The Half-Life of Everything Read online

  The Half-Life

  of Everything

  Deborah Carol Gang

  Copyright: Deborah Carol Gang, 2018. All rights reserved.

  This book is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to actual events,

  people, or institutions is purely coincidental.

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by electronic means,

  including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from

  the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote passages in a review.

  Interior design: Tracy Copes

  Cover: J.L. Herchenroeder

  Author Photo: Mary Whalen

  978-1-61088-233-0 (cloth)

  978-1-61088-234-7 (paper)

  978-1-61088-235-4 (kindle)

  978-1-61088-236-1 (ebook)

  978-1-61088-237-8 (audiobook)

  Published by Bancroft Press “Books that Enlighten”

  410-358-0658

  P.O. Box 65360, Baltimore, MD 21209 410-764-1967 (fax)

  www.bancroftpress.com

  Printed in the United States of America

  For families everywhere that have been forgotten by someone they love

  CONTENTS

  Part I: Before

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Part II: Waking

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Part III: Ordinary Time

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Part IV: After

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  PART I

  BEFORE

  Kate had read or heard somewhere that normal forgetfulness is misplacing your keys, while Alzheimer’s is not knowing what keys are used for. Surely, she thought, there was a middle ground between the two—like when you locate your keys but, for the briefest part of a second, you think, Are these really mine? They look familiar … and yet they don’t.

  Like anyone who was fifty-one, Kate worried about her memory, though her true specialty was dreading disease. In temperament, she wasn’t particularly neurotic, but breast cancer had a hold on her. The disease was so common she had begun to think of it as a normal stage of life, like acne or menopause. And for as long as she could remember, she had paid attention to the risk factors. She had barely adjusted to the trauma of getting her period too young when she learned it was associated with breast cancer. Jewish grandparents from Eastern Europe—also very bad. Delayed childbearing—sensible but also very bad.

  “Moist ear wax,” she told her disbelieving husband. “I don’t know if it’s on the current list, but it was mentioned once when I was a teenager.”

  “And you remembered it,” David said.

  “Hey, as we used to say: ‘It’s not paranoia if they really are after you.’ ”

  He didn’t dismiss her fears. He too assumed himself to be one swollen gland away from death, though he could largely avoid the topic of his own diagnosis. But the thought of losing Kate brought on a feeling of helpless dread. They had been married for longer than their friends, but when people teased them for being high school sweethearts, David would remind them that he and Kate actually met in their mid-twenties.

  In their first half-hour together, they learned that they had graduated the same year from the same urban high school, but professed to have no memory of each other. Every subsequent attempt to find an association from then drew a blank. She thought she remembered him having a small part in “Bye Bye Birdie,” but no, he wasn’t in it. He described a scandalously short prom dress, but she said, “Not me. I wore a borrowed dress in an odd shade of yellow that had looked good on my cousin.”

  When they told their story to new acquaintances who had attended smaller high schools, they would embellish the routine. “I remember when you left the lox and bagels in your locker just before we had two snow days,” she would insist.

  “Never happened,” he’d say, “but I remember the Farrah Fawcett haircut you wore for exactly one day.”

  In their early years, he sometimes said that he had been in love with her for three years, yet she never noticed him. She would dismiss the idea. Still, sometimes it surprised him that she didn’t have an old image of him filed away in her mind. She had a great memory, cluttered though it was by lists of birthdays, books to buy when available in paperback, and movies missed and now to be rented.

  Computers didn’t relieve her of many of those tasks, but Kate liked how easy it was now to send articles, photos, and links. “We are all linked now,” she’d say, “for better or worse.” For short-term needs, though, she was loyal to Post-it notes in a range of sizes, shapes, colors, and degrees of stickiness.

  Occasionally, he’d try an actual event on her, as he did late on the evening of their twenty-fourth wedding anniversary. They were celebrating quietly at home, knowing that next year Kate’s parents would plan something loving but excessive. “You must have seen me at the senior talent show,” he said. “You know, my Bob Dylan act. I may have been invisible before then and after then, but surely I wasn’t that day.”

  “Oh, I was probably in the grove selling pot to sophomores,” Kate said. A well-behaved student despite the anarchy of the times, she had created an alternate persona for his amusement. He laughed and pulled her to him.

  “Yes, I can see how you would have been too busy with your crimes to notice me. Perhaps you can make it up to me one more time.”

  Later that night, after David was asleep, Kate went downstairs. She had a nagging thought that she wasn’t ready for the morning. She looked for her list of things to do but didn’t see it. Now she’d have to reconstruct everything before she’d be able to sleep. She found a stray Post-it note, but what could “Find used labels and Book #3” possibly mean? She started to rewrite the list, wondering if earlier she had organized the tasks only in her mind and not on paper. She would probably forget some item and could picture David teasing her. “So the Memory Queen is human after all.” Then she noticed her car keys—not in their proper spot, but still reassuringly familiar.

