by Daniel Pyne
Yippee-ai-oh-kai-yay.
“Field hockey? Rugby?”
Legs dangling, feet bare, sitting uneasily on the end of the examining bench she feels a cold shiver of loss trouble through her. “No.”
He’s a specialist she found online, deliberately out of network. Patchwork hair not necessarily all his own, troubled skin, lab coat, skinny legs crossed, hipster socks showing, the doctor makes a few more marks with a stylus on the wireless tablet crooked in his arm, then glances up at her, pushing rimless glasses back up his nose.
“Ping-Pong,” Sentro offers. “In high school.”
“Your film shows evidence of multiple concussions. Serial TBI.” He’s fishing.
“Traumatic brain injury?” She just stares at him. The fluorescent ceiling has a faint low-frequency hum that harmonizes with her tinnitus and reminds her of something new; an image flickers, indistinct. Cairo? Apple-shaped man in a mustard-colored suit. Comic book eye patch, leather, tooled with a starburst.
Then gone in, literally, a flash.
Her hearing has, until the high scree crept into it, always been freakishly good.
. . . I’m a cowboy who never saw a cow,
never roped a steer ’cause I don’t know how,
and I sure ain’t fixin’ to startin’ now—
“At some point in your life, Aubrey,” the doctor is explaining, “you received a blow to the head, and then again, and then again—more than once is what I’m saying, likely over an extended period of time, months, years. And now you’re paying the price for it.” His eyes keep straying to the small bandage under her ear, but he seems to have no idea how close he’s stumbled toward the truth.
“Wouldn’t I remember something like that?” She wonders if he can tell she’s dissembling.
“You would. Until you forgot.” There’s a hesitation before he asks, as kindly as he can, “Abusive relationship?”
“Excuse me?”
“Did your late husband get physical with you?”
“What?” The utter absurdity of this misunderstanding is a relief. “No. Nothing like that. Not my husband or anyone. Ever.” She conjures a picture of Dennis, with the easy, restful eyes, running a hand lightly through her hair. His gentle touch a glory.
“Okay. Well. What you have we call persistent postconcussion syndrome,” the doctor tells her, “and it would explain your headaches, the aural distortions, mood swings, memory problems, and so forth. Unfortunately it can present long after the original trauma.”
“Will it clear up?”
“It won’t. No. It’s . . . typically degenerative.”
“Typically.”
“Yes.”
“And rarely?”
“There’s so much we don’t know,” he admits.
The examining room is quiet, farthest away from reception. She feels herself detach so she can brave the only question she isn’t sure she wants answered. “Is this Alzheimer’s?”
“No. Different.”
“Better, worse?”
“Different.”
Shit. Now she just wants to wrap this up and leave. “Treatments.”
“There’s so much we don’t know.”
“Right.” This is why she chose someone not in her provider network. No one at work needs to know.
“Soccer?” She avoids the doctor’s probing gaze, looks away to all the wall monitors and all the film clipped to light boxes that flank the paper-covered bench where she’s sitting. “All that heading of the ball, field collisions,” the doctor elaborates. “You know.” She respects his persistence, not just going through the motions. Part of her wishes she could tell him what he wants to know, but even if it were possible, she wonders where she would even start.
With the song, in the car?
There’s an extended, uncomfortable pause; then he exhales and sits back. His eyes are too big for his face, set far apart, not unkind. “Ms. Sentro. Aubrey. Let me put this as clearly as I can. Your symptoms are still presenting; it’s possible they could stabilize. Palliate. But you need to make some hard decisions. Expect the best; prepare for the worst. Work, family. Reduce your stress. Move to Iowa. Let your brain calm down, and perhaps we’ll get a fuller picture, over time.”
“Okay.” She’s become impatient with him. “Meanwhile, can you give me something for the headaches?”
“I’d like to run some more tests.”
Sentro just looks at him, level, as opaque as she can manage. Refusing to give him the gift of her fear. Of this onset of brain fog and disremembering, she is very afraid, which is unfamiliar territory. She needs time to sort it out.
The physician shifts his bony weight and makes a serious face. “Look, not to overstate your condition, Ms. Sentro, but there also exists with this a possibility that another head injury could be extremely dangerous for you.”
Sentro nods. “Second-impact syndrome. I read about it online.”
“Online.”
“WebMD.” Another concussion could kill her is what it said.
“The University of Google.” A withering professional grimace and sigh as, frustrated, the doctor stands up from his rolling stool. “Well, then, you read that there’s also a persuasive correlation between recurrent head trauma and early-onset Alzheimer’s disease and dementia.”
“Which you also can’t cure. Yeah, I saw that.” If he wanted to touch a nerve, he’s succeeded. “But you said this wasn’t. Alzheimer’s.”
The doctor just shrugs.
She feels a hot West Texas wind buffeting her face through the open window, the gloomy blue-slate sun-split sky bearing down with its promise of a squall—how the Chevy hit a dip in the highway, how her stomach flopped when the chassis bottomed out, bumpers squawking, sparks pinwheeling out behind like shooting stars as she floated up off the seat, unbelted, how her mother’s arm shot out in front of her, protective, and both of them laughing, their off-key singing interrupted, and how her mother’s purse spilled off the seat and the handgun tumbled out of it, small, pink grip, lady size.
