Safety-pinned to my blanket is a pink "While You Were Out" slip (an "Out," I'm to learn, of titanic proportion). Your sister called. Loves you very much. Coming by train tmw. I puzzle thickly over those three letters. Tramway? Tomahawk? Tunisian Motor Works? My mind feels like a fly-mobbed garbage barge plowing through a sea of tar. At the foot of a strange bed, a strange window: leafy branches, bright sky, parking lot of blinding glitter. Pinstriped curtains wall me in.
My right arm is in a cast. From my left hand, an IV snakes its way up to a large crystalline prune. HYDRATION, my brain remarks, the word flashing out, a lighthouse on my sea of tar. I turn my head -- to another flash, this one exuberant pain -- and there's an electrocardiograph showing the placid skip-to-my-Lou of a healthy heartbeat. E K G, my brain instructs, each letter another beacon, a tiny gem in the murk.
Wow, so this is amnesia. But now I recognize the woman asleep in the strange chair by the strange window. My name, my profession, the goings-on in my life: I seem to know all these things and am vaguely disappointed that I do -- except for Jerry, hot-as-a-short-order-skillet Jerry.
The pink note still clings to my thigh. "Oh, tomorrow. Shit." A whisper but, against the white noise of life support, stunning.
In a flash, my mother's awake and pressing a hand to my forehead. "Honey, honey it's you."
"Like I'd be, who, Mick Jagger?" I sound like wheels on gravel.
"Don't talk! Save your energy, sweetheart." She pulls back the curtain and calls out, "Gwen! She's with us at last, she's here!" Someone shushes her gently. Before she lets the curtain fall, I see half a dozen beds in a long arc, some tented, all flanked by machines.
Mom scrapes her chair up beside me. She clearly wants to take my hand, but both are already taken -- one by the IV, the other by a sling.
"You're in the hospital," says Mom. As if I might think we're in a pool hall or carwash. "You've had an accident, but you're going to be fine." I am about to say, Jesus Mom, what hospital, what accident, when she puts a finger to my lips. "Please, sweetheart. In a minute, I'll call Dad. He had to go home to dry-dock a Friendship and feed the horses." Again I take stock: My father runs three boatyards. My mother is an accomplished rider, a master of foxhounds. They live on Pemiquisset Point in Rhode Island, where I grew up. These swatches of knowledge are safely intact, that part of my cerebral quilt unfrayed. But the NOW of my life as I know it takes place largely in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, where I am staying with Jerry while I figure out where my next job's going to be. Jerry says that maybe I should figure out, first, why I change jobs so often, especially since I never get fired.
A nurse enters my tiny lair. "Well, well. Forty winks and then some." She wrangles a pressure cuff onto my cast-free arm. As she leans across me, I see her badge. Her name is Gwendolyn Treeble, she is a blizzard of freckles (in person; the flash of her ID photo bleached them all out), and we are at the hospital in Boston that my father, who went to Harvard and had a broken femur set in this place, calls Poobah General. My brain flings out the weirdest details.
"'Scuse me," I say, figuring she will be more helpful than my mother, but then a man in a white coat pops in behind her. "Well, well," I hear again, as if it's the password. "And how do you feel?"
"Caved in," I say, straining to enunciate. "Kicked by a Clydesdale."
He laughs, a small mannerly laugh. "Vocabulary an excellent sign." He leans in from the foot of my bed and holds out a pen, moves it back and forth before my eyes. Then he untucks the bedding, pulls it up to my ankles, and uses his all-purpose pen to stroke the soles of my feet. When I flinch, he winks. "Guess we'll forgo amputation." Finally, he puts his hands around my neck, hands as cool and dry as a lizard. He seems to be making sure my skull is still attached to my spine. His badge tells me he is Eric Slocum, Chief Res., Emerg. Med. His clipboard, now on the table beside my bed, tells me today is July 28. But wait. That date is more than a month in the future. Isn't it?
"Doctor, excuse me, but have I been out cold for a month?"
He watches the ceiling while taking my pulse. "We don't know why you aren't a lot worse off. You are a very lucky young lady with a noggin of grade-A granite and a pair of very resilient lungs."
Real conversations with these people are going to be difficult. But then, I've been at the mercy of doctors before. I know their game of bait and switch.
Mom's eyes are swollen. Weeping isn't her style, so something serious happened here. She is a woman made of gristle, pumice, and more than the customary dash of testosterone. If my noggin's made of granite, her genes are to thank. She believes in the supremacy of genes; that gene I got from her, too.
Jerry is in the business of genes. I had never wanted a guy the way I wanted Jerry, almost the minute I met him. I was feverish, crazy, jealous of everything he touched, from his cat to his phone to the steering wheel in his Jeep. By nature (genes again!), I am far too skeptical, too bound by gravity to ever get swept off my feet, but if anyone's come near, it's Jerry. Jerry is a high-tech veterinarian. He flies around the country and orchestrates in-vitro breeding of pedigreed cattle and horses, from genetic counseling to the carefully engineered reproductive moment of truth. (His dream is to do the same for lions on the Serengeti.)
I met Jerry last winter in Augusta, Maine. I was alone in a bar, consoling myself after a disastrous interview for a job I might have had tagging moose. Till now, my work has taken place on the ocean, but lately I've been restless for the reassuring enclosure of mountains and lakes. And the ocean is becoming too politically charged. Overfishing, nuclear testing, PCBs, and a mulish nostalgia for whaling have all conspired to make the practice of Darwin-style biology next to impossible.
We got talking about something predictably high-minded like the dawning obsolescence of wilderness. He was wearing a bolo tie, a ridley sea turtle treading water at the throat of his denim shirt, under the reef of a coral-red beard. I remember wanting desperately to impress him. That's not like me, so I was partly hooked, partly annoyed. We'd been talking less than an hour, had moved on to Richard Dawkins and selfish genes, when Jerry admired my earrings: tear-shaped slabs of turquoise hanging from silver studs.
"How'd I look in one of those?" he said. He reached out and gently unfastened my right earring. I was acutely aware of his callused fingertips; of his beard, like fiery sagebrush, grazing my face. Not a soft square inch on the man except this pair of blue eyes, a blue like bridesmaid satin. I expected him to turn toward the mirror behind the bottles and hold the earring up for show, but instead he set it down. When he took an ice cube out of his scotch and held it to his right earlobe, I laughed and said, "You are bluffing."
Merely smiling, he put the ice cube on the bar, where it slid aimlessly away. He took the earring and, just like that, pushed it through. The noise was faint but excruciating, a cell of bubble wrap popping. He did not blink.
"Now we're a package," he said, pressing our naked ears together and facing us toward the mirror. "Siamese, inseparable."
"Get away!" I shoved him, but I was laughing hysterically. The part of me that was hooked had just won me over against all survivalist caution, of which I've been told I possess next to none.
