The Map of True Places

She felt relief for about sixty seconds when the neurologist said it wasn’t Alzheimer’s.

“It’s Parkinson’s,” the doctor told them.

Now, almost ten years later, it took Finch more than a minute to shuffle to the other side of the doctor’s office.

“Good,” the neurologist said. “Though you really should be using your walker. Any falls since your last visit?”

“No,” Finch said.

“What about freezing?”

“No,” Finch said. “No freezing.”

The doctor pulled out a piece of graph paper and once again drew the wavy curves he’d drawn for them at every appointment they’d been to for the last ten years. He drew a straight line through the middle, the ideal spot indicating normal dopamine levels, the one that meant the meds were working. The waves seemed larger and farther apart in this new drawing, the periods of normalcy much shorter.

“The idea is to try to keep him in the middle,” the doctor said.

She knew well what the idea was. At the high point of the wave, there was too much dopamine and Finch’s limbs and head moved on their own, a slow, loopy movement that made him look almost as if he were swimming. At the low point on the wave, Finch was rigid and anxious. All he wanted to do then was to pace, but his stiffness made any movement almost impossible, and he was likely to fall.

“It’s a pity he didn’t respond to the time-release when we tried that,” the doctor said. “And the agonists clearly aren’t working for him. As you were informed, they do cause hallucinations in some patients.” He turned to Finch. “We can’t have you living as Nathaniel Hawthorne forever, now, can we, Professor?”

Finch looked helplessly at Zee.

“So what’s our next step?” she asked.

“There really isn’t a next step, other than upping the levels of dopamine.”

He took Finch’s hand and looked at it, then placed it lightly in Finch’s lap and watched for signs of tremor. “The surgery only seems to help with the tremor, and you really don’t have much of that, lucky for you.”

Zee had a difficult time finding anything lucky about the disease that was slowly killing her father.

“We’ll keep the timing of his Sinemet the same. But with an extra half pill added here”—he pointed to the chart—“and here.”

“So basically he still gets a dose every three hours,” Zee repeated, to be certain she was correct. “Though two of those doses will increase.”

“That’s right,” the doctor said. “Every three hours except when he’s asleep. There’s no need to give him a pill if he’s sleeping.”

“He nods off all the time. If I don’t wake him to give him his pills, he’ll only get one every six hours.”

“Wake him during the day, but don’t give him anything at night,” he instructed. “You have any trouble sleeping at night, Professor Finch?”

“Some,” Finch said.

The doctor reached for his prescription pad and wrote a prescription for trazodone. “This is to help you sleep,” he said to Finch. To Zee he said, “It should help with the sundowning as well, which should stop his wandering. And give him his first dose of Sinemet about an hour before he rises. He’ll want to move, but he’ll be too stiff. We see some nasty falls in the mornings.”

Zee looked at Finch.

“Your daughter will have to keep a close eye on you in the morning,” the doctor kidded.

She wanted to tell the doctor that she didn’t live with her father, that it was Melville he should be telling all this to, but Melville hadn’t come home last night, and she had no idea where he was. When she had asked Finch where he was, all he would say was that Melville was gone.

The doctor started to the door and turned back. “Do you have ramps and grab bars?”

“He has one grab bar,” she said. “In the shower.”

“I’m going to send over an occupational therapist to check the house. The OT can tell you what you’re missing.”

The doctor extended his hand for Finch to shake. “Nice to see you again, Professor,” he said too loudly, as if he were talking to a deaf person and not someone with what Zee had just now come to realize was advanced Parkinson’s. She wasn’t certain how Finch and Melville had kept that fact from her.

“I’m sorry the meds didn’t work out,” the doctor said. “Not so bad to be Nathaniel Hawthorne for a day or two, though, all things considered.”

Finch didn’t smile back. He took Zee’s arm as they left the office together.

“You lied to the doctor about the freezing thing,” Zee said. “I’ve seen you freeze.” She remembered the last time Finch had come to Boston for one of his checkups. As they were leaving the restaurant, he’d frozen on his way out the front door. He couldn’t move forward and he couldn’t move back. They had all stood helplessly waiting for the freeze to break, freeing Finch to step out the door.

“Not for a while,” he lied. “I haven’t frozen once since the last time he asked me that damned question.”

Chapter 8 (#ulink_1ee11521-195f-56f7-9179-f9b9e594ee24)

Friday-afternoon traffic north from Boston was brutally slow. Zee dialed the house again from her cell, hoping that Melville would answer. She was really starting to worry about him.

“Did he go to see his family?” she asked. Melville had family somewhere in Maine, a sister and two nieces. They weren’t close, but he’d been known to make occasional visits.

“No,” Finch said. “Well, where the heck is he?” Zee was frustrated. She had asked Finch where Melville was at least ten times and was tiring of his one-syllable answers.

