Passenger(39)

When she returns she is holding a dark green album in her arms. As if reluctant to get too close to me, she approaches and balances the album over one arm of the sofa. I pick up the album, set it in my lap, and stare at it as if it just fell from the sky.

“Go ahead,” she says. “Open it.”

I open it to find a single newspaper clipping pasted to the first page. There is no picture, just a few lines of text. The headline reads, simple enough, baltimore man struck by city bus and refers to me as an “unidentified Baltimore man” throughout the article. As in, unidentified man was rushed to University of Maryland for immediate medical attention. As in, unidentified man sustained multiple injuries.

“I saw it happen,” she says.

“I don’t believe this.” My voice is hardly a whisper. Already I am thinking of the metal plate in my head, in my leg…

“You don’t remember?”

“Nicole, I don’t remember anything at all. Please,” I say, “help me. Please.”

The coffee machine farts and Nicole Quinland turns to look at it. “Oh,” she utters, and retrieves two mugs. She fills them and carries them across the room, setting them down on the wooden chest in front of the sofa. Awkwardly, she remains standing. I fight off the urge to yell at her, to beg her to tell me what the hell happened.

“I don’t typically bring strange men to my apartment,” she says. “I just thought you should know that.”

“Tell me about the accident.”

“It’s just what it says there in the article. You were hit by a bus.”

“When?” The article is clipped from a larger page. There is no date on it.

“A while ago. Sometime late last year. I don’t remember, exactly.”

I am touching the scar at the back of my head. I remember nothing about an accident. “I was—I mean, I was hit by a bus?” It is impossible to fathom.

“It happened just outside the post office. I remember you because you came in to deliver a package. I helped you with the paperwork and rang you up at the register. Then you left. You stood outside waiting for the bus. I saw you out there when I came out—I was just locking up the store, just like tonight—and the next thing I know I hear the bus tires squeal and people started shouting. You…you don’t remember any of this?”

“No. Please…what else?”

“The bus hit you. It threw you like twenty feet.” Her eyes widen with the retelling. “I’m sorry,” she says, pausing. “I’ve dreamt about seeing it over and over. It took a long time for me to forget about it.”

“Then what happened to me?”

“An ambulance eventually showed up. Cops, too. Some people gave statements. I didn’t. I stood against the building and just watched everything happen, but I couldn’t give a statement.” She is concentrating hard now, thinking back. “You were moving, too, when the ambulance picked you up. Like, spastic, I guess. I didn’t know if you were dead or alive.” She takes a breath. “You were thrown out of your shoes, too. It all looked so real that it all looked so fake.”

I take this all in. Looking down, I stare at the newspaper article. Two splotches of water drop onto the paper. I realize I am crying.

“I thought maybe you died. But I couldn’t be sure. And I couldn’t stop thinking about it, either. I saved the article.”

“You saved the article…” It is hardly a whisper.

“Oh, I have all sorts of articles.” She says this in such a youthful fashion, I suddenly question her age. She is a little girl showing off her favorite doll collection. “From when the Twin Towers went down all the way back to the Kennedy assassination. I found the Kennedy ones in an old newspaper in the library. I cut it out, stole it. I collect them. Articles.”

And I am turning slowly through the pages of the album. Indeed, this young woman has collected some morbid news articles—of car accidents and pile-ups on the beltway, of house fires and boating accidents, of stabbings and shootings, of the tractor trailer recently turned over in the Harbor Tunnel.

“Bus accident,” I say, and close the album.

“You really don’t remember any of it? Not at all?”

“No.”

“And you don’t know your name?”

“No.”

“But this happened a long time ago.”

“Okay.” Because I can think of nothing else to say, I only repeat myself: “Okay.”

“Well,” Nicole says, “I guess you survived. I always wondered.”

I wipe my eyes with the heel of my hand and say, “In a manner of speaking, yes, I guess I did.”

After a while Nicole becomes more comfortable and sits beside me on the sofa. We drink coffee until the pot is empty, which prompts her to brew a fresh one. There is nothing more she can tell me about the bus accident—or, for that matter, about me in general. Still, it feels good talking to her, like talking to an old friend, and I do not want to leave.

“And you can’t remember the date of the accident?” I press her. “I mean, approximately?”

“No. It was last year sometime, like I said. But I’m guessing.”

“What about the package? What did I mail?”

“I don’t know. It was in a box. A brown box.”