Dying to Remember

by Glen Apseloff

  Driving home from Barnes’s house in the cold darkness, Shirley replayed in her mind their evening together. She hadn’t planned to get physical with him, and now the experience took on an abstract quality. She felt no regrets about the turn of events. Dr. Perry, her biochemistry professor in college, had once said to her, “I never regret the things I do, only the things I don’t do.” That conversation had taken place behind closed doors in his office when she came to him for help before the final exam. He followed that remark by leaning forward and putting a hand on her knee, then saying, as he slid his fingers upward, “You should live that way, too.”

  She’d slapped him hard across the face. “Then I shouldn’t regret that.”

  The professor, fifty and married, had taken the rebuff in stride.

  Afterward, the more Shirley thought about what Dr. Perry had said, the more she agreed with it.

  Especially now.

  Chapter 41

  After Shirley left, Barnes turned off the fire in the fireplace. The image of Shirley standing naked before him still lingered. Regardless of whether it was real or imagined, he knew that his relationship with her was evolving into more than just friendship. But how? He could no longer recall either the events or the passion that had brought them together. Shirley was simply a friend of Elizabeth’s, and he felt no closer to her than to the nurses at work.

  In all likelihood the situation would repeat itself. If it happened once, it was bound to happen again, especially since he wouldn’t remember enough to stop it. He made a note to discuss this with Dr. Parks at their next session.

  After cleaning up, Barnes organized his notes and rewrote all of them in French. He had no idea whom he was hiding things from, but chances were the murderer would eventually visit the house again. It could be anyone—even Shirley—and although he had no compelling reason to suspect someone that close to him, he wouldn’t take any chances.

  Then there was the mystery lover. Why hadn’t Elizabeth saved the second page of the letter? Had she lost it? Had somebody taken it? And who would write a letter like that?

  He reread it and focused on the more personal parts: “You’re a special person, and I can’t put into words how much you mean to me. I miss holding you, being close to you, feeling your warmth.”

  Something about that seemed odd. He turned to his French translation: “Tu es une personne speciale.” “You’re a special person.” For some reason it sounded better in French.

  Then he realized why. In French the word “person” is always feminine. Saying “personne” is more like saying “woman.” If he were writing a love letter to Elizabeth, he would have said, “You’re a special woman,” not, “You’re a special person.” It was a subtle difference, but as he reread the letter, other nongender-specific sentences became apparent: “I miss holding you, being close to you, feeling your warmth.” There was nothing odd about that by itself, but combined with references to butterflies, it created a message with an effeminate quality. Maybe he was overanalyzing it, but the more he studied it, the more that seemed to be the case. This was most likely written by a woman.

  He shuffled through his other notes.

  Claire?

  It made sense. She was one of Elizabeth’s best friends, and Elizabeth had never told him the woman was a lesbian. Why hadn’t he thought of her earlier? Of course, he had no hard evidence to back his suspicions, but Claire seemed the most likely person to have written that letter. And apparently Claire was in a relationship with an overly protective judge who had threatened him and who had been described as a “psycho bitch.” Did this judge, Darcia, know Elizabeth, and if Elizabeth was seeing Claire, what would Darcia have done if she’d found out about it?

  He jotted down these thoughts while they were still fresh, then rewrote the main note on the bathroom mirror, incorporating every relevant happening since the morning. He could no longer remember what he’d expected from today, but this series of events certainly wasn’t it. He wondered what he would think when he read about everything in the morning.

  Chapter 42

  Barnes awoke to the drone of his alarm clock at 6:00 a.m. He slapped the “Off” button with his left hand, then turned to his right to kiss Elizabeth before crawling out of bed.

  She wasn’t there. He lay still for a moment, wondering what day it was and trying without success to recall the night before. A touch of a dull headache lingered in his temples. Too much alcohol? Sedatives? Either could cause memory loss. Something had disconnected him, something more than just deep slumber.

