Chapter Twenty-Two
When they got home, she found Andrew working on a puzzle with his grandfather, their heads bent together companionably.
A new one, sunflowers in a field. A week since the heart attack and her dad was starting to improve.
Small milestones. He could get himself out of bed and was lobbying to use the cane instead of the walker.
But the hospital bed was still parked in the family room, and he couldn’t yet get upstairs to shower.
“How about I take a turn?” Shelly said, easing onto the couch.
Cassie gave her a grateful look. She needed to talk to Andrew, and she needed to do it now.
No more excuses. No more delays. The visit with Jeannette Torrington had left her with an unexpected sense of clarity.
She’d looked her options in the eye and come out the other side.
Either she had the mutation or she didn’t.
But this would be a shock to Andrew. She had no idea how he would take it.
“Sweetie,” she said, “want to go for a run?”
Andrew stretched his arms over his head. He wasn’t usually much of a runner, but occasionally she could cajole him. “I guess so. Let me change.”
She started stiffly, her muscles cold after a few days. She hadn’t had much get up and go since her breakup with Glenn. It had been all she could do to set one foot in front of the other. She’d left another message but hadn’t heard a thing, and his silence left a dull, heavy feeling in her heart.
It felt good to get outside now. Her mother’s peonies were in full bloom, a heady pink, already shedding petals on the flagstone walkway.
Their lifespan so brief. Her mother had adored peonies, even after she’d forgotten their names.
Cassie hated the thought of them ripped out along with the house.
But even if she managed to save them, she had no place to plant them in the city.
“Where to?” Andrew looked glad to be outside too, stretching his legs, his skin rosy in the sun.
“Let’s cut through the woods then head toward town.”
“Aren’t they already bulldozing?”
“They haven’t gotten to this side yet.” She wasn’t keen on going anywhere near the construction site, but they could avoid that part. And you couldn’t shrink from reality. She was learning that. Finally.
They jogged across the street and up the hill, ducking into the cool of the trees. A woodpecker swept overhead in a flash of black and red. One of the big ones. Soon all this would be gone, packaged into mini estates with gardeners and manicured lawns.
She slowed to a walk. “There’s something I need to tell you, that I should have told you a long time ago.”
He looked at her. “What?”
“You know Grandma died in her fifties.” She felt a familiar prickle of fear, the way she always felt when she pictured what might lie ahead.
The heartbreaking decline. The inevitable end.
And now, to bring Andrew into this. She’d wanted to spare him, but in doing so had kept him a child when he needed to learn to be a grown up.
“She was sick, right?” he said tentatively.
She took a breath. “Yes, she had a form of dementia—Alzheimer’s—that starts very young. People who have it often start showing symptoms in their forties or fifties. It’s called early onset. A genetic mutation causes it.”
Andrew paled. “Do you have it? Are you going to get Alzheimer’s?”
They’d paused next to a huge woodland rhododendron that towered next to the path, its conical white buds about to unfurl.
Her heart felt like a block of cement. “I don’t know. I have a fifty percent chance of inheriting the mutation. If I do have it, I’ll definitely develop Alzheimer’s, the early onset kind.” She plowed on. “There’s a test but I decided not to do it.”
“So you could know if you wanted?”
“That’s why Aunt Shelly and I went into the city this morning. I had an appointment with a genetic counselor. But I changed my mind.”
“Why?” His eyes widened.
She sat on the remains of a log and motioned for him to sit too.
She looked at his sweet, worried face and saw herself at his age, scared to death she would lose her mother, her anchor to the world.
“I won’t lie, it would be a tremendous relief to know I’m negative.
But if I do have the mutation, it would be devastating.
It’d be like knowing I’m going to get hit by a truck.
Not when I’m going to die, but how. I don’t want to live that way. I can’t.”
He was blinking back tears, which made her tear up too. “I’m sorry, sweetie. I should have told you sooner since it affects you too.”
“It does?” He was still processing, hadn’t quite grasped the whole thing.
“If I do have the mutation, you have a fifty percent chance of inheriting it too. But if I don’t, you don’t either. It doesn’t skip generations.”
“This is fucked up.” He exhaled as it sank in. “So I might have this too?”
She closed her eyes for a brief second. This had always been her greatest fear. She’d been reluctant to have a child because of what she might pass on, but Phil had convinced her. The research is promising. They’re working on a cure. She’d wanted a family. She’d wanted to believe.
“Yes, it’s possible you could have the mutation too.”
He shoved off the log. “Why didn’t you ever tell me any of this?”
She felt a rising misery. Of course he was stunned and confused.
She’d just dropped a bomb on him. “A whole bunch of bad reasons—I was scared. In denial. Couldn’t deal with it.
” She toed away a red and black beetle that had begun investigating her shoe.
“I’m not a very good role model, I’m afraid.
Shelly is much braver. She dealt with it years ago. ”
“Does she have it?”
“No.”
“When were you going to tell me? Were you going to wait until something actually happened and just casually mention it?”
She dipped her head. “I always meant to tell you when you were old enough. It just…time went by and it got hard.”
“This is about me too. Didn’t you think of that?”
“Of course I did. I think of it every day.”
He suddenly ran out of steam. “So you could start losing your memory any time?”
“Yes.” There was no way to sugarcoat it.
“And then how long?”
“It depends. With Grandma, it took about five years from the time she started showing symptoms.”
“Five years? That’s it?” He looked young and afraid and she hated that she’d done this to him. Possibly passed on this curse and left him to deal with it.
“You have every right to be angry with me,” she said. “And if you really want to know, I’ll go back and get tested.”
“But you said you don’t want to know.”
“I’ll do it if it makes you feel better.” The thought of going back to Jeannette and taking the test filled her with a panicky dread, but she would do it for him. Only for Andrew would she go down that road.
