10
WHAT YOU NEED TO KNOW
Lou knew where he was, what day it was, and who
was in the White House. Dr. Allen, his GP, chuckled through most of
the interview, especially when Lou grumbled that his children had
forced him to come.
“Kids ganging up on you, Lou?” The
doctor winked at Grace, who was perched uncomfortably in a chair in
the corner. She hadn’t wanted to come into the examination room,
but her father had insisted, as if to prove to her how wrong she
and Steven were.
Dr. Allen elbowed his patient. “Well,
you should know—‘How sharper than a serpent’s tooth it is. . . .’
”
Her father kept his eyes trained on the
doctor’s face. “I’m sorry?”
Grace dug her nails into her palms to
keep from blurting out the rest. Was he
kidding? Her dad knew King Lear like
she knew Seinfeld.
Dr. Allen’s brow furrowed a moment
before he chuckled again and asked Lou to count backward from one
hundred by sevens. “I have a colleague you should meet,” he said,
already reaching for a pad to start scribbling the name as Lou
faltered at eighty-six. “A neurologist—big brain like you, Lou.
Jacob Franks wrote the textbook they teach at Johns Hopkins. I’m
just a horse doctor next to this guy.”
Grace jumped to her feet, eager to get
out of there. Dr. Allen wasn’t joking about being a horse doctor—he
obviously didn’t know what he was talking about. Even though she
had made the appointment to see him and practically dragged her
father here, she felt like giving the quack a piece of her mind. A
lot of people couldn’t do math in their head, and forgetting one
little quote wasn’t proof positive of anything, either. Her father
was always reading and learning new things. He played chess, for
Pete’s sake.
Besides, he was seventy-six. Didn’t
everybody start to lose a few gray cells at that age?
Why had she instigated all
this?
As they walked out to the car, Lou was
still clutching the piece of paper in his fist. “Can I borrow your
cell phone? I want to call this number.”
Two days later, at the neurologist’s,
Lou hobbled after the nurse by himself, while Grace stayed in the
waiting room. The lighting was soft and Audubon prints of wild
turkeys and woodpeckers decorated the deep forest-green walls.
Several ficus plants stood in corners and served as screens between
clusters of armchairs. Grace took a seat near the glassed-in
receptionist area. Magazines fanned across an oak table next to
her, and a pamphlet display hung on the wall above it.
Each pamphlet title she read seemed
grimmer than the last: What Is a Migraine? . . .
Living with Epilepsy . . . After You’ve Had a Stroke . . . When the
Diagnosis is Alzheimer’s . . .
Her gaze rested on the last.
Alzheimer’s. That word had been skittering
around her mind for days, unacknowledged and unspoken.
She reached over to grab the pamphlet
but recoiled before her hand actually touched it. What was the
point in looking? The diagnosis wasn’t
Alzheimer’s. There wasn’t any diagnosis yet. And she wasn’t a
doctor. Steven had suggested the changes in Lou might be chalked up
to a malfunctioning thyroid. Dr. Allen had run a blood test and
they had yet to hear back on the results. No sense panicking
prematurely.
Still, the furrow in Dr. Allen’s brow
when Lou had failed to finish the quote from King
Lear would not be banished from her mind.
She snatched the Alzheimer’s pamphlet
out of its slot and inspected it. The cover was a collage of old
people of all races and both sexes, usually hugging another old
person or a child, or being hugged by someone else. It appalled her
that her father—dignified, sharp-witted, sardonic—should be
associated with anything this insipid. She flipped it open in
irritation. Alzheimer’s disease is a disease of
the brain that impairs thinking and memory. It may also change
behavior. It is not part of the normal process of
aging.
Who on the planet didn’t know that
already?
She slapped the pamphlet shut again and
tapped it against her palm. The trouble with these things was that
they were written for idiots. They were pointless.
She wondered if there was a section
about symptoms and opened it again, just to check.
Memory
loss.
Well, duh.
The second on the list was Difficulty performing simple tasks. But her father
managed very well on his own. Except for the accident.
People with
Alzheimer’s disease are apt to forget common
words.
That wasn’t Lou, either.
She frowned. Dog
biscuit. That was a word he had forgotten the other day. She
hadn’t thought anything of it at the time.
