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Authors: Katharine Davis

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BOOK: A Slender Thread
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For Anna, who lost her voice, and others like her
Acknowledgments
I
would like to thank my writing group—Susan Coll, Ann McLaughlin, Carolyn Parkhurst, Leslie Pietrzyk, and Amy Stolls—for their careful reading and suggestions. Also, many thanks to my sister, Carroll Charlesworth, for her attentive reading and comments.
Thank you to Dr. Richard Restak and Dr. Leslie Williams for answering my questions on neurological disorders and for guiding my research. Any mistakes about the illness are my own.
Stories are often born of other stories, and I would like to thank Jane Freeman for telling me a story about swimming a moon path that she heard from a lovely older friend.
Special thanks to Sarah Haskell, an artist and weaver, who generously invited me to her studio in York, Maine. Her most recent project,
Woven Voices: Messages from the Heart,
was an inspiration to me. Sarah shared her knowledge of weaving and her library, and allowed me to experience the joy of weaving a Tibetan prayer flag on a fall afternoon.
Many thanks to Katherine Fausset. This is our third book together. Thank you also to my editor, Ellen Edwards, who, after working with me on
East Hope
, believed in my next story.
I am especially grateful for the love and support of my family and friends. Most of all, thanks to Bob, husband, editor, champion—the one who makes it all possible.
Who is to blame? The Weaver?
Ah, the bewildering thread!
 
EMILY DICKINSON,
“A SHADY FRIEND—FOR TORRID DAYS”
Bow Lake, 1971
 
 
 
