Pascal's Wager (8 page)

“You're not making it easier on anybody by keeping things to yourself.”

Max looked wearily at the palms of his hands, which were sparkling with sweat under the fluorescent lights.

“These last six months,” he said. “I've watched her change. It started with little things. You know, she would forget a word now and then—”

“A word?” I said. “Like what?”

“Like my name. Your name.”

“Go on.”

“She lost interest in music. She didn't want to go to the symphony, the opera—all the things she loved.”

“You're talking about her like she's in the morgue,” I said. “Look, I'm sorry I went ballistic on you, but don't do your pessimistic, this-is-the-end-of-life-as-we-know-it routine. This is data. I just need the data so I can formulate a plan. That's all.”

He grabbed both of my hands and squeezed them between his damp ones. “You are so much like your mama—always a rock in a crisis. I never once, not in all these years, saw her shed a tear.”

He went off down Memory Lane then, and I knew I'd gotten all I was going to get out of him. I half listened while I created a new compartment: the what-to-do-about-Mother compartment.

Later that evening, we finally saw her. She'd come out of the anesthesia—at least, that's what the nurses told us—and she was transferred to a private room. She did open her eyes, but she refused to talk to us, wouldn't say a word. I dragged a resident out of the room bodily and into the hall.

“Why isn't she talking?” I asked.

“That's hard to say,” she said.

“What is it with you medical types?” I practically shrieked at her. “Just give me the possibilities!”

The resident, who couldn't have been as old as I was, straightened herself to a new height and said stiffly, “There is no evidence of brain damage from the accident, and she is fully responsive otherwise, so the probability of aphasia from the general anesthesia is very low.”

“Which means?” I said.

“She's not talking because she doesn't want to,” the resident said. “That's my educated guess.”

“Thanks,” I said. I waited until she was well down the hall before I went in and closed Mother's door.

“Mother, if you won't talk to us, we really don't have any
choice but to ask for a psychiatric evaluation,” I said. “In fact, that might not be a bad idea anyway. What do you say?”

She didn't say anything. But she didn't pick up the bedpan and throw it at me, so I took that as a yes. I hailed a different resident and put in a request. Then I went back to Escondido Village and collapsed.

I woke up around three o'clock in the morning, still in my bloodstained top and skirt, riddled with anxiety. I didn't normally get nervous. Every time I heard of another grad student going on Paxil, I resisted the urge to say, “If you'd get your act together, you wouldn't have to pop pills just to function.”

Right about then, however, I wouldn't have turned down a couple of Valium.

The only solution, of course, was to do something—anything. I tried grading homework, but when I found myself leafing aimlessly through the papers, I abandoned that. I thought about doing some of my own work, but that was pointless until I talked to Nigel. It occurred to me then that I hadn't even called anybody over at Sloan to tell them what was going on. Tabitha, I was sure, had folded when I didn't show up for her tutoring session. I could only hope Jacoboni hadn't been there to torment her, or she would be headed for the nearest community college.

This was getting out of hand. I turned on my laptop and logged on to the Internet.

“What do they call it when you lose your marbles?” I muttered as I stared at the cursor blinking
keyword
. “Wacko, nuts, section 8—no that's military. Think scientific—dementia!”

I typed it out, and then I hit the delete button.

What am I doing? She hasn't even had the evaluation yet and I've got her taking Quaaludes. Maybe she's just being stubborn. Maybe it's a mid-life crisis. Menopause?

No, she'd been through that. The way she told it, there was
nothing to go through. You just stopped having periods, and good riddance. These women with their hot flashes and hormone pills just didn't know how to let go of the reproductive years. She, personally, was concentrating on the most
pro
ductive years of her life.

I recalled all of that as I forced myself to type “Dementias” and waited for the computer to collect the data that was surely going to prove that I was wrong. The possibilities were more numerous than I'd expected—since I'd hoped for none. And they were all chilling.