Just like that, I've lost a month of my life. Sloughed off my frontal lobe like snow shearing off an ice floe in May. Other people fill in the details, but what do you believe? One incidental thing I'd like to remember: the helicopter ride to the hospital. A chopper careening up the muscleman arm of the Cape: Ride 'em, cowboy! Woo hah! My mother says, "No you would not want to remember, honey, believe you me. You were in a lot of pain. Sometimes God is merciful. God or whoever. Whatever." She is a Minnesota-born Presbyterian and goes to church only on Easter and Christmas Eve. She went a lot more often when Louisa and I were small, to make sure we had our full dose of Sunday school -- like a course of antibiotics -- but she could never drag our father along, not even for the "Hallelujah Chorus" by candlelight. (He is not swayed by bravura or sentiment, least of all by a merger. In this way, at least, I am his daughter.)
The afternoon is ruthlessly long. There is no conversation around me, and the fading light outside has no impact on the homogenized glare within. Dinner, equally dull, might as well be intravenous, and afterward, every time I drift toward sleep, Gwen or some resident pokes me. Or I hear another patient in distress. Even if I had the energy to complain, I'd feel like a brat. It's no secret that some of my companions here, just beyond my curtain, are going to die -- die right here and soon. That's why they're here. They're like planes in a holding pattern over an airport, waiting their turn to land. This doesn't spook me -- I think about death sometimes as a state of respite -- but I know that I'm moving away from them, that I'll make it out of here. At which point I'll face another struggle. Best not to think about that now.
In my jackknifed bed, subdued by a pill whose name I've forgotten, I assign myself a mental calisthenic: to configure my life as a timeline of medical crises -- of which there have been quite a few.
1 year old: Rolled off the changing table while my mother answered the phone, landed on my chin, and bit through my tongue. The scar's still there: a tiny crescent, like the nail shard clipped off a pinkie.
2 years: While visiting my father's cousin, an antiquities dealer in Charleston who thought she put everything I could destroy out of reach, meandered into an empty room and found, on a low table, a primitive stone head as big as a melon. Carried it all the way to the kitchen, to show the grown-ups, before dropping it on my right foot. Stone head unharmed, middle metatarsal cracked.
4: Bitten in our barn by a rat I was determined to befriend. I wasn't angry; I understood his fear. He was cornered in the grain bin and I'd been too pushy. Winced through the ministrations of the cardiologist who lived next door, but couldn't comprehend my mother's hysteria or the grim aggression with which my father trapped the rat in a shoebox and marched him to the car. A scalding July afternoon of beach traffic; it took us (all four of us -- Louisa hissing in my ear, over and over, "Boy are you gonna get it") three sticky hours to reach a sterile, stingy-windowed building up in Boston. Dad said we were taking the rat for a checkup but emerged from the building without the shoebox. The ride back mostly silent, my questions dodged. That night, overheard Dad describing to Mom how beheading was the only test for rabies (still true; when I worked one summer for a wildlife refuge, I hated that part of my job -- raccoons and foxes, loitering like drunks on somebody's lawn, that I had to corral and deliver for decapitation). Mourned my lost friend all night in secret. Next day, made a shrine under our privet hedge: a cross of twigs beneath which I buried a matchbox holding two cashews, a morsel of cinnamon Pop Tart, a zebra shoelace, a snip of my hair. That same week, Mom came home from the animal shelter with four scrawny cats and moved them into the barn.
7: A violent allergic reaction to blue cheese dip, which made my throat swell up so tight the doctors threatened tracheotomy; I still remember the terror in that one alien word. Having never liked blue cheese, can't imagine why I'd touch it. Forced by Louisa, I bet. For a year or so there, she'd trick me into eating disgusting foods by promising favors that she rarely fulfilled. A sandwich of dill pickles, Marshmallow Fluff, and paprika stands out in my mind.
10: On a Girl Scout camping trip, heading off to find firewood, trampled a nest of yellow jackets. Luckily, this is one allergy I don't have. Stung twice on one arm, once each on lower lip, left eyelid, left ear. The ear hurt most, throb¬bing to the core of my brain. Eye swelled shut for two days. The perfect excuse to drop out of Scouts. I was tone-deaf to that kind of fellowship anyway.
15: To impress the boys with whom I'd broken into a public pool at one in the morning, dove off the high board completely stoned. Landed on the water like a johnnycake flipped on a griddle and was sure I had broken my nose. Mostly, I'd pulverized a slew of capillaries and bruised my left cornea. For the next week, I looked like a raccoon wearing a tea strainer over one eye.
22: On a bike in Michigan, racing with my old boyfriend Luke (we still talk on the phone: lots of silences, mostly his anger, which I often deserve), roared across what I thought was a one-way street -- let the record show I was winning -- and sideswiped a station wagon, plowing a foot-long gash in my thigh. Now a magnificent scar, a conversational ice-breaker when I'm in shorts.
22 again: An ectopic pregnancy that threatened to rupture while I had a plum internship on a project to record whale songs on a sailboat off Newfoundland. Completely unexpected, since I hadn't seen Luke in two months (though there was this flyboy, one sweet fly-by-night in Montreal on my way north). If I were ever to change my mind about children, I might be a little tense...
23: ...though somehow, a year later -- stupid, stupid, stupid -- I was careless enough to get pregnant again.
Then a period of grace until now, seven years later, this. Again, at sea; so I'm told. Head trauma, fractured collarbone, assorted nicks and bruises. Two cracked ribs, three days in and out of a coma, five weeks of memory erased.
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Louisa's smart, smarter than me in the report-card sense, but whenever she's nervous, she babbles. Today, day two of my renewed consciousness, she's worse than ever, as if she's burning off extra fuel. I guess she's just glad I'm alive, and if I weren't so drugged up, I hope I'd be touched. "So I get home," she's saying, "Hugh's already asleep, I've had too much wine, and what do I find on the machine but one of Mom's classic soliloquies. Something like 'Clem's been in a serious accident, honey, I'm not at home because I'm here with her and your father's back and forth because there's a hurricane off Bermuda -- Ethan or Efram I think; your father says it's a bad sign that here we are not even August and already up to E. C and D passed us by, but B was a very close call. Great for the roses, though. ... You can't speak to her, I'm afraid, but call this number, I'm giving you this number, just a second, hang on, it's here in my purse. Is it as hot down there as it is up here? Yes, here it is, right, so call and say you love her. Will you do that, please? She can't talk, but have them leave her a message, I'll call you later.'"
Louisa stops pacing. "So of course I have no idea where 'here' is or who 'they' are, but I call the number, I'm frantic, and this woman answers, 'I see you?' as if I'm expected to answer, 'Aha, but I see you, too!' Like a game of some kind. All I can say is 'You see me? How?' and she laughs. 'That's a new one,' she says. 'This is intensive care,' and I freak out. I can't believe she's laughing."
"That's cute," I say. "Like, ICU in my dreams. ICU on the Johnny Carson show. ICU everywhere."
