The Caregiver
When your mother's dementia reveals buried secrets, which is more terrifying: what she remembers, or what she made you forget?
Laura Caine returns to her childhood home in rural Vermont after twenty-four years of careful distance. Her mother, Eleanor, a renowned psychologist, has been diagnosed with early-onset Alzheimer's and needs care. Laura tells herself she's doing her duty. She'll manage Eleanor's decline professionally, clinically, the way she manages everything else in her carefully controlled life.
But as Eleanor's disease progresses, her filter disintegrates. She begins making accusations: Laura's father was abusive. A child was buried in the basement. Crimes were committed that Laura has no memory of witnessing. She calls Laura by different names, sometimes "Anna," sometimes "the girl who survived."
Laura dismisses these as confabulations, the desperate narratives a failing brain constructs from fragments. Until she finds evidence. A locked room in the attic. Photographs of a child who isn't her. Eleanor's research journals detailing experiments in "memory reconditioning." And the horrifying possibility that her own memories have been manipulated, that her entire childhood is a constructed fiction.
The investigation becomes a descent into psychological horror as Laura uncovers the truth about Eleanor's career, about the foster child who disappeared in 1989, about the experiments conducted in the name of healing trauma. But the deeper Laura digs, the more her own mind begins to fracture. She loses time. Finds herself in rooms with no recollection of entering. Hears voices that may or may not be real.
Is this inherited dementia? Or is something in the house awakening, using Eleanor's deteriorating mind as a doorway? And most terrifying of all: if her memories were written by someone else, who is she really?
Trigger warnings: child abuse, medical trauma, dementia, memory manipulation, psychological horror, parental abuse, death of a child
THE CAREGIVER is a literary horror novel that explores the fragility of memory, the horror of dementia, and the devastating question: can you ever truly know yourself if your past was written by someone else?
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