You Lost Me There (32 page)

“I’m not sorry about the antlers,” Regina said.

I added hastily, “I would not expect you to be.”

She laughed. I noticed that her hair was wet, as if she’d just gotten out of the shower.

“I mean that you don’t have cause to be sorry. I’m sorry that I hurt you.”

“You’re sorry you hurt me how? By fleeing my reading? The time you ripped a poster off my wall?”

“None of it was your fault.”

The wind died down as she turned off the main road onto Sargent Drive. We drove through the woods, coming out into sunshine.

“Well, that wasn’t something I was considering. I’m just shocked to see you. Driving with a public nuisance. I mean, I just want to be filled in, then I’ll drop you off.”

“You saw the newspaper.”

“I told you on the phone.”

“Well,” I said, “the story’s pretty much all there.”

“And now you’re out on Cranberry, lying low.”

I was sweating through my undershirt. Her car was too small for me, forcing me to bend my legs so that my knees rested on the door, but I didn’t want to reach down and adjust the seat. We quickly went around a turn and I put a hand on Regina’s shoulder for balance and she jolted away.

“What are you doing?”

“Sorry—”

“Look, I’m pulling over.”

Regina got out, but left the engine running. The inlet the road overlooked, Somes Sound, was supposedly the East Coast’s only fjord. Sara had told me that, adding it could be just a rumor, some island lore. A local legend. The road there was meandering and narrow, hugging the sea cliff like an Italian route for testing Ferraris.

The day we got our new cars, Sara and I had raced from one end of the road to the other, at one point driving side by side, death defying. Sara won, not wearing her seat belt.

“I heard about your swim, you know. The one after my reading.”

“How?”

“Your goddaughter. The girl who works at Blue Sea. The other night I was eating there, she remembered me from the time I stopped by your house. She told me all about it. The day a poem almost drowned you.” Regina laughed. “She said she thought I’d want to know since we were colleagues, that you were staying out on Cranberry until the coast was clear. Since we were colleagues.”

There was a long silence. Regina took off her the cap and threw it into the car through the window. My embarrassment forced me to stare at Regina’s face. She was dignified, I was a mess. I leaned against a wooden barrier, and she sat looking up at me from a large, flat rock, blinking while she redid her ponytail with two hands, her elbows fanned out.

I said, “I haven’t been myself in a long time.”

“Since before we met.”

“Probably.”

She nodded, staring out. “Part of me knew all along.”

“Regina, I didn’t realize.”

“I happen to really hate dishonesty, you know? What a waste, when the other person is lying. What a waste for them.”

“When I said I cared about you, I wasn’t lying.”

She looked up at me. “Why say that?”

“What?”

“Will you listen to yourself? It’s, like, Alzheimer’s of the emotions. You know what, forget this.”

Regina got in the car. I followed.

“I think studies find that people, in general, are naturally suggestible,” she said. “You know, at work, in court. All it takes is a leading question from the opposition, suddenly they’re astray. We’re so busy searching, we don’t stop and see.”

I said a moment later, “I think you’re right.”

She laughed under her breath. “See, with you I was so busy trying to analyze what we were, I never actually looked. It’s like, bodies are complicated, not people. We get brain scans, we go to therapists, we try to pin things down. But finally, when we come up for air? We forget the water was only two inches deep.”

“You’re saying we’re superficial.”

Regina stared at me. One of her hands was on the emergency brake. “Your wife died. With me, you got easy sex cheap. When I started wanting more, you panicked. The end. My bad.”

“You know, Lindsay had you pegged exactly right,” Regina said, shifting into reverse, “you’re just this little boy.”

We drove back to Northeast Harbor. Traffic accumulated by the mile, first one car in front of us and another, then two behind us, until we were a wagon train of sedans going west at twenty miles an hour.

“Regina,” I blurted out, “I did care about you. I still do.”

“Oh my God, just stop.”

The light before the harbor was notoriously slow to change. Regina stared up through the windshield. I clasped my hands and pushed my toes against the floor, thrusting myself back hard against the seat.

Regina reached around, grabbed a book, and dropped it in my lap.

“You don’t call me,” she said. “I won’t call you.”

When the light turned green, she drove down to the ferry and out the loop for exiting cars.

 

 

 

After a fashion, I was back to my old ways: I worked morning, noon, and night documenting Betsy’s life. Cognitive-functionally, I clocked maybe a seven out of ten. One afternoon, Joel came down the basement stairs. He was sweating, pink from too much sun, growing a beard and gaining weight. He smelled like booze. He asked what I was doing. I played him some of what I’d recorded that morning with Betsy, her describing how the admiral had moved the family to Hawaii for two years. Joel walked away, saying I was wasting my time.

“Worse than that, you’ll give her a bigger head.”

Joel and Betsy now began most days with a dignified European lunch featuring wine. By dusk, fights broke out, screamers mainly consisting of amnesiacs’ roulette, blame games fought to exhaustion.

“Liberal attitudes never start at home.”

“What is that supposed to mean?”

“If you’re such a humanitarian about towel-heads, why ship off your own kid?”

“Oh, so you think we had an easy decision?”

“Hilarious. Yes, I do.”

“Well, your father believed in tradition. His father went to St. Luke’s, Bill had a lovely time there, why wouldn’t you, unless you deliberately fought against it? The grounds were beautiful, terrific sports teams, a good choir.”

“Honestly, Mother, you know I saw kids get their heads slammed against a wall.”

“Now you’re exaggerating.”

“My Latin teacher? He broke my index finger with a fucking Bible.”

“Well, had we
known
, Joel, your father never would have stood for such
malfeasance
.”