"More like, ICU every time all hell breaks loose. For both of us."
"Yeah, well, life is never dull." I'm too slow to pick up on the second half of what she said, but later, when I'm alone, it comes back and I tell myself, Remember to ask her. This is like trying to leave a footprint in sludge.
"Sometimes I wish you'd let it be. Dull. Just for a change." She puts a hand on my leg. "Are you in a lot of pain? Can I get you anything from the outside world? Mom's buying books, since they say you'll be in here awhile."
"I have a concussion. You can't read with a concussion. And no, the pain is just sort of predictably there, not too much, not too little. I know what drugs to ask for. But thanks." What I want from the outside world, of course, is Jerry, Jerry, Jerry. Why isn't he here?
Because no one told him. Who would tell him? I've kept him to myself for months. Not because he's not important to me. Because there's so much at stake. That's when I clam up.
I interrupt my sister's running commentary. She's acting weirdly jumpy. "Louisa? Can you make a call for me? I can't have a phone till I'm in a regular room." Miraculously, I recite his number.
"Who's Jerry?"
"A guy I met who . . . Can you please just call him and tell him where I am?"
For once, I don't get her patent-pending look of disapproval. "Anything you need. Today, I'm your slave." She smiles and lowers her voice. "Your go-between."
I feel sorry for her, but it passes. Louisa's married, and before that, her love life was never too complex. When I see her these days, I keep waiting for her to tell me she's having a baby. It's way beyond time.
I don't think Eric Slocum's superiors would like how familiar he is, the casual way he sits on my bed, twiddling his stethoscope. He's just told me that I was in an accident during a sailboat race off Westport, Massachusetts, on July 25. "You do sail," he says coyly in response to my shock.
"Yes, I sail," I say, perhaps rudely. "But I have never been in a race. I grew up around boats, but I'm not the yachting type. I've sailed to do research."
"Research?" His eyebrows, raised, sprout tiny projectile tufts. Other than this hint of vampire, he is Ken-doll handsome, down to his patent-leather hair.
"Whales and seals. Until the money for my last job dried up. I was in California. The last place you want a state-funded job right now."
"Ah." He looks impressed, though I doubt he is. He writes something down. If doctors are impressed -- a rare event -- it's by artists, acrobats, athletes. Any science other than medicine has the cachet of hand-me-down clothing with perspiration stains.
I want to ask again about the race but stop myself. Best not to invite more concern than I want from this guy. Now he is telling me that I was unconscious when I came off the chopper, but talking nonstop.
"What was I saying?"
"According to the EMT who took your vitals, it was mostly nonsense but weirdly intelligible." He looks at his notes. "When I arrived, you were asking for Band-Aids and coleslaw -- and there was something about 'Krishna sloughing.'" He leans closer. "Are you fond of coleslaw? Are you a Hindu?"
"What I am is tired." Is he actually flirting?
He knocks on one of my shins, as if to see who's home.
"I can feel that. In case you've reserved a wheelchair."
He laughs nervously. "Dr. A. will be through in an hour. One more night without further complications and we are copacetic. Upstairs you go." Dr. Slocum nods at the hills and valleys of my cardiograph, sound as a Sousa march. Earlier today, I flipped through the printouts on the clipboard tied to the head of my bed. They looked more like the Tetons my first day in; a solo by Max Roach.
"Gwendolyn taking good care of you? Everything to your satisfaction?"
"Just swell. I'd turn down Mar-a-Lago to be here."
"Attagirl." He knocks on my shin again and, finally, leaves.
Coleslaw is the name of Jerry's old tomcat who is missing so many teeth that he emits, when he sleeps between us, a snore as loud and jagged as a woodchipper mauling a dead Christmas tree. Krishna is the mainsail of the Gannet, orange like the robes of the bald guys who chant and beat tambourines. (Krishna's luffing, I must have said.) The Gannet is the sailboat on which I helped record whale songs eight years ago, the summer my uterus lost access to an ovary, the summer I fled Luke and his first proposal of marriage (two reunions, two breakups, lay ahead of us yet). Not that I wasn't working my tail off. The crew had names for everything: The galley stove was Pelee because of its volatile nature, the keel Great Whitey because the captain said it was sure as a shark. The head, my favorite, was Tricky Dick, Nix for short, because it liked to spit back at opportune moments.
I eat my entire inedible breakfast. What I am ravenous for is visiting hours. Louisa, I hope, will have spoken with Jerry. If she caught him at home last night, he should be here soon. I asked Gwen to open my curtain and turn my bed around; that way, I can see the window to the waiting room and the clock above the door. Assorted loved ones, visible from the waist up, begin to gather and mill about, like a captive school of fish. Gwen is strict, unless someone is dying. From ten to noon means just that: she unlocks the door exactly when the second hand sweeps the twelve.
At fourteen to, three short round Italian-looking women arrive. They try to get Gwen's attention by tapping the glass (soundlessly, from this side). At thirteen to, a stooped elderly man shuffles straight to what must be a couch and sinks out of sight. At seven to, the elevator releases a tall blond man in a crisp suit, worthy of a magazine. He wields an enormous bouquet, a shrub, of roses. As if it were a torch, everyone else in the waiting room steps back. The color of those roses, a chaste milky pink, is so foreign to the spectrum in here (various hues of puke) that the sight of them sends a seismic tremor across my EKG. I have to smile, wondering who the roses are for, knowing -- as this drama king does not -- that flowers are not allowed in the ICU. No spores, no ants or earwigs, no pollen -- which means no summery pungence, no visual joy. My father's roses are the old-fashioned kind that resemble cabbages, infinitely petaled, earthy and elegant as the mistresses of kings. These pink ones, I suspect, are more like Vegas bimbos -- callow, chilled beyond fragrance -- but all the same, seeing them makes me long for grass and sky, for sun on my skin.
The drama king comes straight to the window and cups his free hand to block the reflections and search for someone -- mother? grandmother? fiancée? . . . Right Side of Beacon Hill fiancée. I look around at my neighbors. Of the patients I can see -- those without masks or tents -- no one appears even potentially glamorous enough to merit this botanical fanfare.
Now he beams and waves. If I didn't know any better, I'd say he was waving at me. Just then, my sister shows up. She looks around and then actually goes up to the guy and taps him on the shoulder. They shake hands, smiling like old friends. Side by side, they wave in unison. I wave back.
In the cattle business, they call Jerry the Fertility Wizard. In a single liaison, he can coax more eggs from your prize cow than there are loan sharks in Providence. I wouldn't take Mel Gibson's income to put my arm where he routinely puts his, but he does it with such concentration and dignity that, to look at his face, you'd think he was a pastry chef at the White House.
In March I flew with him to Milwaukee and watched him harvest eggs from a Holstein cow who milks the world record. One of her test-tube calves costs more than a brand-new sports car.
