Unthinkable (Unstoppable 2)

Her hand closed around mine. “It’s a degenerative disease, honey. My memory will continue to deteriorate over time; my mental ability, cognitive function, all of it. I won’t be able to do a lot of the things I used to.”

Pain erupted across my forehead, and I closed my eyes, inhaling and exhaling. “Okay. Okay.” I opened my eyes and met her gaze. “So, how do we fix it? Is there a pill, treatment, or…?”

The edges of her lips contorted into a sad smile, and my heart sank at the pained expression on her face. “I’m on medication, which is helping to alleviate some of the symptoms… but it won’t stop the progression, Liss. There’s no treatment,” she said, her voice fading to a whisper, “Alzheimer’s disease is incurable.”

Incurable.

My eyes widened, and the folder dropped to the floor with a short clatter as understanding dawned. I backed up a step, my lower back bumping into the counter. “You’ll die from it, won’t you?”

She pushed up from the table and took hold of my shoulders. “We don’t need to worry about that right now. People live full lives for years, Liss.”

“How many years? How long until you forget everything?”

Moisture pooled in her eyes and her head dipped to the side.

r /> My throat clogged. I swallowed three times and couldn’t clear it. “How long, Mom?”

Pain radiated from her eyes. “It differs from one person to the next, Liss. I’m still in the relatively early stages. I could have another eight to ten years.”

Eight to ten years?

My stomach rolled, a void opening up inside my chest and swallowing my heart whole. Because she’d said that like it was a good thing. Like that was the best we could hope for.

Eight to ten years.

It wasn’t enough.

My head throbbed, and I pulled out of her grip, driving my fingers through my hair, trying to quell the uprising of what felt like an angry mob of questions and fears. My heart was beating too fast for my brain to keep up. I closed my eyes, trying to count the beats, but I didn’t even know where to begin.

I ground my teeth as my vision spun, looking for an escape from the emotion threatening to suffocate me, and then my fists flexed as a surge of irrational anger flooded my veins. Somewhere deep down I knew it wasn’t the right reaction to have, but I couldn’t seem to figure out how the fuck to feel, and this one came easiest.

My foot snagged the edge of the binder on the floor when I shifted, pulling my gaze down.

She couldn’t remember how to bake fucking cookies.

I never cared about the cookies. Didn’t even like them. But I wanted my mother to be able to fucking bake them. She wasn’t even fifty, for fuck’s sake. How could she have Alzheimer’s disease? How could she be facing the prospect of forgetting everything? It was fucking crazy.

And she hadn’t told me. She’d written her notes and recipes and instructions and reminders, but she’d known, and she hadn’t fucking said anything to me. She’d let me go on living in a bubble of ignorance, knowing my life was going to blast apart. Knowing she wouldn’t know my goddamn name in ten years or less.

“You don’t even know how to make cookies.” The words seethed from me, a bitterness I failed to disguise spilling into the air between us. It swirled like a black cloud, poisoning my mind. My head came up, and I fixed my hardened glare on my mom’s pale face. “What dance class does Bella take, Mom?”

A tiny crease formed between her eyes as her gaze flicked to the side where I knew she had a flyer pinned to the notice board.

“Don’t look at the goddamn board,” I yelled, and she flinched.

A hot wave of guilt crashed into me and my body seemed to lose structure. I flailed behind me for something to grip onto and averted my gaze from the look of dismay on my mom’s face.

I’d shouted at her, as if she’d done something wrong by not being able to remember, as if this was her fault somehow. I knew it wasn’t, but I didn’t know what else to do. Helplessness wasn’t an emotion I knew how to navigate. Navigating emotions at all wasn’t something I did well.

“I have to go.” I scrambled for the door.

“Lissa, wait, please.”

I didn’t. I ignored her plea and walked out of the room, then the front door, and then I got into my car.

I drove for hours with the windows lowered and the frigid December air biting at my cheeks. I drove without stopping until the gauge on the gas read almost empty, and then I parked and took out my cell.

With shaking hands, I pulled up google and typed in young onset Alzheimer’s. My vision spotted as my eyes scoured over page after page of results, and then the pads of my fingers were racing across the screen, typing, scrolling, searching… for one positive thing. One fucking thing. There was nothing positive about my mom’s disease.