time to time experiences with those one is intimate with, when the distance that all the while has been folded up like a Chinese paper toy suddenly springs open between you. And then Lotte shrugged, breaking the spell, and said she didn’t know. She didn’t say anything else about it, but the next day I saw her scanning the newspaper, looking, I felt sure, for some report of the accident. She walked away, you see. She walked away without waiting to find out what had happened.
All her life I thought it was about her parents. When she told the story about the bus it was about her parents, and when she woke up crying it was about her parents, and when she lost her temper at me and went cold for days, it was also, I believed, about her parents in some way. The loss was so extreme there seemed no need to go looking any further. So how was I to know that lost inside the vortex of her there was also a child?
I might never have known about him at all if a strange thing hadn’t happened toward the end of Lotte’s life. By then the Alzheimer’s was quite advanced. In the beginning she had tried to hide it. I would remind her of something we had done together—a seaside restaurant we’d eaten in years before in Bournemouth, or the boat ride we’d taken in Corsica when her hat had blown off and floated on the backs of the waves toward the shores of Africa, or so we’d later imagined lying sun-drenched, naked, and happy in bed. I would remind her of one of these memories and she would say, Of course, of course, but I could see in her eyes that beneath those words there was nothing, just an abyss, like the black-water pond she disappeared into every morning no matter the weather. Then followed a period when she became scared, aware of how much she was losing by the day, perhaps even the hour, like a person slowly bleeding to death, hemorrhaging toward oblivion. When we went for a walk she would grip my arm as if at any minute the street might drop away, the trees and houses, England itself, sending us tumbling down, turning and tumbling, unable to ever right ourselves. And then even that period passed, and she no longer remembered enough to be afraid, no longer remembered, I suppose, that things had ever been any other way, and from then on she set off alone, utterly alone, on a long journey back to the shores of her childhood. Her conversation, if one could call it that, disintegrated, leaving behind only the rubble out of which a once-beautiful thing had been built.
It was during this time that she began to wander off. I would come back from doing the shopping and find the front door open and the house empty. The first time it happened I got into the car and drove around for fifteen minutes, becoming more and more distraught before I found her half a mile away, on Hampstead Lane, sitting at a bus stop without a jacket though it was winter. When she saw me she didn’t move to get up. Lotte, I said, bending down to her, or maybe I said, Darling. Where were you planning to go? To visit a friend, she said, crossing and uncrossing her ankles. Which friend? I asked.
It became impossible to leave her alone. She didn’t always wander, but there had been enough scares that I had to hire a nurse to stay with her three afternoons a week so I could go out to do the errands. The first nurse I found turned out to be a nightmare. In the beginning she had seemed very professional, arriving with a long list of references, but soon enough she revealed herself to be careless and irresponsible, only in it for the money. One afternoon I came home and she was standing nervously by the door. Where is Lotte? I demanded. She wrung her hands. What is going on here? I said, pushing past her into the hall that Lotte and I had first entered together so many years ago when it still belonged to the potter in the wheelchair, and overhead hung the damage of a diverted river, a river, I admit, that from time to time I would wake in the middle of the night and think I could hear still flowing somewhere in