Still Alice Page 0,45

any further. She was a scientist. She knew how to risk everything with no guarantees in search of the unknown truth. As she’d done so many times over the years with her own research, she chose the bullet.

“I want to do the trial.”

“Ali, I think you should trust me here,” said John.

“I can still draw my own conclusions, John. I want to do the trial.”

“Okay, I’ll get you the forms to sign.”

(Interior of Doctor’s Office. The neurologist left the room. The husband spun his ring. The woman hoped for a cure.)

JULY 2004

John? John? Are you home?”

She was sure that he wasn’t, but being sure of anything these days was tattered with too many holes to contain the meaning that it used to. He had left to go somewhere, but she couldn’t remember when he left or where he was going. Did he run to the store for milk or coffee? Did he go out to rent a movie? If either were the case, he’d be back any minute. Or did he drive back up to Cambridge, in which case he’d be gone for at least several hours and possibly the night? Or did he decide, at last, that he couldn’t face what lay ahead for them, and he just plain left, never to return? No, he wouldn’t do that. She was sure of it.

Their Chatham Cape, built in 1990, felt bigger, more open, and less compartmentalized than their house in Cambridge. She walked into the kitchen. It was nothing like their kitchen at home. The bleached effect of the white painted walls and cabinets, white appliances, white barstools, and white tile floor was broken up only slightly by the soapstone countertops and splashes of cobalt blue in various white ceramic and clear glass containers. It looked like a coloring book page that had been only tentatively filled in with a single blue crayon.

The two plates and used paper napkins on the island counter displayed evidence of salad and a spaghetti and red sauce dinner. One of the glasses still held a gulp of white wine. With the detached curiosity of a forensic scientist, she picked up the glass and tested the temperature of the wine against her lips. It was still a little cold. She felt full. She looked at the time. It was just after nine o’clock.

They’d been in Chatham for a week now. In years past, after a week away from the day-to-day concerns at Harvard, she would have been fully committed to the relaxed lifestyle that the Cape insisted on and already deep into her third or fourth book. But this year, Harvard’s day-to-day schedule itself, albeit packed and demanding, had provided a structure for her that was familiar and comforting. Meetings, symposia, class times, and appointments lay like bread crumbs that guided her through each day.

Here in Chatham, she had no schedule. She slept late, ate meals at varying times, and played everything by ear. She bookended each day with her medications, she took her butterfly test each morning, and she ran every day with John. But these didn’t provide enough structure. She needed bigger bread crumbs and more of them.

She often didn’t know the time of day or what day it was, for that matter. On more than one occasion now when she sat down to eat, she didn’t know which meal she was about to be presented with. When yesterday a waitress at the Sand Bar put a plate of fried clams in front of her, she would have just as readily and enthusiastically dug into a plate of pancakes.

The kitchen windows were open. She looked out into the driveway. No car. The outside air still held traces of the hot day and carried sounds of bullfrogs, a woman laughing, and the tide at Hardings Beach. She left a note for John next to the uncleared dishes:

Walk to beach. Love, A

She inhaled the clean night air. The midnight blue sky was punctured with backlit stars and a cartoon crescent moon. Not as dark as it would get that night, it was already darker than it ever got in Cambridge. Without streetlamps and tucked far enough in from Main Street, only lights from porches, rooms in houses, the occasional car high beams, and the moon illuminated their beach neighborhood. In Cambridge, that amount of darkness would have made her feel uneasy walking alone, but here, in this small seaside and vacationing community, she felt perfectly safe.

There were no cars parked in the lot and no