Chapter 12

Chapter Twelve: The Quiet After

Lena woke on Monday morning to a ceiling she did not recognize and a silence she could not explain.

It was not an empty silence. That was what struck her first, lying very still with her eyes half open and the thin gray light of dawn leaking through a strip of blinds. It was a spacious silence, soft and unhurried, like a room after the furniture has been taken out. She could hear the faint beep of a monitor somewhere to her left. She could hear a trolley rattling in a distant corridor. And beneath it all, she could hear something she had not heard in a very long time, though she could not have said how long.

She could hear nothing at all inside herself.

No dread. No tightness behind the ribs. No small anxious voice rehearsing what to say. It was as if someone had stood in a house she had lived in for years and opened every window, and the air had gone through it, and everything that had been pressing against the walls had simply gone out into the morning.

How strange, she thought. How very peaceful.

She turned her head. It ached, a dull, deep, remote ache, like a bruise on someone else's body. A narrow chair sat beside the bed, and in it, with a crocheted blanket across her knees and a paperback fallen open in her lap, sat a woman with a silver bob, fast asleep.

Ruth.

The name arrived whole. The face with it, and a hundred small kindnesses, and the smell of a particular perfume. Lena lay with her eyes on that gentle sleeping face, and she felt a deep, warm certainty that this was a friend.

Then she moved her left hand, and something caught the light.

She lifted it from the blanket. A thin gold band. A single stone.

Oh, she thought. Yes. I'm engaged.

She said it to herself the way one reads a line from a form. I am engaged to Damian Cross. We have been engaged for three years. We live together on the twenty-second floor. The facts rose up one after another, clear and sharp and perfectly intact. The proposal on the rooftop. The apartment. His favorite coffee. His birthday.

She turned the ring slowly on her finger and waited for the feeling to come.

It did not come.

She held the thought up to the light and examined it, with detached curiosity, like a doctor looking at an X-ray. There was the fact. There was the ring. There was a man's face, dark-haired and handsome, and a long sequence of memories that she could recite as clearly as a timetable. But the warmth that should have lived inside them, the ache, the longing, the terror, whatever it had been that she had once called love, was simply not there.

It was like looking at a photograph of a stranger's wedding.

She was still turning the ring when Ruth stirred, opened her eyes, and sat bolt upright.

"Lena!"

"Good morning, Ruth."

The paperback slid to the floor. Ruth was across the room in an instant, her hands clasped around Lena's, her face crumpling and un-crumpling in the dim light. "You're awake. Oh, thank God. You're awake. Don't try to sit up. Let me call the nurse. Oh, my girl."

"I'm all right," Lena said, in a calm, quiet voice. "Please don't cry."

"I'm not crying."

"You are, a bit."

Ruth laughed, wetly, helplessly. "I suppose I am." She wiped her cheeks with the heel of her hand. "I thought... Dr. Okoye said it could be days. I've been here since Saturday night. You gave us all a terrible fright."

"I'm sorry."

"Don't you dare apologize."

The door opened. A small, silver-haired woman in a white coat entered, followed by a nurse, and both stopped at the foot of the bed.

"Well," said Dr. Okoye. "Good morning, Miss Hartwell. I'm glad to see you with us."

"Thank you, Doctor."

"Do you know where you are?"

"A hospital. St. Brendan's. There was an accident on the mountain road." She paused. "On Saturday, I think. Ruth said."

The doctor's mouth twitched. "Very good. Can you tell me your full name and date of birth?"

Lena told her. She told her the date of the accident, her address, her employer's name, the name of the prime minister. She recited the months of the year backward. She counted down from one hundred by sevens, which she found rather pleasant. When she finished, Dr. Okoye stood very still for a while with a look of careful, slightly baffled neutrality.

"Your cognitive function appears entirely intact," she said at last.

"That's good, isn't it?"

"It's very good." A pause. "Miss Hartwell, I want to ask you something, and I'd like you to answer as honestly as you can. When you think about your fiancé, what do you feel?"

Ruth went very still.

Lena considered the question. She considered it seriously, with her head tilted slightly on the pillow, as one might consider a riddle.

"Nothing in particular," she said.

"Nothing?"

"I know who he is. I know that we're engaged. I can tell you everything about him, his favorite foods, what he does, the way he drinks his coffee. I just can't seem to..." She searched for the word. "...connect with it. It's as though I'm reading about someone else's life. I remember that I loved him. I can't remember what it was like."

