“I’ve already told you,” I said. “She’s a secret-keeper. I’m still convinced she was behind Asa breaking up with me.”
“Your high school boyfriend?”
“Yes. But she wouldn’t talk about it. Just like when I was little she wouldn’t tell me who my father was, she wouldn’t answer any questions about my twin sister. I mean, I was a kid and I had a thousand questions and she didn’t answer any of them.”
“Well, the truth was pretty ugly, wasn’t it?”
“So? It was still the truth, as opposed to lies of omission.”
Neither of them looked convinced. But what would they know? Parents who adored them, parents who thought they were great, parents who were not hiding anything. Whereas Tamar was a different animal entirely.
“Everyone’s hiding something, though,” Sunshine said. “Everyone’s got secrets. Don’t you think?”
“I do. Have you forgotten how I earn my living? What is Words by Winter if not an exercise in secrets?”
You would think that people could write their own messages. You would think they could find a way to unburden their hearts to each other. You would think that in this enormous world full of words and the limitless ways to put them together, people should be able to figure out how to say what needs to be said. But you would be wrong. Words by Winter fulfilled three to five word requests per day. $100 x 3 = $300/day x 7 days a week (no days off in the world of words) = $2,100/week x 4 = $8,400/month, which was more than enough to live on, much more, at least in the places where the wordsmiths who work for Words by Winter had chosen to live thus far, up to and including Old Forge, New York.
Not that there were wordsmiths, plural. There was only one wordsmith, singular, and that singular wordsmith was me. I was the Winter of Words.
“How go the wintry words these days, by the way?” Sunshine asked.
We were sitting at their big wooden dining table. Dinner was finished. We were playing Jeopardy! and taking turns drinking thimblefuls of limoncello from actual thimbles, taken from Sunshine’s needlework bag, every time someone won a round. Sunshine made her living by crocheting fruit and vegetable hats for babies, multiple hats a day, and selling them online. She had taken up crocheting the first time she had cancer, during those long hours of chemo, when she got sick of reading and sick of not moving. When the cancer came back she taught herself how to make baby hats because they were quick and cute and cheery and she could knock one out in less than an hour. When it came back again she set herself a speed goal: three per hour.
Now she was unstoppable. She was crocheting one as we played. From the red and green look of the thing it was a future strawberry. Parents sent photos of their babies wearing Sunshine’s hats: little strawberry and radish and apple and scallion hat–baby photos, magneted to Sunshine and Brown’s refrigerator the way photos of their own babies would be magneted, if they had any babies. Which they didn’t. Strawberries were most popular.
“Booming,” I said. “The word business is to Clara Winter what baby hats are to Sunshine Rourke.”
“You would think that people could write their own goddamn thank-you notes,” Brown said, the same thing that he had been saying ever since I started my word business.
“You would, but you’d be wrong. And they’re not all thank-you notes. Thank-you notes comprise only a small percentage of Words by Winter output.”
It was my habit to use clinical-sounding terminology, like “comprise only a small percentage” and “output,” when talking about the business of words. Clinical terminology kept things simple. Straightforward. Sterile. Clinical terminology avoided the messy, the painful, the please-help-me-this-is-too-hard-to-handle part of the job.
“Isn’t it awful, though, sometimes?” Sunshine said. “Don’t you ever feel wordless yourself and start fumbling around, trying to figure out how to say what needs to be said?”
I slammed my palm down on the table, which was what we did in lieu of a buzzer. Whoever slammed their hand down first got to answer the clue.
“Words for sixteen hundred,” I said. “Answer to Sunshine’s question. What is yes?”
I was cheating, giving both the clue and the answer, but there had been many thimblefuls of limoncello by then and the game had devolved into a non-game. Yes was the right answer, though. It was harder than you’d think to write one hundred perfect words, one hundred words that would convey sorrow, or sympathy, or love, or regret, or any one of a thousand other longings.
* * *
They had a test for it, a test for the gene mutation. What was necessary, before they would test an asymptomatic relative for eFAD, was a confirmed gene mutation in a parent or sibling. eFAD was caused by any one of several different gene mutations on chromosomes 21, 14 and 1. PSEN1, found on chromosome 14, was the most common.
Translation: before the neuroscientists would consider testing me for the genetic mutation that would virtually guarantee my developing early-onset Alzheimer’s, my mother had to be tested for the mutation. Which she had been. PSEN1, you were identified in the wild, lurking in the woodland trails of my mother’s body. A searchlight was shone upon you and you could hide no longer.
“Clara, I am obligated to tell you that if you are considering being tested for one of the genetic mutations, you will need pre-test genetic counseling.”
Dry. Official. Formal. But the look in the doctor’s eyes was none of those things. By now we were comrades, fellow soldiers on the anti-Alzheimer’s footpath. He waited for me to say something. He knew me well enough by now to know that testing was something I already would have thought about, pondered, lain awake at night monkey-minding my way through the various ramifications. Maybe not the monkey-mind part. But the thinking about, the pondering—that much he had already guessed.
I nodded. He took that as a sign to continue.
“You’d first have a telephone call with the genetic counselor in order to assess if you’re a candidate.”
“Which I am because my mother has a confirmed mutation.”
“Correct. So the counselor would explain the procedure, the cost, the challenges and logistics of the test itself”—he paused again, I nodded again, he continued—“and then, if you wanted to pursue it, you and your family members could schedule an office visit with the counselor.”
All this I already knew, and more. An office visit where my family members and I would talk about our experience of the disease in my family, what we would do differently if we did in fact have a mutation, how our spouses or significant others and children and possible future children and colleagues and bosses might feel about it. The possible implications for health insurance and life insurance and long-term-care insurance. The possible loss of hope for our future if we had the mutation, and the equally possible, according to those who had been tested, relief. Because then you would know. You would know. If you wanted to know. Did I want to know?
“Okay,” I said.
“Okay . . . ?”