The Brilliant Fall of Gianna Z. (15 page)

“Yeah, well, neither did I.”

Mom nods. “You shouldn’t have had to.”

Dad puts his arm around her. She lets him. “This is tough, Angela. You’re human.”

Mom picks a piece of wilted lettuce out of her salad, wraps it up in her napkin, and turns to me. “I know you had schoolwork to do today too. I’ll help you tomorrow, okay?”

“I’m fine.” I don’t want her help.

“I’ll help Gianna with her leaves,” Nonna says. “Goodness knows she went above and beyond the call of duty for me today.”

Mom turns to Nonna. “I’m sorry. I got caught up in things at the luncheon and lost track of time. I should have been at your appointment, I know. It’s just . . .”

“I know.” Nonna reaches over and pats Mom’s hand. Mom looks down at her plate, but not before I see her eyes fill up with tears. Nonna doesn’t let her off the hook, though. “Angie, you would have gotten caught up in a trash collectors’ convention today to avoid that appointment. I know you see what’s going on with me. It’s hard to miss. And I know what it’s like to watch someone slip away from you. We both do.”

She means Grandpa. Nonna’s told me before how she and Mom both stayed by his side when he had cancer.

Mom nods and takes a deep breath. “Would you tell me more about today? I’ll listen. What did Doctor Hebert say?”

“He gave me a test to measure my thinking and reasoning, and I had trouble with it.” Nonna looks over at me and smiles a little. “In spite of Gianna’s valiant efforts to get me a few extra points.”

I look down and poke at my spaghetti with my fork.

The questions were stupid. The whole thing made me mad. And not just at the doctor. Part of me was angry at Nonna, too, for not being able to answer the questions, for not being able to think the way she used to, and for going away from us.

“Is it Alzheimer’s disease?” Mom asks quietly.

“He doesn’t know yet. They’re going to run the blood tests next week, and even then, it’s hard to tell for sure. . . .”

“But?” Mom leans forward and looks right at Nonna.

“But I have a feeling that it is,” Nonna says. She doesn’t look scared, just tired.

I’m scared, though. I saw a TV commercial once about a walk to raise money for Alzheimer’s disease research. It talked about how awful Alzheimer’s disease is for families. How it starts with forgetfulness and gets worse and worse. How it affects 4 million Americans.

And now Nonna might be one of them.

CHAPTER 17

T
he doorbell rings while I’m drying the spaghetti-sauce pot.

“Go ahead,” Dad says. “I’ll finish.” He sent Mom upstairs to rest after dinner.

I open the door. It’s Zig with a ShopRite bag full of leaves. “How many more do you need?”

“Two.”

“Here.” He hands me two leaves taped to labeled index cards. “Black cherry and slippery elm.”

“Why is it slippery? Did your leaves get all moldy too?”

He points to the index card. “It’s a kind of elm.”

“I know.” I grin. “Have I ever told you you’re my hero?”

“Maybe once or twice. Ready to work?” He raises his eyebrows and I nod, brushing a tangled lock of hair behind my ear. My hair and I have already had a long day.

“Just let me get my binder and we can go into the den,” I say. He starts to follow me upstairs to the kitchen, but I hold up a hand. “I’ll be there in a sec.”

Ca-chick!
The cell-phone camera click announces Ian’s arrival in the hallway.

“Hey, Zig! Knock-knock . . .”

“Who’s there?” Zig always plays along.

“Ummm . . .” Ian’s eyes dart around the room. Sometimes, his mouth gets ahead of his brain. Finally, he looks down at Zig’s bag of leaves.

“Leaf.”

“Leaf?”

“That’s who’s there,” Ian says. “Leaf.”

“Okay, leaf who?”

“Leaf us alone and knock on somebody else’s door!” Ian doubles over laughing as I brush past him to get my leaf binder.

“Be right back,” I tell Zig.

