Summertime Guests - Wendy Francis Page 0,85
had hovered just beyond the doorway, too afraid to move.
“No, this seems like something else. The other day I watched her at the copying machine, and it was so strange, like she couldn’t remember which way the paper was supposed to go in.” Claire, astonished to hear this, had nearly forgotten the episode herself. But when her colleague mentioned it, a wave of heat rode across her face as she recalled how flustered she’d gotten trying to make copies. She’d concluded the machine was broken.
And finally there’d been that time, just last month, when Amber stopped by on a Saturday night to drop Fiona off for their sleepover party, and Claire, already in her pajamas, had completely forgotten about it. It was a turning point, really. Amber and Jeff had been planning on a date night.
She didn’t let on to Amber or Fiona, of course, but it had shaken Claire to the core, she who planned days in advance for every sleepover with her granddaughter, buying ingredients for homemade cookies and supplies from the crafts store. When she’d gone to check her datebook, sure enough, there were the words scribbled as plain as day on Saturday’s square: Sleepover with Fiona! When she confessed to Ben the next day, he insisted she make a doctor’s appointment to get checked out. “Just to be safe. It’s not like you, Mom, to forget a sleepover with Fiona.” And she had to agree. Maybe it was more than a few senior moments she’d been experiencing. But did she really want to find out if it was something more than old age? Something worse?
Ben promised he’d go with her, and he had, loyally pulling up in her driveway an hour and a half before her appointment at MGH so she wouldn’t feel rushed. Some tests and then a follow-up scan had revealed troubling spots on her brain. When she reviewed the scan herself, the thickening plaques brought to mind the lit-up phosphorescence she’d seen in the ocean when she and Walt had gone snorkeling in Puerto Rico for their honeymoon. It was almost pretty, a work of art. She made Ben promise not to tell Amber, her most emotional child. Not until Claire was ready. But now, she thinks regrettably, her secret is out. How she wishes she hadn’t called Amber at the aquarium! She should have phoned Ben when the fogginess first began to descend. But it was the matter of Fiona that had made her reach out to Amber instinctively. Amber, she’d reasoned, would know where to find her own daughter.
Claire sips her Bloody Mary (her second, but who’s counting?), watching the tiny boats parade across the harbor. The doctor had warned her about these kinds of episodes becoming more frequent, though he couldn’t say when, exactly, they might ramp up. Mental eclipses he’d called them, and Claire had clung to that lovely image, envisioning the moon getting in the way of her sunny brain for a brief moment before moving on to bother someone else.
Ben has been encouraging her to tell her boss, Julian, what’s going on. Especially after the latest debacle, the flubbed article on McKinnon. But Claire hadn’t been quite ready to do that. Her memory problems, she reasons, are her own. And she doesn’t want anyone’s pity. Not yet, at least. Because as soon as she tells Julian, pity will be all she’ll get—from him and her colleagues. Besides, how could she tell her boss before her own daughter?
But she’ll need to have a conversation with Amber soon. Maybe even tonight, if she drives up from Providence. A talk where she’ll reveal that the brain that has served her so well for sixty-one years is starting to let her down, shirk its responsibilities. It’s disappointing. No way around it, she’ll say, but crappy things happen in life—everyone’s dealing with something, right? She’ll do her best to downplay it so that her daughter, always a worrier, won’t worry incessantly. Maybe she’ll even ask her to return Marty’s blazer that Claire rediscovered in her bathroom this morning, forgetting that he’d lent it to her last night. Because Claire doesn’t have the strength to reach out to him again.
She sighs. It won’t be easy talking to Amber. She’s been dreading this conversation, which is probably why she has postponed it for so long. Amber has always been her most apprehensive child—and her most responsible. Maybe because Ben is Claire’s baby, when something needs doing it’s typically Amber who has risen to the