Noah's Compass Page 5

  “Now that I have been attacked, though, I somehow feel that means I won’t be attacked again,” he said. “As if a quota has been reached, so to speak. I realize that’s not logical.”

  “Durn right it’s not logical. Guy breaks in, sees all the loot, doesn’t have time to grab it … More logical is, he decides to come back for it later.”

  “What loot?” Liam asked. “I don’t have any jewels, or silver, or electronics. What would he come back for, except that wallet with seven dollars in it?”

  “He doesn’t know it’s seven dollars.”

  “Well, I hardly think—”

  “Is seven dollars it?”

  “What?”

  “Is that all you’ve got in the world?”

  Liam began to laugh. “You’ve heard of banks, I trust,” he said.

  “How much do you have in the bank?”

  “Really, Kitty!”

  “Mom says you’re a pauper.”

  “Your mother doesn’t know everything,” he said. And then, “Who is this so-called boyfriend of hers?”

  Kitty batted the question away with a flick of her hand. “She’s worried you’ll end up on the streets, what with getting fired and all.”

  “I wasn’t fired, I was … downsized. And I have a perfectly adequate savings account. You tell her that. Besides which,” he said, “I did turn sixty in January.” He let a significant pause develop.

  The pause was for Kitty to realize that she had forgotten his birthday. His whole family had forgotten, with the exception of his sister, who always sent a Hallmark card. But Kitty just said, “What’s that got to do with it?”

  “After fifty-nine and a half, I’m allowed to draw on my pension.”

  “Right; I bet that’s a fortune.”

  “Well, it’s not as if I need very much. I’ve never been an acquirer.”

  Kitty dropped another saltine in her soup and said, “I’ll say you’re not an acquirer. When I went into the den I was like, ‘Whoa! Oh, my God! The burglar guy stole the TV!’ Then I remembered you don’t even own a TV. I mean, I knew that before but I just never put it all together. I’m going to miss all my shows while I’m here! There isn’t a single TV anywhere in this apartment!”

  “I don’t know how you’re going to survive,” Liam said.

  “I’ll bet the burglar looked around and thought, Great; someone’s beaten me to it. Everything’s already been ripped off, he thought.”

  “Funny how people always assume a burglar’s a he,” Liam said. “Aren’t there any women burglars? Somehow you never hear of them.”

  Kitty tipped part of her milk into her soup. Then she started stirring her soup around and around, dreamily.

  “I keep trying to put a face on him. Or her,” Liam said. “I’m sure it must be somewhere in my subconscious, don’t you think? You can’t imagine how it feels to know you’ve been through something so catastrophic and yet there’s no trace of it in your mind. I almost wish you all hadn’t cleared away the evidence. Not that I don’t appreciate it; I don’t mean that. But it’s as if I’ve been excluded from my own experience. Other people know more about it than I do. For instance, how bad were my bed sheets? Were they soaked with blood, solid red? Or just spattered here and there.”

  “Yuck,” Kitty said.

  “Well, sorry, but—”

  A throaty rasp started up, like the sound a toad or a frog would make. Kitty lunged out of her chair and grabbed her cell phone from the coffee table. “Hello?” she said. And then, “Hey.”

  Liam sighed and set his spoon down. He hadn’t made much headway with his soup, and Kitty’s bowl was fuller than when she had started—a disgusting mush of crackers and swirled milk. Maybe tomorrow they should eat out someplace.

  “Oh …” she was saying. “Oh, um … you know”—clearly responding in code.

  Liam’s hands had a parched look that he had never noticed before, and his fingers trembled slightly when he held them up. Also, the vinegar smell was still bothering him. He was sure it must be obvious to other people.

  This was not his true self, he wanted to say. This was not who he really was. His true self had gone away from him and had a crucial experience without him and failed to come back afterward.

  He knew he was making too much of this.

  Liam had once had a pupil named Buddy Morrow who suffered from various learning issues. This was back in the days when Liam taught ancient history, and he had been paid an arm and a leg to come to Buddy’s house twice a week and drill him on his reading about the Spartans and the Macedonians. Anyone could have done it, of course. It didn’t require special knowledge. But the parents were quite well off, and they believed in hiring experts. The father was a neurologist. A very successful neurologist. A world-renowned authority on insults to the brain.

