“Sweetie,” she said, “want to go for a run?”
Andrew stretched his arms over his head. He wasn’t usually much of a runner, but occasionally she could cajole him. “I guess so. Let me change.”
She started stiffly, her muscles cold after a few days. She hadn’t had much get up and go since her breakup with Glenn. It had been all she could do to set one foot in front of the other.She’d left another message but hadn’t heard a thing, and his silence left a dull, heavy feeling in her heart.
It felt good to get outside now. Her mother’s peonies were in full bloom, a heady pink, already shedding petals on the flagstone walkway. Their lifespan so brief. Her mother had adored peonies, even after she’d forgotten their names. Cassie hated the thought of them ripped out along with the house. But even if she managed to save them, she had no place to plant them in the city.
“Where to?” Andrew looked glad to be outside too, stretching his legs, his skin rosy in the sun.
“Let’s cut through the woods then head toward town.”
“Aren’t they already bulldozing?”
“They haven’t gotten to this side yet.” She wasn’t keen on going anywhere near the construction site, but they could avoid that part. And you couldn’t shrink from reality. She was learning that. Finally.
They jogged across the street and up the hill, ducking into the cool of the trees. A woodpecker swept overhead in a flash of black and red. One of the big ones. Soon all this would be gone, packaged into mini estates with gardeners and manicured lawns.
She slowed to a walk. “There’s something I need to tell you, that I should have told you a long time ago.”
He looked at her. “What?”
“You know Grandma died in her fifties.” She felt a familiar prickle of fear, the way she always felt when she pictured what might lie ahead. The heartbreaking decline. The inevitable end. And now, to bring Andrew into this. She’d wanted to spare him, but in doing so had kept him a child when he needed to learn to be a grown up.
“She was sick, right?” he said tentatively.
She took a breath. “Yes, she had a form of dementia—Alzheimer’s—that starts very young. People who have it often start showing symptoms in their forties or fifties. It’s called early onset. A genetic mutation causes it.”
Andrew paled. “Do you have it? Are you going to get Alzheimer’s?”
They’d paused next to a huge woodland rhododendron that towered next to the path, its conical white buds about to unfurl.
Her heart felt like a block of cement. “I don’t know. I have a fifty percent chance of inheriting the mutation. If I do have it, I’ll definitely develop Alzheimer’s, the early onset kind.” She plowed on. “There’s a test but I decided not to do it.”
“So you could know if you wanted?”
“That’s why Aunt Shelly and I went into the city this morning. I had an appointment with a genetic counselor. But I changed my mind.”
“Why?” His eyes widened.
She sat on the remains of a log and motioned for him to sit too. She looked at his sweet, worried face and saw herself at his age, scared to death she would lose her mother, her anchor to the world. “I won’t lie, it would be a tremendous relief to know I’m negative. But if I do have the mutation, it would be devastating. It’d be like knowing I’m going to get hit by a truck. Not when I’m going to die, but how. I don’t want to live that way. I can’t.”
He was blinking back tears, which made her tear up too. “I’m sorry, sweetie. I should have told you sooner since it affects you too.”
“It does?” He was still processing, hadn’t quite grasped the whole thing.
“If I do have the mutation, you have a fifty percent chance of inheriting it too. But if I don’t, you don’t either. It doesn’t skip generations.”
“This is fucked up.” He exhaled as it sank in. “So I might have this too?”
She closed her eyes for a brief second. This had always been her greatest fear. She’d been reluctant to have a child because of what she might pass on, but Phil had convinced her.The research is promising. They’re working on a cure.She’d wanted a family. She’d wanted to believe.
“Yes, it’s possible you could have the mutation too.”
He shoved off the log. “Why didn’t you ever tell me any of this?”
She felt a rising misery. Of course he was stunned and confused. She’d just dropped a bomb on him. “A whole bunch of bad reasons—I was scared. In denial. Couldn’t deal with it.” She toed away a red and black beetle that had begun investigating her shoe. “I’m not a very good role model, I’m afraid. Shelly is much braver. She dealt with it years ago.”
“Does she have it?”