But that was just the trouble. Why
would she? All of these symptoms were problems everyone had. By
these criteria, she suffered from
Alzheimer’s. If it wasn’t for the words thingamajig and whatsit, there
would be days when she couldn’t communicate with
anyone.
She put the pamphlet in her purse and
decided to check messages on her phone. Her inbox contained the
usual mix of spam and messages from family and friends in Oregon.
Her mom wanted to know whether she would be staying in Austin until
August, in which case she would miss Jake’s birthday party. (The
last birthday party of Jake’s that Grace had been to was his
eighth.) She said she didn’t envy Grace having to live through the
heat, or with the Olivers. Grace wondered if the thought of her in
Austin was causing her mom to have flashbacks. Something seemed to
be ginning up the long-distance maternal concern.
There was no message from Ben; Grace
hadn’t heard from him since he’d called to let her know the water
heater had been changed. One message came from Sam. Sick of chess
yet? the subject line read. What followed was a typical communiqué
from her brother, giving her his news and speculating about how
things were going at home. The tone reminded her that she hadn’t
bothered to update him about their father’s health
concerns.
She started to text a reply, but then
stopped. There was really nothing to tell him at this point that
wouldn’t fall into the category of alarming him prematurely—perhaps
unnecessarily—or leaving him in the dark.
The door to the inner office opened and
her father came hobbling back out with a folded piece of pink paper
protruding from his breast pocket.
“What did he say?” Grace asked as she
held the building’s door for him on the way out.
“I’m going to have an
MRI.”
“When?”
“They’ll call me with the appointment.
The doctor said there’s a chance that I might have had a small
stroke. Or maybe some kind of head trauma.”
She slowed as they reached the car.
“But if you’d hit your head, wouldn’t you remember?”
“Not if hitting it caused me not to
remember.”
She frowned, trying to decide if that
made sense or not.
On the drive home, she asked, “What did
he do?”
“Who?”
“The doctor.”
Within the confines of his shoulder
belt, her father shrugged. “Tests.”
“What kind of tests?”
“Just tests, Grace. Reflexes.
Questions.”
“What kind of questions?”
“What does it matter? It was me in
there, not you,” he said sharply. “I don’t give you the third
degree every time you come out of a doctor’s office, do
I?”
At the change in his tone, heat leapt
to her cheeks. “No, of course not. I’m sorry.”
The drive through the next blocks was
so tense Grace fiddled with the air conditioner just to block out
the rigid emptiness. A blizzard of cold air streamed from the
vents.
“When this is all over,” Lou said, “I
want you to go home.”
Grace glanced over at him sitting
straight and still in his seat, his hand resting on his cane. “When
what’s all over?” she asked.
“The tests. Whatever happens, I don’t
want you staying here any longer than necessary. I’m not
helpless.”
“You’ll still need me, Dad. You’ve got
a broken leg. You can’t drive.”
“You’ve got a life in Portland, and the
store to tend to.”
“Ben’s handling it for
now.”
“That’s why I’m concerned,” he
said.
“I worry about you, Dad. Sam’s
thousands of miles away and Steven’s life is crumbling and . . .”
She almost mentioned something about Peggy evidently not being
someone he could count on—she still hadn’t been over to the house
once—but she stopped herself. “Who can you depend on?”
“I’ll manage,” he said. “Life’s not a
children’s game, Grace. I don’t get to count to ten before the
action starts. Ready or not, here it comes. I’ll figure out a way.
I’ll adjust.”
“But—”
She was about to argue, but when she
opened her mouth, she realized she had no words. And as she pulled
into the driveway, she noticed Dominic sitting on the steps of
Lou’s front porch, next to Iago. Both of them got up when she’d
parked, and Dominic crossed to open Lou’s door.
“Where’ve y’all been?” he
asked.
“Out and about,” Lou said as he began
the process of extracting himself from the front seat.
“I walked Iago,” Dominic said, “but you
said you were going to teach me chess.”
“I did, didn’t I?” Lou laughed. “Well,
there’s no time like the present.”
Without a look back, he and Dominic
made their way to the house, slightly impeded by Iago, who, with
the whole yard to walk in, still managed to be
underfoot.