  CHAPTER ONE

  In the beginning, he visited her every day, month after month and, if Dylan and Jack were home from school, he’d take one to visit on Saturday and the other on Sunday. It seemed to embarrass the boys less if they went separately. Smaller numbers of visitors were easier on Kate, too, because she still tried to feign recognition. If a larger group came for a birthday or holiday, she’d become anxious, as if she knew that her genial but generic welcome would be found out, as of course it was. David hated to think that somewhere in her mind lurked an awareness of what had happened to her—that, with her remaining pride or competitive nature, she could still observe herself and suffer at the sight.

  She was now in her second year of living at the facility after being cared for at home for three years. David always thought of Kate as having “left” him and the boys, although not in the literal sense of the word.” On this particular Wednesday, he tried to take stock: Early onset, quickly deteriorating—not a good thing. Maintaining most of her good nature—a very good thing. It was her still-pleasant demeanor that had made him believe they could manage her at home indefinitely. It wasn’t a likely outcome, but it wasn’t unheard of e
ither.

  He and the boys came up with systems and schedules and sought out advice. When the occupational therapist suggested Post-it notes as a possible improvement, they burst out laughing. The problem wasn’t a lack of memory aids, and the problem wasn’t Kate’s temperament. The problem was that Kate had always liked to walk, especially in pleasant weather. If it was mild, she would plan picnics, discover unlikely restaurants that served outdoors on three rickety tables, or think up errands. If we take the longer route to buy the Times, then we can get bananas and milk too. No hiker, Kate preferred destination walking: ice cream cones, window-shopping, used bookstores.

  David would tease her. “You are the world’s most expensive walking partner. I have to take fifty dollars to even leave the house with you.”

  “I was meant to live in New York.”

  “Fifty dollars might not last a block there.”

  As her memory left her, she’d slip away to find gardens or snowmen. From what David and the boys had heard from neighbors in surrounding blocks, she’d engage anyone in pleasant conversation, sounding coherent enough that the stranger wouldn’t realize she had no idea where she was. David desperately wanted her at home and had tried to stay ahead of her with deadbolts, then door alarms, and finally the graduate student twins, Theresa and Tracy.

  Kate seemed to like them, though no one was sure if she knew there were two of them. David and the boys had their own problems sorting out identical twins who had cruelly similar names and worked ever-changing shifts. The twins covered Monday through Friday, alternating their hours so they could get to their college classes.

  Tracy (or maybe both of them) would push him. ““Mr. D, you should call us more for weekends. Don’t pay us. We’ll just come study and you can go do something.” He would agree to call but almost never did. On weekends, it felt like hiring a baby sitter, or being unfaithful.

  Dylan was away at college by then, so Jack and David and whichever twin was on duty would do their best, but every few weeks they’d find that Kate had disappeared. Or worse, they’d get a call before they noticed she was missing. One moment he was watching her nap in their room, and the next she was at Starbucks, and not the close one—the one you walk through traffic to get to.

  David guessed that some of their friends thought stepping in front of a car would be a kind and even natural way for things to end. Maybe he was the one who thought it. He wondered if he would then feel free and relieved. Sometimes he’d glimpse her absence for a moment, but right behind the freedom was a sadness so bleak, so lonely and frightening, that he could never see past it.

  Then the time came to look for an “assisted-living” place for Kate. He liked the name—no jargon, truthful. He had expected to be caught between a barrage of “how can you do this to her?” and “we thought you should have done it long ago.” But it turned out that no one outside the family really cared. People have a sadness quotient. They had tired of the drama and the pain and she didn’t really exist for them anymore.

  Kate had one friend, their neighbor Martha, who stayed in contact, helped her buy new clothes and visited regularly. Kate and Martha would look through old photo albums together or Martha would make cookies and give Kate easy assignments so she could help. Kate seemed to enjoy it and to feel safe around her. David and Martha rarely talked or spent time with one another. They had barely mastered the skill of not crying around the other. He was worried that he was seen, not by Martha but by others, as a pathetic figure, a man determinedly married to a woman who wasn’t there—like the Japanese boys and their pillow girlfriends.

  The incident they couldn’t ignore happened when Theresa and Jack were home and each thought the other was with Kate. David was the one to track her down after frantic multiple phone calls from both Jack and Theresa. He found her farther from home than any previous ramble had taken her, sitting on a bench in a tiny triangular park at the intersection of three streets. Shivering a little, she said, “You’re so late, David. I thought you had forgotten me.”

  That night Jack came to him. “I know you’ve been waiting for me to admit that we can’t take care of her anymore. We don’t even know if Dylan’s coming back after college, and I’m supposed to leave in the fall. Dylan’s kind of useless anyway—he mostly goes to his room and cries.”

