Page 27 of Woman on the Verge

My dad looked up at the ceiling. “September?”

“Close,” Dr. Belton said, with a good-natured smile. “It’s March.”

My dad snapped his fingers, likeAlmost had it.

“Who do you live with, Rob?” Dr. Belton asked.

“My wife, Meredith, and my dog,” he said.

Dr. Belton looked at me to validate this, and I said, “Dad, you don’t have a dog.”

Their last dog was Ruby, and she had died at least ten years earlier.

“Of course I have a dog!”

“Dad, Ruby died a long time ago.”

“Go get Mer. She’ll tell you. Where is she?”

“She’s at home, Dad.”

“No, she was just here!”

This was the first time I had seen him become agitated. I reached for his hand, held it in mine. He calmed.

Dr. Belton asked him to count backward from one hundred by sevens. He did okay at first, though it took him longer than it should have to come up with the right answers—ninety-three, eighty-six, seventy-nine. When he got to the sixties, he seemed to completely forget what he was doing. He threw up his hands with a laugh. I’d never seen him so embarrassed.

Dr. Belton showed him an illustration of a clock and asked him to recreate a drawing of it. My dad drew the circle, but got tripped up when attempting to draw the hands of the clock at six and two. He had the concentrated look of someone presented with quantum physics. Then that went away, and he just appeared utterly lost. The same happened when Dr. Belton showed him a drawing of a cube and asked him to recreate it. After a few minutes of trying, there were just disconnected lines on the paper.

“Okay, Rob,” Dr. Belton said. “Now, do you remember those five words I gave you a few minutes ago?”

I could tell by the look on my dad’s face that he didn’t even remember that Dr. Belton had given him five words. He scrambled, spitting out random words in a hurry:

“Paper?Bird?Plane?” he tried.

Dr. Belton shook his head.

Elephant, flower, red, door, pencil,I thought to myself. I had to confirm my own sanity.

“So?” I asked, as Dr. Belton made notes.

He looked up at me.

“We’re going to admit him.”

“They’re admitting me?” Dad asked.

Dr. Belton and I both ignored him.

“What do you think is going on?” I asked.

Dr. Belton sighed. “It could be any number of things, from a nutritional deficiency to an autoimmune issue to ... We just don’t know yet.”

Then he left, saying someone would be back soon to bring us upstairs.

“Okay, Dad, we’re going to figure this out.”

“I’m tired,” he said. “I’ve been here all day.”