Trust No One Read Free

make the officer look away and to make his daughter come around and put her arms around him.
    “It’s going to be okay, Jerry. I promise.”
    But he’s still thinking about Suzan with a z, about how it felt back when he killed her, back before he wrote about it. Back when he embraced the darkness.

DAY ONE
    Some basic facts. Today is a Friday. Today you are sane, albeit somewhat in shock. Your name is Jerry Grey, and you are scared. You’re sitting in your study writing this while your wife, Sandra, is on the phone with her sister, no doubt in tears because this future of yours, well, buddy, nobody saw it coming. Sandra will look after you—that’s what she’s promised, but these are the promises of a woman who has known for only eight hours that the man you are is going to fade away, to be replaced by a stranger. She hasn’t processed it, and right now she’ll be telling Katie that it’s going to be hard, all too terribly hard, but she’ll hang in there, of course she will, because she loves you—but you don’t want that from her. At least that’s what you’re thinking now. Your wife is forty-eight years old and even though you don’t have a future, she still does. So maybe over the next few months if the disease doesn’t push her away, you should push her away. The thing to focus on is that this isn’t about me, you, us—it’s about family. Your family. We have to do what’s best for them. Of course you know that’s a gut reaction, and you may very well, and probably will, feel differently tomorrow.
    At the moment you are very much in control. Yes, it’s true you lost your phone yesterday, and last week you lost your car, and recently you forgot Sandra’s name, and yes, the diagnosis means it’s true the best years are now behind you and there will not be too many good ones ahead, but at the moment you know exactly who you are. You know you have an amazing wife named Sandra and an incredible daughter called Eva.
    This journal is for you, Jerry of the future, Future Jerry. At the time of this writing, you have hope there’s a cure on its way. The rate medical technology is advancing . . . well, at some point there will be a pill, won’t there? A pill to make the Alzheimer’s go away. A pill to bring the memories back, and this journal is to help you if those memories tend to have fuzzy edges. If there is no pill, you will still be able to look back through these pages and know who you were before the early onset dementia, before the Big A came along and took away the good things.
    From these pages you will learn about your family, how much you love them, how sometimes Sandra can smile at you from across the room and it makes your heart race, how Eva can laugh at one of your small jokes and go Dad! before shaking her head in embarrassment. You need to know, Future Jerry, that you love and that you are loved.
    So this is day one in your journal. Not day one where things started to change—that started a year or two back—but day one of the diagnosis. Your name is Jerry Grey and eight hours ago you sat in Doctor Goodstory’s office holding your wife’s hand while he gave you the news. It has, and let’s be honest since we’re among friends here—scared the absolute hell out of you. You wanted to tell Doctor Goodstory to either change his profession or change his last name, because the two couldn’t be any further apart. On the way home, you told Sandra that the diagnosis reminded you of a quote from Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, and when you got home you looked it up so you could tell her. Bradbury said, “It took some man a lifetime maybe to put some of his thoughts down, looking around at the world and life, and then I came along in two minutes and boom! It’s all over.” The quote, of course, is from one book-burning fireman to another, but it perfectly sums up your own future. You’ve spent your lifetime putting your thoughts down on paper, Future Jerry, and in this case it’s