Away from Her

golden-brown fur-collared ski jacket over a white turtle-necked sweater and tailored fawn slacks. She was a tall, narrow-shouldered woman, seventy years old but still upright and trim, with long legs and long feet, delicate wrists and ankles and tiny, almost comical-looking ears. Her hair, which was light as milkweed fluff, had gone from pale blond to white somehow without Grant’s noticing exactly when, and she still wore it down to her shoulders, as her mother had done. (That was the thing that had alarmed Grant’s own mother, a small-town widow who worked as a doctor’s receptionist. The long white hair on Fiona’s mother, even more than the state of the house, hadtold her all she needed to know about attitudes and politics.)
    Otherwise Fiona with her fine bones and small sapphire eyes was nothing like her mother. She had a slightly crooked mouth which she emphasized now with red lipstick—usually the last thing she did before she left the house. She looked just like herself on this day—direct and vague as in fact she was, sweet and ironic.
    Over a year ago Grant had started noticing so many little yellow notes stuck up all over the house. That was not entirely new. She’d always written things down—the title of a book she’d heard mentioned on the radio or the jobs she wanted to make sure she did that day. Even her morning schedule was written down—he found it mystifying and touching in its precision.
    7 a.m. Yoga. 7:30–7:45 teeth face hair. 7:45–8:15 walk. 8:15 Grant and Breakfast.
    The new notes were different. Taped onto the kitchen drawers—Cutlery, Dishtowels, Knives. Couldn’t she have just opened the drawers and seen what was inside? He remembered a story about the German soldiers on border patrol in Czechoslovakia during the war. Some Czech had told him that each of the patrol dogs wore a sign that said
Hund.
Why?said the Czechs, and the Germans said, Because that is a
hund.
    He was going to tell Fiona that, then thought he’d better not. They always laughed at the same things, but suppose this time she didn’t laugh?
    Worse things were coming. She went to town and phoned him from a booth to ask him how to drive home. She went for her walk across the field into the woods and came home by the fence line—a very long way round. She said that she’d counted on fences always taking you somewhere.
    It was hard to figure out. She said that about fences as if it was a joke, and she had remembered the phone number without any trouble.
    “I don’t think it’s anything to worry about,” she said. “I expect I’m just losing my mind.”
    He asked if she had been taking sleeping pills.
    “If I have I don’t remember,” she said. Then she said she was sorry to sound so flippant.
    “I’m sure I haven’t been taking anything. Maybe I should be. Maybe vitamins.”
    Vitamins didn’t help. She would stand in doorways trying to figure out where she was going. She forgot to turn on the burner under the vegetables or put water in the coffeemaker. She asked Grant when they’d moved to this house.
    “Was it last year or the year before?”
    He said that it was twelve years ago.
    She said, “That’s shocking.”
    “She’s always been a bit like this,” Grant said to the doctor. “Once she left her fur coat in storage and just forgot about it. That was when we were always going somewhere warm in the winters. Then she said it was unintentionally on purpose, she said it was like a sin she was leaving behind. The way some people made her feel about fur coats.”
    He tried without success to explain something more—to explain how Fiona’s surprise and apologies about all this seemed somehow like routine courtesy, not quite concealing a private amusement. As if she’d stumbled on some adventure that she had not been expecting. Or was playing a game that she hoped he would catch on to. They had always had their games—nonsense dialects, characters they invented. Some of Fiona’s made-up voices, chirping or wheedling (he couldn’t tell the doctor this), had mimicked uncannily the voices of women of his that she had never met or known about.
    “Yes, well,” the doctor said. “It might be selective at first. We don’t know, do we? Till we see the pattern of the deterioration, we really can’t say.”
    In a while it hardly mattered what label was put on it. Fiona, who no longer went shopping alone, disappeared from the supermarket while Grant had hisback turned. A policeman picked her