Never Coming Back(48)

“Stop it, Clara.”

Talk out loud to yourself. Say your own name. Be your own doctor, your own nurse, your own statistician. Keep records, but keep them only in your own mind. That way you could deny that you thought about it as much as you did. If you were found to have compiled notebooks, slips of paper, columns and headings and dates and jotted notes, that might be seen as evidence in the court of Alzheimer’s that the early was already onsetting.

2:52 a.m. and the minutes were passing by, the minutes of a dark night that was like the dark night last night, when you also woke at 2:47. Unless you didn’t. Unless this was the only night that you had woken up at 2:47 a.m. thinking thoughts like this. Worrying. Because how would you know for sure if it was beginning?

We strongly advise genetic counseling if you are concerned. If you are thinking of someday having children. If you think you might be falling in love with a bartender that you never, ever want to put through this kind of pain.

3:07 a.m.

It was cold in the cabin. The electric flames of the electric fireplace glowed faintly in the darkness. The fairy lights still glimmered from the trunks of the white pines. Somewhere in the woods a fisher cat screamed and the hairs on the back of my neck prickled at the sound, the sound of a girl screaming, a girl in fear for her life.

Get up, Clara. Get dressed. Feel your way down the ladder with the car keys in your hand and open your door. Find your car in the darkness.

The Subaru roared in response. Down the curves and twists and slopes of Turnip Hill we went, and then through the darkened streets of Old Forge to the darkened parking lot of DiOrio’s. I pulled in next to the handicapped spot by the front door. Kept the car running. Kept telling myself it was already morning, which sounded better than the middle of the night, better than the wee hours. The teeny-tiny wee-hour numbers: one and two and three and four. I stayed in my car, there in the parking lot of the store that would come to light in a few hours. Told myself again that it was already morning. The fisher cat was elusive and solitary and small and because of this tended to hunt only prey smaller than itself. My mother and I were the same exact height. A trapped fisher cat had taken over her brain and its wild twin screamed in the dark woods beyond where I could see. I had a fifty-fifty chance of the eFAD gene mutation. Genetic testing was recommended if. If. If. If.

Stop, Clara. Stop the monkey-minding. Practice detachment. Detach, detach, detach.

I would if I could.





* * *





The next time Sunshine and Brown and I visited my mother, she gazed amiably at Brown.

“How do I know you again?” she said.

“You met Sunshine and me back when your daughter was in college,” he said. “It was a sunny day in the White Mountains. Parents’ Weekend. You were driving a pickup truck.”

Tamar listened intently, her head tilted toward Brown. Follow where she goes, I had told them, but it worked the other way too. We were scooted together on the couch in the Green Room, the four of us, waiting for our show to begin. The order on the couch was like this: Brown, Tamar, Sunshine, me. We were pressed together like the tiny Vienna sausages that, when I was a child, Tamar used to fish out of the Vienna sausage jar with her cocktail fork.

“It’s good to see you, Tamar,” Brown said.

“Good to see you too,” she said, in that new echoey way, in that affable, un-fearsome voice.

“I brought you a gift.” He tapped on her closed fist and she opened it. Obedient, the way she had never been. He placed a tiny jar of maple syrup in her palm and her fingers, again obedient, closed around it. “We made it ourselves,” he said, “Sunshine and I.”

“Maple syrup.”

“Yup. We boiled and boiled and boiled it and then we burnt the shit out of the entire batch. All we got out of the whole mess was this one tiny jar. What do you think?”

“I think you’re not very good at making syrup,” Tamar said.

Now that was her. That was a Tamar remark. Surprise and happiness, electric, passed through Brown into Sunshine and from Sunshine into me.

“My daughter loved maple syrup,” Tamar said.

“I bet she did,” Sunshine said. She was already good at the not-criticizing and not-correcting, the not-pointing-out that Tamar’s daughter was, in fact, sitting right here at the end of the couch.

“How do I know you again?” Tamar said.

“You met Sunshine and me back when we were in college,” Brown said. “It was a sunny day in the White Mountains. Parents’ Weekend. You were driving a pickup truck.”

She listened as intently as the first time. Keep going, I said to Brown in my mind.

“We went to college with your daughter, Clara. She was pretty secretive about you.”

“Pretty secretive?” Sunshine said. “She didn’t tell us anything about you. Zip. Zilch. Nada.”

“Zilch,” Tamar said, and then again: “zilch.” It was like a new word, a word that she was testing on her tongue.

“So Clara hadn’t told us a thing about you,” Sunshine said, “and we thought you must be this creepy witch-mother, like a mother in a Hitchcock movie.”

“Hitchcock.” Tamar brought her fingertips together with care, one by one, and studied them. “Hitch. Hitch. Hitchcock.”

“But then you turned out to be you!” Brown said. “The coolest mother in the crowd!”