“Will it clear up?”
“It won’t. No. It’s . . . typically degenerative.”
“Typically.”
“Yes.”
“And rarely?”
“There’s so much we don’t know,” he admits.
The examining room is quiet, farthest away from reception. She feels herself detach so she can brave the only question she isn’t sure she wants answered. “Is this Alzheimer’s?”
“No. Different.”
“Better, worse?”
“Different.”
Shit. Now she just wants to wrap this up and leave. “Treatments.”
“There’s so much we don’t know.”
“Right.” This is why she chose someone not in her provider network. No one at work needs to know.
“Soccer?” She avoids the doctor’s probing gaze, looks away to all the wall monitors and all the film clipped to light boxes that flank the paper-covered bench where she’s sitting. “All that heading of the ball, field collisions,” the doctor elaborates. “You know.” She respects his persistence, not just going through the motions. Part of her wishes she could tell him what he wants to know, but even if it were possible, she wonders where she would even start.
With the song, in the car?
There’s an extended, uncomfortable pause; then he exhales and sits back. His eyes are too big for his face, set far apart, not unkind. “Ms. Sentro. Aubrey. Let me put this as clearly as I can. Your symptoms are still presenting; it’s possible they could stabilize. Palliate. But you need to make some hard decisions. Expect the best; prepare for the worst. Work, family. Reduce your stress. Move to Iowa. Let your brain calm down, and perhaps we’ll get a fuller picture, over time.”
“Okay.” She’s become impatient with him. “Meanwhile, can you give me something for the headaches?”
“I’d like to run some more tests.”
Sentro just looks at him, level, as opaque as she can manage. Refusing to give him the gift of her fear. Of this onset of brain fog and disremembering, she is very afraid, which is unfamiliar territory. She needs time to sort it out.
The physician shifts his bony weight and makes a serious face. “Look, not to overstate your condition, Ms. Sentro, but there also exists with this a possibility that another head injury could be extremely dangerous for you.”
Sentro nods. “Second-impact syndrome. I read about it online.”
“Online.”
“WebMD.” Another concussion could kill her is what it said.
“The University of Google.” A withering professional grimace and sigh as, frustrated, the doctor stands up from his rolling stool. “Well, then, you read that there’s also a persuasive correlation between recurrent head trauma and early-onset Alzheimer’s disease and dementia.”
“Which you also can’t cure. Yeah, I saw that.” If he wanted to touch a nerve, he’s succeeded. “But you said this wasn’t. Alzheimer’s.”
The doctor just shrugs.
She feels a hot West Texas wind buffeting her face through the open window, the gloomy blue-slate sun-split sky bearing down with its promise of a squall—how the Chevy hit a dip in the highway, how her stomach flopped when the chassis bottomed out, bumpers squawking, sparks pinwheeling out behind like shooting stars as she floated up off the seat, unbelted, how her mother’s arm shot out in front of her, protective, and both of them laughing, their off-key singing interrupted, and how her mother’s purse spilled off the seat and the handgun tumbled out of it, small, pink grip, lady size.
Yippee-ai-oh-kai-ay.
“I come unmoored, is all,” she offers thoughtlessly.
“What?”
Sentro looks up at him blankly and remembers where she is. “If you can’t fix me, I don’t see the upside in running more tests.”
The doctor taps his notebook screen dark and walks out.
An impasse is so often the best she can manage.
CHAPTER THREE
“What’d the doctor say?”
Jeremy Troon has always felt hard put that he looks so much like his mother—or, well, yes, a young, male MBA version of her, but still. Lean, even lanky, strangely graceful but unathletic, a kind of puzzle in which some of the pieces don’t fit, according to his ex-girlfriend Kimmy. Same troubled hair, same nose, same eyes, her unreadable gaze; gentle features not so much effeminate, he decided long ago, as somehow tentative. Almost meek. It didn’t make surviving adolescence any easier. Jenny, on the other hand, got their father’s infectious grin and blind confidence, which, although mostly useless over the long run, made her popular until she decided she wouldn’t be.
Wearing creased blue chinos with a linen jacket for his presentation to his graduate school entrepreneurial seminar later in the afternoon, he’s flung his power tie rakishly back over his shoulder so it won’t get any soup on it.
“He said I shouldn’t eat fries. Then he offered me a prescription sample for this female Viagra.”
“Mom. Jesus. TMI.”
“You asked.”
The gazpacho has a kick to it. The restaurant she chose this time is lively and crowded with young, eager, hungry faces like his. Their bimonthly lunches have become habit, when she’s not traveling, and he finds he looks forward to them, even if he insists to his sister that they’re a pain.
His mother looks tired. “Did you talk to him about your memory stuff?”
She says, poker faced, “Oh. I totally forgot.”
Jeremy shakes his head—“That’s not funny, Mom”—and his mother’s expression softens, and for a moment he can tell she’s trying to find his father in him. He knows all her looks; he studied her greedily growing up so he’d have her in his head during the extended periods she spent away on business. Now, of course, he couldn’t get her out of his head if he wanted to, and so he watches her study him to locate her husband in him, which he knows she always will. The Dennis gene is subtle: the folds of his eyelids, that frustrated downturn of mouth. He sees it, too, sometimes, looking back at him from the mirror in the morning.
But mostly he sees her.
“I don’t have a problem with my memory,” she’s telling him. “A four-hour erection sounds lovely, though. Conceptually. Can a woman really get one?”
Nobody wants to hear their mom talk about erections. “You called me last week from the airport parking lot because you thought your car was stolen.”
“I think ‘missing’ was the word I used.”
“It was in the next aisle.”
“I had jet lag. The flight from Athens was endless, some Turks kept smoking in the bathroom, and the flight attendants ran out of gin.”
“You don’t drink gin.”
“I started, the trip took so long,” she jokes, deadpan.
He gives her back her own deadpan. “You weren’t freaking out?”
“I don’t think so.”
“I think you were. Yes.” On the phone, her voice had an edge of anxiousness he’d never heard before.
“Annoyed, was all. And exhausted.”
She’s probably lying; he lets it go. “Right, fine.” Letting go is reflexive for him—all the years of her ins and outs and extended absences. When he was little he just resented it, but as he got older, he started to believe that her work was so meaningless, so unimportant and tedious, and had cost her so dearly that she clung to it all the more stubbornly. This gave it the aura of something else, something that mattered, that made a difference, so her kids would be proud of her and understand why she couldn’t always be with them.