Melville had seldom left Finch’s side for the better part of twenty years now, a fact that Zee found difficult to comprehend in these times of trial marriages and soaring divorce rates. The two had become a couple long before her mother’s suicide, though Zee had been too young to realize it at the time. When they’d first gotten together, Zee had believed her father when he told her that the reason they spent so much time with each other was that Melville was his best friend. It wasn’t a lie, it just wasn’t the whole truth.

Zee’s mother was the one who told her about Finch’s preference for men. As with many of the inappropriate things Maureen had told her during her manic episodes, Zee would only understand the full impact of the statement in retrospect. At the time the professor had begun to hang out with Mickey and his pirate-reenactor buddies on weekends and during school vacations, and Zee supposed that was what her mother had meant by a preference. Zee was very aware of how much partying they all did together. The pirates drank and they sang, and Finch, who was usually almost prim in his New England reserve, drank and sang with them. Sometimes she would hear him singing as he made his way into the house late at night, the clichéd songs of the gutter drunk that she recognized from the old movies she watched with her mother. Finch was the singing, tippling, happy drunk of 1930s comedies. His joy at such times, especially as it contrasted with Maureen’s growing depression, made Zee believe she understood why her father preferred the company of men. Men drank and sang and had fun. Her only wish at those times was that she could be one of them.

Maureen, being Maureen, eventually told Zee intimate details of Finch’s predilection for men. Much later, when Zee was old enough to have a reference point for such things, she began to understand what her mother had meant and why she had told the stories with such anger. Finch’s misrepresentation of himself to Maureen had become the major betrayal of her mother’s life.

In Zee’s mind, Maureen’s unfulfilled dream had always been to experience what she referred to as “The Great Love.” It was what she wanted most in life and what she had sworn to have from Finch when they first met and when they spent the early days of their marriage on Baker’s Island. She often spoke longingly of the night he had recited aloud to her—not the dark lines of Hawthorne but Yeats. On their wedding night, he had presented her a copy of the book the poem had come from, and that book became one of the treasures of her life. She kept it locked on Baker’s Island in the room where she’d spent her wedding night and which had since become her writing studio. That she no longer found such passion in her everyday life with Finch was her cross to bear. Being Irish and Catholic, Maureen Finch was all too familiar with the idea of burden, and hers had become an increasingly loveless marriage within the confines of a religion that vehemently discouraged her escape.

After it became clear to her that Finch had turned to men, a time Maureen referred to as “The Betrayal,” Maureen had holed up in her cottage on Baker’s Island and had begun to write the story she’d never been able to finish, which she had entitled “The Once.” Finch marked this as the first sign of her impending insanity, though when Zee thought about it now, it was more likely a very bad case of postpartum depression, and one from which Maureen had never fully recovered.

It had been a difficult pregnancy and an even more difficult labor and delivery. The fact that Maureen hadn’t bonded with the child she’d borne him was no great worry to Finch—he had bonded well enough for both of them. The birth of his beloved Hepzibah was the single factor that kept him in his marriage, for, not being a Catholic himself, he was more inclined to believe that the mistake he’d made with such a hasty marriage might be easily remedied.

The days leading up to Maureen Finch’s death had been so terrible that Zee and her father had never talked about them. Zee had talked with Mattei about them many times during her sessions, but never with Finch. In retrospect she wondered how many of those days Finch actually remembered, his drinking having progressed, on many occasions, to the blackout stage.

What Zee remembered only too well was a late night, not long before Maureen’s death, when Finch, drunk and dressed in his pirate garb, stood in the kitchen and recited Hawthorne in a voice loud enough to fill one of his lecture halls: “ ‘No man, for any considerable period, can wear one face to himself and another to the multitude, without finally getting bewildered as to which may be true.’ ” At the time Zee had believed that he was talking about being a pirate. Now, of course, she knew better.

Whether Finch remembered the day of the suicide or not, Zee would never forget his face. Coming home from his revelry, singing up the alleyway, he was instantly sobered by the sound of Maureen’s screams. He rushed into the house and up the stairway to find Maureen bent backward, spine arched in backbend until her head was almost resting on the floor. Her arms stuck straight outward parallel to the floor as if she were performing a gymnastic feat of great difficulty. He stood in the doorway staring, then watched as his wife collapsed. It was such a bizarre and frightening sight that Zee thought of demonic possession and even of the Salem Witch Trials of 1692.

Zee stood helpless and distanced, praying that the 911 ambulance she had called would arrive in time. She did not dare touch her mother’s body. A moment before, her touch had started her mother’s third convulsion—she was certain of it. Zee and Finch stood back, staring in horror, completely helpless as they watched Maureen die.

Ironically, it had been the wail of the approaching ambulance that had sent Maureen into her final convulsion.

For the next two years, until the day Melville came back for good, Finch had dedicated himself to the process of totally anesthetizing himself, leaving Zee stealing boats and otherwise fending for herself.