THUNK!
Just one this time.
Then all was quiet again.
* * *
The visitors’ lounge at the hospital looked like an explosion in a clown’s wardrobe. The walls were canary yellow; the chairs were bright red; the carpet was orange; the magazine racks and end tables were made of heavy purple plastic; and the two large abstract paintings were done primarily in shades of blue and green.
The lounge—obviously the work of a designer who had read too much about the various psychological mood theories of color—was supposed to be positive, life-affirming. It was supposed to lift the spirits of visitors and take their minds off sick friends and dying relatives. In Carol, however, the determinedly cheery decor elicited the opposite reaction from that which the designer had intended, It was a frenetic room; it abraded the nerves as effectively as coarse sandpaper would abrade a stick of butter.
She sat on one of the red chairs, waiting for the doctor who had treated the injured girl. When he came, his stark white lab coat contrasted so boldly with the flashy decor that he appeared to radiate a saintlike aura.
Carol rose to meet him, and he asked if she was Mrs. Tracy, and he said his name was Sam Hannaport. He was tall, very husky, square-faced, florid, in his early fifties. He looked as if he would be loud and gruff, perhaps even obnoxious, but in fact he was soft-spoken and seemed genuinely concerned about how the accident had affected Carol both physically and emotionally. It took her a couple of minutes to assure him that she was all right on both counts, and then they sat down on facing red chairs.
Hannaport raised his bushy eyebrows and said, “You look as if you could use a hot bath and a big glassful of warm brandy.”
“I was soaked to the skin,” she said, “but I’m pretty well dried out now. What about the girl?”
“Cuts, contusions, abrasions,” he said.
“Internal bleeding?”
“Nothing showed up on the tests.”
“Fractures?”
“Not a broken bone in her body. She came through it amazingly well. You couldn’t have been driving very fast when you hit her.”
“I wasn’t. But considering the way she slipped up onto the hood and then rolled off into the gutter, I thought maybe…” Carol shuddered, unwilling to put words to what she had thought.
“Well, the kid’s in good condition now. She regained consciousness in the ambulance, and she was alert by the time I saw her.”
“Thank God.”
“There’s no indication that she’s even mildly concussed. I don’t foresee any lasting effects.”
Relieved, Carol sagged back in the red chair. “I’d like to see her, talk to her.”
“She’s resting now,” Dr. Hannaport said. “I don’t want her disturbed at the moment. But if you’d like to come back this evening, during visiting hours, she’ll be able to see you then.”
“I’ll do that. I’ll definitely do that.” She blinked.
“Good heavens, I haven’t even asked you what her name is.”
His bushy eyebrows rose again. “Well, we’ve got a small problem about that.”
“Problem?” Carol tensed up again. “What do you mean? Can’t she remember her name?”
“She hasn’t remembered it yet, but—”
“Oh, God.”
“—she will.”
“You said no concussion—”
“I swear to you, it isn’t serious,” Hannaport said. He took her left hand in his big hard hands and held it as if it might crack and crumble at any moment.
“Please don’t excite yourself about this. The girl is going to be fine. Her inability to remember her name isn’t a symptom of severe concussion or any serious brain injury; not in her case, anyway. She isn’t confused or disoriented. Her field of vision is normal, and she has excellent depth perception. We tested her thought processes with some math problems—addition, subtraction, multiplication—and she got them all correct. She can spell any word you throw at her; she’s a damn good speller, that one. So she’s not severely concussed. She’s simply suffering from mild amnesia. It’s selective amnesia, you understand, just a loss of personal memories, not a loss of skills and education and whole blocks of social concepts. She hasn’t forgotten how to read and write, thank God; she’s only forgotten who she is, where she came from, and how she got to this place. Which sounds more serious than it really is. Of course, she’s disconcerted and apprehensive. But selective amnesia is the easiest kind to recover from.”