  Liam liked the phrase “insults to the brain.” In fact it might not be a phrase that Dr. Morrow himself had used; he might have said “injuries to the brain.” He’d said neither one to Liam, in any case. They’d talked only about Buddy’s progress, on the few occasions they’d spoken.

  Still, on Tuesday morning at 8:25 Liam telephoned Dr. Morrow’s office. He chose the time deliberately, having given it a good deal of thought in the middle of the night when Dr. Morrow’s name first occurred to him. He reasoned that there must be a patients’ call-in hour, and that probably this was either prior to nine a.m. or at midday. Eight a.m. until nine, he was betting. But he had to wait till after Kitty left for work, because he didn’t want her overhearing. She left at 8:23, walking to the bus stop beside the mall. He was on the phone two minutes later.

  He told the receptionist the truth: he was Dr. Morrow’s son’s ex-teacher, not an official patient, but he was hoping the doctor might be able to answer a quick question about some aftereffects of a blow to his head. The receptionist—who sounded more like a middle-aged waitress than the icy young twit he’d expected—clucked and said, “Well, hold on, hon; let me check.”

  The next voice he heard was Dr. Morrow’s own, tired and surprisingly elderly. “Yes?” he said. “This is Dr. Morrow.”

  “Dr. Morrow, this is Liam Pennywell. I don’t know if you remember me.”

  “Ah, yes! The philosopher.”

  Liam felt gratified, even though he thought he detected an undertone of amusement. He said, “I’m sorry to phone you out of the blue, but I was recently knocked unconscious and I’ve been experiencing some very troubling symptoms.”

  “What sort of symptoms?” the doctor asked.

  “Well, memory loss.”

  “Short-term memory?”

  “Not short, exactly. But not long-term either. More like … intermediate.”

  “Intermediate memory?”

  “I can’t remember being hit.”

  “Oh, that’s very common,” Dr. Morrow said. “Very much to be expected. Are you currently under medical care?”

  “Yes, but … In the hospital I was, but … Dr. Morrow, I hate to presume, but could I come in and talk to you?”

  “Talk,” the doctor said thoughtfully.

  “Just for a couple of minutes? Oh, I do have insurance. I have health insurance. I mean, this would be a purely professional consultation.”

  “What are you doing right now?” the doctor asked.

  “Now?”

  “Could you make it here before nine fifteen?”

  “Certainly!” Liam said.

  He had no idea if he could make it; the phone book had listed a downtown address and he was way, way up near … oh, Lord, he should never have moved. He was way up near the Beltway! But he said, “I’ll be there in half a second. Thank you, Dr. Morrow. I can’t tell you how I appreciate this.”

  “Half a second exactly,” the doctor said, and the undertone of amusement seemed to have returned to his voice.

  Liam had on a more casual outfit than he would normally wear in public: a stretched-out polo shirt and khakis with one torn belt loop. No time to change, though. All he did was switch
his slippers for sneakers. Bending down to tie them made his head throb, which he welcomed. He wanted as many symptoms as possible if he was presenting his case to a doctor.

  In the parking lot, the throbbing in his head was bothersome enough to make him try to slide straight-backed into his car, bending only at the knees. He had just made it onto the seat when a woman shrieked, “What are you doing?”

  He turned to find an aged blue sedan pulled up behind him. His middle daughter was glaring at him through her open side window, and his grandson sat in the back. “Why, Louise,” Liam said. “Good to see you! Sorry, but I’m in a bit of a—”

  “You know you’re not supposed to be driving!”

  “Oh.”

  “They told you at the hospital! I came all the way over here in case you needed some errands run.”

  “Well, isn’t that nice of you,” he said. “Maybe you could take me to the neurologist’s office.”

  “Where’s that?”

  “Down on St. Paul,” he said. He was climbing out of his car now, trying once again not to lower his head by so much as an inch. It was lucky Louise had happened along; he hadn’t realized how woozy he felt. He shuffled around the hood of her car to the passenger side and got in.

