She’d just begun reading King Lear. She so loved Shakespeare’s tragedies but had never read this one. Unfortunately, as was becoming routine, she found herself stuck after only a few minutes. She reread the previous page, tracing the imaginary line below the words with her index finger. She drank the entire glass of iced tea and watched the birds in the trees.

“There you are. What are you doing, aren’t we going for a run?” John asked.

“Oh, yes, good. This book is making me crazy.”

“Let’s go then.”

“Are you going to that conference today?”

“Monday.”

“What’s today?”

“Thursday.”

“Oh. And when does Lydia get here?”

“Sunday.”

“That’s before you leave?”

“Yes. Ali, I just told you all this. You should put it in your BlackBerry, I think it’d make you feel better.”

“Okay, sorry.”

“Ready?”

“Yes. Wait, let me pee before we go.”

“All right, I’ll be out by the garage.”

She placed her empty glass on the counter next to the sink and dropped the blanket and book on the slipcovered chair-and-a-half in the living room. She stood ready to move, but her legs needed further instruction. What did she come in here for? She retraced her steps—blanket and book, glass on counter, porch with John. He was leaving soon to attend the International Conference on Alzheimer’s Disease. Sunday maybe? She’d have to ask him to be sure. They were about to go for a run. It was a little cool out. She came in for a fleece! No, that wasn’t it. She was already wearing one. To hell with it.

Just as she reached the front door, an urgent pressure in her bladder announced itself, and she remembered that she really had to pee. She hastened back down the hall and opened the door to the bathroom. Only, to her utter disbelief, it wasn’t the bathroom. A broom, mop, bucket, vacuum cleaner, stool, toolbox, lightbulbs, flashlights, bleach. The utility closet.

She looked farther down the hall. The kitchen to the left, the living room to the right, and that was it. There was a half bath on this floor, wasn’t there? There had to be. It was right here. But it wasn’t. She hurried to the kitchen but found only one door, and it led to the back porch. She raced over to the living room, but of course, there wasn’t a bathroom off the living room. She rushed back to the hallway and held the doorknob.

“Please God, please God, please God.”

She swung the door open like an illusionist revealing her most mystifying trick, but the bathroom didn’t magically reappear.

How can I be lost in my own home?

She thought about bolting upstairs to the full bath, but she was strangely stuck and dumbfounded in the Twilight Zone–like, bathroomless dimension of the first floor. She was unable to hold it in any longer. She had an ethereal sense of observing herself, this poor, unfamiliar woman crying in the hallway. It didn’t sound like the somewhat guarded cry of an adult woman. It was the scared, defeated, and unrestrained crying of a small child.

Her tears weren’t all she wasn’t able to contain any longer. John burst through the front door just in time to witness the urine streaming down her right leg, soaking her sweatpants, sock, and sneaker.

“Don’t look at me!”

“Ali, don’t cry, it’s okay.”

“I don’t know where I am.”

“It’s okay, you’re right here.”

“I’m lost.”

“You’re not lost, Ali, you’re with me.”

He held her, and rocked her slightly side to side, soothing her as she’d seen him calm their children after innumerable physical injuries and social injustices.

“I couldn’t find the bathroom.”

“It’s okay.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be sorry, it’s okay. Come on, let’s get you changed. The day’s already heating up, you need something lighter anyway.”

BEFORE JOHN LEFT FOR THE conference, he gave Lydia detailed instructions concerning Alice’s medications, her running routine, her cell phone, and the Safe Return program. He also gave her the neurologist’s phone number, just in case. When Alice replayed his little speech in her head, it sounded very much like the ones they had delivered to their teenage babysitters before leaving the kids for weekends away in Maine or Vermont. Now she needed to be watched. By her own daughter.

After their first dinner alone together at the Squire, Alice and Lydia walked down Main Street without talking. The line of luxury cars and SUVs parked along the curb, outfitted with bike racks and kayaks bungeed on roofs, crammed with baby strollers, beach chairs, and umbrellas, and sporting license plates from Connecticut, New York, and New Jersey in addition to Massachusetts signaled the summer season officially in full swing. Families ambled along the sidewalk without regard for lanes of pedestrian traffic, unhurried and without specific destinations, stopping, backtracking, and window-shopping. Like they had all the time in the world.

An easy ten-minute stroll removed them from the congested downtown. They stopped in front of the Chatham Lighthouse and breathed in the panoramic view of the beach below before walking the thirty steps down to the sand. A modest line of sandals and flip-flops waited at the bottom, where they’d been kicked off earlier in the day. Alice and Lydia added their shoes to the end of the row and continued walking. The sign in front of them read:

WARNING: STRONG CURRENT. Surf subject to unexpected life-threatening waves and currents. No lifeguard. Hazardous area for: swimming and wading, diving and waterskiing, sailboards and small boats, rafts and canoes.

Alice watched and listened to the relentless, breaking waves pounding the shore. If it weren’t for the colossal seawall constructed at the edges of the properties of the million-dollar homes along Shore Road, the ocean would have taken each house in, devouring them all without sympathy or apology. She imagined her Alzheimer’s like this ocean at Lighthouse Beach—unstoppable, ferocious, destructive. Only there were no seawalls in her brain to protect her memories and thoughts from the onslaught.

“I’m sorry I didn’t get to go to your play,” she said to Lydia.

“It’s all right. I know it was because of Dad this time.”

“I can’t wait to see the one you’re in this summer.”

“Uh-huh.”

The sun hung low and impossibly big in the pink and blue sky, ready to plunge into the Altantic. They walked by a man kneeling in the sand, aiming his camera at the horizon, trying to capture its fleeting beauty before it disappeared with the sun.

“This conference Dad’s at is about Alzheimer’s?”

“Yes.”

“Is he trying to find a better treatment there?”

“He is.”

“Do you think he’ll find one?”

Alice watched the tide coming in, erasing footprints, demolishing an elaborate sand castle decorated with shells, filling in a hole dug earlier that day with plastic shovels, ridding the shore of its daily history. She envied the beautiful homes behind the seawall.

“No.”

Alice picked up a shell. She rubbed the sand off, revealing its milky white shine and elegant ribbons of pink. She liked its smooth feel, but it was broken on one edge. She thought about tossing it into the water but decided to keep it.

“Well, I’m sure he wouldn’t take the time to go if he didn’t think he could find something,” said Lydia.

Two girls wearing University of Massachusetts sweatshirts walked toward them, giggling. Alice smiled at them and said “Hello” as they passed.

“I wish you’d go to college,” said Alice.

“Mom, please don’t.”

Not wanting to start their week together with a full-blown fight, Alice silently reminisced while they walked. The professors she’d loved and feared and made a fool of herself in front of, the boys she’d loved and feared and made an even bigger fool of herself in front of, the punchy all-nighters before exams, the classes, the parties, the friendships, meeting John—her memories of that time in her life were vivid, perfectly intact, and easily accessed. They were almost a little cocky the way they came to her, so full and ready, like they had no knowledge of the war going on just a few centimeters to their left.