Maggie's hand is shaking on the handle of the carrier.
"Julian. Sweetheart. Are you running a fever."
"Mom."
His voice has gone sharp. He has dropped his hand off my waist and stepped a half-step in front of me.
"I don't know what you are doing this morning. I don't know what you think is going on. But this is Nor. She is my girlfriend. We have been together for two years. We are very happy. I am asking you, with respect — please don't speak to her the way you just spoke to her."
"Julian — "
"First. She is not whatever word you just used. Second. Speak to her with respect, please, or do not speak to her. Third. If you came up here to see me, you are welcome to stay. If you came up here to start something, please go home."
His voice has the cold even clip of the man who fired me from the kitchen yesterday morning.
In ten years I have never heard him use that tone with his mother.
She has gone the color of paper.
"Julian. What is the matter with you."
"With me. Nothing. With you, I don't know."
"Whatever this woman is doing to you — whatever — "
The carrier in her hand.
She lifts it slightly. For one half-second I think she is going to put it down on the kitchen island.
She doesn't. She drops it. From shoulder height. Onto the slate floor of the back hall.
The Pyrex breaks in three pieces. Seafood chowder spreads out across the slate. Bay leaves. Oyster crackers floating in cream. The white napkin she had folded over the top is sitting in the chowder going slowly orange.
She does not pick it up.
She walks out of the back door and down the gravel drive to her Lexus and she does not close the door behind her.
The kitchen is very quiet.
Julian is staring at the chowder on the floor. His shoulders go up, then down.
The cold is gone out of his face. He looks at me, and the face under the cold is the face of the man who is frightened of having done something wrong.
"Nor. I'm sorry. I don't know what — I don't know what's going on with her."
I put my arms around him. I put my face against his collarbone.
"It's okay. Don't be sorry. Thank you."
Thank you. Even with all of yourself locked away from yourself, you walked in front of me.
He puts his chin on top of my head and rocks me a little, side to side, the way he used to rock me when I cried at twenty-three.
"Idiot," he says into my hair. "Who else am I going to defend."
I clean up the chowder. I put the broken Pyrex in a paper bag on top of the kitchen trash. I walk Julian back upstairs and put him into the shower and stand at the bathroom door talking to him about nothing until the steam comes out under the door.
I take my phone into the back yard and I dial Maggie.
She picks up on the third ring. She has been crying. The first thing she says is not hello. The first thing she says is:
"Nora. What is wrong with my son."
I sit down on the cold step.
"Maggie. He's sick."
"Sick how."
"Early-onset Alzheimer's. He was diagnosed three years ago. He didn't tell me. He didn't tell you. He told Dr. Chen at MGH and he hasn't told anyone else."
The silence on the other end of the phone goes long enough that I think she has hung up.
She has not hung up. She is crying. She is crying without any sound, and the only thing that gives it away is the ragged way her breath comes back at me through the line.
"How. He's — he's thirty-five."
"It can happen at thirty-five. It happens to people. It happened to him."
"How long."
"Two years, the doctor said. Maybe a little more, maybe a little less. Right now his memory has — frozen. Five years ago. To when we were dating. That's why he doesn't think we got married. He doesn't remember it."
"Oh god. Oh god, oh god."
"Maggie. I'm so sorry."
"Why are you with him."
The question is not what it would have been an hour ago.
"What."
"Why are you with him. He gave you the house. He gave you the money. He doesn't know you. Why are you here."
I look at the dead grass at the edge of the porch. There is a small chipmunk sitting on the stone wall watching me.
"Because I love him. Maggie. He is still my husband. Whether or not he remembers it. I remember it. That's enough."
She makes a sound on the other end of the line that no one is supposed to hear another person make.
"Nora. Sweetheart. Can I — can I drive back."
"Drive back."
"I don't want to leave him. I don't want to leave you alone with this."
I put my forehead on my knee.
"Yes. Come back. Please come back."
Maggie takes him in for the full panel the following week. She does not tell him she knows. She tells him she has been worried about her own memory and would like company at the appointments.
He goes with her because he cannot refuse his mother any more than he can refuse a stranger in his house.
The MRI confirms what Dr. Chen had on file already. The new cognitive scores are worse than the ones I read in the chart in October. The atrophy is moving faster than the textbooks predicted for his age.
The neurologist on Maggie's side of the room — a colleague of Dr. Chen's — uses the phrase advancing more rapidly than anticipated and watches Maggie's face when he says it. Maggie does not cry until the elevator. In the elevator she puts her forehead against the wall and stays there for two floors.
I'm waiting in the lobby. She comes out of the elevator and walks past everyone on the bench and she puts her face into my shoulder and cries the way a sixty-four-year-old woman is not supposed to be able to cry in public.
I hold her up.
Two years.
That's the number we have, give or take.
I move into the cottage in Rockport that week. I give notice on the apartment in 4B. I hand my notice in at the firm — I work two months out, I close out three projects, I pass the schoolhouse-conversion in Lawrence to a junior I trust, and I leave.
I become Nor full-time.
I do my hair the way I did at twenty-six. I keep my makeup in the bathroom drawer the way I kept it then. I wear his shirts to bed. I let him take me to the movies on Friday nights at the small theater in Gloucester that only ever shows two films at a time. I let him buy me too many books at the used bookstore on Main Street. I let him win at chess.
We go to the sunflower farm in August. I wear a yellow dress for the photograph. He sets the timer on his iPhone and runs into frame and I step back into the same pose I held at twenty-one. He looks at me afterwards and does not know why his eyes are wet.
Everyone says he looks ten years younger. His sister, his college friends, the bartender at the place on Main where we go on Thursdays — Julian. You look like you again. He laughs. He says I am good for him. He puts his arm around me at the bar.
Only I know that what we are inside of is a small bright room with no doors.
The morning it happens I am holding his hand on the sidewalk outside the bakery on Dock Square. He has a paper bag of pastries in his other hand. We are talking about whether to take the long way home along the harbor.
He stops walking. He lets go of my hand.
"I'm sorry. Who are you."
The bag of pastries hits the sidewalk.
I turn around very slowly.
His face is the face I saw in the kitchen the morning after the gala. Polite. Stranger. Frightened.
"Jules. It's me. It's Nor."
"I'm sorry. I don't — I don't know who you are."
He is taking a step back. His hand has come up between us, palm out, the way you hold a hand out at a dog you don't know.
"Don't. Please don't come closer. I don't know who you are."
People on Dock Square are turning to look at us. A woman with a stroller has stopped pushing it.
I do not move. I do not reach for him.
"Jules. I'm Nor. Look at me. Please."
"Don't call me that."
His voice cracks.
"My girlfriend calls me that. Where is — where is Nor. Where is she."
I am cut, all the way through, in one clean movement, by something I cannot see.
"I'll take you home," I say. My voice comes out level. "I won't touch you. Just walk with me. We're going to the white house with the blue door. You know the way."
He starts walking. He stays three feet from me on the sidewalk. He keeps looking at me sideways like I might lunge.
I get him home. I open the front door for him without going in first. He goes inside ahead of me and walks up the stairs and closes the bedroom door and turns the lock.
I sit down on the bottom step in the front hall.
I have lost him.
Again.