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“Yes, well…”
“Wait, if they’re in Cleveland, who’s staying with you?” The last time he had visited her, there had been an aide helping out.
“I’m okay right now, Amos. It’s all right for me to be here.”
“I don’t know, Mary. I don’t have a good feeling about this.”
“You don’t have to worry about me.”
She sounded almost like the old Mary. Almost.
But there was something else going on here that he didn’t like.
Chapter2
DECKER PUT HIS LARGE BAREfeet on the cold wood of the floor. “I’ve been meaning to come to visit you. It’s been too long. But you sound better…than last time.”
“Yes, it has been too long. Far too long. But not you.Me.”
Decker straightened up and eyed the window, where the city lights winked lazily at him in the darkness. “I, uh, I don’t understand,” he replied. “I guess I’m still half-asleep,” he added by way of explanation, but she wasn’t making much sense.
“This…is a terrible thing I have…in my head. It’s…awful.”
“I know, Mary. And I wish you didn’t have to deal with it.” He stopped and struggled to come up with more sympathetic words; it was a task that would have been easy for his old self, and nearly impossible for his current one. “I…I wish there was a cure.”
“For you, too,” she said. “There is no cure for you, either.” In these words he could sense her seeking some level of solidarity with him in diseases of the mind that would end up doing them both in.
“We’re a lot alike in that regard,” he agreed.
“But alsonotalike,” she retorted in a tone she hadn’t used before. It was an escalation of sorts, at least he took it that way.
Decker didn’t know how to respond to that, so he didn’t. He sat there listening to her breathing over the phone. In the ensuing silence he could also feel something building, like thrust did on an airplane about to take off. He was about to break the silence when she did.
“Does it keep changing?” she asked in a small, measured tone.
He knew exactly what she was referring to. “It seems to,” he answered. “But everyone’s mind changes, Mary, healthy or not. Nothing is static. Normal or not, whatevernormalis.”
“But you’re the only one I know who truly…who could maybe understand what I’m going through.”
He heard a sound over the line and thought she might be slapping herself in the head, as though trying to dislodge in there what was slowly killing her. He tried to think of something to say, to draw her back to the conversation.
“But I thought you were getting counseling. It helped me. It can help you.”
“I did get counseling. But then I stopped getting it.”
“But why?” he said as his anxiety rose higher.
“They told me all I needed to know. After that, it was a waste of time. And I don’t have any time to waste, Amos, not onefuckingsecond.” She let the blunt epithet hang there in the ether like smoke from a discharged gun.
“Mary, please let me know what’s wrong. I can tell something’s happened.”
Sharp as a pistol shot she barked, “I forgot Sandy today. Right before they left to go to Cleveland. I forgot her.”
“People forget names all the time, Mary,” said Decker, sounding a bit relieved. He sensed this was where the conversation was intended to go when all was said and done. He didn’t think this when next she spoke.
“I didn’t forget hername. I…I forgot who shewas.” There came another lengthy pause where all Decker could hear was the woman’s breaths and then a sob that was so dry and drawn out it sounded like she was strangling.
“Mary, are you—”