  What had happened last night? He vaguely recalled making love to Elizabeth in front of the fireplace. Or was that a dream? Yes, it must have been. The image in his mind didn’t make sense. The woman by the fireplace, the woman he’d made love to, had been blonde.

  A sinking feeling came over him, a vague sense of dread rooted in the loss of something vital. Elizabeth. He sensed she’d left him. That might explain his confusion—severe emotional turmoil. Extreme mental anguish can cause amnesia. Yet the physician part of him searched for a more plausible explanation. Then he remembered the mussels in Toronto. And Cheryl in Toronto. Had she also been in his house last night? Her blonde hair drifted through his consciousness like a flower’s scent in a breeze—faint but discernible, then gone the next moment.

  He rolled onto his back and noticed now for the first time a note taped to the alarm clock. It hung down over the top and covered part of the digital readout. A message from Elizabeth? He switched on the lamp.

  Read note on bathroom mirror. It was his own handwriting.

  His mouth went dry. Something terrible had happened. Something life-changing. Yet nothing came to mind except images of a woman, perhaps from the night before. His pulse pounded in his temples as he tried to remember more details from yesterday, the day before that, or even the week before. Nothing. Then he pictured Nate Billings in scrubs. Why, he had no idea. Nate was never someone he thought about.

  He threw back the covers and headed to the bathroom mirror. A lengthy handwritten note was taped to the glass. He turned on the lights to read it. The message was in French, and he translated as he read:

  Don’t be alarmed. Your ability to form new memories has been severely damaged since you were poisoned by mussels in Toronto in November. Don’t expect to remember anything from yesterday, and don’t expect to retain new information for more than a few minutes. If you do remember anything from yesterday, write it down immediately on a piece of paper; this may mean a significant improvement.

  He found a pen on top of Elizabeth’s dresser and jotted down on a scrap of paper the vague recollection of having sex by the fireplace with someone other than Elizabeth. He also jotted a note about the image of Nate Billings, on the off chance it might have some significance.

  He continued reading:

  Today is December 17, your third day back home. Elizabeth and Rex were murdered on 11/26, and you’re going to figure out who did it.

  He stared at the note for some time. Not reading. Just staring.

  “Get a grip,” he finally said out loud.

  And he began reading again. The letter continued for another five paragraphs, describing the pregnancy and death of Elizabeth, consultations with a female attorney who might have been Elizabeth’s lover, rejection by Denny, and an anonymous note demanding $10,000. Not to mention possible sex with Shirley.

  You and Shirley Collins have become more intimate, the note said. What did that mean? Coupled with the dream or the vague recollection of a naked blonde in his family room, and the dream or the vague recollection of making love to that woman, it most likely meant they’d had sex. He and Shirley.

  How had that happened? Regardless, he had to acknowledge it. His notes were his memory, and there was no point in being vague about what he’d done. He changed the note to read: You and Shirley Collins had sex. He was tempted to add: That may have been a bad decision. But what mattered were his feelings at that time, not now. Now he was thinking of her
as the old Shirley Collins, Elizabeth’s friend and colleague, with the arrogant boyfriend at the Union Oyster House, but last night she had likely been someone completely different. He thought of the paradox, that events from his recent past were closer to the present than his perception of things at this moment.

  Of course, it was still possible that he was making bad decisions. Assisting Nate Billings in surgery might have been one of those. What had possessed him to do that? If the note hadn’t been written in his own handwriting, he would never have believed it. But he had to believe it. This was the only way he could ever learn—to trust his notes from day to day. Those notes would be his surrogate memory, and they might even enable him to grow emotionally if not intellectually. In theory he could develop a meaningful relationship with another woman, although letting go of Elizabeth would be impossible.

  He remembered a ski trip they’d taken in Vermont three years ago, his first-ever attempt at downhill skiing. In contrast to him, Elizabeth had once been an instructor. She accompanied him to a bunny hill, yet even with prime snow conditions on a gentle slope, he couldn’t maintain his balance.

