Trust No One (2 page)

“Henry Cutter,” he says, reading the name out loud.

“It’s a pen name,” his daughter says, his beautiful daughter, his lovely daughter with a monster of a father, a disgusting old man who moments ago wondered how she would feel beneath him. He feels sick.

“I don’t . . . is this . . . is this you? Did you write this?” he asks. “Did you write this after I told you what happened?”

She looks concerned. Patient but concerned. “It’s you,” she tells him. “This is your pen name.”

“I don’t understand.”

“You wrote this book, and a dozen more just like it. You started writing when you were a teenager. You always used the name Henry Cutter.”

He’s confused. “What do you mean I wrote this? Why would I confess to the world what I had done?” Then it comes to him, something he’s forgotten. “Did I go to jail? Did I write this when I came out? But then . . . how would . . . the timeline doesn’t . . . I don’t get it. Are you really my daughter?” he asks, and he thinks about his daughter, his Eva, but now that he’s thinking about it, Eva is ten years old, not twentysomething, and his daughter would be calling him Dad, not Jerry.

“You’re a crime writer,” she says.

He doesn’t believe her—why would he? She’s just a stranger. Still . . . the crime writer label seems to fit, like putting on a comfortable glove, and he knows what she’s saying is true. Of course it’s true. He wrote thirteen books. An unlucky number—at least if you believe in that kind of thing, and he has been very unlucky, hasn’t he? He’s writing another book too. A diary. No, not a diary, a journal. His Madness Journal. He looks around, but it’s not here with him. Maybe he lost it. He flicks through the pages of the book Eva handed him, but not looking at any of the words. “This was one of the early ones.”

“Your first,” she says.

“You were only twelve when it came out,” he tells her, but hang on now, how can that be if Eva is only ten?

“I was at school,” she says.

He looks at her hand and sees there’s a wedding ring, then looks at his own. There’s one on his hand too. He wants to ask about his wife, but doesn’t want to look a bigger fool for doing so. Dignity is only one of the things the Alzheimer’s has been taking away from him. “Do I always forget you?”

“You have good days and bad,” she says, in the way of an answer.

He looks around the room. “Where are we? Am I here because of what I did to Suzan?”

“There is no Suzan,” the officer says. “We found you in town. You were lost and confused. We called your daughter.”

“There is no Suzan?”

“No Suzan,” Eva says, reaching back into her handbag. She pulls out a photograph. “That’s us,” she says. “It was taken just over a year ago.”

He looks at the picture. The woman in the photograph is the same woman talking to him. In the photograph she’s sitting on a couch holding a guitar, a big smile on her face, and the man in the photograph sitting next to her is Jerry, it’s Jerry a year ago, back when all he was forgetting were his keys and the occasional name, back when he was writing books and living life. The last year has been stolen from him. His personality stolen. His thoughts and memories twisted and decayed. He turns the photograph over. Written on the back is
Proudest dad in the world.

“It was taken the day I told you I’d sold my first song,” she says.

“I remember it,” he tells her, but he doesn’t.

“Good,” she says, and smiles, and in that smile is a lot of sadness and it breaks his heart that his daughter has to see him like this.

“I really want to go home now,” he says.

She looks at the officer. “Is that okay?” she asks, and the officer tells them that it is.

“You’ll need to speak to the nursing home,” the officer says, “tell them this kind of thing can’t keep happening.”

“Nursing home?” Jerry asks.

Eva looks at him. “That’s where you live now.”

“I thought we were going home?”

“That is your home,” she says.

He starts to cry, because he remembers it then—his room, the nurses, the gardens, sitting in the sun with only his sense of loss as company. He’s not aware he’s crying until his tears hit the top of the table, enough of them to make the officer look away and to make his daughter come around and put her arms around him.

“It’s going to be okay, Jerry. I promise.”

But he’s still thinking about Suzan with a
z,
about how it felt back when he killed her, back before he wrote about it. Back when he embraced the darkness.

