The Map of True Places by Brunonia Barry

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.
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    â€œW HAT’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.
    â€œHe had a lot of wine,” Melville said.
    â€œHe always has a lot of wine.”
    â€œMaybe the bills really did get stuck together.”
    â€œRight,” 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.
    â€œIt’s Parkinson’s,” the doctor told them.
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    N OW, ALMOST TEN YEARS LATER, it took Finch more than a minute to shuffle to the other side of the doctor’s office.
    â€œGood,” the neurologist said. “Though you really should be using your walker. Any falls since your last visit?”
    â€œNo,” Finch said.
    â€œWhat about freezing?”
    â€œNo,” 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.
    â€œThe 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.
    â€œIt’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.
    â€œSo what’s our next step?” she asked.
    â€œThere 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.
    â€œWe’ll keep the timing of his Sinemet the same. But with an