Nonna’s teakettle is boiling on the stove when I walk by. I worry for a second, but she gets it right away and pours herself a cup. It’s only eight o’clock, but Mom’s getting ready for bed when I go upstairs. Her makeup is washed off, and she looks like a balloon that’s deflated after it bounced all around the room with the air whooshing out.

I grab my hairbrush and run it through my bangs in front of the mirror on the door. Frizzy and hopeless. I put on a quick coat of watermelon Chapstick and look again. Better. I grab my binder and head downstairs.

I check the stove burner when I pass it. She turned it off.

Zig is standing on a leather chair in the den, reaching as high as he can, and dropping leaves to the ground. He doesn’t even look up when I come in. I put on lip balm for this? I pull a chair to the table and sit down.

“Okay. So I have twenty-five now. I just have to identify them,” I tell him, looking for the binder pocket where I tucked the leaves.

“My leaf guide’s right there if you want it.” Zig bends down from his chair and brushes aside a pile of leaves on the table. He chooses a big brownish one, steps gingerly from the chair up onto the table, and reaches up again.

“What are you doing?” I ask his sneaker, which is planted firmly on the leaf guide.

“Trying to see if they all flutter or just some of them. You always hear about leaves fluttering to the ground, but I’m thinking that it’s really just a phenomenon of the lobed leaves. These other ones seem to do more of a plunging spiral.”

He drops the brown one. There is no fluttering whatsoever. I catch it in midair.

“Hey!” Zig frowns at me. “You messed up my experiment.”

“They’re easier to catch inside.”

“Yeah, well . . . that’s not how it works.”

I hand back the brown, nonfluttering leaf. “What is this one?”

“Catalpa,” Zig says.

“God bless you.”

He tries not to smile, but his eyes give him away.

“Ha! Made you laugh!”

Zig jumps down from the table, scoops up his leaf pile, and sits down next to me.

“Enough Gee-foolery. Now . . . American elm, cottonwood, linden, honey locust . . .”

“Mr. Nelson said that one was a Kentucky coffee tree.”

“It’s not. Look.” He shows me the page in the leaf guide, and he’s right. Kentucky coffee leaves are bigger. Mr. Nelson isn’t going to be happy about this.

Zig deals out the leaves in a row in front of me, like cards.

“I have a full house!” I joke.

He ignores me and points to the first leaf. He brushes his hair from his eyes. He frowns, and his forehead wrinkles. “Write it down at least, Gee.”

I pick up a pencil and an index card and copy down the scientific name.

“Okay, have you looked up the geographic distribution for this one yet?”

I have. And I wrote it down. And then it got washed off my card, down the shower drain. I sigh and look away from Zig, out the window.

It’s too much right now. Too much to add to a vicious fashion-model wannabe trying to steal my spot at sectionals, a mother acting like a robot on too much caffeine, and a grandmother who doesn’t know the difference between a watch and a wall clock. My eyes start to sting and I put my head down. I’m
not
going to cry in front of Zig. A warm hand settles on my shoulder lightly, and then goes away. Then it settles again. Warm.

“Gianna,” he starts, but the door creaks open, interrupting him. The hand goes away again.

“She’s had a long day, sweetie.” I hear Nonna’s voice and blink away the tears so I can sit up. If anyone’s had a long day, it’s her.

“Hi, Mrs. DiCarlo.” Zig stands to pull up a chair for her, but Nonna shakes her head. “I figured it might have been a tough doctor’s appointment when Gianna never called me back. My mom says you should let us know if you need anything.” Nonna nods.

“I’m going to get a cookie if that’s okay,” Zig says, heading for the door. “Want one?”

I shake my head, and he walks out.

“Pretty quiet kitchen after dinner,” I say to Nonna.

“It’s a lot to think about, Gianna. And sometimes I think things like this are hardest on people like your mom.”

“Hard on her?” I know my voice is getting louder, but I can’t help it. “She didn’t even manage to show up for your appointment!”

“And I thank you for being there for me. It was uncomfortable, to say the least, and it was nice to have an ally.”

Nonna walks up behind my chair and pulls out my ponytail holder. I love it when she plays with my hair. She’s the only one who can deal with my frizzy tangles.