Some basic facts. Today is a Friday. Today you are sane, albeit somewhat in shock. Your name is Jerry Grey, and you are scared. You’re sitting in your study writing this while your wife, Sandra, is on the phone with her sister, no doubt in tears because this future of yours, well, buddy, nobody saw it coming. Sandra will look after you—that’s what she’s promised, but these are the promises of a woman who has known for only eight hours that the man you are is going to fade away, to be replaced by a stranger. She hasn’t processed it, and right now she’ll be telling Katie that it’s going to be hard, all too terribly hard, but she’ll hang in there, of course she will, because she loves you—but you don’t want that from her. At least that’s what you’re thinking now. Your wife is forty-eight years old and even though you don’t have a future, she still does. So maybe over the next few months if the disease doesn’t push her away, you should push her away. The thing to focus on is that this isn’t about me, you, us—it’s about family. Your family. We have to do what’s best for them. Of course you know that’s a gut reaction, and you may very well, and probably will, feel differently tomorrow.

At the moment you are very much in control. Yes, it’s true you lost your phone yesterday, and last week you lost your car, and recently you forgot Sandra’s name, and yes, the diagnosis means it’s true the best years are now behind you and there will not be too many good ones ahead, but at the moment you know exactly who you are. You know you have an amazing wife named Sandra and an incredible daughter called Eva.

This journal is for you, Jerry of the future, Future Jerry. At the time of this writing, you have hope there’s a cure on its way. The rate medical technology is advancing . . . well, at some point there will be a pill, won’t there? A pill to make the Alzheimer’s go away. A pill to bring the memories back, and this journal is to help you if those memories tend to have fuzzy edges. If there is no pill, you will still be able to look back through these pages and know who you were before the early onset dementia, before the Big A came along and took away the good things.

From these pages you will learn about your family, how much you love them, how sometimes Sandra can smile at you from across the room and it makes your heart race, how Eva can laugh at one of your small jokes and go
Dad!
before shaking her head in embarrassment. You need to know, Future Jerry, that you love and that you are loved.

So this is day one in your journal. Not day one where things started to change—that started a year or two back—but day one of the diagnosis. Your name is Jerry Grey and eight hours ago you sat in Doctor Goodstory’s office holding your wife’s hand while he gave you the news. It has, and let’s be honest since we’re among friends here—scared the absolute hell out of you. You wanted to tell Doctor Goodstory to either change his profession or change his last name, because the two couldn’t be any further apart. On the way home, you told Sandra that the diagnosis reminded you of a quote from Ray Bradbury’s
Fahrenheit 451,
and when you got home you looked it up so you could tell her. Bradbury said, “It took some man a lifetime maybe to put some of his thoughts down, looking around at the world and life, and then I came along in two minutes and boom! It’s all over.” The quote, of course, is from one book-burning fireman to another, but it perfectly sums up your own future. You’ve spent your lifetime putting your thoughts down on paper, Future Jerry, and in this case it’s not the pages going up in flames, but the mind that created them. Funny how you could remember that sentiment from a book you read more than ten years ago, but can’t find your car keys.

Writing in this journal is the first time in years you’ve handwritten anything longer than a grocery list. The computer’s word processor has been your medium ever since the day you wrote the words
Chapter One
of your first book, but using the computer for this . . . well, it feels too impersonal, for one, and too impractical for another. The journal is more authentic, and much easier to carry around than a laptop. It’s actually a journal Eva gave you for Christmas back when she was eleven. She drew a big smiley face on the cover and glued a pair of googly eyes to it. From the face she drew a thought bubble, and inside that she wrote
Dad’s coolest ideas.
The pages have always remained blank, because your ideas tend to get scribbled down on Post-it notes and stuck around the sides of the computer monitor, but the notebook (now to be a journal) has always remained in the top drawer of your desk, and every now and then you’ll take it out and run your thumb over the cover and remember when she gave it to you. Hopefully your handwriting is better than when you get an idea during the night and scrawl it down only to find you can’t read your own words the following morning.

