surprise her. Anna was the child who most mirrored their mother. She had Alice’s hair, coloring, and temperament. And her mother’s presenilin-1.
“I’m going to go ahead with the in vitro. I already talked with my doctor, and they’re going to do a preimplantation genetic diagnosis on the embryos. They’re going to test a single cell from each of the embryos for the mutation and only implant ones that are mutation-free. So we’ll know for sure that my kids won’t ever get this.”
It was a solid piece of good news. But while everyone else continued to savor it, the taste turned slightly bitter for Alice. Despite her self-reproach, she envied Anna, that she could do what Alice couldn’t—keep her children safe from harm. Anna would never have to sit opposite her daughter, her firstborn, and watch her struggle to comprehend the news that she would someday develop Alzheimer’s. She wished that these kinds of advances in reproductive medicine had been available to her. But then the embryo that had developed into Anna would’ve been discarded.
According to Stephanie Aaron, Tom was okay, but he didn’t look it. He looked pale, shaken, fragile. Alice had imagined that a negative result for any of them would be a relief, clean and simple. But they were a family, yoked by history and DNA and love. Anna was his older sister. She’d taught him how to snap and blow gum bubbles, and she always gave him her Halloween candy.
“Who’s going to tell Lydia?” asked Tom.
“I will,” said Anna.
MAY 2004
Alice first thought of peeking inside the week after she was diagnosed, but she didn’t. Fortune cookies, horoscopes, tarot cards, and assisted living homes couldn’t tempt her interest. Although closer to it every day, she was in no hurry to glimpse her future. Nothing in particular happened that morning to fuel her curiosity or the courage to go have a look inside the Mount Auburn Manor Nursing Center. But today, she did.
The lobby did nothing to intimidate her. An ocean scene watercolor hung on the wall, a faded Oriental carpet lay on the floor, and a woman with heavily made up eyes and short, licorice black hair sat behind a desk angled toward the front door. The lobby could almost be mistaken for that of a hotel, but the slight medicinal smell and the lack of luggage, concierge, and general coming and going weren’t right. The people staying here were residents, not guests.
“Can I help you?” the woman asked.
“Um, yes. Do you care for Alzheimer’s patients here?”
“Yes, we have a unit specifically dedicated to patients with Alzheimer’s. Would you like to have a look at it?”
“Yes.”
She followed the woman to the elevators.
“Are you looking for a parent?”
“I am,” Alice lied.
They waited. Like most of the people they ferried, the elevators were old and slow to respond.
“That’s a lovely necklace,” said the woman.
“Thank you.”
Alice placed her fingers on the top of her sternum and rubbed the blue paste stones on the wings of her mother’s art nouveau butterfly necklace. Her mother used to wear it only on her anniversary and to weddings, and like her, Alice had reserved it exclusively for special occasions. But there weren’t any formal affairs on her calendar, and she loved that necklace, so she’d tried it on one day last month while wearing a pair of jeans and a T-shirt. It had looked perfect.
Plus, she liked being reminded of butterflies. She remembered being six or seven and crying over the fates of the butterflies in her yard after learning that they lived for only a few days. Her mother had comforted her and told her not to be sad for the butterflies, that just because their lives were short didn’t mean they were tragic. Watching them flying in the warm sun among the daisies in their garden, her mother had said to her, See, they have a beautiful life. Alice liked remembering that.
They exited onto the third floor and walked down a long, carpeted hallway through a set of unmarked double doors and stopped. The woman gestured back to the doors as they shut automatically behind them.
“The Alzheimer’s Special Care Unit is locked, meaning you can’t go beyond these doors without knowing the code.”
Alice looked at the keypad on the wall next to the door. The numbers were arranged individually upside down and ordered backward from right to left.
“Why are the numbers like that?”
“Oh, that’s to prevent the residents from learning and memorizing the code.”
It seemed like an unnecessary precaution. If they could remember