“I didn’t mean it that way,” I say.

“I know exactly how you meant it.” Nonna separates three sections to start a French braid. “And I’d be angry, too. You talk with your mom about that later on. But for now, just try to understand that she’s hurting and she doesn’t know what to do with it.”

“Do with what?”

“Any of it.” She carefully adds more hair to my braid. “You and I, well, we wear everything right out on our sleeves. When we’re happy, we sing—loud and out of key sometimes—but we sing. When we’re sad, we cry and we think about things, and then we bake some cookies—”

“Or draw a picture,” I say.

“Or draw a picture or make a collage or splatter paint on the wall.”

“You saw that, huh?”

“It’s hard to miss if the stuffed animals fall down.” She smiles. “But you keep splattering because it’s important. You and I sort out our feelings, and until they’re sorted out, we just let them roam around in our souls. Your mom can’t do that. The lines in her world are straighter and heavier, and her colors don’t really blend. She has to keep things a certain way.” Nonna tugs a strand of hair from behind my right ear to make it reach the braid. “And some things don’t fit that way.”

“Like today.” I hand Nonna the ponytail holder and she twists it onto the end of the braid.

“Like today,” she says. “She hates that she can’t fix it, Gianna.”

“So do I.”

“I know.” I feel Nonna pull gently on a piece of hair that’s escaped from my braid to tuck it in. It springs back out, and she leaves it alone.

“How is it that
you’re
okay with this?” I can’t imagine how hard it must be for Nonna to know she’s losing pieces of herself.

“I’m not.” She picks up the catalpa leaf and twirls it in a wrinkled hand. Her wedding ring gleams under the desk lamp. “When you’ve all gone to bed at night, I think about it.” She looks out the window. The yellow rectangles of Mrs. Warren’s windows glow, and she passes by with a book in her hand. “I look at you and Ian, and I can’t imagine there ever being a day when I don’t know you and love you. I can’t imagine seeing you”—she tucks the catalpa leaf into my braid—“and not knowing every little thing about you. I can’t—I just—” Her voice cracks and she looks out the window again. Mrs. Warren’s living-room light clicks off.

“I know.” I’ve thought about it too. “But you’re here now.”

“Most of the time.” She sighs. “I drift. But I’m here most of the time.”

It hadn’t occurred to me that Nonna would see it that way. Going away and coming back. I nod. “It’s like this poem we did in English, ‘Birches.’ ”

Nonna wipes a tear from her cheek and smiles a little. “When I see birches bend from left to right . . .”

“You know it?”

“It’s my favorite. ‘So was I once myself a swinger of birches, and so I dream of going back to be.’ ”

“ ‘And when I’m weary of considerations, and life is too much like a pathless wood,’ ” Zig says quietly. I hadn’t heard him come back in.

“Today was a pathless wood day,” I say, and Nonna smiles. “And there’s that part about going away from earth and coming back again. It’s sort of like us. My daydreaming, and your . . . your whatever it is.”

“But you know the best line in that poem? ‘Earth’s the right place for love.’” Nonna takes a deep breath. “That’s why I’m trying not to curse the universe too much. I’d rather write down my recipes so they don’t get lost. I’d rather bake my cookies and take my walks and visit with my friends, because those are the things I can do right now. If it turns out I can’t pick up an eggplant by myself anymore, well . . .”

“We can help pick out eggplants,” I say. And Zig nods.

Nonna looks like she’s thinking.

“You have to poke them a little. Press into the eggplant with your finger,” she says, “and if it springs right back, then it’s ripe.”

“Got it,” Zig says.

“I always knew you were a keeper.” Nonna smiles a little and yawns. “I’m turning in. It’s been a long one.” She kisses me on the cheek. “Sleep well. Tomorrow will be a better day.”

I sure hope so.

I watch her leave and turn to Zig, back at his leaf experiments.

He climbs onto his chair with a maple leaf, stretches to the ceiling, and lets it drop.

This one flutters to the wood floor.