  “It’s going to pull like anything when you yank that bandage off,” Louise said, peering at his scalp.

  She had Barbara’s dark coloring but not her softness; there was always a sort of edge to her, especially when she squinted like this. Liam shrank away from her gaze and said, “Yes, well.” He began fumbling through his pockets. “Now, somewhere or other—” he muttered. “Aha.” He held up a torn-off corner from a Chinese menu. “Dr. Morrow’s address.”

  Louise glanced at it briefly before putting her car in gear. Liam turned to look at his grandson. “Jonah!” he said. “Hey, there!”

  “Hi.”

  “What’ve you been up to?”

  “Nothing.”

  In Liam’s opinion, the child lacked verve. He was … what, three years old? No, four; four and a half, but he still sat in one of those booster seats, docile as a little blond puppet, with a teddy bear clutched to his chest. Liam considered starting on a whole new subject but it didn’t seem worth the effort, and eventually he faced forward again.

  Louise said, “I was thinking you might need groceries brought, or a prescription filled. Nobody mentioned a doctor’s appointment.”

  “This was sort of last-minute,” Liam told her.

  “Is something wrong?”

  “No, no.”

  Louise made a wide U-turn and headed out the entranceway, ignoring several arrows pointing in the opposite direction. Liam gripped the dashboard but made no attempt to set her straight.

  “Although I do, ah, seem to be having a little trouble with my memory,” he said finally.

  He was hoping they might get into a discussion about it, but instead she said, “I guess it was pretty creepy staying in the apartment last night.”

  “Not at all,” he said. “Kitty was a bit nervous, though. I had to give her the bedroom.”

  This reminded him; he said, “I believe I owe you some money for the rug shampooer.”

  “Don’t worry about that,” Louise said.

  “No, I insist,” he said. “How much was it?”

  “You can pay me back when you get a job,” she told him.

  “A job. Well …”

  “Have you filled out any applications yet?”

  “I’m not sure I even want to,” he said. “It’s possible I’ll retire.”

  “Retire! You’re sixty years old!”

  “Exactly.”

  “What would you do with yourself?”

  “Why, there’s plenty I could do,” he said. “I could read, I could think … I’m not a man without resources, you know.”

  “You’re going to sit all day and just think?”

  “Or also … I have options! I have lots of possibilities. In fact,” he said spontaneously, “I might become a zayda.”

  “A what?”

  “It’s an adjunct position at a preschool out on Reisterstown Road,” he said. He was proud of himself for coming up with this; he hadn’t thought of it in weeks. “One of the parents at St. Dyfrig mentioned there was an opening. They use senior citizens as, so to speak, grandparent figures in the younger children’s classrooms. Zayda is the Jewish word for grandfather.”

  “You aren’t Jewish, though.”

  “No, but the preschool is.”

  “And you aren’t a senior citizen, either. Besides, this sounds to me like a volunteer position. Are you sure it’s not volunteer?”

  “No, no, I would be paid.”

  “How much?”

  “Oh …” he said. Then he said, “What is it with you girls? All of a sudden you seem to think you have a right to pry into my finances.”

  “For good reason,” Louise told him. She slowed for a light. She said, “And don’t even get me started on the obvious irony, here.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Grandfather!” she said. “You, of all people!”

  He raised his eyebrows.

  “Do you even like small children?” she asked.

  “Of course I like them!”

  “Huh,” she said.

  Liam turned once more to look at Jonah. Jonah sent back a milky blue gaze that gave no indication what he was thinking.

  They entered the city limits and traveled through Liam’s old neighborhood—dignified, elderly buildings grouped around the Hopkins campus. Liam felt a pang of homesickness. Resolutely, he steered his thoughts toward the new place: its purity, its stripped-down angularity. Louise (a mind reader, like both of her sisters) said, “You could always move back.”

  “Move back! Why would I want to do that?”

  “I doubt your old apartment’s been rented yet, has it?”

