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  “And get this,” said Bev (the name she had insisted they call her). “The wine cellar, if you notice, comes stocked. Isn’t that a hoot?”

  “Who stocked it exactly?” said Claire.

  “It’s a gift from the neighborhood association. Isn’t that sweet? There must be at least 100 bottles of wine down there. Classy group of people, if you ask me. Talk about a welcome wagon, am I right?”

  “We’re on a different wagon,” Sam said firmly enough to cause Bev to nod her head and wince empathetically. “But the gesture is sweet, I agree.”

  “You could always turn it into a home gym,” the realtor offered.

  “More than likely, a home office,” said Claire. “I’m supposedly starting my own PR firm.”

  “She is definitely starting her own PR firm,” Sam interjected.

  They saw the garage and the stone patio out back, covered with a whitewashed pergola and encircled by beds of wildflowers exploding in the mid-summer heat, and, a week later, their low-ball offer was immediately accepted.

  They approached the guard shack now and two men in crisp security guard attire, complete with badges, caps and walkie-talkies affixed to utility belts, emerged from the booth, their exhalations blooming before them in the bracing chill of the October night. Both were tall, muscular and blond, and looked so much alike Claire thought they could be brothers. One guard crossed in front of their car and positioned himself on the passenger side as the other motioned for them to stop and, bending forward, gave Sam a friendly wink before waving hello to Claire. Sam rolled the window down.

  “Mr. Sturgis, sir, welcome home,” said the guard, glancing down at a handheld computer tablet, then at Sam’s face, then back down at the screen again. “And Mrs. Sturgis, welcome. Is this your first night in the Village?”

  “Yes, it is,” Sam replied before squinting at the name on the guard’s badge, “Officer Collins.”

  The other guard was now bending over to look in Claire’s window and when their eyes met, he gave a friendly wink and a satisfied smile before standing upright again.

  “And we have here your movers should be here by 8 AM tomorrow, correct?”

  “That is correct, sir.”

  “Well, Mr. Sturgis, if there is anything at all you require this evening, our phone number is right there,” he said, handing Sam a business card. “Don’t hesitate to use it if you need us.”

  “Will do.”

  “You both have a pleasant evening and again, welcome home. I and Officer Gaines are both glad you’re here.”

  “Thank you. Okay, cheers.” Sam eased the Audi forward before saying to Claire, “Well, that was impressive. Knowing our names like that.”

  Creepy if you ask me. She said nothing.

  “Claire, this is a good thing. It will be good for us. Good for me. I just can’t manage living in the city anymore.”

  “I know, baby.”

  “But…you’re holding back. What do you want to say?” he prodded.

  “No, nothing, forget it, Sam. Don’t make me feel self-involved again, okay?”

  “Babe, you’re still allowed to have feelings, despite everything that’s happening.”

  “You said that already.”

  “Well…”

  “Okay, well. Like I said. I had a sense of community on Capitol Hill. And I know that community would have been there for us when things get worse. That’s all. And, I took comfort from my routines. There is a part of me that is just going to have to acclimate to this. Leaving everything we know behind feels —”

  “Demented?” They both laughed at that and, as they drove slowly, taking in their new neighborhood, a procession of gigantic homes encircled by immaculately manicured lawns and paver stone driveways, she thought about the real reason they were moving to Frontier Village.

  “Don’t worry, babe, you’ll find community here, too, I promise.”

  She desperately hoped so. Now, more than ever, it was about finding “a balance in life,” at least that’s how Sam had described it to her after his last doctor’s appointment. Or, more exactly, the last one to which he’d agreed to go. In that moment, she knew this place wasn’t a cure for their problems, but if it would help Sam, benefit him in yet untold ways, well, then that was enough for now. For him, she would embrace it. No more questions. No more doubts.

