Whenever she thought about college, her thoughts ultimately bumped into January of her freshman year. A little over three hours after her family had visited and left for home, Alice had heard a tentative knock on her dorm room door. She still remembered every detail of the dean standing in her doorway—the single, deep crease between his eyebrows, the boyish part in his grandfatherly gray hair, the woolly pills budding all over his forest green sweater, the low, careful cadence of his voice.

Her father had driven the car off Route 93 and into a tree. He might have fallen asleep. He might have had too much to drink at dinner. He always had too much to drink at dinner. He was in a hospital in Manchester. Her mother and her sister were dead.

“JOHN? IS THAT YOU?”

“No, it’s just me bringing in the towels. It’s about to pour,” said Lydia.

The air was charged and heavy. They were due for some rain. The weather had cooperated all week with postcard sunny days and perfect sleeping temperatures each night. Her brain had cooperated all week, too. She’d come to recognize the difference between days that would be fraught with difficulties finding memories and words and bathrooms and days that her Alzheimer’s would lie silent and not interfere. On those quiescent days, she was her normal self, the self she understood and had confidence in. On those days, she could almost convince herself that Dr. Davis and the genetic counselor had been wrong, or that the last six months had been a horrible dream, only a nightmare, the monster under her bed and clawing at her covers not real.

From the living room, Alice watched Lydia fold towels and stack them on one of the kitchen stools. She wore a light blue, spaghetti-strap tank top and a black skirt. She looked freshly showered. Alice still wore her bathing suit under a faded fish-print beach dress.

“Should I get changed?” she asked.

“If you want to.”

Lydia returned clean mugs to a cabinet and checked her watch. Then she came into the living room, gathered the magazines and catalogs from the couch and floor, and piled them into a neat stack on the coffee table. She checked her watch. She took a copy of Cape Cod Magazine off the top of the pile, sat down on the couch, and began flipping through it. They seemed to be killing time, but Alice didn’t understand why. Something wasn’t right.

“Where’s John?” asked Alice.

Lydia looked up from the magazine, either amused or embarrassed or maybe both. Alice couldn’t tell.

“He should be home any minute.”

“So we’re waiting for him.”

“Uh-huh.”

“Where’s Anne?”

“Anna’s in Boston, with Charlie.”

“No, Anne, my sister, where’s Anne?”

Lydia stared at her without blinking, all lightness drained from her face.

“Mom, Anne’s dead. She died in a car accident with your mother.”

Lydia’s eyes didn’t move from Alice’s. Alice stopped breathing, and her heart squeezed like a fist. Her head and fingers went numb, and the world around her became dark and narrow. She took in a huge breath of air. It filled her head and fingers with oxygen, and it filled her pounding heart with rage and grief. She began to shake and cry.

“No, Mom, this happened a long time ago, remember?”

Lydia was talking to her, but Alice couldn’t hear what she was saying. She could only feel the rage and grief coursing through her every cell, her sick heart, and her hot tears, and she could only hear her own voice in her head screaming for Anne and her mother.

John stood over them, drenched.

“What happened?”

“She was asking for Anne. She thinks they just died.”

He held her head in his hands. He was talking to her, trying to calm her down. Why isn’t he upset, too? He’s known about this for a while, that’s why, and he’s been keeping it from me. She couldn’t trust him.

AUGUST 2004

Her mother and sister had died when she was a freshman in college. No pictures of her mother or Anne filled a single page in their family photo albums. There was no evidence of them at her graduations, her wedding, or with her, John, and the children on holidays, vacations, or birthdays. She couldn’t picture her mother as an old woman, and she certainly would be now, and Anne hadn’t aged beyond a teenager in her mind. Still, she’d been so sure that they were about to walk through the front door, not as ghosts from the past but alive and well, and that they were coming to stay at the house in Chatham with them for the summer. She was somewhat scared that she could become that confused, that, awake and sober, she could wholeheartedly expect a visit from her long-dead mother and sister. It was even scarier that this scared her only somewhat.

Alice, John, and Lydia sat at the patio table on the porch eating breakfast. Lydia was talking to them about the members of her summer ensemble and her rehearsals. But mostly, she was talking to John.

“I was so intimidated before I got here, you know? I mean, you should see all their bios. MFAs in theater from NYU and the Actors Studio and degrees from Yale, experience on Broadway.”

“Wow, sounds like a very experienced group. What’s the age range?” he asked.

“Oh, I’m easily the youngest. Most are probably in their thirties and forties, but there’s a man and woman as old as you and Mom.”

“That old, huh?”

“You know what I mean. Anyway, I didn’t know if I’d be totally out of my league, but the training I’ve been piecing together and the work I’ve been getting has really given me the right tools. I totally know what I’m doing.”

Alice remembered having the same insecurity and realization in her first months as a professor at Harvard.

“They all definitely have more experience than me, but none of them have studied Meisner. They all studied Stanislavsky, or the Method, but I really think Meisner is the most powerful approach for true spontaneity in acting. So even though I don’t have as much onstage experience, I bring something unique to the group.”

“That’s great, honey. That’s probably one of the reasons they cast you. What’s ‘spontaneity in acting’ mean exactly?” John asked.

Alice had wondered the same thing, but her words, viscous in amyloid goo, lagged behind John’s, as they so often seemed to now in real-time conversation. So she listened to her husband and daughter ramble effortlessly ahead of her and watched them as participants onstage from her seat in the audience.

She cut her sesame bagel in half and took a bite. She didn’t like it plain. Several condiment options sat on the table—wild Maine blueberry jam, a jar of peanut butter, a stick of butter on a plate, and a tub of white butter. But it wasn’t called white butter. What was it called? Not mayonnaise. No, it was too thick, like butter. What was its name? She pointed her butter knife at it.

“John, can you pass that to me?”