  “I’m very content where I am,” he said. “I have a refrigerator now that dispenses water through the door.”

  Louise just flicked her turn signal on. Behind her, Jonah started singing his ABCs in a thin, flat, tuneless voice. Liam turned to flash what he hoped was an appreciative smile, but Jonah was looking out his side window and didn’t notice.

  Imagine naming a child Jonah. That was surely Dougall’s doing—Louise’s husband. Dougall was some kind of fundamentalist Christian. He and Louise had dated all through high school and married right after graduation, over everyone’s objections, and then Dougall went into his family’s plumbing business while Louise, a straight-A student, abandoned any thought of college and gave birth in short order to Jonah. “Why Jonah?” Liam had asked. “What’s next: Judas? Herod? Cain?” Louise had looked puzzled. “I mean, Jonah’s was not a very happy story, was it?” Liam asked.

  All Louise said was, “I do know someone named Cain, in fact.”

  “Does he happen to have a brother?” Liam asked.

  “Not that I ever heard of.”

  “Inn-teresting,” Liam said.

  “Hmm?”

  Joining the Book of Life Tabernacle had done nothing for her sense of humor.

  Dr. Morrow’s office turned out to be just below Fender Street, in an ornate old building squeezed between a dry cleaner’s and a pawnshop. Parking, of course, was impossible. Louise said, “You hop on out and I’ll find a space around the block.” Liam didn’t argue. According to his watch, it was 9:10. He wondered if Dr. Morrow would restrict him to a mere five minutes.

  The lobby had a high, sculptured ceiling and a marble floor gridded with seams of brass. An actual person—an ancient black man in full uniform—operated the elevator, sitting on a wooden stool and sliding the accordion door shut with a white-gloved hand. Liam was amazed. When the only other passenger, a woman in a silk dress, said, “Three, please,” he felt he had been transported back to his childhood, to one of the old downtown department stores where his mother could spend hours fingering bolts of fabric. “Sir?” the operator asked him.

  “Oh. Four, please,�
� Liam said.

  Four was jarringly modern, carpeted wall to wall in businesslike gray and lined overhead with acoustical tiles. A disappointment, but also a relief. (You wouldn’t want your neurologist to be too old-fashioned.)

  An entire column of doctors’ names marched down the plate-glass door of Suite 401, beneath larger lettering that read ST. PAUL NEUROLOGY ASSOCIATES. Even at this early hour, there were quite a few patients in the waiting room. They sat on molded plastic chairs under the bank of receptionists’ windows—a separate window for each doctor. Dr. Morrow’s receptionist had dyed black hair that made her look less cozy than she had sounded on the phone. The minute Liam gave her his name, she handed him a clipboard with a form to fill out. “I’ll need to make a copy of your insurance card, too, and your driver’s license,” she said. Liam had been sincere when he told Dr. Morrow he intended to pay, but somehow he still felt taken aback by the woman’s crass commercialism.

  The other patients were in terrible shape. Good Lord, neurology was a distressing specialty! One man shook so violently that his cane kept falling to the floor. A woman held an oversized child who seemed boneless. Another woman kept wiping her blank-faced husband’s mouth with a tissue. Oh, Liam should not be here. He had no business frittering away the doctor’s time on such a trivial complaint. But even so, he continued printing out his new address in large, distinct block letters.

  Louise and Jonah came in and settled across from him, although there were seats free on either side of him. Nobody would have guessed they had anything to do with him. They didn’t look his way, and Louise immediately started searching through the magazines on the table to her left. Eventually she came up with a children’s magazine. “Look!” she told Jonah. “Baby rabbits! You love baby rabbits!” Jonah clutched his teddy bear tightly and followed her pointing finger.

  To be honest, Liam thought, the Pennywells were a rather homely family. (Himself included.) Louise’s hair was too short and her face too angular. She had on boxy red pedal pushers, not a flattering style for anyone, and flip-flops that showed her long white bony feet. Jonah was breathing through his mouth and he wore a slack, stunned expression as he gazed down at the page.

  In a low, clear voice just inches from Liam’s right ear, a woman said, “Verity.”