We checked into the best hotel overlooking Lake Michigan. We had lunch with a handful of dairy hotshots, big sweaty guys who love their bourbon and steak followed by ice cream in flavors out of a time-warp (black raspberry, butter pecan, peppermint stick). I would have been happy to play Miss Ornamental, but Jerry wanted me there as Ms. Accomplished. A woman doing what I did would be, in that circle, a captivating eccentric. Maybe he figured a little extra brainy hauteur would scare these guys off from questioning his fees. From the way their eyes traveled, though, I think they took me for a Sea World Suzy Cream Cheese, the girl in a wet bikini who tosses the Frisbees.
We went back to our room after lunch and kept ourselves naked and busy. We drank two bottles of champagne, then lay back and watched the six o'clock news, Jerry's head on my ribs, his rough hair pricking my belly. When they flashed the picture of a missing schoolgirl, he said, "The worst thing that could possibly happen to you. To a parent."
"And if you're not, what's the worst thing then?" I said.
"That you'd be conscious of? AIDS. Watching helplessly while your body's colonized by a kamikaze virus. Or genocide. Watching your family get slaughtered by your neighbors."
"What a nice imagination you have. But what do you mean, 'conscious of'? What's the biggest tragedy you wouldn't be conscious of?"
"Letting life pass you by. Living like a starfish, clinging to your one unchanging colorless rock."
"Don't scare me."
"But you wouldn't. We wouldn't." With his neck pulled up short on my belly, his laugh came out a contemptuous snort.
"Well, aren't we superior. Living our lives like the glorious vertebrates we are." On TV, another borrowed snapshot: a fireman, younger than I am, killed in the line of duty.
"But some people," said Jerry, "say life passes you by if you don't have children. Having children is life. Being a parent."
"Is that what you want?"
He tilted his head back to see my upside-down face. "A few years from now. Sure." Unspoken was a clear And you?
Was this a potential invitation? An early appraisal, like the first vetting on a thoroughbred? I looked at the TV. I didn't say, Not on your life or Scares the bejesus out of me. I said, "Guess I've yet to meet a gene pool worthy of mine."
He laughed. "Or you're afraid of your animal self. That's the danger of living too close to the beasts. When the idea seems repulsive to me, the idea of kids, that's what I suspect. Like, all this education, all this cerebral honing, and I'm going to what? Fritter away my time sniffing small butts? Aiming spoonfuls of mush at drooling mouths? But even more, I think, will I let myself knuckle under to my instincts, with no more control than my ancestors down in Olduvai Gorge?"
"Victim of your own biology," I said, relieved. I frisked his hair.
"But, but." He twisted around and sat cross-legged, looking at me. "I'll always be a Catholic, at root."
My turn to laugh. "Doesn't mean you have to reproduce like one."
"I want a wild and freewheeling life, a life of pick up and go," he said. "I believe anything can happen; there's no individual ration of good and bad. But I can't lose sight of God's purpose -- it's sort of there all the time, just outside my peripheral vision. Embracing us everywhere, a grand invisible womb." I listened to his voice slide away. I let that be the end of it, and so did he. He straddled my thighs and began to massage them, smiling.
I wanted him too much to laugh at the notion of a grand womb (why did I see a circus tent?). Before we let go again, I made him promise we'd drive to Chicago for dinner and dancing. Then I said, "Prove you want it wild." Four hours later, we stood at the top of the Sears Tower, the image of my sequined dress, bought just for this trip, confounding the lights of the city. We talked about Africa, and I remember not saying Take me with you but teasing him instead, singing "Born Free" to the lasso of shoreline below us. Even his ambitions made me jealous when I saw how tightly they held him.
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The drama king is the first to reach my bed. "Honeybee, they confiscated your flowers!" He saves me the difficulty of a reply when he kisses me, long and tender, on my mouth. I gasp, not just at the shock of being kissed like that by a stranger but because I've grown so used to Jerry's beard, its prickle and rasp against my mouth. I feel like I've just been kissed by a Victoria's Secret model.
Behind the guy who kissed me, Louisa gloats like a yenta, and behind her, Dr. Athanassiou makes his typically fragrant entrance. Dr. A. (which is what the other doctors and nurses call him) smells like what I imagine backyards must smell like in Greece, like plants that are green but frugal and thorny, thirst-proof succulents. Ordinarily, I find perfumed men repulsive, just as, ordinarily, I find doctors tedious. To both rules, this man is an exception. Yesterday he came to see me three times. Whenever he arrives, he stands very still for a moment at the edge of my curtain, an unspoken request for permission to enter. He never barges in or bustles around. He's no Dr. Slocum. He asks me strange and amusing questions, like "Can you name for me the capital of France?" "The vice president of your country?" "Your favorite fruit?" "Do you habitually wear pyjamas?" "How many first cousins have you, maternal and paternal respective?" My favorite so far: "What is chivalry?" He has a regal posture, a thicket of a black mustache, slightly salted, and an accent that I like to imagine comes from Athens by way of upper-crust Nairobi or somewhere equally dashing. He makes me feel like the winning guest on a game show; I don't think I've flubbed an answer yet -- but he's still being cautious. Otherwise, he'd have released me to the upstairs world of flowers and phones. And there's the gash under the bandage on the back of my head. When I asked him how much they shaved, he frowned at me and said, "Would not a touch of baldness be but a trivial price for your life?"
The first thing he does today is wheel my bed around, so once again I'm looking out the window at the parking lot. "I prefer that patients face the light," he says.
After I introduce him to Louisa, the drama king grabs his hand. "Larney Poole. I'm the one who got her into this pickle, I fear." Pickle? Is this guy related to the Dr. Slocum of copacetic and noggin?
Dr. A. pats him on the shoulder and says, "I am quite sure your young woman does not believe sailing is checkers."
We chuckle politely.
He turns to me and says, "It is what day today?"
Thursday, I tell him.
"Who are your visitors today? Tell me of your companions here."
I try to draw out a speech on Louisa -- how she lives in New York, she's four years older than me, she's an art critic at a magazine, her husband is a guy named Hugh who teaches American history at a prep school...
Dr. A. interrupts graciously. "And this young man?"
"Barney," I say quickly, pleased that I've remembered his name. "He tried to bring me roses, but roses are taboo. Well, I guess you know that." I crane my neck, which hurts like hell, but I need to see the waiting-room window. Still no Jerry. Instead, Mom. She waves a shopping bag in the air and grins. She'll have to wait for someone to leave, since Gwen never bends the two-guests-only rule. "And hey, there's our mom." I point.
I can't tell what Dr. A is thinking. His tone is always so calm and professional. He says, "We know that you do not remember the accident which placed you here. This is not unusual." He explains to Louisa and Barney what he has already told me. "The memory is not there to retrieve because it was never encoded in the primary instance. The trauma of the moment precluded any recording of events as they had come to pass. The tape, you may say, is not erased but blank. However, your actual memory loss of the entire preceding month is of greater concern -- that you believe we are still in the month of June - this is of greater concern. . . . Possibly it is a vestige of shock or of oxygen deprivation." He turns back to me. "But if this young man was a vector in the accident, it is to my great curiosity whether you remember him."
