her smile before it could be categorized as such. “Good. Now, would you mind writing me a sentence? Anything will do. Whatever comes to mind.”
She held out a pen and my folded appointment slip. I took it, stilled my shaking hand and wrote, I’m sorry to be wasting your time.
She took it back, peering at it for longer than it took to read, then scribbled her own note and dangled it in front of me again. When I reached for it, she drew back. “Those words. Do you remember them?”
“San Francisco, clouds”—a pause thanks to the pressure— “orange.”
“Excellent.” She extended the note again. “Now read these instructions, and see if you can follow them.”
Close your eyes for thirty seconds, it said. I did as directed, staring into the darkness while counting and thinking about how good it’d feel to tell Sharon to go jump in a lake. When I reopened my eyes, I found the doc with a pinched brow. She had the paper in her hand again, fetched quietly from my fingertips without notice. Had I read it right? Had I counted wrong?
“Can I see it again?” I asked.
Her mask returned. “How well do you sleep?”
I set my jaw. “Fine.”
A nod. “Been depressed at all?”
“No.”
“Have you felt unsteady lately?”
“No.”
“Any trouble breathing? Chest pain?”
I paused. She’d tripped me up on my way to a clean bill of health. If I were honest, there were the twinges in my heart, especially during the bout at the bar and in Sharon’s office. There were the breathing problems too, specifically at Walmart, during my fifty-yard walk, and last night at three a.m. But honesty didn’t tell the whole truth, because it needed an asterisk. My symptoms had been caused by a girl who had climbed through my window a few days ago, and good luck treating that.
So I said, “Swear on my mother’s grave, I’ve been feeling all right.”
I couldn’t tell if she believed me. Her best trait—this unreadable demeanor, this nonchalance—was losing its luster.
“So?” I prodded. “Did I pass my IQ test?”
She cocked her head. “Mr. Sinclair, the cognitive test I gave you is not in and of itself a diagnostic instrument for dementia. It’s used as a benchmark for later, so let’s hang on to it.”
I crossed my arms and harrumphed.
“I suggest we schedule some imaging tests so we can get to the bottom of all the falls you’ve had lately. That worries me the most. I’m not thrilled about your blood pressure or your recent unsteadiness, so my priority is to rule out vascular issues before we pursue any other diagnosis.”
I frowned. I wanted a written proclamation concerning my mental and physical vitality, a note that I could slap onto Sharon’s desk whilst flipping her off. Instead the doctor had me worrying about brain fog and blood flow. And the way she spoke of them sounded concrete, which had me suddenly thinking of them as concrete. I saw myself as Sharon saw me, and after that I couldn’t shake this feeling that my behavior over the past week was because of dementia, and that my heart was actually failing. Which meant all I had left to protect myself from Simmons were appearances.
“Am I stuck in this wheelchair?” I asked, panicked.
She clicked her pen. “You can graduate to a walker.”
“You’ll tell them that?”
“Yes.” She pulled out a prescription pad and scribbled. “So I’ll see you back here in a week for stitch removal. I’m prescribing you a beta-blocker to see if we can get that blood pressure under control, and you need to start taking it today. Next is something to help with urinary incontinence, which I see here has been a problem lately too.”
Goddamn Sharon. “Thank you.”
She ripped the sheet off and handed it to me. “Next week then.”
“I wouldn’t miss it.”
She left with a two-fingered salute, a nurse returned with my check-out papers, and soon some nameless aide pushed me into the waiting room, where Shawn sat ignoring the National Geographic open