Marcie's Murder (37 page)

“Did you put it there?” she yelled at me. “Why didn’t you tell me you found it this morning?”

I finally took her to the doctor
,
and s
he was diagnosed with
Alzheimer’s disease
.
It took her seven years to die from it.

I thought it was cruel to have complete personal memory recall. Imagine how shocked I was to learn that the opposite
is
just as horrible.
I watched as everything she knew slipped away.
It was
a nightmare. She kept denying there was anything wrong with her. She’d have a lapse and be all upset and I’d tell her it was because of the Alzheimer’s and she’d scream at me,
“
I don’t have Alzheimer’s!
”

One afternoon we were out here
taking the air. S
he was
sitting
in that rocking chair you’re sitting in now
. S
he looked at me and said,
“
I suppose some day I won’t know who you are anymore.
”

It was the closest she ever came to admitting she
understood
what was happening to her.
W
e sat there
, not saying anything else for
quite
a while
.
Eventually
she started talking about something else
,
and I got the sense that she’d already forgotten
that
she’d
been upset
.
It was l
ike a bubble of lucidity
that
had
floated through her consciousness
,
popped
,
and
disappeared
.

I learned the hard way to depersonalize
it
. A mind afflicted with Alzheimer’s disease compensates for memory loss by constructing plausible stories to fill in the gaps. She’d look at a knick knack on the buffet, couldn’t remember where it came from, and concoct
an
elaborate tale about finding it in a second-hand store in Roanoke when in fact I’d given it to her for Christmas when I was in high school. At first I corrected her mistakes, but it
made her angry
so
I
stopped
and
let her mind
d
o whatever it needed to do to
try to
stay above water. But that meant I had to abandon our real relationship, a normal, caring relationship between a
parent
and child, and accept a different relationship based on agreeing with whatever version of reality she needed to live with that particular day. When I walked in the door after work
,
I had to leave my real self out in the car and become this untruthful, agreeable guy
who didn’t react to her highs or lows but just let pretty much everything go in one ear and out the other. I had to force myself to stop getting upset, stop getting depressed, and stop hoping that
her
brief periods of lucidity meant she was fighting it off and might actually be plateauing for a while. By the time I was able to do all that
,
I was a completely different person to her. I was shallow, superficial
,
and phony
with her. It was like she wasn’t my mother anymore but some stranger
to whom
I was painfully polite. I hated it.

I kept her at home and looked after her as long as I could, but eventually it got too much for me. I’d made detective by then and although there’s not a lot of heavy duty crime around here
,
they kept me busy. Plus I
had started drinking fairly heavily
and had
had
a few
episodes
myself.
It
finally became too much
and she had to go into the hospital in Richlands. I couldn’t afford to put her in a nursing home. My dad was under-insured when he died, and after the funeral expenses there wasn’t much left.
I just couldn’t do everything for her anymore. There’s not only the memory loss but also a loss
of
cognitive skills.
She
forg
o
t how to operate simple things like the washing machine, microwave, even how to dial a telephone number.
She couldn’t prepare a meal anymore. On top of that
,
there’s a physical component. She lost
the ability to wash
he
rself, feed
he
rself,
dress herself,
go to the bathroom
he
rself.
She couldn’t walk without help, couldn’t keep her hands from shaking.
I couldn’t
stay on top of it
, so I had to put her
in Richlands where
she’d get constant care.

I drove down there every day to see her. One evening I could tell she didn’t know who I was. She was
very
polite and we had a nice visit, but I could tell she wasn’t connecting the dots. The next day she asked me what my name was and said we’d never been introduced but she was pleased to meet me.

That night I got stopped by
a
stat
i
e for driving under the influence. I showed
him
my ID and
he
let me off, but I got stopped twice more
in a
month
and finally Billy brought me into his office and read me the riot act. The
d
ivision
c
ommander in Wytheville had called Billy as a courtesy to explain that they couldn’t keep letting me go and that either it stopped or they’d start charging me and it
would
end up
cost
ing
me my job.

Billy could have fired me but he didn’t. He stuck by me. Started riding
shotgun on
my ass, checking on me. He arranged for counseling sessions and got me into AA. None of it worked, but he kept trying. I appreciated it. I really did. But I was too far gone. I couldn’t handle it any more.

Not long a
fter my mother died
,
I went for a little vacation. I was gone for
ten days
. Here’s the funny part: I don’t remember all of it.