I take a good look at my admirer. The passion that gleams from every microscopic pore in his patrician face is way beyond flattering; anyone could see it's been requited. Other than his madras bow tie, I guess I could see myself not turning him down. He is Newport handsome, with eyes not Jerry's wild-yonder blue but the earnest blue of Lake Michigan as seen from that Milwaukee suite. My heart sinks; he is the inverse of Jerry. He is rebound material par excellence.
"You don't, honeybee, do you?" he says. "Remember me." He looks more amused than offended, even touched.
"I don't. I'm sorry, but I don't know you from Adam."
I wait for him to look wounded or angry. But his expression remains bright, and then he actually laughs. As if I've just confessed undying love. He comes over and kisses me again, this time on the hand snagged by the IV. "Then you'll be my Eve. I'll have to convince you what a fine time we've been having, win you all over again. What a challenge -- what a pleasure!"
Louisa says she has to make a phone call, but she'll be back. Dr. A.'s beeper goes off. He says he has grand rounds but will return after lunch. This leaves me alone with the stranger who thinks he's my boyfriend. Or the boyfriend I've mistaken for a stranger.
"Barney, I'm sorry, but who are you?"
"Larney," he says. "I'm the guy who was lucky enough to offer you a ride before the rest of the world had a chance."
I am trying to frame a question to this alarming statement when Mom joins us.
"Hello there, you dapper young man."
"Hi, May." He kisses her on the cheek.
"Did my daughter dent your uncle's boat? Clement's made of tougher steel than the hull of the Intrepid. Don't you mess with her."
"Mom, I'm right here. In case you hadn't noticed."
She reaches into her shopping bag. "Yes you are, sweetheart, and we have never been so grateful to know it, believe you me." Mom wears large gold fox heads on her ears and a scarlet knit dress that few women her age could pull off. She'd never dream of a face lift or color her silver hair, but years of posting in a saddle have preserved her tight hips and legs.
She sets on the chair a racehorse mystery by Dick Francis and a hot-off-the-presses book about the Exxon Valdez disaster. "But wait till you see this," she says triumphantly, and plunks a book on my lap called "Why the Reckless Survive." "I was relieved to see someone thinks that they do! A scientist, no less." She points to the Ph.D. after the author's name.
Larney laughs. He seems to laugh as readily as most people blink.
Mom points back at the shopping bag. "Bananas and grapes, clean undies, Jergens lotion. Am I a good mother?"
"Yes, but you're making me nervous rushing around. Sit."
"That's because I'm temporary." In her maddeningly androcentric way, she addresses herself to the man in the room. "I'm going to wash the grapes, and then I'm leaving you two alone and heading off for lunch at the Chilton Club. I talk too loud for the place, but they'll just have to squirm their way through it. I give the maitre d' a naughty thrill. He loves me. He's from Duluth; we talk about the Vikings between courses."
After she leaves, Larney puts the books back in the bag and pulls the chair to the bed. He leans an elbow against my hip. "I'm not going to take advantage of your forgetfulness. I know I'm just a vacation in Bermuda. I know about your animal self. I know about the sperm king. But we were having a fabulous time. You'll have to take my word on that."
"What about my animal self?" (Though I want to ask, "What about the sperm king?")
"How you're giving in to it, letting it rule; those were your words."
I sigh. Would he mind just telling me how we met? He attacks the task with pleasure. I was hitchhiking south of Boston. The sun was setting. When I got into his car, he could tell I was very upset: heartbroken, angry, or both. When I told him where I was headed -- to my parents', God knows why -- he said his destination was just ten minutes from there. He got me to talk about my policy work on conserving seals in the Northwest and convinced me to go to a cocktail party the next night (at the home of his uncle, skipper of the fateful boat). I showed up at the party in what Larney describes as a Minuteman missile of a sequined dress, a dress intended, in his opinion, for tearing off. I agreed to go home with him if he understood one thing. "You said, I remember exactly, 'I'm in the market for a little amnesia.'"
"Well hey, if I'm in the 'Be careful what you wish for' sweepstakes, I just won. So, did you tear it off -- my dress?"
He closes his eyes. "I came close. I pictured all those popped sequins like shooting stars. But no."
"Thank you. That dress is one thing I do remember. I got a third Visa card to buy it." It was the dress I'd bought for my Ms. Accomplished weekend with Jerry. We laugh together as Larney holds the hand that emerges from my sling. He is smitten, and I know a good drug when I see it. The pleasure is surprisingly real.
"May I take you wherever you're going, whenever they let you out?" he says. Because he sounds as if he's sure I'll say no, I tell him of course.
"What do you drive?" I ask, because cars so readily seduce me. Maybe I will remember his car.
"A blue SL convertible. You liked how it matched your dress. You told me what you needed right then was an expensive car and, if possible, a large cock. Again, I quote you verbatim. I'm nothing if not honest. You told me honest was just what the doctor ordered. You took my breath away."
This is making me feel ill, but I press on. "One more question. This is important. Do I have a job yet?"
"No," he says, "but you're closing in on a good one, and damn it, it's going to take you miles from me, way the hell out to the Rocky Mountains."
This is when Louisa returns. Larney says he's sorry but he has to get back to "the firm." (Law or brokerage, I assume, but his fanciful image of flying sequins makes me think interior design. He seems too sweet to be a lawyer.)
Louisa's mood has cooled; she seems agitated, impatient, no longer my willing slave. She picks up one of the books and pages through it. She doesn't sit down.
"Don't stay if you need to get back home," I say. "I'm not going to be a vegetable."
She snaps the book shut. "I'm sorry."
"Sorry for what?" Looking at her in profile, I notice (not meaning to, not out of spite) that her chin is beginning to sag, just barely. The four years between us once seemed like an eon. Now the gap feels uncomfortably slim.
"Sorry, but yes, I have to go back tonight. Sorry I'm so spacy. It's just . . . a hospital's not the most festive place to hang out." As if she's sensed my scrutiny, she unclips her hair, letting it fall around her face.
"Lou -- did you ever talk to Jerry?"
"I spoke to someone named Sheryl and left a message. I'll try again if you want."
"At his house? This . . . Sheryl?"
"I called the number you gave me."
"Did she know me?"
Louisa looks unambivalently irritated now. "She wasn't extremely friendly. I assumed she would pass on the message. I said it was urgent."
The neighbor who feeds Coleslaw? I'm leafing through the women I remember in his life.
"So," Louisa says abruptly, "how many do you have in mothballs?"
"How many what?"
"Men."
