Trust No One (4 page)

So you forgot your wife’s name and why wouldn’t you think it was anything other than the booze? Sure, you were always losing your keys, but if society threw around the Big A label to anybody who didn’t know where their keys were then the whole world would be suffering from Alzheimer’s. Yes—there was the car keys getting lost, but they would get found too, wouldn’t they? Be it in the fridge, or in the pantry, or once (hello, irony) by the pool. Sure, you lost your dad in a pool, you left your coffee there, and your keys, but that’s just carelessness—after all, you do have a world full of people living inside your head looking for a voice, remember? All those characters? Serial killers and rapists and bank robbers, and of course then there’s the bad guys too (that’s a joke). With all that going on inside, of course you’re going to lose your keys. And your wallet. And your jacket. And even your car—well you didn’t lose it, not really—which is a story that had you calling
This Is My Wife . . . Sandra, I
s It?
from the mall and, thankfully, not the police to report it stolen. She came and picked you up, and she spotted it on the way out of the parking lot exactly where you had left it, and you, well, you’d been looking for the car you used to own five years prior to that. You both had a good laugh about it. A concerned kind of laugh. And it reminded you of the time you
had
forgotten her name, and it reminded you of when you used to renovate houses before the crime writing took off, back when you would paint rooms and put in new kitchens, lay tiles and put in new bathrooms, and through it all you would lose the screwdriver or the hammer (and there was no pool back then to look around). And just where. The hell. Were they? Well sometimes you never
did
find them.

Sandra thought the solution was to have
A Place for Everything.
She emptied a shelf near the front door, and when you came inside you would empty your pockets, putting your phone and keys and wallet and watch there—at least that was the plan. The shelf didn’t work for one very simple reason. It wasn’t so much that you couldn’t remember where you were putting these things, it was that you had
no
memory of even putting them down. It was like when you reach your destination and can’t remember the drive. You can’t use
A Place for Everything
when you’re not aware of even taking your keys out of your pocket. Then you would forget birthdays. You would forget important dates. So that and that and all that other stuff—then you forgot Sandra’s name again. Just. Like. That. You were filling in passport forms. You were sitting beside each other, and Sandra was filling hers in and you said . . . get this, this will make you laugh or cry, but you said to her
W
hy are you writing down Sandra in the name box?
Because that’s what she was doing—of course that’s what she was doing—it’s what any Sandra would do, but you asked because, in that moment, you had no clue. Your wife’s name was . . . what? You didn’t know. You didn’t know you didn’t know that—you just knew it wasn’t Sandra, of course not, it was . . .

It was Sandra. It was the moment. When things changed.

That’s how it started—or at least that’s when it started showing up. Who knows when it started? Birth? In utero? That concussion you got when you were sixteen and you stumbled down a flight of stairs at school? How about twenty years ago when you took Sandra and Eva camping? You were chasing Eva around the campsite, pretending to be a grizzly bear and she was giggling and you were going
roar, roar,
and your throat was getting raw and your hands were forming claws and you ran right into a branch and knocked yourself out cold. Or maybe it was that time you were fourteen and your dad punched you for the first and only time in his life (he was normally a happy drunk) because he was angry, he was mad, he was what he got sometimes when the
normally
wasn’t in play and the darkness was creeping in. Kind of like the darkness you’ve got coming and, thinking about it, maybe he wasn’t as drunk as it seemed—maybe your disease was his disease. It could be one of those things, or none of them, or, as you thought in the beginning, just the Universe balancing the scales for giving you the life you wanted.

Soon you won’t remember your favorite TV show, your favorite food. Soon you’re going to start slurring your speech and forgetting people, only you’re not going to know most of this. Your Brain the Vault is going to turn into Your Brain the Sieve, and all those people, all those characters you’ve created, their world and their futures are going to drain away, and soon . . . well, hey, in a hundred years you would have been dead anyway.

That moment when things changed, well, Sandra said you had to go and see Doctor Goodstory. Which led to more doctors. Which led to news of the Big A on Big F—that’s how you think of that Friday now, as the Big F, the Day at the Doctor, and really you think that’s a pretty appropriate name for it, right? You’d been hoping for something simple, something changing your diet and spending more time outside soaking up vitamin D could fix. Instead the Big F brought the exact news you were hoping you wouldn’t hear.

What do you want to know about that day? Do you want to know you cried that night in Sandra’s arms when you got home? Not the Big F day—that was the result day. But the first time, back when all Doctor Goodstory said was
We’re going to have to run some tests.
Sure, we’ll get to the bottom of it. No, don’t worry about it, Jerry—these were things he didn’t say. He asked if you were depressed. You said sure, what author isn’t after reading some of his reviews? He asked you to be serious, so then you were, and no, you weren’t depressed. How was your appetite? It was good. Were you sleeping much? Not a lot but enough. Diet? How was your diet? It was good, you were getting your vitamins, you were staying healthy and hitting the gym a couple of times a week. Were you drinking much? Maybe the odd gin and tonic or two. He said he’d run some tests, and that’s what he did. Tests, and a referral to a specialist.

Then came the trips to the hospital. There was the MRI scan, there were blood tests, memory tests, there were forms to fill in, not just for you, but for Sandra—she was to observe you, and still you kept this from Eva. Then the Big F, Doctor Goodstory had the results and would you please come in and speak to him, so you did . . . well, you know the news. Just take a look in the mirror. Early onset dementia. Alzheimer’s. Maybe in the future there’s a cure, because there sure as hell isn’t one now, and maybe this journal can be inspiration for your next book—maybe you’ve written fifty books by now and this was just that time in your life, Jerry Grey with his Dark Period, the same way Picasso had his Blue Period and The Beatles had their White.

