The more specific skills, though… Some of them were still there. Probably most of them. But in pulling them out of his memory he hesitated sometimes. Thought he remembered but wasn’t sure of himself.
Wait a minute. Let me consult a textbook before I remove your gall bladder.
Yeah, right. Like that was going to work in surgery.
He looked up and saw Lizzie standing in his doorway, simply observing him. Probably trying to figure out what to do with him.
“Hello,” he said, not sure what to make of this.
She was the house primary care physician—not his doctor, not even a neurologist. Meaning she had no real reason to be here unless he needed a vaccination or something.
“I’ve seen you watch me out in the garden. I was wondering if you’d like to come out with me for a while later…breathe some fresh air, take a walk?”
“Who’s prescribing that?” he asked suspiciously.
“You are—if that’s what you want to do. You’re not a prisoner here, you know. And your doctor said it might be a good idea…that it could help your…” She paused.
“Go ahead and say it. My disposition.”
“I understand from morning staff meetings that you’re quite a handful.”
“Nothing else to do around here,” he said. “So, I might as well improve upon my obnoxious level. It’s getting better. In fact, I think I’ll soon be counted amongst the masters.”
“To what outcome?”
He shrugged. “See, that’s the thing. For me, there are no outcomes.”
“If that’s how you want it. But I’m not your doctor and you’re not my problem. So, take that walk with me or not.”
“And tomorrow? What happens to me tomorrow?”
“Honestly? I’m a one-day-at-a-time girl. Nothing’s ever guaranteed, Mateo. If I get through the day, tomorrow will take care of itself.”
“Well, I like seeing ahead. And now, even behind.”
“To each his own,” she said nonchalantly.
“Which implies what?” he asked, feeling a smile slowly crossing his face. Lizzie was…fun. Straight to the point. And challenging.
“You know exactly what it implies, Mateo. In your effort to see ‘behind,’ as you’re calling it, you’re driving the staff crazy. They’re afraid of you. Not sure what to do with you. And that false smile of yours is beginning to wear thin.”
“Does it annoy you?” he asked.
“It’s beginning to.”
“Then my work here is done,” he said, folding his arms across his chest.
He wanted clothes—real clothes. Not these blue and green things that were passed off as hospital gowns. Those were for sick people. He wasn’t sick. Just damaged. A blood clot on his brain, which had been removed, and a lingering pest called retrograde amnesia. That kind of damage deserved surfer shorts and a Hawaiian shirt, seeing as how he was in Hawaii now.
“And my work has nothing to do with you. I was just trying to be friendly, but you’re too much of a challenge to deal with. And, unfortunately, what should have been a simple yes or no is now preventing me from seeing my patients.”
She sure was pretty.
It was something he’d thought over and over about Lizzie. Long, tarnished copper hair. Curly. Soft too, he imagined. Brown eyes that could be as mischievous as a kitten or shoot daggers, depending on the circumstance. And her smile… It didn’t happen too often, he’d noticed. And when it did, it didn’t light up the proverbial room. But it sure did light up his day.
“And how would I be doing that? I’m here, wearing these lovely clothes, eating your gourmet green slime food, putting up with your hospital’s inane therapy.”
“And by ‘putting up with,’ you mean not showing up for?” She took a few more steps into the room, then went to open the blinds.
“In the scheme of my future life, what will it do for me?”
“Maybe nothing. Maybe everything.”
“No vagaries here, Lizzie. Be as specific as I have to be every time I answer someone’s orientation questions. ‘Do you remember your name?’ ‘Where are you?’ ‘What’s the date?’ ‘Who’s the current President?’”
“Standard protocol, Mateo. You know that.” She turned back to face him. “But you make everything more difficult than it has to be.”
She brightened his day in a way he’d never expected. “So why me? You’re not my doctor, but you’ve obviously chosen me for some special attention.”
“My dad was a military surgeon, like you were. Let’s just say I’m giving back a little.”
“Did he see combat?”
“Too many times.”
“And it changed him,” Mateo said, suddenly serious.
“It might have—but if it did it was something he never let me see. And he never talked about it.”
“It’s a horrible thing to talk about. The injuries. The ones you can fix…the ones you can’t. In my unit they were rushed in and out so quickly I never really saw anything but whatever it was I had to fix. Maybe that was a blessing.”
He shut his eyes to the endless parade of casualties who were now marching by him. This was a memory he didn’t want, but he was stuck with it. And it was so vivid.
“Were you an only child?” he asked.
Lizzie nodded. “My mom couldn’t stand the military life. She said it was too lonely. So, by the time I was five she was gone, and then it was just my dad and me.”
“Couldn’t have been easy being a single parent under his circumstances. I know I wouldn’t have wanted to drag a kid around with me when I was active. Wouldn’t have been fair to the kid.”
“He never complained. At least, not to me. And what I had…it seemed normal.”
“I complain to everybody.”
In Germany, after his first surgery, it hadn’t occurred to him that his memory loss might be permanent. He’d been too busy dealing with the actual surgery itself to get any more involved than that. That had happened after he’d been transferred to Boston for brain rehab. Then he’d got involved. Only it hadn’t really sunk in the way it should have. But once they’d got him to a facility in California, where the patients had every sort of war-related brain injury, that was when it had occurred to him that he was just another one of the bunch.
How could that be? That was the question he kept asking himself over and over. He had become one of the poor unfortunates he usually treated. A surgeon without his memory. A man without his past.
“You’re a survivor who uses what he has at his disposal to regain the bits and pieces of himself he’s lost. Or at least that’s what you could be if you weren’t such a quitter.”
“A quitter?”
Maybe he was, since going on was so difficult. But did Lizzie understand what it was like to reach for a memory you assumed would be there and come up with nothing? And he was one of the lucky ones. Physically, he was fine, and his surgery had gone well. He’d healed well, too. But he couldn’t get past that one thing that held him back…who was he, really?
Suddenly