I'm about to ask why she's picking a fight when suddenly I get it. Her nervous comings and goings? Nausea. Her instinct for combat? Hormones. Now she's saying -- in a kind of hiss, because we have to keep our voices down -- "What I can't believe is this guy Larney -- this, in case you hadn't noticed, outgoing, funny, gorgeous guy -- how he doesn't mind about ... what did he call him? 'The sperm czar'? Who I assume has got to be this Jerry I'm chasing down. Last I heard, you were still talking to Luke, still on the fence about Zip -- whom I liked, you know, despite all his talk about inner power and yin food. . . ."
I wait to be sure she's wound down. "Last I checked, 'talking' and 'on the fence' aren't fucking."
"Did I say anything about fucking? I don't care if you're fucking them all. I'd just love to know how you keep them in tow."
"Louisa, we're not all blissfully married like you." I don't mean to insult her, but the look on her face tells me plainly that I did.
Gwen pokes her head in. "Ten minutes, you two."
The minute Gwen's gone, I say, "Lou, are you having a baby?"
I do a lot of reckless things, my mother is right, but I don't hitchhike (mainly because it's so boring and inefficient). If I was in fact hitching a ride -- close to dark, on a highway -- and if I looked heartbroken, angry, or both, I dread to think what it means. Years ago, in the rain, I hitched away from my very last breakup with Luke. He was devastated; I walked out like a guy, like a cad. No one will ever watch me weep from a broken heart. At my worst moments, I wonder if I know what a broken heart is -- or a heart before it's broken. Maybe broken is all I know.
When we were little, I was sick all the time. Not sick in bed or withering away, but I had a lot of violent allergies, as if life was constant provocation, my body itching for a fight. So I got just about all the attention, deserved or not. Anxious, most of it. The anxious devotion of my mother. Which grew, eventually, into proprietary devotion, because I liked the same things she liked: horses, dogs, working up a good sweat. Later, holding the fascination of men. People talk about "matches" between parents and children, the luck of the cosmic draw. Mom and I are a pretty good match.
One year at our annual Fourth of July cookout (I was in high school, Louisa in college), Mom was telling a bunch of our neighbors how I'd broken into the town pool. (I was still wearing that tea strainer over my eye.) She'd had a decent amount of gin, and her voice carried across the lawn: "When I answered my front door and saw Officer Graves, his ground-chuck nose on the other side of that screen, I remember thinking, Oh my God, my darling baby, my favorite child -- don't tell me what I can't bear to hear, you son of a bitch! I would have ripped the man's tonsils out with my bare hands, believe you me, if the words I feared had come out of his mouth."
I looked myopically up from wherever I was in the crowd and happened to see Louisa's face, wherever she was. Completely tuned in to our mother's words, she was staring me down, the look on her face triumphantly sour. She'd always said I was our mother's favorite, and I would deny what I knew to be true, because until then she never had proof. Here it is at last, said her look, what she'd been waiting for: justification she could bank against any future family injustice. Funny, though, how then we were free to be friends -- carefully, but still. It was like the end of a game of musical chairs: over, all that wondering who'd get the seat; win or lose, the same relief.
Louisa's still angry, but I've made a dent, because she laughs for about ten seconds. "Oh, I am anything but having a baby."
"Well you are something. I don't know what, but something."
She hides her face again. "Something. Yes, I am something."
I wait. "Well?"
"Clem, can I ask you a question?" She looks serious. "Do our lives, I mean ours in particular, revolve around men?"
"Pardon my intrusion."
Louisa and I look over, startled. It's Dr. A. "I had meant to observe the back of your head, Miss Jardine. Then I will entrust you again to your sister."
As he snips gently at the bandage, he asks me random questions. His smell is so overwhelming, so lovely, that it takes me nearly a minute to recall how many playing cards there are in a deck, sides to a stop sign, states in the Union. His fingers touch my bare scalp. I tell him Tangier is a city or maybe a country, tangelo a fruit, tangent a geometric divergence. When he leaves, I say to Louisa, "What does that man smell like? It's beautiful."
"That's vetiver," says Louisa. "It's nice, you're right."
Gwen pulls back my curtain. She taps her watch. "Time, girls."
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Larney's roses await me. They are nicer than I thought -- pungent and meaty, flowers of pedigree and substance. The card reads, With profound apologies & unswervingly tropical affections, Yours and yours only, L. At the top, a deft slash through J. LARNED QUINCY POOLE, indigo on ivory.
Thanks to Dr. Slocum, I have a private room at dormitory cost. After two sessions of dramatic pleading, the day nurse finally agreed to turn off the fluorescent light that runs like a racing stripe around the upper walls. So the light in my room is now sun, which swells and fades as the clouds come and go, the way a pupil widens and constricts. In a week, it's the closest I've come to open air, which I desperately crave. I nap erratically, black holes of dreamless sleep that quench like rationed swigs of cold spring water. Each time I wake, my head aches with the labor of healing.
Dad is my first visitor here, exhausted from hurricane vigil. For half of every summer, hurricanes are to my father what national economists are to CEOs: whispering Disaster, disaster right in your ear, then half the time saying No, sorry, just joshing!
It's the first time I've seen him since coming to, but Dr. Slocum tells me he was here on the second day of my delirium. Between tests, he sat by my gurney while Mom paced and cursed and bargained with my absent self. Now he carries a rose -- a Mrs. Anthony Waterer -- red as a cherry sno-cone. He loves reciting the names of his roses, most of them Baroness This, Comtesse That, Principessa Hooha. He enjoys evoking these Old World grande-dames (though he didn't exactly marry one; maybe that's why). He carries my rose in a mason jar with a punctured lid, which he will have packed in a picnic cooler to keep it fresh for the two-hour drive.
It's Dad who tells me exactly what happened, and the story seems to give a purpose to his presence that makes him less uncomfortable in mine.
The uncle had a crew member cancel before an important race, and Larney recruited me. Entering the last leg, a strong wind at our stern, we were neck and neck with another boat to port. When their bow began to veer toward ours, the skipper panicked: He tacked before us when we had the right of way. I was on the foredeck, raising the spinnaker, which unfurled against my face and snapped in the wind like gunfire, leaving me blind and deaf to all warnings. When the two boats collided and our bow rode up over theirs, I was smacked in the chest by their boom and hurled backward into the water. As I went in, the jib sheet snared my right arm, snapping the ulna; then my head slammed against the side of our boat. Larney dove in and passed me up to the other crew members. Somebody radioed for an ambulance. The paramedics, en route to the nearest ER, called in the medevac from Boston.
Though Dad inhabits the sailing world and lives a life many would kill for, in his dreams he's just the plantsman he was schooled to be, pruning vines, cataloging spores, protecting fragile blooms from extinction. This old long¬ing gives him a professorial tone when he tells tales, not the blow-me-down air of your average nautical windbag. As I eat my dinner, he re-enacts methodically the way in which his youngest daughter almost died.
"But here you are, safe," he says at last. His tone is so reverent, it makes me nervous.
"After a fashion!" I say, to lighten him up, but he doesn't smile.
