River. There’s a bridge to the side, dotted with headlights. The river itself is a frozen expanse, gently reflecting the lights of the Boston skyline.
I walk to the window. Matt comes up behind me, one hand finding my waist and the other sweeping my hair over my shoulder. Without a glance at the view, he kisses my neck.
I lift my lips to his and fall into his arms.
Fitz
I HAVE PIZZA with squash blossoms for dinner. Lewis and I hardly talk.
We walk from the restaurant onto the busy sidewalk, Lewis a couple of steps in front, pulling his coat close and glaring warily into the cold. We cross Commonwealth, a wide street with train tracks and overhead cables for the T running down the center. On the opposite curb, I follow Lewis toward the StuVi Commons.
In the lobby, I blurt what’s been burning in my thoughts for the past hour. “Do you think Mom’s okay with you moving to New York?”
Lewis’s step falters, or I might be imagining it, because his voice comes out characteristically easy and level. “Of course,” he says, hitting the button for the elevator. “She helped time the trip to coincide with an interview I have in the city.”
I bite back my bitterness about skipping school, about Lewis’s schedule getting prioritized over mine. This is the way it always is, me making sacrifices—me committing, doing what needs to be done—while Lewis does whatever he wants. “But what will you do when—” I cut myself off. I don’t want to say it. I have half a superstition that every time I say it, it comes closer to reality. But I force myself. “When she needs help.”
His eyes skirt mine. “I’ll cross that bridge when we get there,” he says decisively, and I know it’s the end of the conversation. The elevator doors open, and I follow him in.
We ride the elevator without speaking. Lewis scrolls sporadically on his phone. He chuckles to himself once or twice. Unbelievable. The second time, he bothers to nudge me with his elbow and move the screen closer to me.
It’s a video of a cat on one of those motorized vacuums.
“Wait for it to replay,” Lewis mutters. I wait. The video replays. The vacuum, with cat rider, hums toward a couch or coffee table, I can’t tell which. The vacuum keeps going, under the object, while the furniture pushes the cat off and onto the ground, where it sits, bored or disaffected.
I muster a smile, and Lewis only chuckles once again and resumes scrolling his newsfeed.
We return to his room. I guess Lewis noticed I’m not in the mood for conversation or cat videos, because I hear impatience in his voice when he informs me he’s going to grab his extra blanket and make up the couch for me. He heads to his bedroom, and I wait by the window.
My head is a whirlwind. It’s within me to shout at my brother, to force him to take our mother’s diagnosis seriously. It’s not just some bridge to be crossed. It’s the rest of our lives. The rest of her life. I don’t understand how I’m the only one who understands.
Mom has the genetic mutation that guarantees she’ll develop early-onset Alzheimer’s disease. We don’t know how much time she has before her symptoms set in.
She is the most responsible, resilient, positive person I know. Through college and graduate school, she cared for her own mother, who also had early-onset Alzheimer’s. I’ve heard the stories Mom would tell on the rare evenings when she was in dark moods—the first time her mother ever forgot her name, the nights she called at two a.m. convinced she was being held against her will, the panic in her mother’s eyes when confronted with a room full of family she saw as strangers. None of my mom’s efforts could rescue her mother from the disease, of course. Her mother died four years following her diagnosis.
She was fifty-five.
That’s not unusual—neither her age nor the years she hung on. I know because I’m one of those teenagers whose Google search history includes, “How long do Alzheimer’s patients typically live?”