  “Are you okay?” She looked down at him, her breath coming out in puffs of mist. She wore a mostly white ski suit, and to Barnes she looked like an astronaut.

  “I could use some snow tires or chains on these.” He tried to stand up, but his skis slipped out from under him again.

  “I wish I’d thought to bring a camera. This would make a wonderful photograph—world-famous cardiothoracic surgeon on his bum, or ‘butt,’ as you would say.”

  He tried to stand up again. No luck. “Damn. How do you do this?”

  “Stick your ski pole in the ground here . . .” She pointed with her own pole. “. . . and push yourself up.”

  He tried but lost his balance again. “Forget it.” In frustration he reached back with his pole to release one boot from the ski.

  Elizabeth parried his pole with hers. “Don’t do that. That’s cheating. Pull your legs up more, and stick your pole right here in the snow.”

  “I can’t believe you’re doing this to me.”

  “With you, not to you. Now come on, Christopher. Get up.”

  “You’re enjoying this, aren’t you?”

  “Perhaps a little.”

  “I thought so.” He struggled to his feet, leaning on his pole the way she’d instructed.

  “There you go . . . Now that wasn’t so bad, was it?”

  “I’ll bet you say the same thing to your hip-replacement patients.” He brushed himself off. “But at least you’re cute when you’re sadistic.”

  “I’m cute? I’m not the one doing an imitation of a powdered doughnut.” And she kissed him on the nose.

  Most of that vacation was now a distant memory, except that afternoon on the bunny hill. When Barnes closed his eyes, he could still see Elizabeth smiling down at him in the snow. He didn’t ever want to forget.

  Barnes got dressed, then looked through his notes again. According to what he’d written, solving Elizabeth’s murder was his number one priority, yet he was also supposed to go to work and do surgery with Nate Billings. Being in the OR seemed more appealing than undertaking the daunting task of solving a homicide, no matter how personal, so, after promising himself not to forget about Elizabeth, he hurried through his morning coffee, then headed off to work. On the passenger’s seat in his car lay a framed photograph of him and Elizabeth, and his list reminded him that he had decided to put a picture of Elizabeth on his desk at work, not just to remind him of her and their life together but to remind him of his highest priority.

  In silence he drove through the dark streets of the sleeping city. When he arrived at the hospital parking lot, the sun had risen, bathing the buildings in a reddish hue. The hospital complex loomed over the main lot like a guard tower, and he imagined how depressing it must be for a patient to enter that huge, somber building, which served as the main entrance.

  He walked through the automatic doors and hurried down the hall, past the Christmas decorations, to the elevators in the Braddigan Building. There he got off at the eighth floor—the surgical wing.

  As he walked past the nurses’ station, a woman behind the counter chimed, “Good morning, Dr. Barnes.” She was a thirty-something unit clerk whose name he’d never bothered to learn.

  “Good morning,” he replied. Unit clerks usually didn’t greet him, and he’d never given that any thought. Yet now, receiving a salutation felt validating.

  You’re still Dr. Barnes, it said to him.

  He entered the surgeons’ lounge and poured himself a cup of coffee. An elderly physician whose name he couldn’t remember sat at the conference table reading a journal. The man ignored him. On the couch in front of the television sat Denny, his legs stretched across two cushions. He looked up from a newspaper. “Hey, Chris. What are you doing here?”

  “Same thing you’re doing.” In one hand Barnes carried the note Nate had written for him the previous day.

  “Uh-huh.” Denny sounded unconvinced.

  Barnes went to the OR schedule and looked up Billings. A case for him was coming up in fifteen minutes, a quadruple bypass. Barnes also noticed Houston had been scheduled for a mitral-valve replacement at the same time. Given the choice, Barnes would have taken the bypass.

  “Have you seen Nate?” he asked.

  The elderly surgeon glanced up from his journal to verify that Barnes wasn’t addressing him, then returned to his reading. Denny looked up from his newspaper as though the question had caught him by surprise. “Billings? Don’t tell me you’re going to work with him again.”

