My mouth dries up. There’s a strange humming in my ears.
It’s as if the exact symptoms my mother experienced sprang off these very pages.
I keep reading.
One woman who was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s forgot what month it was. A few days later, she called ice cubes “water squares.”
I’m hyperventilating.
The book falls out of my hands, landing on the floor, as I leap up and run outside. I’m aware of someone calling after me, asking if I’m okay.
I collapse onto a bench in front of the library, my head in my hands. The world around me is swirling too fast. It’s dizzying.
A suspicion is building in my brain, one so bizarre and terrifying I can’t yet form the framework to express it.
I no longer know what is real.
This must be what it feels like to lose your mind.
A sob wrenches free from my throat and I begin to shake. My vision blurs. Then I hear someone’s voice close by.
“Are you okay?”
I can’t catch my breath to answer. I’m crying too hard.
I feel a hand on my shoulder, and for a moment, I think it’s my mother, that she has somehow tracked me down. Then I wipe my eyes and look up to see the librarian.
“Can I sit with you a minute?”
I nod and she joins me on the bench. She hands me a tissue, and for a few moments, as I dab my eyes and try to regain control of myself, she doesn’t say anything.
“I’m sorry for whatever you’re going through,” she finally tells me.
I manage to find my voice and thank her.
“If you need any help connecting to resources, we have a lot of information inside. I’ll be there if you’d like to talk more.” She gives my shoulder a squeeze and stands up before the meaning of her words hits me. I twist around to stare after her, but she has already disappeared into the building.
In a two-minute conversation with the librarian, I pretended to have multiple memory lapses. That, combined with my emotional breakdown, could have easily pointed her toward the wrong conclusion. Does the librarian suspect I might be suffering from a medical crisis, one with symptoms of severe memory loss—even early-onset Alzheimer’s—because of the way I presented myself to her?
Because of the way I presented myself to her.
Something about those words nags at me.
I dig my nails into my palms and force myself to focus on the facts I’ve been trying to assemble:
My mother has no social life or close friends, outside of me.
My mother may have tried to destroy my relationship with Ethan.
My mother has not made any noticeable mistakes at work, but she makes them frequently at home.
My mother refuses to undergo any tests that could provide confirmation of her diagnosis.
My mother got a library card and checked out a book about Alzheimer’s disease at the same time I began applying for jobs out of state five months ago.
My mother began exhibiting textbook-perfect signs of the disease— as if the book provided a blueprint she followed—right before I planned to move away and begin a new life, one that would push her to the fringes of my world.
My thoughts circle back, retracing themselves: Diagnosing Alzheimer’s is a slow, methodical process. Usually it’s a jigsaw method; individual pieces are put together until the picture becomes clear.
Reversing the diagnosis means moving the pieces into a different formation, testing out combinations until a fresh image clicks into place. The one I’m now creating is a mirror image of the original picture I held. It’s a complete perspectival switch.
The idea is monstrous, but I can’t dismiss it.
There could be nothing wrong with my mother. Nothing at all.
ACT
TWO
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
RUTH
Catherine was five years old when she began to scare me.
Before my daughter, the only child I’d ever been close to was Timmy, who was basically pure sunshine wrapped in the form of a freckle-faced boy.
Catherine was different from the start. She rarely cried, she didn’t speak until she was nearly fifteen months old, and she almost never laughed. I wasn’t laughing a lot during those early days either—being perpetually exhausted and dead broke tends to dampen one’s sense of mirth—so I didn’t pay much attention to it.
When Catherine was about a year and a half, I took her to a playground and put her in a bucket swing, the kind with two holes for those chubby baby legs to dangle through. It was a beautiful mid-October morning. The leaves on the trees surrounding the park were brilliant shades of crimson and gold, and the sun gently warmed my skin. At first we had the park all to ourselves, which was nice.
A few minutes after we got there, though, a group of moms arrived. They all had kids around Catherine’s age. The moms wore the kind of expensive-looking exercise clothes that typically don’t see the inside of a gym, and they carried pretty diaper bags with all sorts of pockets and loops for coordinated accessories like sippy cups and wipes.
One of them had brought along a bottle of bubbles with a wand, and another had a big quilt for all the babies to sit on. The group stayed in a clump most of the time I was there, the moms squealing and snapping pictures with their phones every time one of the babies reached out to try to grab a bubble.
After a while, a mom carried her son over to the swing next to Catherine’s. When she gave him a gentle push, her son giggled. They went on like that for a while: The mother pushed, the son giggled, the mother made exaggerated expressions and talked to her boy in a high-pitched voice.
She caught Catherine’s attention, too. I watched as Catherine turned her head and studied the mother.
“Well, hello there!” The woman gave Catherine a toothy grin. “Do you like to swing, princess?”
Catherine didn’t smile back.
“Look at you, so small and so serious!” The mom began talking in a voice meant to be funny. Catherine wasn’t having any of it.
The woman hadn’t paid attention to me before, but now I could see her taking me in. I had an old cloth tote bag with a cinnamon raisin bagel wrapped in a paper towel for me and Catherine to share, a spare diaper, and a water bottle to refill at the playground’s fountain. It wasn’t just my age that separated me from the group of moms with their stackable Tupperware containers of blueberries and rice puffs and their organic apple juice boxes.
I tried to crack a joke. I guess I was pretty lonely, and as I’ve mentioned, Catherine wasn’t the best conversationalist.
“Maybe she can be Wednesday for Halloween. You know, that little girl from The Addams Family who never smiles?”
The mom looked shocked. She even stopped swinging her son for a minute, and his smile slipped away, too. Like we were contagious.
The mother’s cheer returned quickly, but it seemed a bit forced now.
“Is she your little sister?”
I’d gotten that question before. Most people assumed Catherine and I were siblings, or I was her babysitter. “No, she’s my daughter.”
“Oh! I’m sorry! You’re just … it’s that you’re so…”
Her little boy’s grunts turned into the start of a wail. He wanted to be pushed again. His mom’s attention snapped back. “Ooh, I’m so sorry, my little man! Mommy’s here! Want to swing up to the sky and grab a cloud?”