Still Alice Page 0,32
to church.”
She smelled the booze on his breath.
“Well, I did today.”
“We were supposed to have dinner with Bob and Sarah. I had to call and cancel, didn’t you remember?”
Dinner with their friends Bob and Sarah. It was on her calendar.
“I forgot. I have Alzheimer’s.”
“I had absolutely no idea where you were, if you were lost. You have to start carrying your cell phone with you at all times.”
“I can’t bring it with me when I run, I don’t have any pockets.”
“Then duct tape it to your head, I don’t care, I’m not going through this every time you forget you’re supposed to show up somewhere.”
She followed him into the living room. He sat down on the couch, held his drink in his hand, and wouldn’t look up at her. The beads of sweat on his forehead matched those on his sweaty glass of scotch. She hesitated, then sat on his lap, hugged him hard around his shoulders with her hands touching her own elbows, her ear against his, and let it all out.
“I’m so sorry I have this. I can’t stand the thought of how much worse this is going to get. I can’t stand the thought of looking at you someday, this face I love, and not knowing who you are.”
She traced the outline of his jaw and chin and the creases of his sorely out of practice laugh lines with her hands. She wiped the sweat from his forehead and the tears from his eyes.
“I can barely breathe when I think about it. But we have to think about it. I don’t know how much longer I have to know you. We need to talk about what’s going to happen.”
He tipped his glass back, swallowed until there was nothing left, and then sucked a little more from the ice. Then he looked at her with a scared and profound sorrow in his eyes that she’d never seen there before.
“I don’t know if I can.”
APRIL 2004
As smart as they were, they couldn’t cobble together a definitive, long-term plan. There were too many unknowns to simply solve for x, the most crucial of those being, How fast will this progress? They’d taken a year’s sabbatical together six years ago to write From Molecules to Mind, and so they were each a year away from being eligible for taking another. Could she make it that long? So far, they’d decided that she’d finish out the semester, avoid travel whenever possible, and they’d spend the entire summer at the Cape. They could only imagine as far as August.
And they agreed to tell no one yet, except for their children. That unavoidable disclosure, the conversation they had agonized over the most, would unfold that very morning over bagels, fruit salad, Mexican frittata, mimosas, and chocolate eggs.
They hadn’t all been together for Easter in a number of years. Anna sometimes spent that weekend with Charlie’s family in Pennsylvania, Lydia had stayed in L.A. the last several years and was somewhere in Europe before that, and John had attended a conference in Boulder a few years back. It had taken some work to persuade Lydia to come home this year. In the middle of rehearsals for her play, she’d claimed she couldn’t afford the interruption or the flight, but John had convinced her that she could spare two days and paid for her airfare.
Anna declined a mimosa and a Bloody Mary and instead washed down the caramel eggs she’d been eating like popcorn with a glass of iced water. But before anyone could harbor suspicions of pregnancy, she launched into the details of her impending intrauterine insemination procedure.
“We saw a fertility specialist over at the Brigham, and he can’t figure it out. My eggs are healthy, and I’m ovulating each month, and Charlie’s sperm are fine.”
“Anna, really, I don’t think they want to hear about my sperm,” said Charlie.
“Well, it’s true, and it’s so frustrating. I even tried acupuncture, and nothing. Except my migraines are gone. So at least we know that I should be able to get pregnant. I start FSH injections on Tuesday, and next week I inject myself with something that will release my eggs, and then they’ll inseminate me with Charlie’s sperm.”
“Anna,” said Charlie.
“Well, they will, and so hopefully, I’ll be pregnant next week!”
Alice forced a supportive smile, caging her dread behind her clenched teeth. The symptoms of Alzheimer’s disease didn’t manifest until after the reproductive years, after the deformed gene had unwittingly been passed on to the next generation. What