Gabriel’s heart sank. Edna spent most days roaming the halls, one foot permanently stuck out like an arrow and the other bent inward. Her Parkinson’s symptoms caused her to shake uncontrollably.
“Pleeeease…” she repeated.
Her features remained in a constant scowl, her eyes continuously glaring with reptilian intensity. Her mouth was pulled back into a tight, open-mouthed smile she had little control over. She had no teeth, no dentures, and a long beak-like nose.
But still, there was something amazing about Edna’s face. A powerful tenacity, a century’s worth of strength, and a fierce will to live resided in those eyes. Gabriel admired her, and yet, inside every line, inside every furrowed brow, her pain and loneliness was made just as agonizingly apparent as her strength.
“Hello, Edna,” Gabriel said.
“Hi…” She peered up at him suspiciously.
“How are you, today?”
“Ohhh my God,” she groaned, her face contorting into an angry, flesh-colored raisin. “Everything is terrible. So terrible. Like it always is.”
“Always?”
There was a long pause. Edna often had difficulty finding the right words. “I didn’t see you at first, dear. I’m nearly blind, you know. Blind as a bat. Please give me a… ah… push me somewhere. Please.”
Gabriel knew the routine. She would want to go to her room then to the lobby. Then back to her room. Then to the communal kitchen. No matter where someone pushed her, she would never be happy. “I can’t right now, Edna. I—”
“Oh, cram it. You’re no good. Get outta my way, sonny boy.” She threw Gabriel’s hand away.
Sonny boy? As a man in his seventies, Gabriel couldn’t remember the last time he’d been called that. “But Edna—”
“You go take a walk somewhere and think about what you’ve done, dummy.” She forcefully grabbed the wheels of her chair and slowly rolled away.
Gabriel, not sure how to feel about the interaction, returned to his previous course. Panting with exhaustion, he finally reached the door to the smoking area and pushed it open.
Air. Wind. Sun. The invigorating sunshine was like salve to his wounds. He looked up at the cloudless blue sky, smiling with rapture. Then, he heard it. The ocean. Waves crashed, water collapsing upon a beach, somewhere just out of sight.
A tall, impenetrable, cast-iron gate surrounded the smoking area, equipped with ear-shattering alarms in case anyone tried to escape. Safety… at the cost of freedom.
Gabriel stepped up to the gate, wrapped his fingers around its frosty metal bars, and stared out at the mundane gravel parking lot that was his excuse for a view. He could smell the saltwater. The beach was so close, just a short way down the big hill on the other side of the building. Out of sight and out of reach. He’d asked numerous times if he could walk down to it, but they’d never permitted him to do so, not even with supervision.
He closed his eyes and listened to the waves, trying to feel them and to remember the sensation of water splashing against his bare skin. He imagined his old sailboat and the gentle rocking motion beneath his feet as the moon shimmered over the ocean.
“Zero,” he whispered. “One, one, two, three, five, eight, thirteen…”
He placed a cigarette in his mouth and sat down at his regular spot over in the white gazebo, where all the smokers were supposed to do their dirty business. He patted his pockets, searching for a lighter. Nothing. He’d forgotten to bring it.
But it wasn’t his fault. He was expected to forget everything because he was the lucky recipient of life’s final going-away present, that red velvet, chocolate-covered cake of wonderfulness that the doctors liked to call Alzheimer’s. With Alzheimer’s, suddenly nothing was his fault anymore. No fault. No blame. No choice. No freedom.
Many decades ago, someone had once told Gabriel that he had “an amazing mind.” The compliment had meant a lot to him. His mind had defined him.
Not anymore.
Chapter 2:
Before
Summer 1997
Off the shore of California, a tiny sailboat rocked itself to sleep in the rolling arms of an enormous blue giant. Much as mankind was subservient to time, the sailboat was subservient to the water. It could point itself, but only the ocean could propel it forward. For the moment, the boat simply relaxed on the water’s gentle surface, allowing its master to gently carry it wherever it chose.
Down in the cabin, Melanie rolled around in bed. She couldn’t sleep. It was her last night on the West Coast, the end of summer vacation before junior high. It was also the last night she’d get to spend with her dad, until the next summer.
She unrolled her cocoon of blankets and got out of bed. The air smelled of saltwater. She stood for a moment, smoothing out the cowlicks in her long red hair and considering how weird the ocean moving beneath her bare feet felt.
Her summer trips to California had been a regular event since she was little, but she’d never been so depressed about leaving. Between homework, meeting new teachers, and all the fantasy books she would read, the year would rush by quickly enough, and then Dad would…
Dad. Melanie walked through the cabin, glancing through Dad’s shelves, which held hundreds of notebooks. A blackboard with strange, alien-looking equations scrawled onto it stood next to a bookshelf that held dozens of books and scattered photographs, most of them of her.
Despite all of the clutter in his sailboat, there was only one true clue to his true identity: a golden medal that had been casually left on the counter like spare change. She picked up the medal, which was cool to the touch. Engraved with a picture of a bearded man looking to the left, the award was from Sweden. A little award called the freaking Nobel Prize, the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, to be precise.
When she was younger, she’d hadn’t thought much about who her dad was. But lately, every time she told someone her father’s name, the questions were always the same.
“Your dad is Gabriel Schist?”
“Your dad is that guy who cured AIDS?”
That was him, all right. But even though she’d always known that fact, she’d never realized it. It’d never seemed real, not until the past summer.
Melanie reverently placed the medal back on the counter and climbed the ladder to the deck to stand outside with the beautiful, glimmering black and blue waves of the Pacific Ocean. The full moon looked down on her, promising freedom, infinity, and a world beyond the one she knew. If there were a face in that moon, it would’ve been smiling. She shivered in the breeze, arms wrapped around her torso. The tall white sail flapped gently in the wind.
The quiet was broken by the sound of whistling.