  Three years into their marriage, life hadn’t been perfect, but it certainly wasn’t bad, either. Sam had just received top secret security clearance at NASA, forever ruling out boring work talk at the dinner table. She didn’t know much about what he did at “the Agency,” as those who worked there called it, so whenever someone asked her what her husband did she just said “space stuff,” and that was usually enough of an explanation for any of the wonks in her social circles. What she did know was he was very good at whatever the hell he did. Not because there were tons of awards on the walls or a steady stream of defense contractors trying to lure him into the private sector, although both were true. For Claire, Sam’s expertise was evident in the intensity he brought to his work, and for the sheer and obvious enjoyment he got from his professional life.

  Case in point: they had upgraded from their tiny downtown apartment to a brownstone on Capitol Hill and their basement was festooned with all kinds of computer and electronic gadgetry, and posters of galaxies and satellites and asteroid belts. “I’m pretty sure he could land the space shuttle from his man cave,” she would half-kid with her best friend, Jessica. And their daily routine would always include her standing on the landing of the stairs leading into the basement, bending over slightly to spy on him at his computer, his nose practically touching an indecipherable display of code. “Sam, your dinner is stone cold. Come on, babe!”

  “Sorry, sorry, sorry!” is all he would ever say as he pushed himself away from his computer, still staring at the screen while rolling backwards in his office chair, swiveling and then zinging right back to it again. “One more minute, just one more minute.”

  Cold food aside, it was hard for Claire to get angry. So many people she knew in D.C. despised their jobs. And that always strained relationships. Jessica’s ex-husband, Nick, was a sleazy lobbyist for some industrial chemicals association. He hated his job, but he didn’t hate hanging out at the bar across from his work on K Street, where he met another miserable, boozy lobbyist named Marlene. When she wasn’t screwing around with married men, Marlene represented the portable toilet industry’s interests before Congress. It was a match made in heaven, and Jessica was now single again at 40 after a gut-wrenching divorce that included shared custody of their three-year-old daughter, the issuance of a restraining order; and an inebriated altercation with Nick’s paramour that had ended with Jessica crying all the way back to her Capitol Hill condo in the back of an Uber.

  So Claire indulged Sam’s work-related obsessiveness. It wasn’t uncommon for him to spring up out of bed in the middle of the night – scaring her half to death – because he had solved some line of code in his head. “Sorry, sorry, sorry!” he’d say, his whispered pleas fading down the staircase to the first floor, followed by more hurried footfalls down to the basement. She’d stare for a minute at the depression in his pillow and never hear him come back to bed, if he even did. Sometimes she would find him asleep in his computer chair before gliding a cup of steaming hot coffee below his nose, like caffeinated smelling salts.

  Yet Sam could hardly be described as a geek. His height, which had so captivated her when they met, was paired with jet black hair, so thick his fingers sufficed as a comb. He belonged to a hockey team with some of the guys from work, wasn’t into Star Wars or Star Trek and was an incredibly good cook. But most importantly, except for the details of his work, she knew everything about him. Her husband was a tremendous and caring human being who loved her unconditionally. She had never found that before him. Other men had always tried to change her. Maybe not right away
, but in time, as familiarity threatened to turn to boredom — always, it seemed, around a relationship’s third year. Inevitably they would make a subtle, or not-so-subtle, plea for some sort of change. Not Sam. Sure, he insisted she not turn into a homebody and that they take a few overseas vacations. But, above all, they were best friends and, in that beautiful agreement, forever forgiving of the other’s faults and limitations.

  In fact, most of Sam’s faults were virtues. He hated argumentation of any sort and preferred to instead “sit down and talk it out.” This was a welcomed change to the house Claire had grown up in, one in which her older, rebellious sister often plunged the family into weeks of angry and argumentative conflict. In contrast, his aversion to disagreement was paired with an impressive inability to become overly emotional. His passivity and collectedness were starkly contrasted by Claire’s sweeping range of emotions, a character trait she struggled to control. The first time she drove her mother-in-law to the airport for a flight it seemed she would miss due to the unbearably heavy traffic, Claire ground her teeth during their banal small talk, focusing instead on the endless cavalcade of idiots cutting her off or not letting her in.

  “And, I just think if you and Sam want to come to our place for Christmas this year that would be —”

  “You asshole! Get out of the way, you fucking idiot!”