Yippee-ai-oh-kai-ay.
“I come unmoored, is all,” she offers thoughtlessly.
“What?”
Sentro looks up at him blankly and remembers where she is. “If you can’t fix me, I don’t see the upside in running more tests.”
The doctor taps his notebook screen dark and walks out.
An impasse is so often the best she can manage.
CHAPTER THREE
“What’d the doctor say?”
Jeremy Troon has always felt hard put that he looks so much like his mother—or, well, yes, a young, male MBA version of her, but still. Lean, even lanky, strangely graceful but unathletic, a kind of puzzle in which some of the pieces don’t fit, according to his ex-girlfriend Kimmy. Same troubled hair, same nose, same eyes, her unreadable gaze; gentle features not so much effeminate, he decided long ago, as somehow tentative. Almost meek. It didn’t make surviving adolescence any easier. Jenny, on the other hand, got their father’s infectious grin and blind confidence, which, although mostly useless over the long run, made her popular until she decided she wouldn’t be.
Wearing creased blue chinos with a linen jacket for his presentation to his graduate school entrepreneurial seminar later in the afternoon, he’s flung his power tie rakishly back over his shoulder so it won’t get any soup on it.
“He said I shouldn’t eat fries. Then he offered me a prescription sample for this female Viagra.”
“Mom. Jesus. TMI.”
“You asked.”
The gazpacho has a kick to it. The restaurant she chose this time is lively and crowded with young, eager, hungry faces like his. Their bimonthly lunches have become habit, when she’s not traveling, and he finds he looks forward to them, even if he insists to his sister that they’re a pain.
His mother looks tired. “Did you talk to him about your memory stuff?”
She says, poker faced, “Oh. I totally forgot.”
Jeremy shakes his head—�
�That’s not funny, Mom”—and his mother’s expression softens, and for a moment he can tell she’s trying to find his father in him. He knows all her looks; he studied her greedily growing up so he’d have her in his head during the extended periods she spent away on business. Now, of course, he couldn’t get her out of his head if he wanted to, and so he watches her study him to locate her husband in him, which he knows she always will. The Dennis gene is subtle: the folds of his eyelids, that frustrated downturn of mouth. He sees it, too, sometimes, looking back at him from the mirror in the morning.
But mostly he sees her.
“I don’t have a problem with my memory,” she’s telling him. “A four-hour erection sounds lovely, though. Conceptually. Can a woman really get one?”
Nobody wants to hear their mom talk about erections. “You called me last week from the airport parking lot because you thought your car was stolen.”
“I think ‘missing’ was the word I used.”
“It was in the next aisle.”
“I had jet lag. The flight from Athens was endless, some Turks kept smoking in the bathroom, and the flight attendants ran out of gin.”
“You don’t drink gin.”
“I started, the trip took so long,” she jokes, deadpan.
He gives her back her own deadpan. “You weren’t freaking out?”
“I don’t think so.”
“I think you were. Yes.” On the phone, her voice had an edge of anxiousness he’d never heard before.
“Annoyed, was all. And exhausted.”
She’s probably lying; he lets it go. “Right, fine.” Letting go is reflexive for him—all the years of her ins and outs and extended absences. When he was little he just resented it, but as he got older, he started to believe that her work was so meaningless, so unimportant and tedious, and had cost her so dearly that she clung to it all the more stubbornly. This gave it the aura of something else, something that mattered, that made a difference, so her kids would be proud of her and understand why she couldn’t always be with them.
And the truth is it didn’t matter—she tried her best; he knows she’s still trying. Other kids had a mom at home; Jeremy and Jenny had their dad. And what Jeremy really feels now, as a grown-ass adult (as Jenny would say), is the acute need to take care of his mom the way his dad would.
She gets lost. She’s been forgetting things.
He pokes at his salad and returns to his soup. “Is this something I should worry about? As a matter of genetics, I mean? Gramps didn’t have it, but what about your mom?”
“Died young.”
“I know, but what if what happened with her was an early sign of dementia or—”
“No. Totally different,” his mother adds, and then, unnecessarily, “I’m not her. It wasn’t contagious.” She reaches across the table and touches his arm. “It’s not something you’ll get.”
It’s always been a little awkward when she tries to nurture, because it’s not her nature; his sister was the first to point this out to him. Back from another failed shopping expedition on which tweenage Jenny had been determined to find a fashion intersection with the cool girls who’d been merciless in trolling his sister because of her feral opposition to everything they represented, their mother had, unfortunately, bought into Jenny’s fiction that she wanted, needed, to be accepted. Five hours and $362.45 of Forever 21 later, Jenny had a wardrobe she would never wear and was flopped facedown on her brother’s bed in tears, since all she really had wanted was a mom who would tell her she didn’t need to curry favor with those little bitches. That she could be loved the way she was. And their mother did love Jenny—loved them both unconditionally, no question about it. She could even say the right words, once their father helped her disentangle the Gordian workings of a twelve-year-old girl’s mind.