"I would like to impress upon you that your mother and I were terrified. Please realize, this is the third time our town police chief has materialized at our front door on your behalf. Clem, honey, it is my sincerest, most heartfelt wish that this time will have been the last. The very arrival of this man's car in our driveway again would do us in." He's still holding onto his flower, as if he's not sure I deserve it. Condensation from the jar drips onto the floor and one of his boat moccasins (a new pair).
"Dad, it's my wish too," I say, but I have to suppress the urge to giggle at his solemnity. Apology is no more my style than gushing about grief, love, and mortality is his.
He kisses me on the cheek and sets Mrs. Waterer beside Larney's bouquet. He stops to finger one of the pink blooms, now fully open. "Souvenir d'un ami. Your young man is not undiscerning."
Before leaving, he reaches inside his jacket. "This looks important," he says. The envelope is addressed to me at Jerry's, forwarded in his scrawl to Rhode Island, and I wonder if Dad saw the irony: his daughter bashed up in an ICU while there's her name, Clement Jardine, typed on a clean white surface, placid as a stormless sea, c/o Mr. Beau Jardine, in whose care she has not been for some time. I'll bet it made him feel awful, that c/o. It makes me want to say something reassuring, but I fail again, because he is out the door, with a taut wave, before I can think of a thing.
The return address is Jackson, Wyoming, and the letter inside -- from someone whose name means nothing to me, Department of Game and Fish -- tells me that he and his colleagues were "more than impressed" by our meeting and hope I will, taking into account the funding constraints we discussed, accept a position as research biologist on the Interagency Grizzly Bear Study Team and move myself out west by September. I concentrate hard, but no bells go off, no boards light up, no fireworks fill that dense black sky. I have flown across the country, seen a place I've always yearned to see, landed myself an impressive if poorly paid job, and right now I can't remember a bit of it. I am not going to tell this to Dr. A. I can only hope dependable Larney will tell me about the sights I saw and, if I told him enough, about the people I more than impressed.
The sky matches Larney's roses when the nurse shows up to take my tray. I tell her not to turn on the lights just yet.
Jerry answers the phone, like he always does, "Heya."
"Hey yourself." My fingers on the receiver burn, as if I've just come inside from a bitter cold day. I trample right over the pause: "Just us lately comatose invalids here, don't mind us." I stare at my laid-up wrist, at the bruise seeping from under the cast. I apply what I know about healing to its spectrum of yellows and blues.
"I heard you're in the hospital. I'm sorry." This is the voice I've heard, deep and careful, when he's talking with difficult but wealthy clients.
"'Sorry.' Ah." I look up; my room is nearly dark. When I switch on the reading lamp beside the bed, I switch on my reflection in the window. I'm a mess, except for the ivory satin pajamas that Larney brought when they let me out of purgatory. "Listen, Jerry, just tell me this. Back in, oh, late June, why would I have been hitchhiking outside Boston, madder than Croesus?"
He laughs briefly. "I think it's 'richer.'"
"What's richer?"
"Never mind." He says gently, almost playfully, "Are you drinking?"
"Jerry, I have amnesia. I'm in the hospital. Cocktails are not one of the amenities offered. So help me out here. The last thing I know, I'm maybe moving in with you. Then it's five weeks later, I'm at death's door in the ICU, and you are nowhere in sight."
"ICU . . . my God, the ICU--"
"As in, I see you dumped me when I wasn't looking. Yes?"
"Bad timing, Clem. I'm sorry. I don't know what else to say."
"Bad timing?"
"Your forgetting, I mean. This is..." He sighs loudly. "What a mess."
My reflection grows more and more insistent. A winking jet soars through my bedridden self.
"Would it be a good idea or not for me to come right out and beg you to tell me what happened? Did I make too big an ass of myself? Or do I just pretend, oh well, oops, a chapter got ripped from my book."
I get a second laugh from Jerry, still far from warm, but he tells me. Because he wants us to be friends. I glare at my reflection: Cold day in hell.
We were out to dinner in Boston, eating at a sidewalk table, when a panhandling gypsy offered to read my palm. Jerry had been waiting all week -- a coward, he admits -- to tell me about this woman he ran into, someone he knew in college. The gypsy gave him the only chance he saw. And you know what's weird? Unlike all the things about my lost month that I have to fish from other people, the encounter with the gypsy I reel back in, here and now, on my own. Like some archetype who's shown up in too many dreams, she wore the gold hoops, the garish peasant textiles, smelled too perfectly of garlic -- the only glitch her local, car salesman accent. "A world explora" were her first words. "I see you in Africa, hon, I see you in Java, I see you with the Eskimos way up nawth. I see you everywaya." She didn't say how she could draw this travelogue from my cupped hand in hers, but I didn't mind.
"And love, love, love. Hon, I see a tapestry of love. Hahtbreak, flirtations, wild lee-ay-zones, marriage, the gamut." I smiled at Jerry when she said this. "See any offspring?" I asked, and I can imagine the goading edge to my voice. The gypsy shook her head. "Can't see it clearly, hon. A toss-up. But see heeya?" She twisted my hand toward the candle and jabbed my palm with a long sharp nail. "Middla the life line, a break." I leaned in, my hair mingling with hers. She was right. A miniature chasm, bisecting the line.
"What does it mean?"
She shrugged. "Could be a crisis, I nevva lie. A serious accident. Loss of a deeya one. Your house burnin' down. But see heeya, the line goes on? Resurrection. A second wind." She stood up and readjusted her shawl. "Time waits for no man. No woman neitha." Without a wave or a nod, as if the prophecies ticked like minutes off a meter and my dime had run out, she walked on down the street, turning the nearest corner.
"A big crisis? That's easy," I said to Jerry. "The day you leave me." The copper light from the candle made me happy, the way it flickered so fondly through his red beard. I was feeling romantic, smiling like a fool. I was a fool.
Jerry stared into the candle as well, but the glow it cast on his face did not illuminate a look of romance. "I'm sorry to be such an ass," he said, "but I've got to put this on hold."
"This? What do you mean by 'this'?"
"Us," he said sheepishly.
That's when he told me about the woman, and that's when I told him no one was putting me "on hold," like some alternative phone call. I don't remember that whole conversation (who'd want to?), but now, as he tells me his side of the story, I remember the wildfire racing through my limbs as I fled down the sidewalk and, not long after, the even hotter rage when I discovered, clamoring through my purse in South Station, that the gypsy, that bitch, had lifted my wallet.
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"So, is it back to California?" Dr. Slocum sits, as he does too often, on my bed. He visits at least twice a day, claims he's writing me up as a special case of retrograde amnesia. The thing is, he rarely takes notes.
"Rhode Island for a little while. Till I get my head together." I touch my bandage. "So to speak."
He twiddles his stethoscope and nods. He shifts his weight toward me.
"Listen, don't do it," I say, as nicely as I can.
"Do what?"
"Ask me out to dinner, say you want to see me again, whatever. No matter what you have in mind, you'd be disappointed."
