Mission Flats

6

During those first anxious days, the cabin on Lake Mattaquisett was guarded round the clock. Dick and I, with a couple of other officers, split the guard duty, rotating shifts so no one pulled two overnight watches in a row. There was not much to do out there, to be honest, especially at night. Once, some kids came driving down the access road, only to turn around the moment they saw the police Bronco parked out front. That was about it. There was no rush to contaminate this crime scene — Cravish would not be OJ’ed this time. I wasn’t much of a watchman anyway. I tended to spend most of my time at the water’s edge, listening to the plash and gurgle at my feet or gazing at the bare spots in the trees on the opposite side.

There are only a few months when we Versellians really get to see our lake. In summer, we are too busy making twelve months’ worth of income in just twelve weeks. In winter, the lake freezes and is covered with snow. There are only these few precious weeks in between when the lake is there just for us. It is a magical time of year, late October, early November. Leaf season is over. The flashburst of red and yellow foliage has faded, and the leaf-gazers have moved on to southern Vermont, New Hampshire, and Massachusetts chasing the ‘high color.’ The air begins to take on the feel of winter. The water is a flinty blue. The lake is ours alone, briefly.

During these long quiet watches, my thoughts inevitably turned to my mother. I could envision her swimming here, arms turning in languid windmill strokes, far out into the lake where the white buoy of her bathing cap would vanish in the lambent cloud-shadows that slid across the water and up over the trees.

She used to swim in this lake nearly every day from May through September. That is no mean feat, mind you. In early spring Lake Mattaquisett is cold enough to shock your lungs into seizures. Joking about the water temperature (and, among men, about its effect on the genitalia) is a rite of spring around here. But Mum was fearless. She plunged in like an otter. She was a slippery swimmer too, the kind you stopped to watch. Her body glided along the surface, frictionless, back and forth, crisscrossing the lake at the pinch-point of its hourglass shape. You could tell she was proud of her swimming, all that naturalness achieved by hours of hard labor in the lap pool as a teenager. She would emerge from the water beaming and, between heavy breaths, challenge all comers: ‘Who wants to race me?’

It was for her that I came back to Versailles. I have said that I was trapped here, but that’s not true, really. I chose to come back, and even in hindsight, even knowing where the decision led, I would do it again. It was a Hobson’s choice, but all the same it was an easy choice.

In December 1994 — not quite three years before the Danziger murder — I was a graduate student in history at Boston University. I was only in my second year, but already the academic world seemed everywhere and everything. I’d quickly joined in the death struggle with grad students nationwide over the usual desiderata: fellowships and grants and publications. The ultimate grail, a tenure-track faculty position, was an obsession — a measure of just how far I’d come from Versailles, Maine. Nothing else seemed to matter. I had a basement apartment in Allston, a horrible apartment even by grad-student standards — grungy, cold, damp. It had only one window, at sidewalk level with a view of legs scissoring past. A water stain ran along the bottom half of the wall like wainscoting, left by a flood who-knew-how-long ago. I had a girlfriend too, a fellow PhD candidate named Sandra Lowenstein. She was sallow and thin as a bird in December. Sandra talked a lot about Gramsci and Marx, and wore heavy black-framed eyeglasses to show her commitment to the cause. Maybe she dated me to show her commitment to the cause too: a bodily self-sacrifice to the lumpen-proletariat of backwoods Maine. Which was hunky-dory with me because I’d put my prole past behind me. I was out. The big Venus’s-flytrap had not got me after all. Versailles was a memory, a quaint story I would tell my friends over cocktails in Cambridge or New Haven or wherever I was headed.

By this time I already suspected my mother had Alzheimer’s. The disease can be difficult to diagnose, especially in early-onset cases like Mum’s. The symptoms precisely mimic the ordinary prosaic effects of aging — forgetfulness, trivial sorts of confusion. Eventually, however, the signs become too obvious to ignore. In the fall of ‘94, Dad was calling every week to complain about her. She left the lights or the oven on overnight, he’d say. Once, she left the car engine running until it was out of gas and he had to go out to the station with a can to refill it. Exasperated, he told me, ‘Your mother’s just not there anymore.’

All of which I understood, and yet I was able to minimize it somehow. Or at least to compartmentalize it, as the euphemism goes. (We say compartmentalize when we mean ignore or blow off.) Maybe it was just the selfishness of a twenty-something; I could not bear to rouse myself from the hermetic life of a student. More likely, I could not accept that Mum was ‘not there anymore.’ The reports from Dad just did not fit. In my mind’s eye, Annie Truman was always and very much all there.

But when I came home for Christmas break that year — after an absence of six months — I was brought up short by the reality of it. The slippage.

