Still Alice Page 0,48
before leaving the kids for weekends away in Maine or Vermont. Now she needed to be watched. By her own daughter.
After their first dinner alone together at the Squire, Alice and Lydia walked down Main Street without talking. The line of luxury cars and SUVs parked along the curb, outfitted with bike racks and kayaks bungeed on roofs, crammed with baby strollers, beach chairs, and umbrellas, and sporting license plates from Connecticut, New York, and New Jersey in addition to Massachusetts signaled the summer season officially in full swing. Families ambled along the sidewalk without regard for lanes of pedestrian traffic, unhurried and without specific destinations, stopping, backtracking, and window-shopping. Like they had all the time in the world.
An easy ten-minute stroll removed them from the congested downtown. They stopped in front of the Chatham Lighthouse and breathed in the panoramic view of the beach below before walking the thirty steps down to the sand. A modest line of sandals and flip-flops waited at the bottom, where they’d been kicked off earlier in the day. Alice and Lydia added their shoes to the end of the row and continued walking. The sign in front of them read:
WARNING: STRONG CURRENT. Surf subject to unexpected life-threatening waves and currents. No lifeguard. Hazardous area for: swimming and wading, diving and waterskiing, sailboards and small boats, rafts and canoes.
Alice watched and listened to the relentless, breaking waves pounding the shore. If it weren’t for the colossal seawall constructed at the edges of the properties of the million-dollar homes along Shore Road, the ocean would have taken each house in, devouring them all without sympathy or apology. She imagined her Alzheimer’s like this ocean at Lighthouse Beach—unstoppable, ferocious, destructive. Only there were no seawalls in her brain to protect her memories and thoughts from the onslaught.
“I’m sorry I didn’t get to go to your play,” she said to Lydia.
“It’s all right. I know it was because of Dad this time.”
“I can’t wait to see the one you’re in this summer.”
“Uh-huh.”
The sun hung low and impossibly big in the pink and blue sky, ready to plunge into the Altantic. They walked by a man kneeling in the sand, aiming his camera at the horizon, trying to capture its fleeting beauty before it disappeared with the sun.
“This conference Dad’s at is about Alzheimer’s?”
“Yes.”
“Is he trying to find a better treatment there?”
“He is.”
“Do you think he’ll find one?”
Alice watched the tide coming in, erasing footprints, demolishing an elaborate sand castle decorated with shells, filling in a hole dug earlier that day with plastic shovels, ridding the shore of its daily history. She envied the beautiful homes behind the seawall.
“No.”
Alice picked up a shell. She rubbed the sand off, revealing its milky white shine and elegant ribbons of pink. She liked its smooth feel, but it was broken on one edge. She thought about tossing it into the water but decided to keep it.
“Well, I’m sure he wouldn’t take the time to go if he didn’t think he could find something,” said Lydia.
Two girls wearing University of Massachusetts sweatshirts walked toward them, giggling. Alice smiled at them and said “Hello” as they passed.
“I wish you’d go to college,” said Alice.
“Mom, please don’t.”
Not wanting to start their week together with a full-blown fight, Alice silently reminisced while they walked. The professors she’d loved and feared and made a fool of herself in front of, the boys she’d loved and feared and made an even bigger fool of herself in front of, the punchy all-nighters before exams, the classes, the parties, the friendships, meeting John—her memories of that time in her life were vivid, perfectly intact, and easily accessed. They were almost a little cocky the way they came to her, so full and ready, like they had no knowledge of the war going on just a few centimeters to their left.
Whenever she thought about college, her thoughts ultimately bumped into January of her freshman year. A little over three hours after her family had visited and left for home, Alice had heard a tentative knock on her dorm room door. She still remembered every detail of the dean standing in her doorway—the single, deep crease between his eyebrows, the boyish part in his grandfatherly gray hair, the woolly pills budding all over his forest green sweater, the low, careful cadence of his voice.
Her father had driven the car off Route 93 and into a tree. He might have fallen asleep. He might have had too much to drink at dinner.