“Of course he knew.”

“You told him?”

“He wanted me down there getting my ass whipped, that’s obvious. It was the same headmaster in place as when he was there. How many times did I ask to come home?”

“You’ll remember, if you didn’t remain through graduation, then how would you have gotten into Yale?”

“Well, that worked.”

“Not our fault, dear.
We
didn’t light the school on fire.”

“Dad didn’t want me around. The serving utensils were more useful. Not like you ever stood up to him anyway.”

“Oh, allow me to confide in you, Joel, I am terribly sorry, but you’ll find, perhaps I didn’t
want
to confront him on this topic. This will not be comfortable to hear, but I did not adore being a mother. It wasn’t my strong suit. Would you believe, could you imagine I had aspirations of my own? Do you fancy it was easy then for a woman to want something more for herself than darning onesies?”

“You know what? Both of you were lousy parents.”

“And you, you were an
ungrateful
child.”

“What was I supposed to be grateful for?”

“Don’t interrupt me. Your generation, you were good for what? Escape, excess, and misanthropy. You were an advertising campaign. What would you know about duty? About adversity? Responsibility?”

“Well, I’m not the one who abandoned my kid to pederasts.”

The house was quiet. I worked undisturbed for ten minutes. Then I heard ice cubes being broken out of a tray and thrown in a glass. Joel came downstairs with a big gin and tonic.

“Okay, what have you got on me?”

“Some stories from your mother, that’s all,” I said. I opened a folding chair next to the desk. “You’re welcome to correct them.”

“How about I give you the original version. We’ll go old-school, straight from the source.”

For three hours he recounted his life story, filling up his cup twice, watching me take down the outline as though I were some antique automaton he’d found in the basement.

His patient chronicler, neither judge nor jury.

 

 

 

“Victor, you need to know something.”

“What is it?”

“I don’t know how to say this. I’ve begun looking around to move.”

“To move? To move work?”

“I’m just putting out feelers,” Lucy said. “You know, maybe bio-tech. I don’t know where it sits with me. The timing feels right.”

I was crushed. “No, of course, it’s a good idea.”

“You mean that?”

“Well, it’s sudden.”

Lucy laughed darkly. “Try having your research partner go AWOL.”

“I understand.”

“It’s not because of you, Victor. Not completely.” She sighed. “Deke is moving. To California. He’s taking a position at UCSF.”

“But that’s wonderful. I mean, if you’re going with him.”

“Are you asking me?”

“I just assumed.”

“Like I said, I don’t know.”

“Lucy,” I said, “I’m happy for you. I already miss you as it is.”

“Yeah,” she said after a second. “You, too.”

With Betsy’s and Joel’s entries finished, I left the Gardner book alone for a week. Only Sara’s and Miriam’s entries remained to be included. People had suggested occasionally that I write a book about Alzheimer’s disease for the lay reader, a look at current research from the inside perspective. Now was the first time I’d seriously considered it. I began swimming again. Some days I lay in the hammock and read an old mystery. I got a haircut, I gardened, I drove the golf cart to pick up groceries. There were moments when I thought I’d never leave, that here was paradise. Twice I had dinner with Ken and his wife, Dot, who looked just like Pat Nixon.

One Thursday, a foggy morning with an overcast sky, Joel found Betsy dead when he went in to help her into the shower. Joel stumbled downstairs. He was wearing a T-shirt and boxers. He ran outside.

Betsy was crumpled on the floor in a nightgown by the curtains, her eyes wide open, her glasses knocked off a few feet away.

The fog had settled in the grass. Joel went past me into the kitchen and poured out two full glasses of gin. He laid his arms on either side of my neck. His face was flushed underneath his beard. He would see to the coroner, he said, I was to call the lawyer, the family, and arrange the funeral, whatever his mother said she’d wanted. We embraced, then we toasted with our juice glasses. Joel poured himself more, became sullen, and fell into an easy chair.

I walked around through the fog to shake off the alcohol. My knees creaked, my back ached, my mind wouldn’t go one stop past the obvious:
dead, gone, cold
. I refused to accept any of it. I walked to the ferry dock and sat down on one of the benches. People would appear from the fog, then fade away. There were watchers in the trees, all eyes on me.

One gull, guarding a pyramid of lobster traps, wouldn’t stop screeching.

Who’s to say the whole island couldn’t sink in the fog? And if it did, who would mourn us? Fifty years down the road, who remaining would remember us and what we’d done?

The week after the funeral, I stuck it out on Cranberry alone, rarely leaving the house. Joel moved back in with his girlfriend, Jill, in Man-set, then was kicked out again, and then I didn’t know where he was. He disappeared. His cell phone went straight to voice mail.

I called Lucy, but the lab told me she and a friend had taken a last-minute vacation to Tortola. I left a message. I sought occupation at all costs. I swept the floors, vacuumed bedrooms, mowed the lawn, cleaned out the shed. Ken and Dorothy brought over a big pan of lasagna, and I stored it in the basement freezer, which I’d just emptied out and defrosted.

Joel showed up unannounced one chilly, cloudless night with tidings of September. He had a twelve-pack of beer and a bag of cheeseburgers. We sat in lawn chairs in the backyard and looked out over the water, listening to the frogs and bugs. I had to go in for jackets, bringing out some of Bill’s, two old flannel work shirts. The lights of Bar Harbor were clumped together in the distance, as though the town were a far-away cruise ship.

Joel threw one of his cheeseburgers into the ocean. “Honestly, I can’t feel any worse. My tongue is like fucking a layer of fertilizer.”

“That’s the McDonald’s.”

“I don’t mean the food.”