At first the changes were not startling. If you’d seen her, you would not have noticed anything obviously wrong. My mother was still an elegant-looking woman, effortlessly slim and ‘put together’ (her phrase, not mine). She had a new pair of designer eyeglasses, for which she’d made the long trip to Portland twice, to order them and to pick them up. Those vivid blue eyes had not faded. Her face had aged a little. The skin had shrunk over the facial bones and you could just make out the longitudinal curve of the eyeballs. Still she was extraordinarily lovely.

To me, though, there were subtle but noticeable changes. She spoke less and resisted being drawn into conversation. She seemed to have determined that there was a risk of embarrassment in speaking and decided the safer course was to say as little as possible. There were occasional memory lapses, nothing shocking but unlike her. (Every morning she greeted me with the vague exclamation ‘Ben!’ as if she were surprised to find me home.) What I saw at first was not a sudden, violent transformation in my mother, but a shift in mood. A sense of dullness and withdrawal about her, remarkable only because Anne Truman had never been remotely dull or withdrawn in her life.

Because the university virtually shuts down over the holidays, I was at home for several weeks that December. Family custom dictated that I work as a temporary at the department, but my real job was to look after Mum. By this point, Claude Truman had had just about enough of his wife. From the start, he was spectacularly unfit for the task of caring for an Alzheimer’s patient. He was still The Chief, nearing the end of his glorious reign, floating along on an argosy of self-satisfaction. Is that too unkind? Maybe. Alzheimer’s imposes a burden on the spouse, and maybe it is unreasonable to demand that every spouse be equal to the challenge. Better to say, Claude had always been able to nourish himself from within, and now he simply could not understand how his wife, who’d once had the same knack, had mysteriously become so ravenous.

So for a few weeks I put on a uniform and worked a detail as Anne Truman’s bodyguard, a happy enough arrangement. I learned the various strategies Mum and Dad had improvised for protecting her. There were yellow stick-on notes posted throughout the house — CHECK OVEN, they said, or TURN OFF LIGHTS or KEYS ON PHONE TABLE — and I began to add my own notes rather than nag her, which wounded her leonine pride. To prevent her from wandering, I took her on long walks every morning and afternoon to tire her out. For good measure, I was told, I should install a second lock on each of the house doors, keyed from the inside. This I refused to do. It smacked too much of imprisonment. I did hide the car keys, though, just in case.

The hardest moments were in simple conversation.

‘Do you have…?’

‘Do I have what, Mum?’

‘Never mind. It’s not important.’

‘No, what is it?’

‘I don’t know — I can’t-’

‘Go ahead, Mum, it’s alright. Do I have what?’

‘Ben.’

‘Yes?’

‘What do you…?’

‘I’m in school, Mum.’

‘Of course. Of course, I knew that.’

Word-finding troubles were particularly infuriating for her. Over and over, she would pause in mid-sentence, suspended, unable to grasp the word she needed. If we were walking, she would stop and stare at her feet, fists pressed to her forehead, while she racked her brain for the missing tools. I learned not to guess at the next word, which frustrated her even more. ‘Shh! Shh!’ she would hiss, and swing a stop-sign hand at me.

For all that, I still intended to go back to Boston when my break ended. I convinced myself that the Forgetting Disease was no more than an inconvenience. It was still in an early stage (she was only fifty-six), and Annie Truman would outwork it the way she’d outworked every other damn thing.

It took a calamity to open my eyes.

December 24, 1994, was absolute cold. At eight A.M., the temperature was five degrees above zero, fifteen below with the windchill. Gray, sunless, with a stabbing wind. The snow encasing us — on the roof, in the yard, in tree branches — made creaking sounds.

Mum and I did not walk that morning. Around eleven, Dick Ginoux called to say there was an impromptu Christmas party at the station. Sandwiches and beer (diet orange soda for The Chief). I declined, but Mum urged me to go. ‘It’s Christmas Eve, Ben. Go have a good time for once.’ The kitchen thermometer had risen to ten degrees or so. Still, it was a forbidding day, and I hated like hell to leave her alone in that house. But it was only for an hour or two. ‘I’m not a child,’ she insisted.

When I got back around two, the house was quiet. An empty ticking sound in the halls. I called out and got no answer. Mum’s bedroom was empty too, the bed made up neatly.

To ward off panic, I indulged the notion that she must be lost inside the house. I’d once found her standing in the hallway, confused about which doorway led to her room; maybe she’d fallen into a similar confusion now. But racing around the house was just a waste of time. Her coat, hat, and knit mittens were gone.

In the front yard I shouted her name.

No answer. The wind loud in my ears.

Anxiety thickening into dread.

How could I have left her? Stupid stupid stupid stupid stupid.

I shouted her name. The cold swallowed my calls. There were no tracks. It was possible she’d walked off down the road, which had been plowed clear.