When he says nothing (what would he say?), I say, "Not good timing."
He stands. "Well. Say it like it is." He fingers his beeper, willing it to save his pride.
"You need a nap; go. I'm sorry to be such a jerk. I'll see you later." We both know I won't.
"Got everything you need?" he asks.
"Within reason."
"Sayonara," with a smirk, is how he tells me good-bye.
I turn on my TV. Out blazes a football montage, men colliding over and over. Everywhere, everywhere: men, men. I leave it on but mute. Football in July? I feel more disoriented than ever.
I jump when the phone rings. Oh Jerry, change your mind roars to the front of my brain like a projection onto a movie screen. But it's Louisa, calling from New York. She tells me, in a breathtaking rush, that not only is she not having a baby; she's fallen in love and doesn't know what to do. She wanted to tell me in person, but she chickened out. If you want advice, I tell her, take anyone's but mine.
"I know what your advice would be," she says. "'Burn those bridges! Choose hellfire over tundra!'"
"I guess that's how well you know me. You think I like hearing this news."
"I'm sorry. This is selfish. I just need to tell someone ... outside my life. Get it out of my head, to keep from going nuts, but somewhere safe."
She sees me as safe? This brings tears to my eyes.
"I trust you, Clem. Are you pissed?"
"Come on, Lou. I'm flattered. But Lou -- what a mess." Isn't that what Jerry said? Then she does what I guess she intended to do from the start, no matter what my reaction. She tells me about the guy, eyelash by eyelash, cuticle by cuticle (a man every inch the animal her husband is not). Gutless, I listen. I wonder if the gypsy put a curse on me too -- just in case I canceled all three of my Visas.
"I think I'm moving out," she says.
"Oh no," I say. "Don't do that. That's crazy!"
"I have to!"
I take a deep breath. "I thought you wanted my advice."
I have to wait a few seconds before she says, "I thought I knew what you would tell me. I guess I was wrong. It's okay."
Everyone seems to know who I am, and what I think, but me. After Louisa hangs up, I think instantly of her husband. I feel more sorrow for him than I do for Louisa, which isn't right -- not morally, but because I have no real bond with Hugh. Am I suddenly the queen of empathy? No. It's more that I need Louisa to be with this placid, loyal man. I needed her to make that choice in the first place -- and I need her now, though it's none of my business, not to unmake it. Please stay married and have that baby, I'm thinking. Please have several. I wish I could blame this insanity on drugs, yet my head, however sore, is clearer than I want to admit.
Dr. A. examines me one last time. When he comes in, I am as thrilled to see him as if this were a date -- even though, after so many meetings, he's still immune to chat. "Miss Jardine," he greets me. "I know you are expectant to depart, but will you please take your seat on the bed?"
His hands close around the back of my skull as usual. As usual, I'm surprised how little I resent the confinement. The heels of his hands, resting on my cheekbones, smell as green as ever, but today a little less arid, as if they've come straight from pruning young trees. Ah, horticulture. Perhaps that explains why I'm charmed by this fusty man who I'm guessing drives a dog-eared Civic and, come winter, wears wool socks in bed to console his Mediterranean feet. It's Freudian after all.
He asks me to define archipelago, estuary, fjord. Piece of cake. Then he asks for the names of the oceans and the Great Lakes. I leave out Ontario. "Listen, doctor, you'll never discharge anyone with tests like this," I say. "Schools over here haven't taught geography in years."
He jots on his clipboard. "Dr. Slocum has told me you are a scholar of the water." He rips off a form and hands it to me. "Your father, how is he?"
"Dad? Dad's fine. You met Dad?"
"Oh, you will not remember, of course," he says. "The day he was here with you -- a long day -- he was massaging your feet while we attended to your head. At one moment, I was resolute that he thought you were to die. I could not say otherwise, though I felt your case to be hopeful. Before he drove that long way home, I asked him to languish in my office and take a little drink. He told me you were so very small when you were born. He said it was the first time he ever prayed since he himself was a child. This day, he said, was the second. He said prayer is -- I remember exactly -- pointless but indispensable. The membrane of sanity. I told him that a doctor would be obliged to agree. It made a strike upon me." He taps his head with a finger. He gives me one of his rare smiles. "You will please thank him for the beneficent roses."
I wait for him to go on, but he looks at his watch and hands me his card. He says that if I have any unusual headaches, I am please to call. Without hesitancy. His first name, which did not fit on his badge, is Anastasias. Anastasias Athanassiou. Live forever; that's what his last name means, according to Dr. Slocum.
Larney has brought me a silk scarf to wrap my patchy head in, a dowdy yet sumptuous thing printed with sailor's knots. Probably his mother's. It looks silly with the jeans and Peter Tosh T-shirt he's fetched from my parents' house, but I am too touched to refuse. In the parking lot, I get a few stares.
He helps me into his car. "You are something, honeybee, you are a tough one," he says when he gets in beside me. (You might wonder how it is that I let him go on using his silly endearment. I let him because it's true. Yes I carry sweet stuff, but yes I wander far afield, and yes I sting.)
I smile. Am I something? What is that something? Why does everyone insist all the time on my toughness? How blind can they be? I take one of the inventories that have become second nature in the past week: I am confused, weary, ashamed of things I will never recall, but I am glad to feel the sun, then glad to be riding in a fast expensive car, top down, along a shining river. Though ultimately I will be in no one's care but my own, and that's just as well, today I find myself c/o J. Larned Quincy Poole and glad about that, too.
After a mile or so, I say, "Larney, what does the J. stand for?"
"Jephthah. A great-great-grandfather. Name like a mouthful of gauze."
"Well Jephthah, you are one charming guy. You know what? In the hospital, I got asked the definition of chivalry -- long story. But it's you: you're the definition. And I have a feeling you saved my life." I can tell he knows my honest praise is the beginning of a respectful letdown, fair and square. It's my way of saying that he's made, as Dr. A. would put it, a strike upon me.
When we turn south, he reaches across the rearview mirror and lowers the visor, to shield me from the sun. After I thank him, he says, "You're welcome," both reflexively and with a bottomless heart. I pretend that dust has blown in my eyes.
He says, "If you're tired, just sleep. Please."
At the touch of a chrome toggle, my seat swoons slowly back. How sweet such tiny empirical pleasures feel at a moment like this. As I turn on my good side to search for a semblance of comfort, my cheek soothed by the warm leather, I see on the backseat a blue plastic bag labeled Personal Belongings. It contains, I imagine, nothing I owned before the accident: just the books, underwear, and lotion my mother bought me; the satin pajamas from Larney, now flecked with coffee and saline. Stowed there as well are my sister's secret longing, my father's fears, and this stranger's curious devotion, so worthy it pains me. I close my eyes and relabel the bag Things Entrusted To Me ... We Will See How Wisely. Then I'm off, scholar of the water winging toward a lofty, land-locked retreat.
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