You have slowly progressive dementia. The Big A. Dementia in people under sixty-five is not common, Goodstory said, which makes you a statistic. There are drugs to take for the anxiety and the depression that is, he assured you, on its way—but there aren’t drugs you can take for the disease itself.

We can’t accurately map the rate at which things are going to change for you,
Doctor Goodstory said.
The thing is, the brain—the brain still has a lot of mysteries. As your doctor, and as your friend, I’
m telling you there might be five or ten okay years ahead for you, or you could be full-blown crazy by Christmas. My advice is to use that gun of yours and blow your brains out while you still know how.

Okay, he didn’t say that, that’s just you reading between the lines. You spent half an hour talking about the future with him. Soon a stranger is going to be living inside your body. You, Future Jerry, may even be that stranger. Bad days are coming, days when you will wander from the house and get lost at the mall, days where you will forget what your parents looked like, days where you’ll no longer be able to drive. Other than the journal, your writing days are over. And that’s only the beginning. The days will get so dark that in the end you won’t know who Sandra is, or that you have a daughter. You may not even know your own name. There will be things you can’t remember, and there will be things you can remember that never actually happened. There will be simple things that no longer make any sense. The day is coming when your world will be without logic, without any kind of sense, without any awareness. You won’t be able to hold Sandra’s hand and watch her smile. You won’t be able to chase Eva and pretend you’re a grizzly bear. That day . . . Doctor Goodstory couldn’t tell you when it would be. Not tomorrow. That’s the good news here. All you have to do is make sure that day will never be tomorrow.

The nursing home is fifteen miles north of the city. It’s set on five acres of land, gardens flowing out into the neighboring woods, a view of the mountains to the west, no power lines to interrupt the view, far enough off the main road to avoid the sound of passing trucks. It’s secluded. Peaceful. Though Jerry doesn’t see it that way. He sees the nursing home as being out of the way so people can shovel their parents and sick relatives into them then slip into the
out of sight out of mind
phase of their life.

Eva has the car radio on as they drive there. The five o’clock news comes on just as they hit the driveway leading up to the home. The driveway is close to a hundred yards long, the trees lining it mostly skeletal looking, a handful of them with tiny buds starting to grow. A report comes on the radio of a homicide. A woman’s body was found an hour ago, and like always when Jerry hears these type of reports it makes him sad to be a human being. Ashamed to be a man. It means while he was walking along the beach with Eva enjoying the breeze, this poor woman was living the last few seconds of her life. It’s news like this, Jerry remembers, that has always put his own problems into perspective.

Eva brings the car to a stop. The nursing home is forty years old, fifty at the most, two stories of gray brick stretching fifty yards from left to right, and another fifty yards from front to back, a black roof, some wooden windowsills stained dark brown, not a lot of color other than the gardens where spring is working its magic, bulbs planted in the past now coming back to life. There’s a large door at the front of the nursing home made of oak that reminds Jerry of a church door. It all looks familiar to him, but doesn’t
feel
familiar, as if he hasn’t lived here but saw it once in a movie. He can’t even remember what the name of this place is. This life that is now his isn’t his at all, but belongs to a man from the same movie this nursing home is from, a man who confesses to murders of women who never existed, a man whose wife hates him, this man becoming less and less of the Jerry he used to be.

“Don’t make me go in there.”

“Please, Jerry, you have to,” Eva says, taking off her seat belt. When he doesn’t move, she reaches across and takes his off too. “I’ll come and visit you again tomorrow, okay?”

He wants to tell her no, that tomorrow isn’t good enough, that he’s her father, that she wouldn’t exist if it weren’t for him, that when she was a baby he once tweaked his back while bathing her and could barely walk for a week, that he once dropped a jar of baby food and cut his finger picking up the pieces, that he once thought about calling an exorcist after undoing her diaper and seeing the mess she had made. He wants to tell her he put Band-Aids on her knees and tweezed out splinters and bee stings, that he brought back teddy bears from faraway countries and then, when she was older, brought back fashion from those same places. These things he can remember. He can’t remember his parents. He can’t remember his books. He can’t remember this morning. The least Eva can do, he wants to tell her, is not make him go in there. And the very least she can do is come in with him. But he says none of this. It’s the way of the world, the natural cycle, and he’s thirty years ahead of schedule, but that’s not her fault, it’s his, and he can’t punish her for that. He takes her hand and he smiles, and he says, “You promise?”

The big front door of the home opens. Nurse . . . Hamilton, her name comes to him as she walks towards them, stops halfway between the big oak door and the car and smiles at them. She’s a big woman who looks like she could bear-hug a bear. Her hair is a fifty-fifty mix of black and gray, and looks like it was last styled in the sixties. In her late fifties or early sixties, she has the exact kind of smile you want to see on a nurse, the kind of smile your grandmother would have. She’s wearing a nurse’s uniform with a gray cardigan over top that has a name badge pinned to it.

“Do you promise?” he asks again.

“I’ll do my best,” Eva says, looking down for a moment, and that doesn’t sound like a promise at all. He keeps smiling as she carries on. “You have to do your best to stay put, Jerry. How you made it into the city from here I don’t know,” she says, and nobody knows, least of all him. It’s a fifteen-mile walk to the edge of the town, but it’s another five on top of that to where he was found. He also can’t think why he went to the library. Maybe to see his books, maybe to see other books, maybe to fall asleep and get kind of arrested. They get out of the car just as Nurse Hamilton reaches it.