examination cubicles separated by curtains. A Spanish-speaking family were clustered in the first one, spilling partly out into the aisle, all of them talking at once. “He’s this way, down at the end. Hardy’s with him.”
“The message I got said your patient didn’t know what year it is.”
“He thinks it’s 1998. To be fair, his memory’s always iffy, so I understand why Hillary thinks I shouldn’t have called you.”
“That’s exactly the sort of memory problem I need to know about. I’ll need to talk to that doctor—the attending?” Lily searched her tired brain and couldn’t come up with the name. “He won’t be happy that you called me, I take it.”
Denise snorted. “Plackett doesn’t want us to take a piss without his say-so.”
In the next cubicle a baby cried, thin and sad, in his mother’s arms. The mother looked about fifteen and exhausted. They passed an emaciated young man with gang tats being hooked up to an IV, an old man on a heart monitor, and a middle-aged couple exchanging worried words in what sounded like Vietnamese.
“I ought to tell you about Hardy,” the nurse went on. “
They had to stop and move aside to let an enormously obese woman make her way slowly down the hall with the aid of a walker, breathing heavily. She wore two hospital gowns—one to cover her backside and one her front—and a look of grim determination. As the woman struggled by, music arrived. Harmonica music.
It was a hymn of some sort. Lily knew that much, even if she couldn’t put words to it. Lily had been exposed to religion as a child, but the battle between her parents over which faith system their daughters would be raised in—Christian or Buddhist—had made her decide to opt out of the whole subject. She’d been studious in her inattention whether dragged to church or to temple, and eventually her parents dropped the subject, too.
The woman beside her obviously recognized the song. She was humming along, smiling. “That Hardy,” Denise said as the obese woman finally passed them. “He can sing most anything—well, old songs, anyway. I never heard him sing any of the newer ones. But he only ever plays the same three hymns on that harmonica of his—‘Blessed Assurance,’ ‘Amazing Grace,’ and ‘In the Garden.’ We hear those over and over. He does a real pretty job with them, though.”
The small space held two men. The one in the bed was white, unshaven, and scrawny, with a potbelly and mouse-colored hair. His eyes had the yellow tinge of a failing liver. The one standing beside the bed was over six feet tall and gaunt, though muscle lingered on his wide shoulders. His skin was unusually dark, the kind that takes on a bluish tinge under fluorescent lights, and his hair was grizzled. He wore a faded flannel shirt and baggy gray pants. He, too, could have used a shave.
“This is Agent Yu,” Denise announced. “She’s with the FBI.”
“The FBI,” the man in the bed said in a marveling way. “Imagine that, Hardy. That pretty girl is with the FBI.”
The other man lowered his harmonica to look at her in delighted surprise, as if they were old friends but he hadn’t expected to run into her here. “‘I’ll be calling you . . . ooo,’” he sang. “‘You will answer true . . . ooo.’” His voice was deep and true, but rough. Maybe the beating that damaged his brain had included a blow to his voice box.
“It’s mostly songs with Hardy, see,” Denise said. “Sometimes rhymes, but songs are easiest for him. Music is stored differently in our brains than language, see? He makes himself understood pretty well. Right, Hardy?”
The broken man smiled at Denise with the sweetness usually reserved for very young children, then held out both hands to Lily, still smiling.
Lily didn’t pass up a chance to get a reading on people. She moved closer and learned that he probably lacked the chance to bathe often. She put her hand in his. Not a trace of magic. His dark eyes were filmed at the edges with cataracts. “You’re Mr. Hardy?”
He shook his head.
“He likes to be called Hardy,” the man on the bed put in helpfully. “No ‘mister.’”
Hardy nodded, but his smile faded. There was something odd about his eyes, the intent way he looked at her . . . suddenly uncomfortable, Lily thought about her third grade teacher and felt a pang of sympathy for the other nurse. Mrs. Hawkins had been kind of creepy, too.
Hardy frowned. “H-h-hard road, heavy load. You true, you blue.” He still held her hand in one of his, but reached up to pat her cheek with the other. He started humming—a pop song this time, one she knew, though the words eluded her. It wasn’t recent.
“Hey, Hardy, you aren’t the only one who wants to hold hands with the pretty girl,” the man in the bed said. The crooked smile he gave her might have been charming many years before, when he still had all his teeth. “I’m Festus Liddel, miss, and I guess you’ve come to see me.”
“I guess I have,” Lily said, disentangling her hand from Hardy’s. “And I’d be happy to shake your hand, too, Mr. Liddel.”
“Well, I got to go check on my patients,” Denise said, smiling at all of them, “but you come talk to me later, Agent Yu.”
Festus Liddel had dry, cracked skin, a deep scratch on the back of his hand, and he smelled worse than Hardy. A lot worse. He also had a trace of an empathic Gift. It was weak, but it was wide open. “How can you stand it here?” Lily exclaimed before she thought.
Liddel flinched. “What do you mean?”
Lily cursed herself for introducing the subject of her Gift—and his—so poorly. She must be more tired than she’d realized. “I apologize for giving away information you might not want revealed. I’m a touch sensitive, and —”
“Get away! Get away! I don’t have anything to do with magic!”
Liddel, it turned out, had been raised in a fundamentalist sect that hated magic even more than they did gay sex. It took time to find that out—time, and Hardy crooning country music lyrics about how he believed in love, music, magic, and you. By which he meant
Amazingly, it worked. Liddel did calm down and let Lily explain and apologize for speaking about his Gift. “I understand that many people don’t want others to know, and I deeply regret mentioning it out loud. I was concerned. A hospital is a miserable place for someone with . . .” She paused, hunting for a way of referring to empathy without using the word in front of Hardy so she wouldn’t give away even more than she already had. And realized Hardy wasn’t there. “Where did he go?”
Liddel shrugged. “Guess he was called elsewhere.”
Lily was used to noticing things. Her job depended on it; sometimes her life did, too. It bothered her that the big man had slipped out without her noticing. “You’ve known him a long time?”
“So they say. To me, I just met him tonight. Guess I must have met him after 1998. That’s what year it is for me.”
Startled, she said, “But you trust him. You seemed to be relying on him.”
“He’s a man of God, isn’t he? Doesn’t matter if he doesn’t have a church of his own. I’ve never been around anyone who felt like . . . like he’s true, all the way down, the way Hardy is.”
Lily had a sinking sensation. “Almost like a saint.”
“Well, the Brethren don’t hold with all that papist stuff, so that’s not a word I’d use. But I guess if you were Catholic, you’d call him a saint. You Catholic?”
“Ah—no. But the subject of saints has been on my mind recently. You seem very calm about losing a large part of your life, Mr. Liddel.”
“I was upset at first, but after Hardy reminded me how God has a plan for each of us. Besides, it looks like what I lost was the worst part.” He chuckled. “I probably wouldn’t remember much of those years anyway.”
EMPATHS are not all alcoholics, nor are all alcoholics empaths, but Liddel wasn’t the only person who started drinking to drown out an empathic Gift. Alcohol, Lily had been told, didn’t so much shut