There is so much to tell you, but let me begin by being blunt. You’re heading into Batshit County. “We’re all batshit crazy in Batshit County”—that’s a line from your latest work. You’re a crime writer—now’s as good a time as any to mention that. You write under a pen name, that of Henry Cutter, and over the years have been given the nickname The Cutting Man by fans and the media, not just because of your pen name, but because many of your bad guys use knives. You’ve written twelve books, and number thirteen,
The Man Goes Burning,
is with your editor at the moment. She’s struggling with it. She struggled with number twelve too—and that should have been a warning flag there, right? Here’s what you should do—get this put on a T-shirt:
People with Dementia Don’t Make Great Authors.
When you’re losing your marbles a plot is hard to construct. There were bits that made no sense and bits that made even less sense, but you got there, and you felt embarrassed and you apologized a dozen times and put it down to stress. After all, you’d been touring a lot that year so it made sense you were going to make some mistakes. But
The Man G
oes Burning
is a mess. Tomorrow or the next day, you’ll call your editor and tell her about the Big A. Every author eventually has a last book—you just didn’t think you were there yet, and you didn’t think it would be a journal.

Your last book, this journal, will be your descent into madness. Wait—better make that the
journey
into madness. Don’t mix that up. Sure, you’re going to forget your wife’s name, but let’s not forget what we’re calling this—it’s a journey, not a descent. And yes, that’s a joke. An angry joke because, let’s face it, Future Jerry, you are exceptionally angry. This is a journey into madness because you are mad. What isn’t there to be mad about? You are only forty-nine years old, my friend, and you are staring down the barrel of insanity.
Madness Journal
is the perfect name. . . .

But no, that’s not what this is about. This isn’t about writing up a memorial for your anger, this is a journal to let you know about your life before the disease dug in its claws and ripped your memories to shreds. This journal is about your life, about how blessed you’ve been. You, Future Jerry, you got to be the very thing you’d always dreamed of becoming—a writer. You got the amazing wife, a woman who can put her hand in yours and make you feel whatever it is you need to feel, whether it’s comfort or warmth or excitement or lust, the woman who you wake up to every morning knowing you get to fall asleep with her that night, the woman who can always see the other side of the argument, the woman who teaches you more about life every day. You have the daughter with an old soul, the traveler, the girl who wants people to be happy, the girl taking on the world. You have the nice house on the nice street, you sold a lot of books and you entertained a lot of people. Truthfully, F.J., you always thought there would be a trade-off, that the Universe would somehow balance things out. It turns out you were right. Most of all, this journal is a map to the person you used to be. It will help you get back to the times you can’t remember, and when there is a cure, this journal will help restore anything you have lost.

The best thing to do first is explain how we got here. Thankfully, you’ll still have all your memories tomorrow and you’ll still be you, and the next day, and the next, but those next days are running out the same way authors have a final book. We all have a last thought, a last hope, a last breath, and it’s important to get all this down for you, Jerry.

You’ve got the badly written book this year and, spoiler alert, Jerry, last year’s novel didn’t review that well. But hey—you still read the reviews, is that another effect of the dementia? You told yourself years ago not to read them, but you do anyway. You usually don’t because of the occasional blogger calling you a
This is Henry Cutter’s most disappointing novel yet
hack. It’s the way of the world, my friend, and just part of the job. But perhaps one you don’t have to worry about where you are now. It’s hard to pinpoint when it started. You forgot Sandra’s birthday last year. That was tough. But there’s more. However, right now . . . right now exhaustion is setting in, you’re feeling a little too all over the place, and . . . well, you’re actually drinking a gin and tonic as you’re writing this. It’s your first of the evening. Okay, that’s another joke, it’s your second, and the world is starting to lose its sharp edges. What you really want to do now is just sleep.

You’re a good news, bad news kind of guy, F.J. You like good news, and you don’t like bad news. Hah—thanks G&T number three for giving you Captain Obvious as another narrative point of view. The bad news is that you’re dying. Not dying in the traditional sense—you might still have a lot of years ahead of you—but you’re going to be a shell of a man and the Jerry you were. The Jerry I am right now, that you are as of this writing, is going to leave, sorry to tell you. The good news is—soon you’re not even going to know. There’ll be moments—of course there will be. You can already imagine Sandra sitting beside you and you won’t recognize her, and maybe you’ll have just wet yourself and maybe you’ll be telling her to leave you the hell alone, but there’ll be these moments—these patches of blue sky on a dark day where you’ll know what’s going on, and it will break your heart.