Turn of Mind (6 page)

2. You keep discovering new rooms in your house.

And the No. 1 sign you have Alzheimer's is . . . It's somehow slipped your mind.

If I could see through this fog. Break through this heaviness of limbs and extremities. Every inhalation stabs. My hands limp in my lap. Pale and impotent, they used to wield shiny sharp things, lovely things with heft and weight that bestowed power.

People would lie down and bare their naked flesh. Invite me to dismember them.
And if thy hand off end thee, cut it off: it is better for thee to
enter into life maimed, than having two hands to go into hell, into the fire that
never shall be quenched.

Write about yourself,
Magdalena urges.
If it helps, write in the third person.
Tell me a story about a woman who happens to be named Jennifer White.

She is a reserved person. Some would say cold. Yet others welcomed that quality, saw it as a form of integrity. She thought either was a fair assessment. Both could be attributed to her training. Surgery requires precision, objectivity.

You don't get emotional over a hand. A hand is a collection of facts. The eight bones of the carpus, the five bones of the metacarpus, and the fourteen phalanges. The flexor and extensor tendons that maneuver the digits. The muscles of the forearm. The opposable thumb. All intertwined. Multiple interconnections. All necessary to the balance of motion that separates humans from other species.

But Amanda. She thinks of Amanda's metacarpus, minus four sets of phalanges. A mutilated starfish. Does she cry? No. She writes it in her notebook.
Amanda died. Fingerless
. But the details won't stick.

I stop, put my pen down. I ask Magdalena, Which neighbor was suspected in Amanda's death? but she will not answer. Perhaps because I have asked and she has answered the question many times. Perhaps because she knows I will forget my question if she ignores it.

But I rarely forget that a question has been asked. When Magdalena ignores me, unfinished business lies heavy between us, disrupts our routine, hangs over us as we drink our tea. In this case, it pollutes the very air. For something is terribly wrong.

My notebook again. Fiona's handwriting:

Came over today to find you uncharacteristically subdued. Anger we see a lot of.
Bewilderment. And a surprising degree of intelligent acceptance. But rarely this
resigned passivity.

You were slumped at the table, your face flat down, your hands hanging at your sides.
I crouched down and put my arm around your shoulders, but you didn't move or
say anything. Wouldn't answer any questions or give any sign you knew I was there.

Eventually you sat up, pushed back the chair, and slowly went up the stairs to
bed. I didn't dare follow you. Didn't dare ask any more questions for fear of what
you would reveal about the dark place you were residing in.

I had never been afraid like that. I wasn't always sure what you were thinking,
but I could always ask, and sometimes you would even tell me. If the truth had
the power to hurt, you made it palatable by your calm acceptance of it.

You don't really like me very much, do you?
I asked you when I was
fifteen.
No,
you said,
and you don't like me very much either right now.

But we'll find each other again.
And we did. If I'd known that within a
decade I would lose both you and Dad, would I have acted differently back then?
Probably not. I probably would have gone out and gotten another tattoo.

That tattoo. You keep asking about it, Mom, so I'll write it down here. It's a
pretty good story. I already had two tattoos. There was the one I got with Eric
when I was fourteen. You didn't know about that one. It's very discreet—on my
left buttock. A tiny Tinker Bell. Well, I was fourteen.

Then when I was sixteen, the youngest freshman in my class at Stanford, I got
another one, this time on my ankle. A
cannabis sativa
plant. Yes, you can guess
why a kid really too young to be away from home would think that was cool.

But the rattlesnake. That was my junior year. I'd done okay the first two years,
better than I'd done in high school socially, actually made some friends, did the
things you'd expect. Drank too much. Slept around.

But in my junior year, things fell apart. My best friend had a sort of breakdown
and went home to West Virginia. He wrote a couple times, made jokes about the
skinny dogs and the ugly women, and that was that. Two of my other friends
started dating each other, retreated into their own private world, put up a barrier
against others. It felt oddly personal.

At that point, I was living off campus in a room rented from this Silicon Valley
marketing type. She wasn't there half the time, either traveling or staying up in the
city with her boyfriend. The house was up in the redwoods, high above the university.

