“I do want to learn more,” I said. It had not even occurred to me that I had the option. But once she offered, I admit I hesitated. It would indeed be no small relief for grandmother’s past to remain hidden. I could go on seeing her as my hero—and this power I had inherited, while remarkable, would stay dormant. After all, I had experienced firsthand what it could unearth.

“Maybe after I think about it some more,” I backtracked.

She nodded.

“Let me know when you are ready.”

She looked like she was about to say something else, then her eyes lost focus. A look that is becoming more common. Her eyes either cloud over or look at me without seeing, then she panics. I brought her to her room, sat her down in her rocking chair. She keeps a sack of knitting supplies there. I dug through for a half-started project, placed the needles in her hands. Even though her eyes were still lost, she picked up the needles, looped the yarn around her pinkie, and began to knit. The panic on her face ebbed as she returned to this familiar task.

It’s happening more frequently, these moments of disconnect. Grandfather and I have tried our best to reassure and reestablish her routine and she always regains herself within a few minutes. But the episodes are longer, and this time, when I checked on her half an hour later, she was still knitting, lost in thought, or maybe lack of thought.

The forums say it’s an uncontrollable disease, that it will progress differently for everyone and there is nothing you can do except watch. They also say it can be helpful for a caretaker to have something they can control. So, when I’m not working on EMBRS, I clean.

Every day after work, I attack one thing. First the rice cooker, then the air filter, the toilets, the bookshelves, the stove, the kitchen sink. With my first paycheck, I bought the best vacuum cleaner I could find. I listed it as my 😄 for the day, and Louise laughed.

The next day I stumbled upon a sale for the same vacuum that included extra filters, and I cursed my luck.

Grandfather’s coping mechanism is his computer. He claims he’s replying to correspondence from former students, when really I know he’s taken to answering people’s math questions online. I found his profile. His avatar was a doodle I’d drawn of him when I was in middle school—a stick figure wearing a tie, with square glasses and an inexplicably rectangular mouth. He had thousands of reputation points, and his username was “mango_grandpa.” I swelled with pride, reading his clear answers to their algebra questions and even the occasional chemistry one, nobody knowing that mango_grandpa was a former MIT professor desperate for a distraction, attempting to cope with his wife’s decline.