Free Mission Flats by William Landay Page B

woods stretched for miles in all directions, thickening into impenetrable old growth. We would never find her by trial and error. We would run out of light and time long before we ran out of trees.
    I stopped to think. Where did we walk? Where would she go?
    Think.
    An idea crowded in: This was what Alzheimer’s disease meant. This was the lethal danger behind that austere Teutonic name. She had wandered, in the clinical parlance; she’d had a catastrophic event.
    Control your emotions. Where would she go?
    A blackbird flitted in the trees, unsettling the branches.
    She would go to the lake. I knew it with a crashing certainty. She would follow the road to Lake Mattaquisett, lured by some memory of a vanished summer – an engram not quite expunged, a nano-thought surviving as a skittery arc of electrical current jumping across a damaged synapse somewhere. The lake, her lake. Had the weather not been so extremely cold, or had it not been Christmas Eve, maybe the roads would not have been empty and someone would have seen her walking. She’d have been picked up on small-town radar and her whereabouts would never have been a mystery. But she’d chosen a bad day for wandering.
    I ran up the trail, scrabbling past the fingers of the trees.
    To the house, the car.
    Driving, I felt this adrenalized sense of certainty grow. She was there, I knew it. I raced along the Post Road. I was a policeman, a real one this time, rushing to an emergency.
    At dusk I found her curled on the dirt road that rings the lake. The sports use this road to reach their summer rentals. In winter it is abandoned, and far enough from the house that no one had thought to search there. No one thought she could walk that far.
    I knelt and put my arms around her. Her body trembled. She pulled her arms against her chest so I could hold her. I squeezed tight to stop the shivering. Her lips were blue, her eyes frightened.
    In the gloom, the water beside us looked black. This lake had been the scene of so many blithe sunny afternoons. Now it was transformed into a forbidding place. Deep, glacial, primal.
    I carried her to the car to warm her up. Her cheek against mine was cold rubber.
    ‘I . . . I got lost.’ Her jaw chattered, her lips and tongue were thick.
    ‘Mum, you’ve been on this road ten thousand times.’
    ‘I got lost.’
    I understood she meant more than she’d said. It was not simply that she’d got lost or even that she’d had such a dangerous close call. She’d glimpsed the horrifying course of her disease. The illness was no longer theoretical. It was the inescapable future: erasure of everything she had ever learned – even near-instinctive ideas like how to chew and swallow food, how to speak, how to control bowel movements – and the inevitable end when the brain would lose its ability to regulate essential bodily functions, when she would become bedridden and at last perish from diseases common to the bedridden, heart failure, infections, malnutrition, pneumonia. Mercifully – and it was merciful – my mother died before experiencing the full devastation of Alzheimer’s. But what she did experience – starting that Christmas Eve, I think, as she lay shivering on the frozen dirt road – was almost worse: the foreknowledge that this would be her end, the awareness that her brain had begun to clot with plaque and fibrous tangles, that neurons had begun to shut down by the tens of thousands, winking out like lights on a sinking ship. She would be stripped. Her body, unbrained, would continue to operate for years, maybe decades. Babbling, demented, incontinent. A fool.
    ‘What will . . . I do?’
    ‘I don’t know, Mum.’
    When Dad arrived a few minutes later, he opened the passenger door of the car as if he meant to tear it off the hinges. He buried his head in her neck and kissed her and muttered, ‘Jesus, Annie. Jesus.’
    The next morning I withdrew from school and joined the Versailles Police Department.

7
    It was