A long silence.

"I see," said Dr. Okoye. She looked at Ruth, then back at her patient, and her voice was very gentle. "There's a name for this. It isn't a common one. Some patients, after an injury to the temporal lobe, retain every fact of their lives, every date, every name, but lose the emotional charge that went with them. We call it affective amnesia, or sometimes emotional blunting. The memory remains. The feeling doesn't."

"Will it come back?"

"I don't know."

"Do I want it to?"

It was a strange question. Lena hadn't meant to ask it. It simply slipped out, drifted up from some quiet place beneath thought, and hung in the air of the sunlit room.

Ruth made a small sound.

"That," said Dr. Okoye, after a pause, "is not a medical question."

Damian came at eleven.

Lena heard them before she saw them. A man's footsteps, quick and impatient, and beside them a slower, softer set, accompanied by the faint squeak of wheels. Voices murmured in the corridor. A nurse said, "Sir, visiting hours are not for another..." and was cut off. Then the door swung open.

He stood on the threshold in a fresh charcoal suit, clean-shaven, his hair combed. He looked, Lena thought with that same strange detachment, extremely handsome and quite tired. His eyes moved over the room, over Ruth in the chair, over the monitor, over the bandage that wrapped the left side of Lena's head. They landed on her face, and something flickered across his own, quick as a cloud's shadow, and was gone.

Behind him, in a wheelchair pushed by a smiling orderly, sat Celeste.

She wore a soft lavender cardigan and a pale pink scarf, and her right hand was swathed in a fat white bandage that rested on a pillow in her lap. Her face was drawn and delicate, with a hint of shadow beneath the eyes. She looked like a very beautiful woman who had suffered nobly and wished no one to notice.

"Lena," said Damian.

"Hello, Damian."

He took a step into the room. He paused. He seemed to be waiting for something, a flood of tears, an outstretched hand, one of the small breathless broken sounds she had made so often in his presence. Lena looked back at him with calm, courteous attention.

"How are you feeling?" he asked.

"Better, thank you. How is your hand, Miss Marlowe?"

It was her own voice, light and even and polite. She saw Celeste's eyes flick up, quick and sharp, and then drop.

"Oh, it's nothing," Celeste said softly. "Eleven stitches. I'll be fine. I'm just so relieved you're all right."

"That's kind."

There was an odd little pause.

"The doctor tells me," said Damian slowly, "that you've had some trouble with your memory."

"A little. I remember everything. I just don't feel it the way I should."

"What does that mean?"

"I'm not sure it means anything yet. I'm told it may be a temporary effect."

He studied her. His brow had drawn together, and she saw, as if from a long distance, the tight line between his eyebrows that had once made her chest ache with tenderness. It looked like a small, odd, unremarkable crease.

"Lena," he said. "Is this a joke?"

"I'm sorry?"

"Because if it is, it isn't funny." His voice had hardened. "You were lying in the road for forty minutes. I was out of my mind. And now you're lying here talking in that voice, that flat, strange voice, as if you've never met me."

"I know exactly who you are."

"Then why won't you look at me properly?"

"I am looking at you."

He stared at her. She watched him do it, quite calmly. She watched his jaw tighten, the color rising along his cheekbones, a flush she had once taken for passion and now recognized, with clinical interest, as simple anger.

"Damian," Celeste murmured, gently. "Maybe she's in shock."

"It isn't shock."

"Perhaps she doesn't want to worry us."

"Perhaps." He did not look away from Lena. His voice dropped. "Or perhaps she thinks this is the way to get my attention. After everything that's happened. After the retreat, after the road, after..."

"Mr. Cross," said Dr. Okoye, from the door.

He turned. The doctor had slipped back in without a sound, and she stood with her hands in the pockets of her white coat, perfectly composed.

"Your fiancée has a documented injury to the left temporal lobe," she said. "I performed the surgery myself. The delay in treatment, which I understand was not entirely accidental, caused pressure damage consistent with exactly this presentation. She has a rare and genuine form of affective amnesia. I would appreciate it very much if you would stop accusing her of pretending."

"I'm not accusing—"

"You are, in fact. I heard you from the corridor."

The room went quiet. Damian's face did something complicated.

