The Burning Side(17)

“Knives or just forks?”

I startle. I hadn’t noticed Billy come into the kitchen with his old gray slippers.

Billy, who faithfully sets the table. Who cleans the oven and fixes the blender. Who scrubs stuck food off pans and rubs my feet across his lap on the couch. Billy, who would—I’m certain—drop everything and cook for me if I asked.

“Just forks.” Whisk in hand, I pause and smile at him. “Your eyes look nice with that shirt.”

He shrugs, hiding his grin like a schoolboy. His hair is a mess, and his presence floods me with reality. Then someone tromps down the stairs, following the smell of food.

When Sadie rounds the corner, Billy says, “Is your room clean, Josie girl? You know Mom doesn’t like when you go off to school and leave behind a big mess.” He is setting forks on napkins, and my heart speeds to a gallop.

Sadie giggles. “Silly Grandpa B! I’m not Josie—I’m Sadie!”

He frowns.

I drop my whisk and rush to his side.

April has appeared a moment too soon, and her eyes dart from her dad to me.

I pull Billy’s chair back and say with contrived lightness, “Breakfast is about ready. You hungry?”

Sadie loses interest and skips away in search of juice.

Billy’s frown lingers as he settles into his chair and looks up at me. “You cut Jo’s hair?”

I avoid April’s stare as I answer him quietly. “Yes.”

This is the first time I’ve allowed Billy’s confusion to permeate our reality, the first time I’ve entered his version with a little white lie. An alarm rings out in the halls of my body: we have just entered a gate through which we can never return. And April is our uninvited witness. She narrows her eyes and asks, “Can I help you in the kitchen?”

I follow her around the corner, knowing full well that we won’t be cooking.

Her expression is bare, her hand gripping my forearm. “Mom?”

I meet her bloodshot eyes, but I still can’t say it. I know life has dark valleys, even for these children I’ve tried to protect, but my daughter needs a respite. My daughter, my ray of sunshine, whose eyes are now struck through with jagged pink bolts of lightning.

“Mom.” Her tone is now like a mother issuing a warning. “Tell me what I just saw.”

I pinch the bridge of my nose. “You can’t tell the others yet.”

She takes my hand, waiting.

“Dad has—” I look down and just say it: “Early-onset Alzheimer’s. Confirmed last week.”

April’s hand goes to her mouth.

I feel like a traitor, naming it. Like I’m welcoming it, which I’m not.

I’m not, I’m not, I’m not.

Billy is at the table around the corner, whistling as he waits to take Josie to a school that no longer exists, in the pigtails she stopped wearing two decades ago.

As I cry for the first time since the diagnosis, my firstborn holds me. Alzheimer’s is a form of time travel, but time travel hurts. It always leaves someone behind. We hadn’t planned to tell our kids yet, but April has always had a way of sniffing things out. Plus, I felt so alone when Billy looked up at me and asked about his daughter’s hair while staring straight at his granddaughter. This sickness is a hundred tiny deaths, so when is the right time to grieve?

With everyone clamoring for breakfast, further conversation with April gets tabled until later, just long enough for me to feel the relief of sharing this news, and the guilt of sharing it without Billy.

An hour later, I walk in on April holding a napping Otto in the Boston rocker, her own eyelids looking heavy. I rocked her in that very chair, usually humming a Russo family favorite: “Dream a Little Dream of Me.”

I back away, but April whispers, “No, come in.”

So I approach quietly, and she offers a small smile. It’s hard to feel despair when innocence is in your arms, smelling like lavender baby soap. But it isn’t Otto’s cherubic rest that touches me. It’s April. How many people she holds. She cups a hand over her son’s fuzzy head as though protecting a house for memories yet to be made, and she looks up at me, searching. “Is this what happened to MeeMaw?”

“We think it is.” I shrug. “The doctor said it can be genetic.” Billy’s sister died without any sign of the disease, but their mother declined for years. By the end of her life she was unrecognizable. She would run into walls, comb her hair with candles, doodle on furniture, and yell obscenities at her grandchildren. She wasn’t old, and we never understood what happened to her. I shudder to think of Billy becoming like that.

April takes my hand tenderly. “I’m so sorry,” she says. How very April of her to hurt for me rather than herself. I often worry about her making so much space for the pain of others that she leaves no space for her own.

Our gazes drop toward Otto, who is both legacy and promise, past and future. He won’t remember this moment, and I wonder what gives a moment meaning, if not memory. Then he squirms and reddens and fills his diaper, and April and I smile. She knows nothing of the storm her father and I weathered at our start. Or how surviving that one makes this one even harder.





DEB


1988

WE MARRY QUICKLY ONCE THE pregnancy is confirmed, and we agree to take this unromantic fact to our graves. I didn’t want to give up the baby, and Billy thought it only right to get married. So we drive away from the courthouse, husband and wife, on a crisp afternoon as the leaves begin to turn.