But she nevertheless has always, in his opinion, lacked the basic tools to truly connect and console.
He doesn’t resent it. Or does he? Always disconcerting, growing up, when he’d have to explain to teachers that no, his mom was away working, and his dad would be bringing the class snacks, or whatever. Kimmy, the psych major, was of the opinion that a father could never provide his children what a mother would. Jenny was of the opinion that Kimmy was a pretentious bitch and was quick to point out Kimmy also claimed she was a virgin because she’d only had anal sex.
At the time he wished he hadn’t shared with his sister that intimate detail, but it turned out Jenny, in the case of Kimmy, was proved absolutely right. He was still paying off their trip to Thailand, where she’d left him for a scuba instructor and then used his PayPal account for another six months before Jeremy figured it out and changed the password.
“You don’t need to worry about this, or about me. I’m just old,” his mother is saying to him, trying to lighten the mood. “We seniors start to slip.”
He wonders again what the doctor really told her or if she went to the clinic at all.
“You’re not even fifty,” he points out. His phone chimes, and he can’t stop himself from glancing down at the text screen, and while his mother says nothing, he’s well aware of her opinions about phone etiquette and braves her irritation at the interruption.
Message from Jenny. His mother complains that she never gets texts from her daughter; he gets from his sister at minimum a dozen a day. With a flurry of taps on the screen keyboard, he tells Jenny where he is and whom he’s with and, defensive, in a variation on an old theme, multitasking with only a slight distracted delay, suggests to his mother: “Maybe you’re feeling job lag.”
“I like my job.”
Here we go again, he thinks. “Your job.” Sipping soup and talking: “Reinsurance.”
“International risk mitigation.”
“Reinsurance,” he repeats, even more sarcastically.
“Somebody has to do it.”
“And you’ve been there how long? Flying red-eyes to wherever, whenever, East Bumfuck. Jesus, Mom—the sleep deprivation alone. And jet lag. Long term, you know what that does to you? They’ve done studies of old flight attendants. It’s not good. I mean, no wonder you have brain rot.”
“I like my job.” She says it again because it’s true. “I’m fine, Jemmy, really.”
A sour warning frown—it’s Jenny’s pet name for him, from when she was little, and his sister’s still the only one Jeremy allows to make use of it. Is his mom breaking the rule on purpose, or did she forget? “Shouldn’t you have gotten promoted or something? Running your own team, sending other people out to do the shit work? You’re smart.” He means it. Whenever she came home from a long trip and had a little time off, she would be right there to help him with schoolwork. She rocked with history and the world, geopolitics, capital cities of every country, the myriad troubles with China, Russia, the Middle East. “Dad used to always brag on how you got yanked out of basic and sent to Berlin on special assignment at, what, eighteen?”
“I think I was twenty.” She says this modestly but seems pleased that Jeremy remembers. “Your father liked to spin stories.”
“You’re saying it didn’t happen?”
“It wasn’t nearly as colorful as he made it sound,” she says in a tone that lets him know she doesn’t want to talk about it anymore. He’s trawled these waters before during their lunches, but she never takes the bait.
There’s so much about her she won’t let him in on. Could that be how it is with every parent? They have whole other lives before their kids are born and no obligation to share. His dad used to say their mom’s guardedness came from what had happened with her mother. Something else she doesn’t like to talk about. But at least with that, he understands why.
“Do you think it bugged him?”
“Who?”
“Dad.”
“Do I think what bugged him?”
“You being the breadwinner, him staying home?”
She nods and hesitates. “I don’t know so much that we made a decision as that it was just kind of how
things worked out.” And Jeremy marvels, irritably, at how quickly she turns it around on him: “How would you feel if Kimmy made all the money and you had to raise the kids?”
“Mom, I broke up with her almost two years ago.”
An awkward pause. His mother looks momentarily caught out, and he realizes that she’s forgotten.
“We talked all about it; you said it was probably for the best. Remember?”
She clearly doesn’t. Color flushes her cheeks; she looks down at her empty plate.
“Jet lag, I guess,” Jeremy deadpans.
Ignoring the dig, she answers a question he didn’t ask. “We made a life. Your dad and I. Or tried to. We made a home.”
“Where you hardly ever were.”
“A home isn’t necessarily a fixed place.”
“Oh.” Jeremy pounces. “Let’s see. There was me and Jen and Dad—and, well, yeah, you sometimes, in person, but a lot of times just like swooping in with the phone call from a galaxy far, far away.” He doesn’t mean for it to sound so bitter, but the words just tumble out and swarm like Furies.
“We were on the forefront of Skype,” his mother jokes.
Jeremy feels no need to pretend that this is funny. “You do realize that meant I never had a dad who was a role model in the business world. Good or bad. Somebody to emulate, somebody to rebel against.”
She shrugs. “You have me.”
“It’s not the same.”
His mother sits back, folding her hands on the napkin in her lap. She gets stronger, he knows, and grows calmer when she’s upset. “How’s your sister?”
“I don’t know. Why don’t you ask her? She isn’t talking to me.”
“Why?”
Jeremy just shrugs. An only child, his mother doesn’t understand the sibling thing.