I'd been right about her not having the symptoms of Alzheimer's, and depression seemed like only a remote possibility. But it could be a tumor on the frontal lobe of the brain. And it could be one of the few dementias that specifically affected language. Only one of them involved the area of judgment, however. Even the name needled me: Pick's Disease.

“Who came up with that?” I said to the screen.

It just blinked back at me and gave me a list of symptoms that could have been taken out of my diary entries about Mother—if I'd been keeping one. But what really shook me was the description of the later stages, given coldly, as if the writer were making out a grocery list:

• Total loss of motor control
  

• Total loss of all language functions
  

• Severe dementia
  

There was no cure, it told me matter-of-factly. The progression couldn't even be slowed down. Its rate varied from a duration of less than two years to well over ten.

That's about the time I turned the computer off and made myself a cup of extra-strong Earl Grey. There was no way. We had to be talking at worst a tumor—which would more than probably be operable—or at best a case of severe mid-life crisis, which,
knowing Mother, she could knock out of commission in about three sessions with a psychiatrist. Make that two.

By the time I finished deciding all that, the sun had long since come up and it was time to head for Sloan. I splashed some cold water on my face and threw on an outfit I wasn't sure was a whole lot better than the little number my mother had worn the day before.

The woman is haunting me
, I thought as I headed across campus at a trot.
We have to resolve this
.

I was practically running by the time I got there, and I forced myself to slow down and get it together. Just because my mother was losing it didn't mean I had to. It was time to get out of the what-to-do-about-Mother compartment and into the what's-going-on-with-my-thesis slot. It would be bad form to actually look like I'd been up all night when I met with Nigel.

I fumbled in my bag for a clip and, using the front door for a mirror, organized my hair into some semblance of order. There wasn't much I could do about the bags, fully packed, under my eyes. For once I wished I
did
drink more coffee.

I closed my eyes, took a couple of deep breaths, and pushed through the double doors. They swung open into the cool, clean, orderly place that was my real world.

Except that Jacoboni was right there, leaning into the half-door on the department office.

“Have mercy, McGavock,” he said. “I thought you looked bad yesterday.”

I gave him a sour look and glanced at my watch. “What are you doing here at this hour? Am I that late?”

“No, the Arab terrorists roped me into meeting them for breakfast. Do people really eat at this ungodly hour?”

“The who?” I said. And then I put up a hand. “Never mind. I don't want to know.”

“Actually it's Peter and Rashad, but—”

“Jill, I've been looking for you.”

It was Nigel, emerging from the classroom across from the department office. It took a few seconds for that to register. My brain was like a 45 rpm being played at 33⅓.

“I'm sorry,” I said. “My mother and I had an accident yesterday on the way to lunch—”

To my utter amazement, Nigel put out a hand and curled it around my arm. “Come in here. We don't need to discuss this in the hallway.” He drew me toward the classroom door, his eyes on Jacoboni. “Keep the noise to a minimum, would you, please, Alan? I have a class taking an exam in here.”

I let him usher me into the classroom like I was some kind of bereaved mourner, but the minute we were in I managed to tactfully pull away. His eyes swept the room where ten students were hunched over their Scantrons and wiping away beads of sweat. Nigel motioned me toward one of the wide windowsills on the bowed window that overlooked Lomita Mall and the Science and Engineering Quad beyond it. I perched dutifully and tried to reclaim an aura of composure. Fortunately, I'd just clipped my hair back or I would've raked it.

“Have you had a chance to look at my new proposal?” I said.

Nigel gave me a long look.

Not a good sign
, I thought.

“Is it a huge problem?” I said. “I felt confident about—”

“Were you hurt?” he said.

“By what? I haven't checked my mailbox yet this morning. Did you put some kind of reply in there? If the proposal is trash, I can deal with that.”

“I'm talking about your accident.” Nigel's normally impassive face was puckered. Was every middle-aged person I knew undergoing a personality transplant?

