Passenger(38)

Yet the girl walks right into me.

“Oh!” She is flustered, high strung, shocked at her own carelessness. “I’m—oh—”

“It’s okay.”

She has just come from the post office. Her uniform still on, the office’s keys still clenched in one small, white fist, she executes a single step backward, still staring up at me.

“I’m sorry. I didn’t see you.”

“It comes and goes,” I say, grinning, but my hideous face probably only frightens her.

She isn’t moving. Frozen, staring at me, I keep waiting for her to say something more. Or at least for her jaw to drop open. Or for her to run screaming down the street. But nothing happens. She just stands there gazing up at me. Suddenly, I am a comet streaking across the night sky, the time-elapsed blossoming of a wild orchid. I am the crystallization of ice. Judging from her stare, I am that beautiful to watch.

“Take care,” I say, and turn my back to her.

I get about a half-dozen paces down the street until I hear her say, “Wait.” She says, “Stop.”

I turn, surprised to see her closing the distance between us. Now it is my turn to stare, speechless and dumbfounded.

She stops directly in front of me. Hers is a small, white, narrow face. She has large, beseeching eyes, very dark, and a mouth so small it is a mere pink notch beneath her pointy little nose. My memory loss has rendered me unable to differentiate between beauty and ugliness—I have no memory of association, nothing to compare the two—but I am aware of a nonspecific helplessness in her that touches some animal emotion deep within me.

I flinch when she brings up one hand. She pauses momentarily…then gently grazes the side of my face with two fingers.

“You,” she says. The impossibility of this encounter is evident in her tone. “It’s you. You’re alive.”





FIFTEEN





I open my mouth to speak but nothing happens. The girl—the woman—does not try to speak, either. Not at first. Instead, she touches my shoulder, sort of prodding it. As if to make certain I’m not made of vapor.

“I’m real,” I assure her while second-guessing myself at the same time. “I’m not a ghost.”

Embarrassed, she withdraws her hand as if she’s been burned. “I’m sorry.”

“Do I know you? Or…do you know me?”

“I’m Nicole Quinland. I work over there.” And she moves a hand in the direction of the darkened post office. “I saw…I mean—I’m sorry…” Flustered, she laughs. She is like a little bird. “This is strange for me. I apologize. It’s just, I’ve dreamt about you.”

“I think we should talk,” I say.

“Yes,” she says, almost too quickly. “I’m just across the street…”

I follow her to the shell of an old four-story tenement on Madison. In silence, we enter the building, the air stagnant and musty, and climb the risers to the fourth floor.

Her apartment consists of two rooms—a main living area where the windows overlook the Baltimore School for the Arts and a bedroom that, what with its unpainted walls and empty shelves, looks hardly lived in. The silence between us is a comfortable one. I get the sense that we are both exhausted. There is no pressure to maintain dialogue. Not here, not now. It is like walking through a dream.

“Go ahead,” she says, her first words to me since coming in off the street. “You can sit down.”

I shrug out of my coat and spill onto a poorly upholstered sofa by the windows.

“You want coffee?” she calls to me from the kitchen nook. “I’ll brew some.”

“Sounds good.”

I watch as she fills the coffee filter and pours water into the percolator. There are framed pictures of different cats on an end table. Watercolor landscapes hang on the walls in simple frames.

When she’s done prepping the coffee, she turns and stares at me from across the room with both her arms down at her sides.

“What’s your name?” she says.

“Don’t you know who I am?”

“Sort of. But I don’t know your name.”

“Neither do I.”

She watches me intently. Perhaps she is regretting her decision to invite me in. Finally, after the sound of my own heartbeat becomes too loud, she says, “You look different. I didn’t recognize you at first. You’re thinner, much thinner. And your hair…”

“How do you know me?”

“I was there when you had the accident. I was working in the post office that day.” She shuffles from one foot to the other. In her little postal uniform and flat chest she looks like a cardboard cutout of a woman. “You probably don’t remember me.”

“You have no idea,” I say. “What accident?”

“The one with the bus,” she says. Then her eyes light up. “Wait,” she says quickly. “I have something to show you.”

Before I can answer, she darts into the empty little bedroom—I can see the blank walls and a conga-line of saddle shoes at the foot of the bed through the open door—and I can hear her rummaging through her belongings.

Across the room the coffee machine steams and gurgles.