‘Do you have…?’
‘Do I have what, Mum?’
‘Never mind. It’s not important.’
‘No, what is it?’
‘I don’t know — I can’t-’
‘Go ahead, Mum, it’s alright. Do I have what?’
‘Ben.’
‘Yes?’
‘What do you…?’
‘I’m in school, Mum.’
‘Of course. Of course, I knew that.’
Word-finding troubles were particularly infuriating for her. Over and over, she would pause in mid-sentence, suspended, unable to grasp the word she needed. If we were walking, she would stop and stare at her feet, fists pressed to her forehead, while she racked her brain for the missing tools. I learned not to guess at the next word, which frustrated her even more. ‘Shh! Shh!’ she would hiss, and swing a stop-sign hand at me.
For all that, I still intended to go back to Boston when my break ended. I convinced myself that the Forgetting Disease was no more than an inconvenience. It was still in an early stage (she was only fifty-six), and Annie Truman would outwork it the way she’d outworked every other damn thing.
It took a calamity to open my eyes.
December 24, 1994, was absolute cold. At eight A.M., the temperature was five degrees above zero, fifteen below with the windchill. Gray, sunless, with a stabbing wind. The snow encasing us — on the roof, in the yard, in tree branches — made creaking sounds.
Mum and I did not walk that morning. Around eleven, Dick Ginoux called to say there was an impromptu Christmas party at the station. Sandwiches and beer (diet orange soda for The Chief). I declined, but Mum urged me to go. ‘It’s Christmas Eve, Ben. Go have a good time for once.’ The kitchen thermometer had risen to ten degrees or so. Still, it was a forbidding day, and I hated like hell to leave her alone in that house. But it was only for an hour or two. ‘I’m not a child,’ she insisted.
When I got back around two, the house was quiet. An empty ticking sound in the halls. I called out and got no answer. Mum’s bedroom was empty too, the bed made up neatly.
To ward off panic, I indulged the notion that she must be lost inside the house. I’d once found her standing in the hallway, confused about which doorway led to her room; maybe she’d fallen into a similar confusion now. But racing around the house was just a waste of time. Her coat, hat, and knit mittens were gone.
In the front yard I shouted her name.
No answer. The wind loud in my ears.
Anxiety thickening into dread.
How could I have left her? Stupid stupid stupid stupid stupid.
I shouted her name. The cold swallowed my calls. There were no tracks. It was possible she’d walked off down the road, which had been plowed clear.
Or into the forest. On our little street the forest crowds right up to the road’s edge. The curtain of trees is pushed back as if by an invisible arm to reveal the house in its shadow. She might have wandered anywhere in these woods.
Stupid stupid.
I phoned the station. No one in town knew where she was. Within minutes there were twenty guys out looking for her, then fifty.
‘She’ll be fine, Ben,’ Dad said.
‘The sun sets at five,’ I reminded him.
Why didn’t I insist we walk that morning, cold or no cold? We should have walked till we were both exhausted.
I set out along the unmarked trails in the thick woods around our house where we often walked and where my mother had been hiking for as long as I could remember. It was gloomy among the trees but warmer since the wind was somewhat subdued here. My undershirt was soon clammy with sweat as I ran along shouting for her.
No answer. Just the crunch of my boots in the snow.
I had a radio on my belt. Now and then a searcher would call in to report he’d seen no sign of her.
I receded into the forest along familiar trails until each ran out, then doubled back until I reached a new spur to follow. Others were searching near me. I could hear their shouts — ’Anne!’ — and my own, more frantic — ’Mum!’
The light became shadowy and dull as afternoon began to dim.
How ridiculous that she might die this way. That an entire remarkable life could arrive at such an abrupt and stupid terminus.
I scrambled through the forest for two hours, through the bare pines growing thick like hairs on a vast scalp. Dusk was coming. It was foolish to run around this way, calling crazily into the trees. The search needed better planning, better organization. Who the hell was in charge here? Didn’t they realize? These woods stretched for miles in all directions, thickening into impenetrable old growth. We would never find her by trial and error. We would run out of light and time long before we ran out of trees.
I stopped to think. Where did we walk? Where would she go?
Think.
An idea crowded in: This was what Alzheimer’s disease meant. This was the lethal danger behind that austere Teutonic name. She had wandered, in the clinical parlance; she’d had a catastrophic event.
Control your emotions. Where would she go?
A blackbird flitted in the trees, unsettling the branches.
She would go to the lake. I knew it with a crashing certainty. She would follow the road to Lake Mattaquisett, lured by some memory of a vanished summer — an engram not quite expunged, a nano-thought surviving as a skittery arc of electrical current jumping across a damaged synapse somewhere. The lake, her lake. Had the weather not been so extremely cold, or had it not been Christmas Eve, maybe the roads would not have been empty and someone would have seen her walking. She’d have been picked up on small-town radar and her whereabouts would never have been a mystery. But she’d chosen a bad day for wandering.
I ran up the trail, scrabbling past the fingers of the trees.
To the house, the car.
Driving, I felt this adrenalized sense of certainty grow. She was there, I knew it. I raced along the Post Road. I was a policeman, a real one this time, rushing to an emergency.
At dusk I found her curled on the dirt road that rings the lake. The sports use this road to reach their summer rentals. In winter it is abandoned, and far enough from the house that no one had thought to search there. No one thought she could walk that far.
I knelt and put my arms around her. Her body trembled. She pulled her arms against her chest so I could hold her. I squeezed tight to stop the shivering. Her lips were blue, her eyes frightened.
In the gloom, the water beside us looked black. This lake had been the scene of so many blithe sunny afternoons. Now it was transformed into a forbidding place. Deep, glacial, primal.
I carried her to the car to warm her up. Her cheek against mine was cold rubber.
‘I… I got lost.’ Her jaw chattered, her lips and tongue were thick.
‘Mum, you’ve been on this road ten thousand times.’
‘I got lost.’
I understood she meant more than she’d said. It was not simply that she’d got lost or even that she’d had such a dangerous close call. She’d glimpsed the horrifying course of her disease. The illness was no longer theoretical. It was the inescapable future: erasure of everything she had ever learned — even near-instinctive ideas like how to chew and swallow food, how to speak, how to control bowel movements — and the inevitable end when the brain would lose its ability to regulate essential bodily functions, when she would become bedridden and at last perish from diseases common to the bedridden, heart failure, infections, malnutrition, pneumonia. Mercifully — and it was merciful — my mother died before experiencing the full devastation of Alzheimer’s. But what she did
