Borrowed Time

Chapter 1: The Diagnosis

The neurologist's office smelled like antiseptic and dying flowers. Rebecca sat in the leather chair across from Dr. Whitmore, watching his lips move but hearing only fragments. Early-onset. Familial. Progressive. The words floated past her like debris in a flood.

"Mrs. Chen, do you understand what I'm telling you?"

She wasn't Mrs. Chen anymore. She'd gone back to her maiden name, Rebecca Holloway, after the divorce three years ago. But she didn't correct him. It seemed unimportant now.

"Forty-two," she heard herself say. "I'm forty-two years old."

"I know this is difficult to process." Dr. Whitmore's voice was practiced, gentle in the way of someone who delivered devastating news regularly. "Early-onset Alzheimer's is rare, but not unheard of. Given your family history—your mother's diagnosis at fifty-one—we've been monitoring you closely. I wish I had better news."

Rebecca thought of her mother, who had spent her final years in a facility that smelled of boiled vegetables and loneliness, who had looked at Rebecca with the eyes of a stranger, who had called her by her dead sister's name until she stopped speaking altogether.

"How long?" Rebecca asked.

"Every case is different. With medication, lifestyle modifications, cognitive therapy—"

"How long?"

Dr. Whitmore paused. "Based on your current cognitive assessments and the rate of progression we've observed, you likely have three to five years of relatively normal function. After that..." He spread his hands in a gesture that encompassed everything she was about to lose.

Three to five years. Marcus was fifteen. If she was lucky, she might see him graduate high school with her mind mostly intact. If she was lucky.

"Is there someone you'd like me to call? A family member, a friend?"

Rebecca shook her head. There was only Marcus, waiting at home, probably arranging his collection of vintage cameras in the precise order he preferred, unaware that his mother's brain was slowly betraying them both.

"I need to go," she said, standing on legs that felt borrowed from someone else. "My son is waiting."

She drove home in a daze, muscle memory guiding the car through familiar streets. The radio played a song she'd danced to at her wedding, and she turned it off. Past tense. Everything was about to become past tense.

Marcus was exactly where she'd expected him to be, seated at the kitchen table with his cameras arranged in a semicircle before him. He was seventeen now, though he still had the face of the boy she'd held in the delivery room, the boy who hadn't cried at birth but had stared at the fluorescent lights with an intensity that should have told her something.

"You're eleven minutes late," Marcus said without looking up. He was polishing the lens of a 1970s Pentax, his movements precise and rhythmic. "You said you'd be home by four."

"I know. I'm sorry, honey."

He looked up then, his dark eyes scanning her face with the analytical attention he gave to everything. "Your eyes are red. You've been crying. Your posture is different. Something bad happened."

Marcus had never been good at reading emotions in the traditional sense, but he'd developed his own system over the years, cataloging physical indicators like data points. Sometimes he understood her better than anyone.

Rebecca sat down across from him, careful not to disturb the camera arrangement. "I need to tell you something, and it's going to be hard to hear."

"Is it about the doctor? You went to the brain doctor today. I have it on the calendar."

"Yes." She took a breath. "The doctor found something wrong with my brain, Marcus. It's called Alzheimer's disease. Do you remember when Grandma was sick?"

Marcus's hands stilled on the camera. "Grandma forgot things. She forgot my name. She forgot how to eat. She forgot how to breathe." He paused. "You're going to forget things."

"Yes."

"You're going to forget me."

The words hit her like a physical blow. "Not for a long time," she said, though she didn't know if it was true. "And even if my brain forgets, my heart won't. I will always love you, Marcus. That's not something a disease can take away."

Marcus processed this in silence, his fingers resuming their polishing motion. It was a self-soothing behavior, she knew, a way of managing information that didn't fit neatly into his understanding of the world.

"How long?" he asked finally.

"The doctor said three to five years before things get really bad."

"That's one thousand ninety-five to one thousand eight hundred twenty-five days." Marcus did calculations automatically, converting abstract concepts into concrete numbers. "That's not very many days."

"No," Rebecca agreed. "It's not."

"What happens to me when you forget?"

It was the question she'd been dreading, the one that had circled her mind like a vulture during the entire drive home. Marcus was brilliant in many ways—he could identify any camera model from fifty feet away, could recall conversations from years ago with perfect accuracy, could solve complex mathematical problems in seconds—but he struggled with things most people took for granted. Cooking. Budgeting. Navigating social situations. Reading faces and understanding subtext.

His father had left when Marcus was twelve, unable or unwilling to handle the demands of raising an autistic child. The divorce papers had arrived six months later, along with a check that covered child support but not the absence of a parent. Marcus had never mentioned his father since, filing him away in whatever mental category he reserved for things that no longer existed.

"I'm going to make sure you're okay," Rebecca said. "That's my job now. Teaching you everything you need to know."

"Everything is a lot of things."

"I know. But we have time. Not a lot, but enough." She reached across the table, and Marcus allowed her to take his hand, though she could feel the slight tension in his fingers. Physical affection was something he tolerated rather than sought. "We're going to figure this out together."

Marcus nodded slowly. "I'll make a list," he said. "Lists help me understand things."

"That's a good idea."

"Mom?" He met her eyes, which he rarely did. "I don't want you to forget me."

Rebecca squeezed his hand, blinking back tears. "I don't want that either, sweetheart. I don't want that either."