He slumped back onto the log. “Could I get tested at some point even if you don’t?”
“I suppose so. They know what mutation to test for.”
“I don’t want to make you get tested if you don’t want to,” he said miserably. “I don’t even know if I’d want to. This whole thing is so fucked.”
She put an arm around him, and he leaned into her. “Yes, that’s a very good way of putting it. But you have time to make that decision. And maybe in ten years they’ll have a cure or at least a way of slowing it down.”
“There isn’t anything now?”
“Nothing that makes any difference.”
He looked at her anxiously, like the small boy he’d once been. “But you’re okay now, right? You haven’t started, like forgetting things?”
She kissed his cheek, which like her own was damp with tears. “I’m okay now.”
. . .
They started up running again, leaving what was left of the woods and dropping to the street.
They ran the back roads of Laurelton amid the glossy green abandon of late spring.
Past stone walls and a neighbor seeding his lawn.
Skirting a thorny wild rose that had run amok near someone’s mailbox.
The conversation with Andrew had been hard.
So hard. But she felt a kind of peace. At least now he knew.
“There’s actually something I wanted to talk to you about too,” Andrew said shyly as they caught their breath back at her father’s cul de sac.
For a moment, she felt a throb of fear but he looked calm.
“I saw the therapist yesterday. Janice. The one Dr. Milburn recommended.”
“I’m so glad.” Cassie felt her chest warm. Finally, a bit of good news. “You don’t have to tell me what you talked about, but how did it go?”
“I thought she would tell me what to do, but she mostly asked a lot of questions. What’s going on, how I feel about stuff.”
“Did it help, to talk to someone?”
“More than I thought it would,” he admitted. “I made another appointment for next week.”
“That’s terrific, sweetie.”
His face clouded. “I talked to Dad yesterday too. He wants me to live with him this summer and do an internship in the city, somebody he knows in some hedge fund.”
“Is that what you want?”
“Not really. I don’t want to work at a hedge fund, and Dad’s never around anyway.”
“What would you like to do? You know you can stay with me, wherever I end up, but you need some kind of job, part-time at least.” She thought of what Shelly had said about living in New York.
Did she even want to be in New York anymore?
The longer she was away, the less she missed it.
She never thought she’d feel that way, but the crush of people, the traffic, the noise.
And her dad was here. She didn’t want to just park him somewhere and go back to her old, harried life.
Seeing him only occasionally as his memory dimmed, so that eventually he wouldn’t even be sure who she was.
For a second she imagined Glenn’s reaction, the way his face would light when she said she was staying.
Then her heart thudded back into place. He wouldn’t even know.
“Jack’s home from rehab,” Andrew said once they’d said hello to a neighbor walking her dog. “I want to go see him.”
“I didn’t know you’d been in touch.” Cassie looked at him in surprise.
“We’ve been texting. He has trouble with words sometimes, gets them mixed up, but he understands what’s going on.” He glanced at her. “His mom hates me.”
The boy’s mother would never forgive Andrew, Cassie understood that. Some things a parent could never get over. “What about Jack,” she said cautiously, “does he want you to come?”
“He said he did.”
“Did Janice suggest this?” She was pleased he was finally talking to someone, but Andrew needed to make this decision. If the therapist had suggested a visit, Andrew’s heart wouldn’t be in it.
He shook his head. “I’ve been thinking about it for a while.”
“If Jack wants to see you, you should go.” She hesitated, trying to find the right words.
“But be prepared. It’s not going to be easy, and he might change his mind once you’re there.
And his family probably won’t be happy to see you.
You can’t go looking for forgiveness,” she said gently. “It’s not about you.”
“I know. I just want to apologize in person.”
“I’m proud of you.”
“You are?” He looked like the thought was inconceivable.
He would carry this shame forever. The raw edges would seal up, but it would live inside him and shape the man he would become.
He could bury it or face it. It had taken her a lifetime to learn that.
She’d run from her mother’s illness and her father’s grief.
She’d withheld from Andrew and Glenn. Andrew, at least, was trying.
“Yeah.” A lump rose in her throat. “I’m proud of you.” Andrew had stumbled and was trying to right himself. She couldn’t catch him anymore; he had to do that on his own. All she could do was cheer him on.
“So when will you go?” she asked as they walked up the driveway.
“I thought I’d look at flights now, if that’s all right.”
She smiled at him. “Now is definitely all right.”
After Andrew went inside, she wandered across the field, not quite ready to go in.
The grass had shot up in the last couple of days, wild with clover and dandelions.
A meadow, Glenn had called it. She sat on the stone wall, but all she could think about was being here with Glenn just before she sprang the news about Weber.
Her stomach wound so tight. Her fear that it would change everything, which it had.
She missed him. He lit her up like she hadn’t thought possible at her age.
At any age. He’d listened to her and made her feel seen.
He had seen her. At least what she was willing to show him.
He was smart and thoughtful and sexy. She was stunned by how fast it had happened, how completely she’d fallen.
But it had blown up equally fast, over before it really started.
The truth was, she ached for him. It hadn’t gotten better; it had only gotten worse.
The nights were especially miserable, lying awake, wondering if he was awake too.
She missed his voice, his laugh, the way his face brightened when he saw her.
She wanted to share her decision not to get tested.
She wanted to tell him about her conversation with Andrew and how her dad had started to improve.
The small miracles that make up a life. If they didn’t speak they would leave it in a tangle of hurt and misunderstanding. And she would always regret it.
She pulled out her phone and tried him again but got voicemail. She left another message, fidgeting on the stone wall, phone in hand, in case he called back. But the only sounds were the drone of a leaf blower and the shouts of children down the street.
Finally she put her phone away and headed back to the house.