Sixteen
“You’re saying she has amnesia?” Miriam Travers said.
Dr. Watkins pawed at his jowly face.
He still wore a black rinse on his once-gray hair and still filled his showerhead with aftershave lotion.
He stank of it the way frontier docs, according to legend, had stunk of John Barleycorn. His wife had died two years ago. He was sixty-four and had just started dating. There were a lot of gentle jokes about his love life.
“Now that’s one of those five-dollar words I hate to use,” he said, fiddling with his stethoscope. The only hospital in Black River Falls was a sixteen-bed affair. If you were very bad off, you went to Cedar Rapids; worse than that, you went to Iowa City. He peered down at Mary, asleep in her hospital bed. She’d been cleaned up but you could still see bruises. “She’s had some kind of terrible shock. So right now she’s not remembering too good.”
“But she didn’t even recognize me!”
Miriam said. She’d held back tears for quite a while now. It was 2ccjj A.M. and she was spent. She had a very sick husband at home and a daughter whose state had yet to be determined.
I slid my arm around her. She leaned against it, frail and weary.
“Again, Miriam, we don’t know what happened. But obviously something pretty bad did. Amnesia, as they like to call it on television, comes in all kinds of forms. It rarely lasts very long. I expect in a day or two she’ll be saying hello to you when you walk into the room.”
“But where has she been? What happened to her?”
Miriam said.
Those were the questions of the evening. I’d brought her straight to the hospital. She’d slept most of the way. Not once had she shown any recognition of me. A couple of times, I wondered if she was still alive.
“As I told you, Miriam, there’s no sign of concussion. She has feeling in all her extremities. Her limbs are functioning well. And the bumps and scrapes she has are relatively minor. Cleaning them up made them look a lot less threatening. Her injuries mostly seem to be psychological. And there again, once she gets her physical strength back, she’ll be better able to deal with whatever happened to her.”
“Was she… raped?” Miriam asked, obviously dreading the answer.
“Not that we could tell.”
“I didn’t tell Bill about any of this,” she said to me.
“Good,” I said.
“I’m not sure he could stand to hear it.”
I gave her another squeeze.
“Now, I recommend some bedrest for you too.
You’re nearly as worn out as your daughter. You need some sleep. And you also need some help around the house.”
“We can’t afford it.”
“I’ve got a high school girl who plans to go to med school at the university. She helps out in my office ten hours a week. I pay her thirty-five cents an hour. She wants to get as much experience as she can. I’ll have her give you a call.”
“That’s very nice of you, doctor.”
He smiled. “Well, isn’t that what doctors are supposed to be, Miriam?
Nice?”
On the way back home, she said, “She was going to tell you something.”
“Yes.”
“I wish I knew what it was.”
“So do I.”
She turned and looked at me. “I shouldn’t say this, Sam. But she loves you so much.”
The streets were empty. A rising wind whipped the streetlights around, casting shifting patterns of tree leaves on the street. The cars along the curb looked like slumbering animals. All the house windows were dark.
She said, “I shouldn’t have said that.”
“It’s fine, Miriam. It’s fine. It’s just I don’t know what to say back.”
She put her hand on my shoulder. “That’s all right, Sam.”
“I keep wondering about that envelope from the county.”
“So do I. I don’t know why she’d write them. What would she be looking for?”
“I’ll have the Judge call over there,” I said. “The woman I spoke to didn’t want to wade back through all her correspondence.
That’s what she said, anyway. She was speaking to a peon so she didn’t have to worry. You know how bureaucrats are. But she won’t try that with the Judge.”
“Judge Whitney is some woman. I wish I could be more like her in some ways.”
I laughed. “Not all ways, huh?”
She smiled sadly. “No, I wouldn’t ever want to be as stuck-up as she is. You know, you think people are stuck-up sometimes just because they’re shy or because they’ve been hurt and they’re afraid to be hurt again. But with the Judge you know she’s stuck-up because she really does consider herself superior.”
“Oh, yes. Very much. Maybe it was all the Connecticut water she drank growing up.”
“Is there something wrong with Connecticut water?”
“Well, the longer you drink it,” I said, “the bigger your head seems to get. There must be a connection somewhere.”
The sad smile again.
When we reached her house, she leaned over and kissed me on the cheek. “You’re a good man.”
“Thanks, Miriam.”
There were a lot of lies, social lies, I could have told just then but I didn’t have the spiritual energy. You know, that everything was going to be fine.
Mary would be fine. Bill would experience a miraculous recovery. And she’d open her bankbook and find an extra $100eajjj in her account, the angels having deposited it before fluttering their way back to heaven.
“Good night, Miriam.”
I returned her kiss. I started to get out of the car but she said, “I’m not quite that feeble yet, Sam.”
I watched her walk to the door. There were a lot of people like her in our town: good, solid, hardworking people who took care of their own. Her bad luck had bent her but it hadn’t beaten her. She moved slower than I’d ever seen her move before.
On the porch, after getting the front door open, she turned and waved back to me.
I went home.
TV had long ago signed off. The Cedar Rapid stations never broadcast past midnight; often they went off after the eleven o’clock news. I was drained but not sleepy. I spent half an hour twisting the rabbit ears back and forth, trying to form pictures out of the noisy snow on my screen. I had a pair of rabbit ears that were the envy of Mrs. Goldman’s apartment house. They must have weighed twenty pounds and had more buttons and dials and doodads and doohickeys than most intergalactic spaceships. If you knew all the right codes and combinations, it would also mow your lawn and give milk. It was quite a rig. Most nights anyway. But not tonight. Every once in a while, an image would sort of form and I’d hear dialogue and get my hopes up, but then the signal would fade and there would just be snow again. I gave up. That’d be one of the nice things about living in Chicago. You could watch Tv all night.
I sat in my reading chair and drank a beer.
So many questions, including the identity of the girl in the black Ford ragtop. Would I have been in the right spot to find Mary if the mystery lady hadn’t challenged me to a race? Was she some kind of guardian angel? And Mary’s amnesia. The doc was probably right.
Temporary amnesia was probably fairly common in accident victims. But it was still disturbing that she
