Dead Letters(77)
“Where will we go, brainiac?”
“Hollywood! Let’s be starlets,” I answered.
“Ha. Or we could go to Opal’s?”
“And live in a retirement community?” I wrinkled my nose distastefully.
“Yeah. Maybe not. I know: Paris!”
“Not practical. We’re minors.”
“Okay, let’s go live in the woods, then. I’ll be the huntress, and you can cook.”
“You mean the national forest?” I asked, considering. It was a huge patch of completely empty land. It would take them forever to find us.
“I’m really glad I’m not the only one here with them,” she said in a small voice.
“Me too.” I leaned my head on her shoulder for a moment, looking out at the water and feeling my sister’s fear, anxiety. “If we start now, we can make it to the forest before dark. It’s only a few miles.”
“Are you serious about this?” Zelda asked, a wicked, excited glint in her eyes. “I mean, I’m totally game if you are.”
“It was my idea!” I stood and raced up to the house, Zelda following close at my heels. As ever.
I’ll never know how far we were prepared to take it, if we would have escaped from this house, this family. Made our way out to Hollywood and started anew, just us two. But when we got back up to the house, it was Marlon who was packing a suitcase and fleeing west before the sun slipped below the shore across the lake. Leaving the three of us.
I realize it’s nearly dinnertime and I haven’t eaten all day. The sky is hazy and blank. I stand up and stretch. I’m sliding the incomplete alphabet worksheets back onto the shelf when my hands fumble across a brown folder tucked snugly at an angle between the books. I pull it out and open it up.
19
Staring at the scribbled scrap of paper for long minutes, I feel an unhappy click of recognition, a sick sense of foreboding. It’s a checklist of sorts, a catalogue of ailments. Memory loss, disorientation, difficulty reading, vocabulary loss, poor judgment, changes in mood or personality, hallucination, changes in blood pressure. I know this checklist well; I’ve seen it written in the comforting pastel fonts of informational brochures, pressed soothingly into the palms of terrified family members, the smooth, waxy paper wicking away the fearful sweat that dampens the hands of those in the waiting room. I’ve read through this list on Wikipedia and in doctors’ offices, Zelda silently looking over my shoulder, our lips pursed and heads nodding in grim, synchronized recognition. This is an inventory of symptoms for early-onset dementia with Lewy bodies. The disease our mother was diagnosed with two years ago. I remember Zelda carrying this folder around while we were trying to piece together what was happening to Nadine. But now, on its cover, Zelda has printed “SYMPTOMS.” The S’s at the beginning and the end of the word have been underlined. Unwittingly, unwillingly, I have found the letter S, even as I tried to ignore it. I realize I have unconsciously gone looking in Zelda’s paperwork, just as she suggested.
Zelda’s handwriting is loopy and discombobulated, and I squint at it. She’s circled “poor judgment” and “hallucination.” Below, she has scrawled: consult? Too young! I flip through the stack of papers, and then I start reading more closely.
Here I find an invoice for a neurologist in Ithaca. I recognize his name, because we dragged Nadine in three years ago, when we were desperately trying to figure out what was going on with her, why she would wake us up in the middle of the night with nightmares, why she couldn’t remember who any of our neighbors were. She had gone begrudgingly, muttering profanities the whole way, but we had seen the glimmer of acknowledgment in her eyes, the nearly imperceptible awareness that things were not quite right with her. She had concealed her terror beneath the usual flinty disavowals and biting comments, but Zelda and I had felt the fear radiating off her as we drove into town, sandwiched into the pickup truck. She had stormed out of the appointment when she was presented with a mental acuity test, and we were unable to coax her back in for a consult until weeks later, after she had nearly lost three fingers to frostbite, wandering our driveway in the middle of winter and clueless about how she had gotten there. By that point, her diagnosis had hardly required an expert.
The patient’s name on this invoice, however, is not Nadine O’Connor but Zelda Antipova. Three months ago, my sister drove into Ithaca for an appointment with Dr. Felix Laurent, for which she paid four hundred dollars, in cash. The appointment wasn’t covered by her health insurance, or she didn’t want a paper trail. I realize I likely don’t have insurance, here in the States. She hadn’t mentioned this appointment in any of the wordy and elaborate emails she’d sent, emails that documented the minutiae of life on Silenus, her every worry and thought, spewed forth in Zeldaesque excessive prose.
The last page in the file finally makes me realize that this is not the folder we compiled for Nadine but a different diagnostic collection. Zelda has obsessively written down a list of times and dates, with accompanying notations.
Friday, February 19: Woke up in hallway, unsure how I got there. Unable to remember the previous day for nearly an hour.
Wednesday, April 20: Jason asked where I got a cut on my hand and I told him from the tractor. He looked at me strangely and said that it had actually come from a broken wineglass and I had instructed him to ask me about it later. Confabulation?