Flashback

THIS BOOK IS DEDICATED TO THE MEMORY OF MY MOTHER, ROSE GOSHGARIAN, AND MY AUNT, NEMZA “NANCY” MEGRICHIAN.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

For their contributions on various technical matters, I would like to thank the following people: James Stellar, Roy Freeman, Alice Janjigian, Karen Chase, Alice Gervasini, Tweedy Watkins, Deborah Copeland, Jack Reynolds, Karen Hutchinson, Karen Zoeller, Michael Ku, Richard Deth, Marjorie D’alba, Amy Sbordone, Peter Mollo, Michael Carvalho, Kate Flora, Kenneth Cohen, Charles O’Neill, and Malcolm Childers.

A special thanks to Dr. Daniel Press for his generous time and great help with medical matters. Also to Barbara Shapiro for her great advice and encouragement.

A very special thanks to my own special muse, Wanda Hunt, for her extraordinary assistance, her patience at the tape recorder, and her inspiration.

And, of course, my deep gratitude to my agent, Susan Crawford, my editor, Natalia Aponte, and my publisher, Tom Doherty, for their continuing support.

I’m also indebted to the books Alzheimer Solutions: A Personal Guide for Caregivers by Jim Knittweis and Judith Harch and The Story of My Father by Sue Miller.

So many dreams—it’s hard to pick out the right one.—E. B. WHITE, who died of Alzheimer’s disease

When I was young I could remember anything whether it happened or not; but my faculties are decaying now and soon I shall be so I cannot remember anything but the things that never happened.—MARK TWAIN

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Homer’s Island, Massachusetts

FROM HIS PERCH ON SKULL ROCK, they looked like pale eggs sunny-side up moving just beneath the water’s surface. Some kind of jellyfish. Half a dozen, pulsating vigorously through the black surf like muscular parachutes.

Odd. Jack Koryan had spent several summers of his childhood out here and could remember only a few occasions seeing jellyfish in the cove, most of them washed ashore by the night tide-dinner- plate-sized slime bombs with frilly aprons and long fat tentacles. But these creatures were small round globs, translucent jelly bells with nothing visible in trail.

Maybe some tropical species that the warm water brought in, he thought.

Jack watched them pump by in formation, driven by primitive urgings and warm eddies. Somewhere he had read that jellyfish were ninety-five percent water—creatures with no brains, bones, or blood. What enabled them to react to the world around them was a network of nerves. What a lousy fate, Jack thought—to relate to the world only through nerve endings: a life devoid of thought, passion, or memory.

The cool, moist air had picked up, ruffling the water’s surface. The tide was coming in, and soon the rock would be covered.

Skull Rock.

It looked just as it had forever—a domed granite boulder rearing out of the surf about fifty yards offshore, it’s crown whitened by generations of barnacles, the base maned with sea grass, a necklace of shiny black mussels hugging the high-tide line like exotic pearls. When they were kids, he and his cousin George would fill a pail with the mollusks for his Aunt Nancy’s Armenian dishes or bouillabaisse.

It had been fifteen years since Jack had last swum out to the rock. Back then he’d spend hours there with his cousin and other summer kids. At low tide they’d pack as many as ten wriggling bodies on the crown, holding their perch by little more than the worn barnacles under their feet. He could almost hear the yowls of laughter as they lost balance or got elbowed off. First man in is a rotten skate.

Behind him a sea like liquid iron rolled off to the dark rain-sagged clouds swelling down from the north. Someplace out there Jack’s mother had died—August 20, 1975. She had paddled out to her small sailboat, moored just beyond Skull Rock—probably within fifty yards of where he was now standing. It must have been a nor’easter since the tender had washed up a half mile down the beach with lifejackets still in it. Her body was never recovered.

Today was the thirtieth anniversary of her death. Every few years he’d come out in quiet commemoration. He was not even two years old at the time she died. His Aunt Nancy and Uncle Kirk had raised him as their own.

Below, more jellyfish floated by—a skewed phalanx of them. Translucent bodies with intersecting purple rings at the centers just below the surface.

This was a special place, a caretaker’s cottage to Vita Nova, the large Sherman estate on the cliff above. His mother, Rose, had rented it decades ago for vacations, attracted to the unusually warm water, the results of complicated weather phenomena involving El Nino. Periodically, eddies from the Gulf Stream would bring into the area creatures from the tropics—sunfish, hawks-bill turtles, bonito, and smaller creatures that fascinated his mother. According to Aunt Nancy, Rose had a half-mystical yearning for the sea and would spend hours walking the beaches collecting odd critters. But Jack had no memory of her—only scraps of information from his aunt, who had died thirteen years ago. His father perished in a plane crash when Jack was only six months old. So he had no memory of him, either.

But Jack did remember getting stung once by a big orange lion’s mane jelly in shallow water. It had felt like a hot lash across his calf. As he choked back tears, Aunt Nancy calmly walked him into the house and flooded his skin with vinegar. “Never rub,” she had said, “that only makes it worse.” Then with the dull edge of a knife she had scraped off a small scrap of tentacle. An old Armenian remedy—something she learned from his mother, she had said. He wondered if that was true.

On shore, in the dimming light, Jack could make out his clothes where he had left them to swim out and, just up the beach, the dark silhouette of the cottage. The sandy beach that rimmed Buck’s Cove was completely empty, although lights burned in the Sherman mansion above. It was a private island, but on summer weekends the cove would draw boaters to its pristine beauty. Tonight the place was empty of life.

Lightning lit up the horizon. The storm would break soon.

From the rock the lightless cottage brooded in the shadows of the shore, yet it was a place incandescent with memories. After his mother had died, the Shermans continued to rent the place to his family for a summer week or two. He could still recall how he and his cousin charged down the sand and plunged into the water, inured to the chill that stopped adults dead at the knees.

From out of the gloom a seagull sliced low to catch something in the water then shot up with a squawk at the last second as if spooked. It came to rest on shore near Jack’s clothes, still protesting.

Jack felt a jab to his chest. Under the flashing sky, the half-dozen jellyfish had turned into a school. He looked at the water behind him.

“Jesus Christ!”