I drove
to Cincinnati. I remember being there a few days. I decided to drive to Cleveland.
T
he first night on the road after Cincinnati
,
I stayed in Columbus. Then I woke up one morning in a motel in Zanesville
,
and it was four days later. Somehow I’d lost four days
out of my life
. I couldn’t believe it.
That had never happened to me before.
It shocked me sober and scared the
hell out of me.

What
had
happened during that time? What did I do? Something bad, something I’d regret? I
turned around and came right back
home.

I went easy on the
booze
for a while after that, because I was scared. But at the same time it was fascinating
.
Like a
cavity
in a back tooth you keep sticking the tip of your tongue into. You just can’t leave it alone, you have to keep feeling it. Still there. Ye
ah
, still there. I kept going back to that hole in my memory. I
’d discovered i
t was possible
not
to remember every
goddamned
thing.

So was
that a
good
thing
or
a
bad
thing
? I didn’t know; it just confused me. I couldn’t make up my mind. I kept going back to it, trying to make up my mind if having gaps like that
, the way normal people sometimes do, would be good or bad.

On the one hand, I’d always hated having perfect recall of every goddamned moment of my life. I’d wished every day for a break from it. But on the other hand
,
I’d seen what gradual, brutal, inexorable memory loss had done to my mother
,
and I was scared to death at the thought of ending up like that. With hyperthymesia I have a painfully clear understanding of exactly who I am based on the sum total of all my experiences, thoughts
,
and perceptions,
available in real time at any given moment,
but with Alzheimer’s
d
isease I would be left with absolutely no awareness of who I’d been and what I’d done, good
,
bad
,
or indifferent. I would be no one. Nothing. A worm in a bag of water.

I just can’t decide what
I want
. Some of that gap eventually came back, a little fuzzy around the edges, but there’s still a hole of about two days th
at
are
apparently gone for good.

So now I drink, I guess I’d have to say honestly, because I don’t know what to do. Alcohol takes the edge off.
It inhibits the instant recall just enough that consciousness is tolerable. I can still remember whatever I need to remember just by reaching for it and pulling it out, but once I’ve had enough to drink the involuntary memory tones down
just enough that
I can get through the day.

At the same time if I drink too much, I know I can destroy something of myself in there, so I drink right up to the edge, I flirt with it, then I get scared because I’m not quite ready to commit suicide just yet. There’s still a primitive survival mechanism that keeps me from going all the way. Usually I think of my father and how disappointed he’d be. Then I have one more drink because I know he’d be damned disappointed in me anyway
,
and I leave it at that.

The result of which is what you see in front of you
now
,
a shit cop with a bad reputation who’s a joke all over the district.

2
7

Hank
walked up to Bluefield Street and leaned against a telephone pole on the corner
. He
took out his cell phone and called Karen to
come
pick him up. While he was waiting, he watched the traffic pass and memorized license plates for
practice
. When Karen skidded to a stop in front of him
,
he slid into the passenger seat of the
Fire
bird and barely had time to close the door before she rocketed away from the gravel shoulder
back
into traffic.

“Dark blue Malibu, probably ’06, West Virginia license number 657Y45,” he said, buckling up.

“What’s that?” Karen frowned, stomping on the brakes and pulling a hasty U-turn
in front of a tractor trailer
.

It was the license number of the first vehicle he’d seen after calling Karen. “Nothing,” he said. “Question for you
:
w
ould you rather remember absolutely everything that ever happened to you every minute of your life
whether you wanted to or not,
or forget everything five minutes afterwards and never be able to remember it again
no matter how much you wanted to
?”

“Huh? I don’t know. What th
e hell kind of question is that
?”

“Never mind.” He watched a pedestrian
hurry a
cross the street as they shot through the intersection of Bluefield and Chestnut. “Who’s first on the list?”

“Some guy named
Peter
Allen
.
”
S
he fish
ed
a piece of paper
out of her jacket
pocket and hand
ed
it to him. It was the list of students who’d taken the photography course with Marcie Askew. “First guy on the list, first guy I got a
hold of on the phone. He’s a nurse at the hospital. Said he’d meet us outside the Emergency entrance for a smoke.”

There were twelve students on the list, including Marcie. “How many did you talk to?”

“Four. Allen, the woman Dillon,
the man McCarty and the woman Smith.”

Peter
Allen turned out to be a
thirty
-year-old father of three girls who remembered nothing at all about Marcie Askew that was useful to them. He was obviously more interested in what they might be able to tell him about the investigation than in what he might be able to tell them
.