  Barnes wasn’t in the mood to take any lip. “You have a problem with that?”

  Houston folded the paper dramatically. “You do what you want.”

  “I will, Denny.” Barnes turned from him and headed to the locker room.

  Houston started to say something, but Barnes wasn’t listening.

  In the locker room, he ran into Billings. Houston had always been annoyed by the fact that Billings’s locker stood only ten feet from his and Barnes’s. Barnes had never cared one way or the other, but now it seemed like a stroke of luck.

  Barnes grunted and nodded, not comfortable enough to address Billings by name.

  “Morning to you, too.”

  Barnes turned his combination lock. “We’re scrubbing together. Right?”

  “That depends . . . You remember the rules?”

  “Rules?”

  “You treat everyone with respect, and don’t forget . . . you’re assisting me.”

  Barnes opened his locker. “Right.”

  “We’ve got a quadruple bypass on a sixty-six-year-old Caucasian male . . . Vessels are so occluded . . . I’m surprised he can squeeze blood through them. He put off getting a physical till it almost killed him.” Nate pulled a scrub shirt over his head and down past his dark chest and abdomen.

  Barnes’s own physique wasn’t as good as Billings’s, but he was certain his skill as a surgeon was superior. “Any other health problems?” he asked.

  “Only hypertension. Should be fine if we can just get him to the recovery room.”

  Barnes took off his shirt and reached for a pair of scrubs. “We’ll do it.”

  “You know your buddy Houston is hoping we don’t.”

  Barnes opened his mouth to defend Denny, then decided not to. Billings was probably right.

  Using glasses that provided threefold magnification, Barnes sutured blood vessels onto the patient’s heart with a precision that comes from innate talent and years of experience. With needle holders like forceps, he grasped the eyelash-sized needle and guided it through the delicate walls of the blood vessels. The special vascular suture was stuck directly to the blunt end of the needle and filled each hole exactly as it passed through, preventing leakage of blood from the procedure.

  Barnes believed that even on a bad day, he could suture blood vessels more skillfully than anyone. Even under magnification his
hands had no perceptible tremor, his motions entirely fluid.

  “With hands like that,” Billings said, “you should take up target shooting . . . or biathlon, if you can ski.”

  “I can’t ski to save my life,” said Barnes, “but I used to shoot in college.”

  “I assume you mean targets . . . and not classmates or teachers.”

  “Just targets. I shot pistol, and I can’t tell you how many hours I spent at the range.” Barnes grasped the tiny tip of his needle with the metal needle holders and pulled it through the thin wall of the vessel, completing the attachment to the left anterior descending coronary artery. “Now I don’t even own a gun.”

  After the bypass operation, Barnes and Billings walked to the surgeons’ lounge.

  “Looks like Mr. Parsons is going to see Christmas,” said Billings as they passed the recovery room.

  “Yeah.” Barnes had long since forgotten the patient’s name, although he knew what Billings was talking about. “Thanks for letting me help.” Barnes yanked off the surgical mask that dangled around his neck and dropped it into a wastebasket as they walked by.

  “No problem. I’d ask you to assist me again . . . tomorrow, but I don’t schedule surgeries on Fridays.”

  They’d reached the surgeons’ lounge. It was empty, and they headed to the coffeepot.

  “I suppose . . . we could do lunch instead,” said Billings.

  Barnes was caught by surprise. “Lunch?”

  “It’s that meal between breakfast and dinner.”

  “Uh-huh. Sure. I guess if we can stand each other for, what, four hours in the OR, we should be able to do lunch. Where are you taking me?” He poured himself a cup of coffee.

  “Oh, now suddenly I’m buying? How did that happen?” Billings poured himself a cup, too.

  “You asked me, right?”

  “Yeah . . . but it’s not like a date.” Billings took a sip of coffee. “All right. If I’m paying, I’ll take you to McDonald’s. After you forget, I’ll tell you we went to L’Espalier. How does that sound?”