Or into the forest. On our little street the forest crowds right up to the road’s edge. The curtain of trees is pushed back as if by an invisible arm to reveal the house in its shadow. She might have wandered anywhere in these woods.

Stupid stupid.

I phoned the station. No one in town knew where she was. Within minutes there were twenty guys out looking for her, then fifty.

‘She’ll be fine, Ben,’ Dad said.

‘The sun sets at five,’ I reminded him.

Why didn’t I insist we walk that morning, cold or no cold? We should have walked till we were both exhausted.

I set out along the unmarked trails in the thick woods around our house where we often walked and where my mother had been hiking for as long as I could remember. It was gloomy among the trees but warmer since the wind was somewhat subdued here. My undershirt was soon clammy with sweat as I ran along shouting for her.

No answer. Just the crunch of my boots in the snow.

I had a radio on my belt. Now and then a searcher would call in to report he’d seen no sign of her.

I receded into the forest along familiar trails until each ran out, then doubled back until I reached a new spur to follow. Others were searching near me. I could hear their shouts — ’Anne!’ — and my own, more frantic — ’Mum!’

The light became shadowy and dull as afternoon began to dim.

How ridiculous that she might die this way. That an entire remarkable life could arrive at such an abrupt and stupid terminus.

I scrambled through the forest for two hours, through the bare pines growing thick like hairs on a vast scalp. Dusk was coming. It was foolish to run around this way, calling crazily into the trees. The search needed better planning, better organization. Who the hell was in charge here? Didn’t they realize? These woods stretched for miles in all directions, thickening into impenetrable old growth. We would never find her by trial and error. We would run out of light and time long before we ran out of trees.

I stopped to think. Where did we walk? Where would she go?

Think.

An idea crowded in: This was what Alzheimer’s disease meant. This was the lethal danger behind that austere Teutonic name. She had wandered, in the clinical parlance; she’d had a catastrophic event.

Control your emotions. Where would she go?

A blackbird flitted in the trees, unsettling the branches.

She would go to the lake. I knew it with a crashing certainty. She would follow the road to Lake Mattaquisett, lured by some memory of a vanished summer — an engram not quite expunged, a nano-thought surviving as a skittery arc of electrical current jumping across a damaged synapse somewhere. The lake, her lake. Had the weather not been so extremely cold, or had it not been Christmas Eve, maybe the roads would not have been empty and someone would have seen her walking. She’d have been picked up on small-town radar and her whereabouts would never have been a mystery. But she’d chosen a bad day for wandering.

I ran up the trail, scrabbling past the fingers of the trees.

To the house, the car.

Driving, I felt this adrenalized sense of certainty grow. She was there, I knew it. I raced along the Post Road. I was a policeman, a real one this time, rushing to an emergency.

At dusk I found her curled on the dirt road that rings the lake. The sports use this road to reach their summer rentals. In winter it is abandoned, and far enough from the house that no one had thought to search there. No one thought she could walk that far.

I knelt and put my arms around her. Her body trembled. She pulled her arms against her chest so I could hold her. I squeezed tight to stop the shivering. Her lips were blue, her eyes frightened.

In the gloom, the water beside us looked black. This lake had been the scene of so many blithe sunny afternoons. Now it was transformed into a forbidding place. Deep, glacial, primal.

I carried her to the car to warm her up. Her cheek against mine was cold rubber.

‘I… I got lost.’ Her jaw chattered, her lips and tongue were thick.

‘Mum, you’ve been on this road ten thousand times.’

‘I got lost.’

I understood she meant more than she’d said. It was not simply that she’d got lost or even that she’d had such a dangerous close call. She’d glimpsed the horrifying course of her disease. The illness was no longer theoretical. It was the inescapable future: erasure of everything she had ever learned — even near-instinctive ideas like how to chew and swallow food, how to speak, how to control bowel movements — and the inevitable end when the brain would lose its ability to regulate essential bodily functions, when she would become bedridden and at last perish from diseases common to the bedridden, heart failure, infections, malnutrition, pneumonia. Mercifully — and it was merciful — my mother died before experiencing the full devastation of Alzheimer’s. But what she did experience — starting that Christmas Eve, I think, as she lay shivering on the frozen dirt road — was almost worse: the foreknowledge that this would be her end, the awareness that her brain had begun to clot with plaque and fibrous tangles, that neurons had begun to shut down by the tens of thousands, winking out like lights on a sinking ship. She would be stripped. Her body, unbrained, would continue to operate for years, maybe decades. Babbling, demented, incontinent. A fool.

‘What will… I do?’

‘I don’t know, Mum.’

When Dad arrived a few minutes later, he opened the passenger door of the car as if he meant to tear it off the hinges. He buried his head in her neck and kissed her and muttered, ‘Jesus, Annie. Jesus.’

The next morning I withdrew from school and joined the Versailles Police Department.