Noah’s Compass: A Novel Read online

  He had lain down in his new bedroom. He had felt grateful for his firm mattress and his bouncy foam-rubber pillow. His tucked-in top sheet, the open window, the stars beyond the pines …

  By morning, the ache in his head had grown more localized. It was specific to his left temple. He believed he could detect a goose egg there, not from the contour of it, since his bandage was so thick, but from the way a certain spot leapt into full-blown pain before the surrounding area when he pressed tentatively with his fingers.

  There was still no sign of Xanthe. Had she come and gone again while he was sleeping? A stream of other people passed through, though. A woman took his vital signs; another brought him breakfast. (Toast and eggs and cornflakes; he must have graduated to solids.) A third woman freed him of his IV tube and his catheter, after which he tottered into the bathroom on his own. In the mirror, he looked like a derelict. The white gauze helmet gave his skin a yellowish cast, and he had a stubble of gray whiskers on his cheeks and bags under his eyes.

  Of course his scalp wound was impossible to see, but once he was safely in bed again he set to work unwinding the adhesive tape from his hand. Underneath he found blood-spotted gauze. Under that, two inches of coarse black stitches curved across his swollen and discolored palm. He was sorry now that he’d looked. He replaced the tape as best he could and lay back and stared at the ceiling.

  If his attacker had knocked him out while he slept, the knot on his head would have been his only injury. It was clear, then, that he must have been awake. Either that, or he had awakened as soon as he heard a noise. He must have raised a hand to protect himself.

  The woman who’d brought his breakfast tray returned for it and tut-tutted. “Now, how you going to get your strength back, not eating more than this?” she asked him.

  “I did drink the coffee.”

  “Right; that’s a big help.”

  Encouraged, he said, “I wonder if I could have a phone in my room.”

  “You don’t have no phone?”

  “No, and I need to call my daughter.”

  “I’ll tell them at the desk,” she said.

  But the next woman who entered carried a compartmented box of medical supplies. “I’m Dr. Rodriguez,” she told him. “I’m going to change your dressings before we send you home.”

  “Well, but my daughter’s not here,” he said.

  “Your daughter.”

  “How will I get home on my own?”

  “You won’t. You’re not allowed. Somebody has to drive you. And somebody has to keep an eye on you for the next forty-eight hours.”

  She set her supplies on his table and selected a pair of scissors sealed in cellophane. Liam doubted that she was past thirty. Her glowing olive skin lacked the slightest wrinkle, and her hair was inky black. Maybe you needed to be older to realize that it wasn’t always easy to find someone who would stick around for forty-eight hours at a stretch.

  He closed his eyes while she snipped at the gauze around his head, and then he felt a coolness and lightness as she pried it away. “Hmm,” she said, once it was off. She peered closely, pursing her lips.

  “What’s it look like?”

  She slid a drawer from beneath his table. For a moment he thought she was leaving his question unanswered, but it turned out she wanted to show him his reflection in a little pop-up mirror. He saw first a flash of his neck (old!) and then the side of his head, his short gray hair shaved away to reveal a purple swelling on his scalp and a shallow V of black threads dotted with dried blood.

  “Fairly clean edges,” the doctor said, folding away the mirror. “That’s good.” She unwrapped a square of gauze and stuck it in place with adhesive tape—no more helmet. “Your primary-care physician can take the stitches out. We’ll give you written instructions when you leave. Now let me see your hand.”

  He held it up, and she unwound the tape without much interest and applied a fresh strip. “I’ll write a prescription for pain pills too,” she said, “just in case you need them.”

  She dumped the old dressings, the paper wrappers, and even the scissors into a red plastic bin. The scissors clattered so loudly that they hurt his head. Such wastefulness! Not even recycled! But he had more important things to discuss. “Is it all right to go home in a taxi?” he asked.

  “Absolutely not. Somebody should be with you. Do you not have anybody? Should we be getting in touch with the social worker?”

  For a minute he thought she was referring to Xanthe, who happened to be a social worker herself. When he realized his mistake, he flushed and said, “Oh, no, that won’t be necessary.”

  “Well, good luck,” she told him. She picked up her box of supplies and walked out.

  As soon as she was gone, he pressed the call button on his bed rail.

  “Yes?” a voice crackled from some invisible spot.

  “Could I have a telephone, please?”

  “I’ll ask.”

  He sank back on his pillow and closed his eyes.

  How could he have ended up so alone?

  Two failed marriages (for he had to count Millie’s death as a failure), three daughters who led their own lives, and a sister he seldom spoke to. The merest handful of friends—more like acquaintances, really. A promising youth that had somehow trailed off in a series of low-paying jobs far beneath his qualifications. Why, that last job had used about ten percent of his brain!

  And he should have stood up for himself when they fired him. He should have pointed out that if they really needed to reduce the two fifth-grade classes to one, he ought to be the teacher they kept. He was way, way senior to Brian Medley. Brian was hired just two years ago! But instead he’d tried to put a good face on it. He’d tried to make Mr. Fairborn feel less guilty for letting him go. “Certainly,” he had said. “I understand completely.” And he had packed up his desk drawers when no one else was around to feel discomfited by the sight. Why make a scene? he had asked when Bundy voiced his outrage. “No sense clinging to resentments,” he’d said.

  He must not even have clothes to go home in. Not day clothes, at least; just pajamas. He was naked and alone and unprotected and unloved.

  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 unremarked 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 break-in 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.