Summertime Guests - Wendy Francis Page 0,84
up to Boston later this afternoon when she gets off work. She’d pitched it as a fun girls’ night out on the town (she could sleep over in Claire’s room), but Claire, while forgetful, isn’t dense. She knows full well that her daughter is worried, concerned that maybe her mother is losing her marbles. Already Amber has alerted Ben to her incident, as she called it, this morning. Claire knows this because Ben texted her a little while ago to ask if she’s all right. Eventually, she knows she’ll have to tell her daughter.
Because what Amber doesn’t know and Claire does—and so does Ben—is that this isn’t just a hiccup, another senior moment that will evaporate, right itself in time. Nor is it merely a panic attack. It’s oh-so-much more than that.
They happened slowly at first, the senior moments. She’d started noticing them probably a couple of months after Walt’s passing. Around the house, little things started to go missing. A container of ice cream returned to the fridge instead of the freezer. Her hairbrush left behind in the laundry room. A half-eaten pear abandoned on a bookshelf, as if she’d been called away to the phone and had forgotten to return for it. A neglected cup of coffee she’d reheated in the microwave only to discover it the next morning. Typical absentmindedness, she told herself, for someone who was recently widowed. She’d been guilty of the same forgetfulness when she was pregnant.
But then she’d started losing words, which had been more concerning somehow. At an editorial meeting back in January, she’d gotten stuck on the word halo while presenting. Imagine! Such a simple thing. And yet it was nowhere accessible in her brain when she’d faced her colleagues around the massive oak table, a place where she’d attended meetings for more than thirty years. She’d made a joke of some kind: Oh, you know, that little circle thingy an angel wears over her head. And right away someone guessed halo, and everyone laughed. Happens to me all the time, an associate editor fifteen years her junior said. And after that, Claire got skilled at playing off her memory lapses. Just wait till you get old, she joked. Or There goes another senior moment.
Eventually, though, the things that went missing around the house got stranger, grew more anomalous. One day in April, she’d found her toothbrush in the refrigerator. Another day a flip-flop in the basement and its match on top of the TV in her bedroom. It reminded her of that Norwegian memory game, Husker Du, that she and the kids used to play. A game that required finding two matching objects—a ribbon or a cat or a lamp—hiding behind a black checker-like circle on a game board. If the picture under the second black checker you picked up didn’t match the first, then you had to return both checkers and wait for another turn. Claire had lost hundreds of times to Ben and Amber, who both had an uncanny knack for remembering where they’d last seen that ribbon or cat. Well, now she was playing it by herself in her own home.
When she stumbled upon something out of place, she’d struggle to remember where it was meant to go exactly. Some days it would come to her right away. Oh, the TV remote belongs next to the television, not in the bathroom! Or Why on earth would this carton of orange juice be sitting on top of the piano? It belongs in the refrigerator! Sometimes she let herself believe that it was Walt’s spirit playing tricks on her, a mischievous elf hiding the very things he knew she’d be searching for later.
On bad days, though, when she couldn’t figure out the appropriate place for an item, it would end up on her kitchen counter, where similar mismatched items had begun to collect. A random screwdriver. A coaster. A miniature sewing kit. A slipper. An envelope of coupons she’d been saving for something but couldn’t remember what. Her kitchen counter had become the Land of Missing Stuff, much like the Island of Misfit Toys. Funny she had no trouble recalling that sad little jack-in-the-box in the TV Christmas special from years ago, and yet she couldn’t fathom where her other slipper had gone yesterday.
One day last month she’d overhead two colleagues at the watercooler talking about her.
“Does Claire seem off to you?” one asked.
“Yeah, something’s not right. Maybe she’s coming down with that flu bug that’s going around?” Claire