We ride the elevator without speaking. Lewis scrolls sporadically on his phone. He chuckles to himself once or twice. Unbelievable. The second time, he bothers to nudge me with his elbow and move the screen closer to me.
It’s a video of a cat on one of those motorized vacuums.
“Wait for it to replay,” Lewis mutters. I wait. The video replays. The vacuum, with cat rider, hums toward a couch or coffee table, I can’t tell which. The vacuum keeps going, under the object, while the furniture pushes the cat off and onto the ground, where it sits, bored or disaffected.
I muster a smile, and Lewis only chuckles once again and resumes scrolling his newsfeed.
We return to his room. I guess Lewis noticed I’m not in the mood for conversation or cat videos, because I hear impatience in his voice when he informs me he’s going to grab his extra blanket and make up the couch for me. He heads to his bedroom, and I wait by the window.
My head is a whirlwind. It’s within me to shout at my brother, to force him to take our mother’s diagnosis seriously. It’s not just some bridge to be crossed. It’s the rest of our lives. The rest of her life. I don’t understand how I’m the only one who understands.
Mom has the genetic mutation that guarantees she’ll develop early-onset Alzheimer’s disease. We don’t know how much time she has before her symptoms set in.
She is the most responsible, resilient, positive person I know. Through college and graduate school, she cared for her own mother, who also had early-onset Alzheimer’s. I’ve heard the stories Mom would tell on the rare evenings when she was in dark moods—the first time her mother ever forgot her name, the nights she called at two a.m. convinced she was being held against her will, the panic in her mother’s eyes when confronted with a room full of family she saw as strangers. None of my mom’s efforts could rescue her mother from the disease, of course. Her mother died four years following her diagnosis.
She was fifty-five.
That’s not unusual—neither her age nor the years she hung on. I know because I’m one of those teenagers whose Google search history includes, “How long do Alzheimer’s patients typically live?”
My mother understood the genetics. She knew she had a fifty-fifty chance of carrying the early Alzheimer’s mutation. She avoided taking the test for as long as she could, knowing firsthand what the disease would do and that nothing could stop it, and not wanting the diagnosis looming over the rest of her life. However, she understood the game of chance she’d be playing if she had her own children. She knew she could consign them to the wild-eyed nights and empty moments she’d watched her own mother go through.
It’s why she and my dad decided to adopt. Lewis came from Bengaluru four years before I was brought home from Arkansas. We were both infants. I’ve never met my birth mother, though I’ve been told she had me when she was sixteen and has since gone to college. We send her Christmas cards, and I know she’s not opposed to other contact from me. I just haven’t reached out. I might one day, but with everything going on with my mom, it’s one question too many.
A year after my mom and dad divorced, she decided she couldn’t put off finding out whether she’d inherited her mother’s disease. If she was going to be a single parent, she’d have to plan for herself and for Lewis and me. One day, when I was in middle school, without telling either of us, she took the test.
I don’t have a great memory for things other than words. I don’t remember my first day of high school, or the trip we took to Disney World when I was in elementary school, or the first time Lewis brought a girl over—which, to be fair, might be because he’s brought enough of them over that I’ve lost track. But I remember the day Mom told us her test results. The way the winter sunlight filtered through the window in the front of the house, the smell of apple pie—Lewis’s and my favorite, one of the few things we’ve ever agreed on—from the kitchen when she sat us down in the living room. I remember worrying the threads of the green couch, knowing something was coming even if I didn’t know what. Lewis, for his part, stared at his shoes in uncharacteristic stillness while Mom gave us the details on how the results would and wouldn’t change our lives.
There isn’t a question of if she will develop the disease. She will. With a strength I’d never known she had in her, she never mourned her prognosis. She’s only repeated how grateful she is she decided not to have biological children, how grateful she is to have Lewis and me—how grateful she knew enough to avoid the weight of worry over whether we’re going to share her disease.
She reassured us the coming years wouldn’t change and our lives would remain normal. Lewis took her at her word, from what I understood from his quick return to texting during dinners and working on college apps with his friends instead of coming right home every afternoon. He did become interested in his biological family, writing them letters in the summer before going off to college. He’s close with one half brother, who gave him the news their mother died years before.
As for me, I couldn’t accept life would “remain normal.” There is no normal, not now.
Normal is a memory. And it’s my job to hold on to every one of my mom’s. Every day I watch her for early signs—whenever she forgets the time of an appointment, or something I mentioned to her, or where she put her keys. What would be tiny annoyances in the life of a normal high-school senior fill my head with a parade of red flags.
There’s nobody else to watch for her condition developing or care for her. We don’t have extended family. My dad, who lives in Canada with his girlfriend, was rocked by her test results. It was never a question that he would continue to support Lewis and me financially, but nobody expected him to handle his ex-wife’s medical expenses, not to mention the full-time care she’ll one day need. I don’t resent him for it, even if I understand our lives would be easier were our family whole. He and I talk on the phone regularly, and I spend a month with him in Canada every summer—but for practical purposes, I’m on my own.
It’s why I’m always asking her where she and Dad met, or what her dissertation was about, or other pieces of her life I want us both to hold on to. It’s not only that I want to check on her recall. It’s that I want to know she’s still the person she was the day before, and the day before that. Because when she can’t remember those things, she won’t be her.
With my mind running over the daily list of worries, I watch Lewis fit the sheets to the futon. Hours later, I’m staring out the window overlooking the river. The lights of the city are undimmed, despite the late hour. Instead of falling asleep, I’m awake and wondering—wondering if Mom’s okay, wondering if tomorrow’s the day things start to go downhill.
Every day I wait. And one day the waiting will be over, and I don’t want to lose the good years she has left because I’m away at college.