  It was true that Dylan, no longer hardened against the grief, would cry during his visits home. And crying upset Kate. She’d try to comfort whoever was sad, and if it didn’t work, she’d cry too—or get agitated. To avoid such outward displays of sadness, David and the boys used the Lamaze breathing she had taught them for undergoing dental work, or they would look towards the ceiling—a suggestion one of them heard on NPR. If things were really tense, one of them would say, “Well, you can’t have everything.” No one remembered who had said this first, but the mildly dark humor proved to be a reliable weapon.

  “Dad, please let’s wait until I leave for college. It’s less than four months. Sports will be over soon, and I’ll help more.”

  David stared at this boy, who until recently wouldn’t shut the microwave door after removing food, who had to be reminded ten times to write a thank-you note, and who left cereal bowls with aging milk for others to find and dispose of. Jack had been adult-sized for several years—he hardly recalled Jack even going through puberty. The kid had just morphed without awkwardness. He and his brother had Kate’s complexion, the kind that tanned easily and made you expect brown, not blond hair with pleasing stripes of darker blond. They used to tease David that he was a different species, the only one with dark hair and curls that emerged if he skipped a single haircut. He had skipped many haircuts at Kate’s request.

  David had once been the tall one, but both boys surpassed him by early high school. For the last year or so, Dylan would hide behind Jack, copying his stance but obscured by Jack’s thicker silhouette. They enjoyed scaring David and he always seemed to fall for it. He didn’t mind. He would rather see them silly than unhappy. Now, looking at Jack, who was studiously not crying, he realized that the narcissism of adolescence was over.

  “I know Mom is gone,” Jack said. “She’s just someone who looks like Mom. But I like having someone around who looks like Mom. It helps a little. I mean—” He found a tattered Kleenex in his pocket and blew his nose. “Since we can’t have everything.” He gave a half smile. “I don’t want her to leave before I do. I’ll take her driving and on more walks. We’ll buy stuff for the dorm. I’ll just have to be around more.”

  And he was, but he was leaving for college in late August, and that was non-negotiable as far as David was concerned.

  Eventually, August came and the four of them found themselves parked in the surprisingly small lot of the Caring Glenn Residence. The day after July Fourth, they had begun working their way down a list from the local Alzheimer’s group. This was only their fourth place (unlike the names of plumbers, those of assisted-living facilities clustered towards the middle and end of the alphabet).

  Dylan hadn’t seemed surprised or angry when, shortly after he arrived home for the three weeks between graduation and a summer internship, his dad told him that the time had arrived. He showed no sign of claiming, as absent relatives sometimes do, that things could be managed better.

  Perhaps he saw David’s exhaustion and watched as his little brother managed to look simultaneously eighteen and thirty. Perhaps, like David, he was determined that Jack go away to college as he had.

  Only the twins had pleaded for more time. “We can keep this going until we graduate,” one of them said. “My boyfriend will cover if we need him to.” But David just smiled, puzzled that they seemed to genuinely love Kate when they had never really met her.

  He and the boys had debated whether they should bring Kate along for the tours. David remembered similar discussions about whether to bring their young sons to a concert or a funeral. They often guessed wrong and found themselves saying, “The kids would have loved this” or “I’ll take him to the car.” They
didn’t want to frighten her, but they thought she’d make a good impression, and they also hoped to detect signs of a preference, though so far she just seemed uniformly puzzled. Yesterday, when they toured a small garden belonging to a facility none of them liked, Kate praised the garden and surprised them by saying, “Did they want our advice on something?” But that was all she said.

  “I don’t like this—the parking lot. It means hardly any relatives visit,” Dylan now complained as they looked around the very small lot and saw that the employee area was the only one with cars. Despite the limited parking, the building itself turned out to be large and expensive-looking. They entered through an over-perfumed and over-decorated lobby that led to activity rooms with fabric flower arrangements on every surface and homilies hung in tiers of two or three. He and the boys studied them while their guide left to take a call.

  One said “Every Ending Leads to a New Beginning,” seemingly more cruel than wise. Another read “Live Out Loud,” which the boys decided was bad advice. They were puzzling over “Life Itself Is the Proper Binge” when Kate spoke up to say maybe they shouldn’t worry about it. Jack then pointed to one on the far wall, “Life is Short, Fill it Up,” and said, “That’s something you would say, Mom,” and she said, “Why, thank you.” David reminded himself she could sometimes be less vacant than she seemed, though only for long enough to hurt.

  “I envy these families,” Jack said quietly. “Their people probably didn’t get sick until seventy or eighty.” Dylan put his arm on Jack’s shoulder. David reminded himself that when Dylan graduated from high school, his mom had been a vague but credible presence. For Jack, she was a stranger looking at the wrong kid.

  They finished their tour and were standing at the main entrance where David was preparing to thank the guide and politely convey their lack of interest. Kate interrupted his first sentence to say, “Is everybody warm enough?”