Read Online The World in Half by Cristina Henríquez - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: Cristina Henríquez
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palms, as I waited for what she had to say.
After about half a mile, I stopped. “Mom, come on. You have to tell me what you wanted to talk about. I can’t stand it anymore.”
She turned to look at me. We were face to face on the sidewalk, my mother with her back to the lake, the sounds of the birds still coursing through the air, the sounds of cars whizzing by on the street not far from where we stood. My mother crossed her arms and pinched her lips together. In the breeze, her hair-sprayed hair lifted all together at the sides like wings.
“I failed all the tests,” she said. “I have Alzheimer’s.”
Just like that.
I knew that she had gone for testing earlier, and that the doctor had wanted her to come back in six months, which was the appointment she just had. The tests weren’t about absolute numbers. They were about establishing a pattern of decline. They were things like puzzles and answering questions about a paragraph you’d just read and counting backward by sevens. We had practiced these things together over the phone. Her performance over the past few months had been sporadic. And there had been signs that things were off—the time she got frustrated to the point of tears because she couldn’t remember how to use the letter opener, the time she was late meeting me for lunch because she got lost driving to a restaurant we always ate at, the time she left the back door to the kitchen wide open overnight, the time I found her eating a peppermint candy with the wrapper still on. But I got good at convincing myself that these things happened because my mother was under a particular amount of stress right then or that what she was experiencing were isolated, and entirely normal, moments of forgetfulness.
“Dr. Wu said there was also a possibility it could be something called Pick’s. But he’s pretty sure it’s the other thing. I have to go to a neurologist. They want to do some scans of my brain.”
I felt as though my head had suddenly inflated. I felt fuzzy and hot.
“Anyway, I told Dr. Wu he was wrong. I told him I was too young to have it. Do you remember that first doctor? That’s what he said. But Dr. Wu said I have the kind called early-onset.” She twisted her body to look out at the lake and, when she turned back to me, said quietly, as if conferring a secret, “I think my mother had it. That must have been what it was. We just thought she was going crazy.”
My mother never brought up her parents. They had both died years earlier, but even when they were alive, we had no sort of relationship with them. I had never even met them.
She had a little spasm of a shiver.
“That isn’t what’s going to happen to you,” I said.
“It is. That’s exactly what’s going to happen to me.” She kicked at something invisible on the ground. “Damn it.”
My stomach was killing me.
“It runs in the family,” she said.
I didn’t think about it this way at the time, but I guess she was warning me. If it wasn’t exactly a warning, I believe that she was at least contemplating a future for me that caused her more despair than her own diagnosis had brought. She was casting it out in her mind, imagining the bright and capable daughter she’d raised felled by a disease that dissolved a person’s mind wholly and persistently. She must have been, because what she did next was so uncharacteristic it could have been prompted only by the most piercing anguish: She put her arm around me. She drew me to her. She circled her arms around my middle, her hands below my shoulder blades. And she held me there. I cupped her shoulders from behind and squeezed her soft arms with mine. I could feel her breathing. I could smell her hair spray in the breeze.
Four
Deflation
I n the morning, a slice of sunlight cuts through the gap between the drawn curtains. Lying on my side in the bed, my hands palm to palm between my knees, I stare at it and wonder what’s going to happen today. I have absolutely no
After about half a mile, I stopped. “Mom, come on. You have to tell me what you wanted to talk about. I can’t stand it anymore.”
She turned to look at me. We were face to face on the sidewalk, my mother with her back to the lake, the sounds of the birds still coursing through the air, the sounds of cars whizzing by on the street not far from where we stood. My mother crossed her arms and pinched her lips together. In the breeze, her hair-sprayed hair lifted all together at the sides like wings.
“I failed all the tests,” she said. “I have Alzheimer’s.”
Just like that.
I knew that she had gone for testing earlier, and that the doctor had wanted her to come back in six months, which was the appointment she just had. The tests weren’t about absolute numbers. They were about establishing a pattern of decline. They were things like puzzles and answering questions about a paragraph you’d just read and counting backward by sevens. We had practiced these things together over the phone. Her performance over the past few months had been sporadic. And there had been signs that things were off—the time she got frustrated to the point of tears because she couldn’t remember how to use the letter opener, the time she was late meeting me for lunch because she got lost driving to a restaurant we always ate at, the time she left the back door to the kitchen wide open overnight, the time I found her eating a peppermint candy with the wrapper still on. But I got good at convincing myself that these things happened because my mother was under a particular amount of stress right then or that what she was experiencing were isolated, and entirely normal, moments of forgetfulness.
“Dr. Wu said there was also a possibility it could be something called Pick’s. But he’s pretty sure it’s the other thing. I have to go to a neurologist. They want to do some scans of my brain.”
I felt as though my head had suddenly inflated. I felt fuzzy and hot.
“Anyway, I told Dr. Wu he was wrong. I told him I was too young to have it. Do you remember that first doctor? That’s what he said. But Dr. Wu said I have the kind called early-onset.” She twisted her body to look out at the lake and, when she turned back to me, said quietly, as if conferring a secret, “I think my mother had it. That must have been what it was. We just thought she was going crazy.”
My mother never brought up her parents. They had both died years earlier, but even when they were alive, we had no sort of relationship with them. I had never even met them.
She had a little spasm of a shiver.
“That isn’t what’s going to happen to you,” I said.
“It is. That’s exactly what’s going to happen to me.” She kicked at something invisible on the ground. “Damn it.”
My stomach was killing me.
“It runs in the family,” she said.
I didn’t think about it this way at the time, but I guess she was warning me. If it wasn’t exactly a warning, I believe that she was at least contemplating a future for me that caused her more despair than her own diagnosis had brought. She was casting it out in her mind, imagining the bright and capable daughter she’d raised felled by a disease that dissolved a person’s mind wholly and persistently. She must have been, because what she did next was so uncharacteristic it could have been prompted only by the most piercing anguish: She put her arm around me. She drew me to her. She circled her arms around my middle, her hands below my shoulder blades. And she held me there. I cupped her shoulders from behind and squeezed her soft arms with mine. I could feel her breathing. I could smell her hair spray in the breeze.
Four
Deflation
I n the morning, a slice of sunlight cuts through the gap between the drawn curtains. Lying on my side in the bed, my hands palm to palm between my knees, I stare at it and wonder what’s going to happen today. I have absolutely no
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