  “Claire, I’d rather miss my flight than listen to that. Honestly,” her mother-in-law had said. “It’s not helping anyone.”

  Three years ago, she thought about all this as she sat across from her husband at their favorite restaurant in D.C., Grist, a votive candle burning in a purple glass holder between them, their third anniversary dinners ordered. She thought about this man she knew so well, who accepted and respected her decision to not have kids right away, who had endured one Capitol Hill mixer or fundraiser too many, who had supported her through half-hearted attempts to learn Spanish, and piano, and how to cook, and smiled cheerily through every incorrect pronunciation, note and flavor profile. He loved her. And she him.

  “To us,” she toasted, lifting her glass of ginger ale to his.

  “To us,” he clinked back, spilling a bit of his soda on the red tablecloth the restaurant had obviously broken out for the Christmas season.

  “Three years. Isn’t it crazy? It seems like just yesterday we were at that awful office party. You remember, the one where you couldn’t take your eyes off my intense beauty.”

  “As I recall I made you blush,” he flirted. “Or maybe it was the wine. You drank a lot of wine. Back then.”

  “Guilty as charged. With the scars to prove it. Oh, here is the waiter. I’m starving,” she said, moving aside her utensils to make way for her mushroom gnocchi and broccoli rabe.

  The server, a lanky millennial whose manufactured snobbery came across as cute to Claire and Sam, placed her plate before her and then circled the table to deliver Sam’s entree. But as he moved toward Sam with the bowl, a greasy thumb undid his hold and the short rib ragú went flipping like a Tiddlywink right into Sam’s lap. The young man was so shocked at himself, he cupped his mouth in horror. Sam stood up and let the steaming meat fall to the floor with an unfortunate sounding squish.

  “I am so terribly sorry sir. Oh my God, let me get some water and napkins and —”

  Sam exploded, his face as red as a candied apple. With a closed fist, he pounded on their table, causing their settings to jump and their glasses to fall over into each other, smashing upon contact. “You dumb fuck! Piece of shit! You stupid fucking asshole!” he bellowed like a madman.

  The rant might as well have been a discharged machine gun in the demure dining room, which fell utterly silent after a collective gasp that felt to Claire like it had stripped the room of every molecule of oxygen.

  “Sam! What are you doing! Sit down!” she implored. “You are way overreacting! Sam, for Christ sakes, sit down!”

  “No, no, no, I will not sit down,” he screamed at Claire, a petulant child refusing to end his tantrum. “I am mad! Very mad! Very, very angry! And he did it! He did it! To me! Whose side are you on?” He punched the table again, causing a glass water decanter to roll off and smash to the floor.

  The tide of shock had rolled out, and with its retreat rushed in a blur of restaurant employees and a few good Samaritans from nearby tables coming to the defense of the waiter and, Claire realized in horror, her. Sam sat back down in his chair, looking dazed and dumbstruck.

  “Jesus, dude, it was a mistake,” the server was imploring, as his coworkers patted his back and shot Claire looks of questioning disgust or pity.

  Claire saw her husband’s rage flee his face, like sunlight chasing shadows into the corner of a room. The fury was replaced by an innocent, dumbfounded look, as if he had been genuinely surprised to find himself responsible for such a mess. “Sorry, sorry, sorry,” was all Sam kept saying, as Claire gathered their things. She tried to pay the manager, who waved her away. “We don’t want your money. Just go.”

  “I don’t know what’s wrong with him. I’m so sorry. This, this isn’t him.”

  “Whatever,” she heard the manager say. And, then, just before the door clicked shut behind them, “Lunatic.”

  The days and weeks that followed were a blur. Sam said he had been overcome with rage, something he described as a nearly involuntary response to the food hitting his lap. The almost primal loss of control had shaken him to his core. It was, he told Claire — and eventually the psychiatrist, and then neurologist — as if something in his brain just snapped, like a dried-out rubber band. The rage at the restaurant was apparently not an isolated incident. Although he hadn’t told anyone, not even Claire, he was having difficulty paying attention at work, too. Rather than intensely focusing on a project with a looming deadline, he had become inexplicably sidetracked by less important tasks. And, two weeks before their anniversary, on his drive to work, he drove 30 miles past the exit for his office. “I was in a daze. I pulled off the highway and sat at a McDonald’s and had no idea where I was or where I was going.”

