Noah's Compass (4 page)

Well, this was just a mood he was in, created by current circumstances. He knew it wouldn’t last.

Before they could bring him a telephone—if they ever planned to—his ex-wife arrived.

Cheery and purposeful, hugging a paper grocery bag from which his favorite blue shirt poked forth, she breezed in already talking. “My goodness, what it takes to track a person down in this place! The switchboard said one room, the reception desk said another …”

Liam felt so relieved he was speechless. He stared round-eyed from his bed, clinging to the sight of her.

She was a medium sort of woman, medium in every way. Medium-length curly brown hair finely threaded with gray, medium-weight figure, and that lipstick-only makeup style that’s meant not to draw attention to itself. Her clothes always looked slightly unkempt—the belt of her shirtwaist dress, today, rode inches above her waistline—but she would have gone unre-marked in almost any gathering. He used to have trouble recalling her face when they were dating. This had seemed a plus, he remembered. Enough of those lovely, poetic, ethereal women who haunted a person’s dreams!

“It’s good to see you, Barbara,” he told her finally. Then he had to clear his throat.

“How are you feeling?”

“I’m okay.”

“Awful experience,” she said blithely. “I can’t imagine what the world is coming to.” She sat down on the green vinyl chair and started rummaging through her bag, producing first the blue shirt and then a pair of over-the-calf black silk socks, not what he would have chosen to wear with the khakis she drew out next. “If you can’t sleep safely in your own bed—”

Liam cleared his throat again. He said, “I don’t think it was Damian, though.”

“Damian?”

“Xanthe believes Damian was the one who clobbered me.”

Barbara waved a hand and then bent to set his black dress shoes on the floor beside the bed. “I’m sure I brought underpants,” she murmured, peering into the bag. “Ah. Here they are.

Well, you know Xanthe. She thinks pot’s the first step to perdition.”

Barbara used to smoke a bit of pot herself, Liam recalled. She could surprise you sometimes. For all her medium looks and her stodgy school-librarian job, she’d had a fondness for rock music and she used to dance to it like a woman possessed, pumping the air with her soft white fists and sending her bobby pins flying in every direction. This was back in the days when they were still together, before she gave up on him and filed for divorce. Strange how distinctly, though, that image all at once presented itself. Maybe it was a side effect of the concussion.

“Do you still like Crack the Sky?” Liam asked her.

“What?” she said. “Oh, mercy, I haven’t listened to Crack the Sky in ages! I’m sixty-two years old. Put your clothes on, will you? Heaven only knows when they’ll spring you, but you might as well be ready once they do.”

From the way she held out his underpants, stretching the waistband invitingly and cocking both her pinkies, it seemed she might be expecting him to step into them then and there. But he took them from her and gathered the rest of his clothes and padded off to the bathroom, clutching his hospital gown shut behind him with his free hand.

“After we get you settled at home,” she called from her chair, “the girls and I will keep in touch by telephone to see that you’re okay.”

“Just by telephone?” he asked.

“Well, and Kitty’s going to come spend the night with you as soon as she gets off work.

She’s found herself a summer job filing charts in our dentist’s office.”

“Your dentist’s open on Sunday?”

“It’s Monday.”

“Oh.”

“We’ll phone and ask if you know your name, just to make sure you’re compos mentis. Or where you live, or what day it is …” There was a sudden pause. Then she said, “You thought it was Sunday?”

“That could happen to anyone! I just lost track, is all.”

He had to sit on the toilet lid to put his socks on; his balance seemed a bit off. And bending down made his head throb.

“They told us you should be under constant observation, but this is the best we can manage,” he heard through the slit in the door. “Xanthe works such impossible hours, and Louise of course has Jonah.”

She didn’t say why she couldn’t do it, with her luxurious summer schedule, but Liam didn’t point that out. He shuffled from the bathroom in his stocking feet, holding up his trousers.

(Barbara seemed to have forgotten his belt.) “Could you hand me my shoes, please?” he said as he sat on the edge of the bed.

“Forty-eight hours is the amount of time they told us,” she said. She bent for a shoe and, without being asked, fitted it onto his foot and tugged the laces snug and tied them. He felt well-tended and submissive, like a child. She said, “I did call your sister. Has she been in touch?”

