looked so relieved that Zee almost cried. The book sat on the table where she had left it. She picked it up and turned it over, reading the blurbs on the back. A picture of a younger-looking Finch stared out at her from the jacket cover. He was standing in front of the House of the Seven Gables. “To those hedges,” she said, raising her glass.
She could see Melville’s amusement at her toast. As much as she resented him sometimes, Melville was one of the only people in the world who truly got her.
They ordered dinner and drank several glasses of wine.
Since the celebration was in Finch’s honor, Melville had planned to pick up the tab. But Finch wouldn’t hear of it and insisted on paying. The bill came to $150, but Finch laid down $240 in cash, unusual for him, as a frugal Yankee. Melville reached over and retrieved three twenties. “I think these bills were stuck together,” he said, handing them back to Finch. “Damned ATMs.”
Finch looked surprised and then slightly embarrassed. He stuffed the returned bills into his pocket.
Zee could see that he was genuinely confused.
“What’s the matter with my father?” she called to ask Melville the next morning. She was moving between classes, and the reception on her cell phone kept cutting in and out.
“He had a lot of wine,” Melville said.
“He always has a lot of wine.”
“Maybe the bills really did get stuck together.”
“Right,” Zee said.
At Melville’s insistence Finch had already made an appointment with his primary-care physician. Zee said she would prefer for him to see a neurologist in Boston.
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.”
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