"A rare and genuine form," Celeste repeated softly, as if testing the words. "Doctor, forgive me. I don't mean to speak out of turn. But I've read a little about this sort of thing, and isn't it usually... isn't it very hard to tell? From the outside?"

Dr. Okoye turned her head. Her eyes were very level.

"I beg your pardon?"

"It's only that people do sometimes seek attention, after trauma." Celeste lowered her gaze, and her voice trembled gently on the edge of tears. "I would never accuse Lena of anything. But she hasn't been herself for weeks. She's been so unhappy, so unsure. And I wonder, I only wonder, if some part of her mind might be reaching for a way to be looked after. It isn't her fault. It happens to the best of people."

It was beautifully done. Lena watched it with something very like admiration, as one might watch a violinist play. Each word was soft, each pause perfect. The little catch in the voice. The bowed head. The slender bandaged hand, lifted and then lowered in a small helpless gesture.

And Damian's face, as he listened, changed. She saw the doubt fall away and the certainty settle, like a lid closing over a pot.

"That's it," he said slowly. "That's exactly what it is."

"Mr. Cross," said the doctor.

"You've been seeing her for what, a day? I've lived with her for three years." He turned back to Lena, and his voice was cold. "You know what you're doing. You were jealous. You've been jealous for weeks, and now you want me to feel guilty. Is that it? You want me to sit by your bed and hold your hand and beg for forgiveness?"

Lena folded her hands on the blanket. The ring caught the light.

"I don't want anything," she said. "That's rather the point."

"Don't."

"I'm only telling you what's true."

"Stop pretending, Lena!" His voice cracked across the room like a whip. The nurse flinched. Ruth rose halfway out of her chair. "The injury wasn't that bad. I saw it. It looked worse than it was. People get knocked on the head every day and they walk it off. I don't have patience for this. If you can't grow up and stop playing games, I swear to God I'll call off the engagement."

The words dropped into the silence like a stone into deep water.

Three weeks ago, they would have shattered her. Three weeks ago, she would have wept and begged and promised anything. Three weeks ago, a version of Lena had been trained, over years, like a dog to a whistle, to flinch at those words and fall into line.

She waited for that version to arrive.

She waited, with her hands folded, and her eyes on his face, and her heart beating slow and steady beneath the thin hospital gown. She felt nothing. Not a flicker. Not a tremor. It was the strangest, most marvelous sensation, like putting her foot down in the dark expecting a stair and finding a smooth, level floor.

"If you want to," she said.

Damian blinked.

"I'm sorry?"

"If you want to call it off. You can." She said it gently, in a tone of mild, pleasant interest. "I don't believe I'd mind."

For a moment, no one moved.

Ruth had put a hand over her mouth. Dr. Okoye's eyebrows had risen, very slightly. On her pillow, with her bandaged hand curled on her lap, Celeste had gone completely still, and across her lovely face something passed, brief and sharp, like the shadow of a bird. It was not triumph. It was not quite alarm. It was the look of a chess player who sees, a fraction too late, that the opponent has stopped playing the game.

And Damian Cross, who had stood at the head of boardrooms and made grown men sweat, stared at the woman in the hospital bed, and for the first time in three years, did not know what to say.

"You don't mean that," he said at last. It came out strange and hollow.

"I think I might."

"You're confused."

"Perhaps." Lena turned her head on the pillow. The morning sun lay across her face in a long gold bar, warm and quite lovely. "I'm very tired now. Would you mind if I rested?"

They left. She did not watch them go.

When the door had closed, Ruth was at her side again, white-faced, fierce, hovering. "Lena, my love. Lena, are you really..."

"I'm all right."

"You said..."

"I know what I said."

"And you meant it?"

Lena looked down at her left hand. The ring lay on her finger like a small cold coin. She worked it slowly over the knuckle, wincing slightly at the tightness, and drew it off. It left a faint pale line in the skin, as though it had been there a very long time.

She held it in her palm. It was very small. She was surprised how small.

"I don't know," she said quietly. "I think... I think I'd like to find out."

She set the ring on the tray beside the bed. It rolled once, in a bright little arc, and came to rest against a plastic cup, and lay there glinting in the sun.

And in the corridor outside, in the long beige hush of the hospital, a man who had never in his life been told no stood with his back against the wall and his eyes shut tight, wondering why, for the first time he could remember, the silence felt like something he had lost.

End of Chapter Twelve