“This room doesn’t have a phone.”

“Well, she’ll probably call once you’re home. I told her you’d be discharged today. She wants you to get a burglar alarm as soon as possible.”

He nodded, not bothering to argue, and raised his other foot.

Then there was a period of limbo while they waited for his paperwork. Barbara took a crossword puzzle from her grocery bag, and Liam lay back on the bed, shoes and all, and stared at the ceiling.

The few times he’d been hospitalized before, he could hardly wait to leave, he remembered. He’d pressed his call button repeatedly and kept sending whoever was with him out to the nurses’ station to see what the holdup was. But now he was grateful for the delay.

At least here, he wasn’t alone. He felt lazy and content, and the sound of Barbara’s pencil whispering across the paper almost put him to sleep.

Imagine he was a man who lived in the hospital permanently. He’d been born here and he had somehow never left. His meals, his clothes, his activities—all taken care of. No wonder, therefore, he had forgotten how he had arrived! He had been here all along; this was the sum of his world. There was nothing more to remember.

Eventually, though, a nurse came with his prescriptions and instructions. She perched on the very edge of his bed, giving off a smell of mouthwash, and went over the doctor’s orders line by line. “You can’t be alone for the next two days, and you can’t drive your car for a week,” she said.

“A week!”

“Longer than that if you experience the slightest sense of vertigo.”

“You’re being unreasonable,” Liam told her.

“And it’s crucial to complete the full course of antibiotics. There is nothing on earth more septic than the bite of another human being.”

“A what?” he said. “A bite?”

“The bite on your hand.”

“I was bitten?”

A sickish zoom hit the bottom of his stomach, as if an elevator had dropped. Even Barbara looked taken aback.

“Well, not on purpose, maybe,” the nurse said. “But from the shape of the wound, they think you must have flailed out and made contact with the other guy’s teeth.”

She gave him a smile that was probably meant to be reassuring. “So it is very, very important to take these pills for the full ten days,” she said. “Not nine days, not eight days …”

Liam lay back and covered his eyes with his good hand. On purpose or not, there was something so … intimate about a stranger’s biting him.

After that they had the usual endless wait for a wheelchair, and Barbara used the time to go off to the hospital pharmacy and get his prescriptions filled. Liam picked up her crossword puzzle and studied it while she was gone. Famous WWII battlefield and Birthplace of FDR

and Palindromic Ms. Gardner—she had known them all, good librarian that she was, and so did Liam, or at least he recognized her answers as correct once he saw them. But Stressful occupation? gave him an itch of anxiety deep inside his skull, the way riddles used to when he was a child. Poet, Barbara had answered, so confidently that the cross of the T flew tip-tilted across the upright. He felt overcome with discouragement, and he dropped the puzzle onto the bed.

It was nearly eleven a.m.—Barbara long back from the pharmacy and deep in a novel—before an orderly arrived with a wheelchair and they were free to go. Shifting from the bed to the wheelchair made Liam realize that he didn’t have his wallet. He missed the pressure of that slight bulge in his rear pocket when he sat. “How did they admit me?” he asked Barbara.

“What do you mean?” she said. She was trotting down the hall behind him, keeping pace with the orderly.

“I mean, without my insurance card and ID.”

“Oh, Xanthe gave them the information once she got here. I have your insurance card now in my purse; don’t let me forget to return it.”

He pictured how it must have been—his flaccid, unaware form heaved onto a stretcher, loaded into an ambulance, trundled through the emergency room. It was the most unsettling sensation. “Depending on the kindness of strangers,” he said.

“Excuse me?”

“Nothing.”

But as soon as they were alone—as soon as she’d brought her car around and the orderly had settled him inside it—he told her, “I hate, hate, hate not remembering how this happened.”

“It’s probably just as well,” she said.

She was fumbling in her pocketbook, and she sounded distracted. He waited until she’d paid at the parking booth before he spoke again. “It is not just as well,” he said. “I’m missing a piece of my life. I lie down one night; I go to sleep; I wake up in a hospital room. Can you imagine how that feels?”