  Claire had also witnessed his strange behavior. A couple of times, as they were eating dinner at home, he had begun shoveling food into his mouth as if it was his last meal on Earth. This level of heartiness was out of character for Sam, normally a very picky, light eater. At the time, she laughed it off, saying, “I guess my cooking classes weren’t entirely a waste of money!” Loss of appetite, okay, maybe he was ill. But increased appetite? It was weird, but at the time, seemed harmless.

  It wasn’t.

  After a series of tests and scans and sessions, the now team of physicians came to their conclusion: Sam had a form of early onset dementia.

  “Sam, the frontal and temporal lobes of your brain are shrinking,” said one of the doctors before Claire began sobbing uncontrollably. “You’re going to experience changes in your personality, like you did at the restaurant, and in your cognitive function, like some of the issues you’re experiencing with work. And it’s progressing.”

  That night, as Sam slept, Claire walked down the street and bought a bottle of wine. She told herself she would hide it somewhere in the house and open it only in times of extreme stress. She hadn’t had a drink in over a year and she wasn’t about to start now, she assured herself. It was just in case. Just in case, Claire.

  Before she went to bed the next night, she crept on unsteady feet through their small backyard to the alleyway out back. She carefully lifted the cover of their neighbor’s recycling bin and placed the now empty wine bottle quietly on top.

  Chapter 2

  The new house in Frontier Village was full of moving boxes. Claire sat on the floor, overwhelmed, surrounded by stacks and stacks of them. Some were sensibly labeled: “Kitchen Stuff” or “Bedroom” (Sam’s process). Versus those labeled: “Crap I Don’t Need” and “Misc. Things” (her process). Before she met Sam, she had been known to buy IKEA furni
ture, only to have the box become the thing she was supposed to build. “Why do you have an IKEA box for your night table?” he had asked her the morning after the first time they’d slept together. The truth was she could procrastinate better than anyone, and if Sam wasn’t in the picture, she’d probably never unpack 80 percent of the junk they had accumulated over the years. They were just things, and considering Sam’s diagnosis, they seemed more irrelevant than ever.

  She came across a box Sam had marked, “Claire, College.” Opening it, she found a stack of photographs of different sizes and sheens. She matter-of-factly rifled through them, not wanting to be seduced by time-consuming sentimentality. You should be setting up your home office, Claire, not indulging in retrospective daydreams! If she took a wrong turn onto memory lane, she knew her afternoon could easily be spent crying over old love letters and pictures of family dogs long since dead. But she allowed herself this one stack: she and her parents, smiling at her grammar school graduation; her grandmother, sitting in her flower garden, surrounded by a ring of her prized African marigolds, as orange as clementines, doing little to soften the stoicism of her expression; and then, there she was, her sister Jenny, laughing in denim culottes and a floral-printed spaghetti-strap blouse. She traced her finger along the edges of her sister’s face, irrationally disappointed to find it impersonally flat and without texture. Her chest and throat tightened and she sat down, surprised by how accessible such old emotions still were.

  They were only two years apart. Jenny was older than Claire but everyone assumed the opposite based on their wildly different personalities. As a freshman in high school, Claire quickly realized when teachers said, “Oh, you’re Jenny’s little sister,” that was rarely a good thing. By the time she was a junior, Jenny had been suspended no fewer than five times, once, somewhat famously, for blowing Luke Sizemore behind the gym after school (his unfortunate surname only served to intensify her sister’s tawdry notoriety), and another time for pulling the fire alarm after a grandiose expletive-laced exit from Mr. Cranston’s algebra class, replete with her commanding him to “bite” her. She was the school bad girl and an unapologetic tomboy, but her edgy rebelliousness made her as popular as most cheerleaders. Even those who ridiculed her, in time came to at least respect her.