She lives next door, in a house where words vanish, the wind slipping through cracks to steal, sweeping syllables from the cobwebbed corners, shooing phrases out from behind gauzy drapes, stripping thoughts bare. She does not recognize the theft at first. A stumble, a pause.
“What?” We are chatting over her azaleas on a warm summer evening.
She halts, midsentence, stammers, a word suspended on the tip of her mind. The lapse is brief. She is herself again.
“Age,” she laughs, though she is not old, this mother of a ten-year-old boy, this long-distance runner, this writer of poetry. She tells me she has taken first prize in a poetry competition and will be the featured poet at the Friday reading.
The café is crowded with poets and romantics. She rises to read, a sinewy waif in her black dress.
Within these pages
falling loose
from unraveled spine
The lilt in her voice betrays a London childhood, washing the listeners in nostalgia for a thatched-roof town no one has been.
faded words
cl-cl for space,
She falters, repeats.
Sp-space for cl-clamber
The lapse is long. A hundred ears wait.
Whisp-ed-er fading—
The words scramble, vanish into a sudden hush. She stares at the words, Demotic script from her own hand. She searches the room, looking for the thief, reads the stilled faces, finds no Rosetta stone. The wind is a whirling dervish, stealing her words away.
Primary progressive aphasia. She sits in a sterile room with too many echoes, stainless steel cabinets distorting her reflection, her husband beside her. Rain slashes at the window.
Primary. The first stages in which memory, thought, and recognition begin to fade.
Progressive. The gradual disappearing, seven years maybe.
Aphasia. The inability to articulate ideas or comprehend language.
Primary progressive aphasia, she tells me, raking fallen leaves, clawing at the dirt with the metal tines.
Who will I be, she wants to ask the doctor, when all of me is gone? She had the words, she tells me. But she could not find the voice.
I cannot find the voice either, but I think the title of her poem: A note in the margin.
A year passes. Another. Winter has thawed into an early spring. Her son is thirteen now, the same towheaded toddler framed on her desk, but sullen with early adolescence. He hoists his backpack on his shoulders as he climbs out of the car, looks at me warily. I cross the driveway, gaze at the newly planted pansies. She has returned from a run, her tanned legs lean, her face flushed, is on her knees, patting the soil. Her son stomps toward the front door. His father gathers groceries from the trunk, waves.
“How was yesterday’s appointment?”
She rises stiffly, wipes her forehead with a dirt-streaked hand.
“I can run. When all the wo-words are gone, I can—run.” She speaks in terse syllables. On her office walls are photos of a jubilant finish at the Boston Marathon. She runs faster than the thieving wind. “And I will still be his mom.” She does not look up as he slams the door shut.
Another year passes. She greets me in snatches from the flower beds, agitated despite hard runs, tells me the latest before she can’t anymore, her words in stumbles and lurches, each day a sentence, the seasons the stanzas. The clock rewinds, is ticking backward, taking her into childhood, into infancy, into the womb, when all was sensation, the earth without form and void, darkness upon the face of the deep, without thought, without words, without memory, only heartbeat, the wind at her back.
“Hello, Maggie,” I call. She kneels among the irises. “Finish your run?”
She starts, rises, takes a stiff step backward, soil falling from her fingers. The front door opens.
“Bye, Mom,” her son kisses her cheek, bounds into the car.
“She doesn’t know us either.” Her husband pauses on the porch.
She lives next door, in a house swept empty of words, wakes only to dig in her garden, to mold the pulsing earth, to plant the spring, leaves only to lace her shoes and run, mile after mile, the steady thud of feet on concrete.
Until one day when she does not return. Hit by a car, the newspaper says, twenty miles from home. A terrible accident.
The irises beyond my kitchen window sway. I pick up a pencil, strike out the words.
She ran faster, I write.
A note in the margin.