“D
on't be scared,” my sister, Lacey, calls to me.
Another wave slaps me in the face. I swim harder. My legs won't stay level and drag behind me like an anchor. I turn my head, breathing in at the start of each stroke. The movement feels sloppy, out of sync. My body does not feel whole, but made of separate parts, every limb with a mind of its own.
“You're doing great, Margot.” Lacey is rowing Pigtail, our flatbottomed boat.
The numb feeling in my feet climbs to my knees. My goggles crush my nose. I'm swimming to Junior, the island 411 yards offshore from Grandmother Winkler's camp.
“This way.” Lacey's voice from the rowboat carries across the chop. Bow Lake was calm when we started. I swim past the float raft. Alex, the boy next door, stands there, rocking aloft on the lake. He's never far from Lacey.
I'm nine. This is my first solo swim to Junior. Lacey did it five years ago when she was eight. I kick harder. I choke on a mouthful of the mossy-tasting lake. Junior seems farther away than ever. After another burst of kicks, I stop.
“That's okay,” Lacey calls out. “Tread water while you catch your breath.”
I switch to breaststroke. Lacey has breasts this summer. Sometimes I forget that this grown-up girl is my sister. I cup my hands, pull harder. My arms ache less, but my progress is slower. I keep going. Lacey told me there's nothing to be afraid of. There are two life vests in the boat.
My neck strains forward like a turtle's. I lift my face out of the water. The goggles have fogged. Another wave smacks into my open mouth. I'm choking now, working to catch my breath.
“Turn on your back.” Lacey's voice sounds far away.
I do as she says. I won't let her down. Arching my neck, face to the sky, I float. Lacey passed junior lifesaving last summer and has a badge to prove it.
“Do the elementary backstroke,” she commands. “That's it. Slow and easy.”
I'm blinded by the brightness. My fog-filled goggles blur the clouds. I'm still floating.
“Keep moving.” Lacey's voice is clearer now above the lapping of the waves.
“Which way?” Water sloshes over my head. I drink some in. I choke.
“Over here. Just follow my voice.”
Slowly, slowly, I relax and let the water support me. I move my arms and legs together, like when we make snow angels in winter.
“You're doing great.”
I find my rhythm. The goggles no longer hurt. I don't care about the lake grass clinging to my leg. Lacey's voice guides me.
All of a sudden it's quiet. I turn over, about to thrash. There, twenty feet ahead of me, Lacey is dragging Pigtail onto the beach. My feet touch bottom. The soft grit of sand oozes between my toes. The sun warms my back. I wade to shore.
“I knew you could do it.” Lacey reaches out and offers me her pinkie finger. We hook our little fingers together in our secret handshake. “You can do anything, Margot Winkler,” she says.
1
Weave: Make cloth by interlacing threads on a loom.
M
argot heard the news that changed everything just after the bus from the airport reached Portsmouth. It was the Tuesday before Thanksgiving. She scanned the parking lot as the driver slowed and brought the bus to a halt. She saw Lacey and waved from the bus window. Her sister didn't respond; her attention seemed fixed on some distant place, her mind apparently elsewhere. Margot descended the steps and pulled her bag toward the silver Volvo wagon. She called out to Lacey, who smiled abruptly, almost as if she had forgotten why she was there, and then hurriedly came forward to pull Margot into her arms. Margot immediately felt the tension of her New York City life slip away.
“So great to see you,” Margot said, barely containing the silly childhood excitement she always experienced when reunited with her sister. Lacey was her only real family.
“You, too.” Lacey hugged Margot firmly and then pulled back, studied her briefly, and gently drew her hand across Margot's cheek, a motherly gesture, as if to make sure she was really there. “How's Oliver?” she asked.
“Complaining about his work. He needs this break.” Margot shrugged, wondering if she would get the “why don't you guys get married” lecture that Lacey offered periodically. When Margot had bent to kiss him good-bye early that morning, Oliver, still asleep, had put his hand on her neck, the weight of his palm a soundless reminder that he loved her. He was leaving the next day to see his daughter in Atlanta. Margot hoped his trip would take his mind off his worries for a while.
“Let's go,” Lacey said in her matter-of-fact big-sister voice, and quickly stowed Margot's suitcase in the back of the car.
They began the ride out to New Castle, a small town on an island near Portsmouth, New Hampshire, where Lacey and her family lived. It was then, in the car, as they left the C&J Bus Terminal and headed toward the city of Portsmouth, that Lacey told Margot about her symptoms, the visits to doctors, and the diagnosis that would eventually change her life. Margot would think later how odd it was that they both remained so calm. Margot didn't cry then. Lacey didn't drive off the road.
“But we all forget words now and then,” Margot said, not wanting to believe any of what she was hearing.
“That's how it started. It's been a couple of years . . . like this. I'd be talking”—she paused—“and couldn't come up with a word—something stupid, like I'm going . . . to the post office. I couldn't say ‘post office.' Or, Alex . . . Alex would ask me something. I'd open my mouth and nothing would come out. This fall it's gotten worse.”
Margot remembered thinking that Lacey had seemed distracted the last time they spoke on the phone. She had pictured her sister stirring something on the stove, glancing at a recipe, all the while listening to Margot's explanation of her travel plans for this Thanksgiving holiday. Perhaps one of Lacey's twin daughters, Wink or Toni, had been hurrying past, mouthing something silently to her mother at the same time.
Yet Margot's sister had always been able to do many things at once, a veritable multitasker before the term was invented. She was organized, unflappable, while Margot was the scattered one—searching through her closet at the last minute for the black skirt to wear to some art opening with Oliver, only to remember that it was still at the cleaners and that the pants that also went with the silk top she wanted to wear had caught on her heel the last time she had worn them and the hem of one leg was still undone. Oliver would fidget in front of CNN looking annoyed while she rummaged in the kitchen for Scotch tape to do a temporary repair job.
“Is it possible it could be menopause?” Margot asked, her thoughts jumping erratically as she sought some explanation for Lacey's illness.
“It's not. And it's getting worse.” She puckered her lips and let out a rush of breath.
Lacey stopped at a light. They'd crossed over Route 95, and were driving into Portsmouth. Margot was still foggy from getting up early to make her flight. Lacey's news was impossible to grasp, inconceivable.
“Lack of sleep, some memory loss, sure, that's”—Lacey paused—“normal when you're menopausal. Forgetfulness now and again.” She stopped speaking, as if the telling of this string of ideas was exhausting. “Now it happens every day, several times a day. I thought I had Alzheimer's.”
“You're too young for that,” Margot said quickly, thinking of Alex's elderly mother, lost to all of them in her muffled world.
“Not necessarily. But it's not.”
“What's it called again?”
“Primary Progressive Aphasia.” Lacey said it like a mantra, as if she had practiced the phrase to be able to say it with ease. These were words she had to know—the words that would come to define her life. She reached into the handbag and handed Margot an index card. “It's hard for me to explain. Read this,” she said. “I can give you more information later.”
Margot recognized Lacey's handwriting, though her once large and elegant script looked wobbly on the small card. Perhaps Lacey had still been in shock as she copied out the essential facts that the doctors had told her.
Primary Progressive Aphasia, a form of frontotemporal dementia, is caused by brain cell degeneration. “Aphasia” refers to deficits in language functions. The patient slowly loses the ability to use language—first the use of speech, and later the ability to understand, read, or write. The onset of this form of dementia occurs in younger individuals, the symptoms possibly presenting as early as forty-five years of age.
Margot had never heard of this disease. The brutal medical terms were chilling. “Should you be driving?” she asked.
“It's fine. Everything in my brain is fine. I understand. I can do everything.” Lacey paused. “Only . . .” Her chin lifted as if in determination. “It's getting more and more difficult to get the words out.”
For the next few minutes neither sister spoke while Lacey navigated through downtown Portsmouth and onto Pleasant Street. Margot stared out the window, stunned, barely taking in the passing scenery. Portsmouth was an old city, a Colonial settlement, the home of once-prominent ship captains. The Portsmouth harbor was still a working port. Arriving ships bearing loads of salt for the soon-to-be-snow-covered New England roads would depart heaped with loads of scrap metal, the chopped remains of the rusty vehicles that were victims of the salted highways. Red tugboats were moored along the city wharf, rugged and ready to guide the ships through the mouth of the river and pull them to the docks.
The town was filled with stately eighteenth-century mansions, charming clapboard houses, restaurants, and shops, along with a few worn-out taverns that refused to transform themselves to be like their more fashionable twenty-first-century neighbors. Eventually Lacey turned onto Route 1B, the road that would take them out to Lacey and Alex's home in New Castle.
New Castle, an island reached by bridges and causeways, was a gem of a town, a village really. Since the death of their parents many years before, Margot had been coming to Lacey's house every Thanksgiving. Lacey, her husband, Alex, and their twin daughters had included Margot in many of their family holidays, though since she'd lived with Oliver, she came less frequently. Thanksgiving was the only holiday Oliver spent with his grown daughter and Margot thought he should have some time alone with her, thus the separate trips.
Margot read the card a second time. “Lacey, this can't be true.” Margot swallowed and cleared her throat. Her mouth was dry. She didn't know what to say. The irony of being inarticulate made her feel worse.
“We've spent the entire fall going down to Boston to see specialists.”
“Why didn't you tell me?”
“I didn't think it was serious. Not at first anyway. We weren't even sure . . . until last week.” Lacey was speaking very carefully. “Alex doesn't want to believe them.”
“The doctors?”
“He wants to see more . . . more specialists. Like someone else can fix it. Like it's a business problem. And he can find”—she swallowed—“the solution.”
They passed the Portsmouth Naval Prison, a huge, gray, decaying monster of a building across the Piscataqua River on their left, abandoned since the 1970s. Since then it had remained empty and silent, but for the rats and seagulls. “He thinks different . . . doctors might come to a different conclusion.”
BOOK: A Slender Thread
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