When people came up to visit they'd sit in the hot tub and ooh and aah, but I
never got used to the place. The quiet disturbed me, as did the fact that the sun
went behind the hills at two in the afternoon and suddenly the day was over.

Coyotes trotted boldly through the yard, rats scratched under the floors and in the
woodwork, and even the deer spooked me. They'd come right up to the house to
forage, and since there were no curtains on the windows—the house was on three
acres of redwoods, so there was no need—I'd woken up several times to deer faces
pressed against the glass, solemnly observing me as they chewed.

So I took to spending a lot of my time down on the flats, in Palo Alto. There
was one coffeehouse I liked, and I'd sit there for hours, drinking cup after cup of
black coffee and studying. By then I was taking grad classes, and my professors
were telling me I had a career in academia if I wanted one. Because I wanted one,
badly, you could find me at that coffeehouse working pretty much every night.

I was there one Friday night as usual, hyped up on coffee and lonely as hell, and
not wanting to go back up the hill to that house without curtains. I had resigned
myself to doing just that, however, when a nice-looking young woman—just a
little older than myself, I'd guess—came up to me. She had a question about
what I was studying—was it math?
Sort of,
I said, and we fell into a conversation
about what economics was and why it mattered.

After a while she motioned to a young man sitting at another table and said
, We're going to a party in Santa Cruz, you want to come?
I thought,Well,
this is strange. And, I'm not sure I like these people. There was something too
eager about them. The woman's teeth were too large for her mouth when she
smiled. And then, recklessly, Why the hell not?

They told me not to bother with my car, that they'd bring me back when the
party was over. That should have alerted me. But I got in the car, and the
first thing that happened was they started going up the hill toward where
I lived.

I said,
Wait a minute, this isn't the way to Santa Cruz,
and they told me it
was a back way, a really pretty one. Since I'd had enough of that kind of pretty
and was beginning to think I'd done a very foolish thing, I asked them to just
drop me off at my house—we were passing right by my street—and said that
I'd pick up my car in the morning.

But they refused. Said,
No, you're coming with us.
And I was both very
angry and very frightened. I had a kind of a crazy idea that I would wait until
the car slowed to go around a corner and then jump out, but when I tried to open
the door I found they'd put the child-safety locks on. So I just folded into myself
and waited to see what happened.

We got to this old ranch house up in the Santa Cruz mountains—where, I'm
still not sure—and there was another poor soul like me who they'd picked up in
Santa Clara. We were all in this room and this man came out and welcomed me
and this other girl to what he called “the family.” Said we shouldn't be alarmed.
Said we could go home whenever we wanted, we just had to give them a chance.
Keep an open mind.

At that point, I got up and left the room. Didn't run, didn't hurry, just walked
right out of that house and down the long driveway and into the road. Astonishingly,
no one followed me.

Later, maybe a half mile down the road, I found my hands clenched into fists.
I kept walking, it was pitch-black, and I had no idea where I was, but had a
vague idea of getting to the nearest house and calling the police. And then I saw
headlights. I stuck out my thumb, and a truck with two sixteen-year-old kids
from Ben Lomond stopped.

One of them had only that day gotten his driving license and they were both
pumped up like hell on excitement. They were on their way into Santa Cruz to
get drunk and tattooed to celebrate.

I said,
I'm game,
and I was. I figured I couldn't get a bus back to Palo Alto
until the next morning anyway.

After downing a bunch of tequila shots in a campus bar, we somehow got to a
twenty-four-hour tattoo parlor on Ocean. I stumbled into a chair and said
Do your worst. Give me the biggest meanest thing you have.

So he started in. It took him all night. He kept popping pills to stay awake,
which should have worried me, but it didn't. The pain was almost unbearable,
but the booze helped and when I got home and saw my lovely snake it was
worth every acid-laced sting.

I aced my finals that week and, my arm throbbing, took a red-eye back to Chicago.
You took one look at my arm and prescribed a course of antibiotics, but you never
said anything about my snake. Whether you liked it or not. Until after you got sick.

Then you began complimenting me on it. Telling me not to cover it up. Encouraging
me to wear sleeveless tops. I think at this point you're as proud of it as I
am. Our joint emblem:
Don't Tread on Me.