“You don’t have any recollection whatsoever? Like, hearing a suspicious noise? Seeing somebody in the doorway?”

“Nothing.”

“Maybe it will come back to you when you get into bed tonight.”

“Ah,” he said. He thought about it. “Yes, that makes sense.”

“You know how sometimes you dream about someone, and you forget you dreamed at all but then you happen to see that person and this sort of inkling will flit across your mind …”

“Yes, it’s possible,” Liam said.

They stopped for a traffic light, and he suddenly felt impatient to be home. He would lie down on his bed immediately and see if the memory wafted up from his pillow the way his past dreams often did. Probably nothing would come until dark, but it wouldn’t hurt to try earlier.

“If it were me, though,” Barbara said, “I’d be happier not knowing.”

“You say that now. I bet you wouldn’t feel that way if it really happened.”

“And how about your nerves? Do you really think you’ll be able to sleep comfortably in that apartment again?”

“Of course,” he said.

She sent him such a long doubtful glance that the car behind them honked; the light had changed to green. “I’d be terrified, myself,” she said as she stepped on the gas.

“Well, I will lock the patio door from now on. Do you know how you would lock one of those plate-glass doors that slides sideways?”

“There’s a thingamajig, I believe. We’ll look.”

This implied that she would be coming in with him, and he was happy to hear it. It wasn’t fear of another breakin he felt so much as distrust of his own capabilities. He had lost his self-confidence. He wasn’t sure anymore that he was fully in charge. Intruders were the least of his worries.

Barbara parked in the proper lot without his directing her. Obviously she had grown familiar with his apartment. And she had his keys in her purse—his worn calfskin key case with his car key and his door key. She took them out as she was waiting for him to inch forth from the passenger seat. (Standing up too fast made his head go spacey.) “Want an arm?” she asked him, but he said, “I’m all right.” And he was, once he’d waited for the amoebas to clear from his vision.

The pine needles gave off a nice toasty scent in the sunshine, but the foyer smelled as cold and basement-like as ever. Barbara unlocked his front door and then stood back to let him go first. “Now, the girls and I did clean up a little,” she said.

“Did it need it?”

“Well, somewhat.”

He wasn’t sure what she meant when he first entered, because the living room looked just the way he’d left it: more or less in order if you didn’t count the few unpacked cartons lined up along one wall. He moved down the hall past the den, Barbara close on his heels, and saw nothing different there, either. But when he reached the bedroom, he found a runner of brown wrapping paper on the carpet leading toward the bed. And the bed was fitted with linens that he had never seen before—an anemic light-blue blanket, slightly pilled, and sheets sprinkled with flowers. He had avoided patterned sheets ever since a childhood fever in which the polka dots on his sheets had swarmed like insects.

“We rented one of those carpet shampooers from the supermarket,” Barbara said. “But the carpet’s not completely dry yet; you’ll have to walk on the paper a while. And your sheets and blanket were, well, I’m sorry; we put them in the trash. I didn’t know where you kept your extras.”

“Oh,” he said. “I see.”

He stood there in a daze, looking slowly from bed to window to closet. Everything seemed benign and ordinary and somehow not quite his own. But maybe that was because it wasn’t quite his own; he had so recently moved in.

“Was anything taken?” he asked.

“We don’t think so, but you’re the only one who’ll be able to say for sure. The police are going to come back and interview you later. We did see that the drawer was yanked out in that table between the armchairs, and there wasn’t anything in it but we didn’t know if that meant something was missing or you just hadn’t filled it yet.”

“No, it was empty,” he said.

He walked into the room, his shoes scuffing across the brown paper, and sat on the edge of the bed and continued gazing around him. Barbara watched from the doorway. “Are you all right?” she asked him.

“Yes, fine.”

“Really the police made more mess than the burglar, I think. And the ambulance people.”

“Well, it was nice of you to clean up,” he said. His lips moved woodenly, as if they too were not quite his own.

“Louise was the one who rented the carpet shampooer; Louise and Dougall. You might want to offer to pay them back; you know they’re not rolling in money.”

“Yes, certainly,” Liam said.

“Are you sure you’re all right, Liam?”