The books say not to confront him or contradict him, but not to go along with the hallucination either,