“I'm fine,” I said. “A couple of stitches and a bump on the head. I'm ready to get focused on this issue.”

“And your mother?”

She has nothing to do with this! I
wanted to shriek at him. Only
my reverence for all things mathematical reined me in. I explained my mother's injuries, leaving out the part about the psychiatric evaluation. Stanford was a mammoth community as universities go, but its grapevine was as efficient as any.

“It's nothing life-threatening,” I said.

“But certainly enough to distract you.” Nigel shook his head slightly. “We do not have to talk about this today. A couple of days for you to regroup and be there for your mother isn't going to hinder you that much.”

If we don't talk about this right now
, I thought,
I may explode
. That
would hinder me
.

“Look, Dr. Frost,” I said evenly, “I don't mix my personal life with my academic life. Whatever needs to be done to get me back on track, I'd like to know now. Did I not go far enough with my thesis? Are you thinking I may be scooped again?”

I could tell I had Nigel a little unnerved, because he was patting his pocket for his half-glasses, which I spotted up on the overhead projector. Fine. Let him be unnerved. This wasn't about his life anyway.

“My notes are upstairs in my office,” he said when he had given up the search for his specs.

“Shall I go get them?” I said.

“No,” he said heavily. “I would prefer not to go into detail at this time. I will tell you, however, that in my view you may have gone further than you need to with the new thesis. There's a chance you won't be able to finish the necessary work on schedule, especially given your mother's injuries.”

He apparently noticed my jaw tighten, because he continued.

“There are only so many hours in the day, Jill,” Nigel said. “No matter how you juggle them, they still come down to twenty-four. Subtracting sleep, you're left with sixteen.”

If I got eight hours of sleep a night I'd think I had narcolepsy
, I thought.

“I see that you disagree,” he said.

He was getting good at reading me. I didn't think I was so transparent.

“We will discuss this more thoroughly,” he said. “At present, I think it's best you simply do what you can in your—” he paused—
“academic life.”

I heard his deliberate emphasis, and I resented it. My voice went cold as I said, “Do you have any objections to my continuing work on my thesis until we have a more in-depth discussion? I have to go in the same direction, no matter what is decided about the conclusion.”

He absently patted his pocket again. “It would not be my choice, and I'm advising you against it. However, there will be no official consequences if you do. It is ultimately your decision how you integrate the various aspects of your life.”

“Thank you,” I said.

As I padded out of the room, I could feel him still watching me. He was “integrating” just a tad too much as far as I was concerned. My personal life was none of his business. Having him cross that line was worse than getting the once-over from Jacoboni. Who, I decided as I scooped the paperwork out of my mailbox, was going to get zero details about the accident. Nothing. Nada.

I headed down the hall toward the stairs, quickening my steps as I passed the break room with its odor of overcooked coffee. It was getting more tempting by the minute to take up the caffeine habit. Shuffling mail as I hurried down the steps, I stopped cold in front of the lecture hall at the bottom and stared at my mail. Stuck between the proclamation from American Express that I had qualified for a Gold Card and the latest plea from a distraught freshman to let him take his midterm late was a pink While You Were Out slip telling me to call a Dr. Fenwick at Stanford Hospital—re: Your Mother.

I took the rest of the turns at a near crawl as I studied it. It couldn't be an emergency or they'd have called on my cell phone.
I'd given the number to that second impertinent little resident. Of course, chances were he'd lost it.

When I got to my office, a dig through my bag revealed that I'd left the cell phone in my apartment. I went for the stairs again and climbed to the grad student lounge on the second floor. It was the only phone we had access to, though with everybody packing wireless it was always available.

I tapped the pink slip against the window as I waited endlessly for Dr. Fenwick to come to the phone. Who the heck was that, anyway? I'd talked to so many doctors the day before, I was surprised I remembered my own name. I stopped tapping and made a concerted effort to pull myself in. It was the crossover from mother-world into math-world that was stressing me out, and that was going to be my downfall if I didn't nip it in the bud.