Eating With the Angels (11 page)

‘I don’t know about no vacation,’ she said, her fingers starting to massage my scalp again, moving in tiny circles. Then she rolled her chair away from the bed again to read whatever was on the wall. ‘All I know is what it say here: admitted June 29, 2004, with subdural haema —’

Jesus, there it was, the lightning flash of comprehension.

‘Stop!’ I cried out. ‘What? Two thousand and what?’

She rolled her chair back to the bed and her hands moved down to my shoulders, which had started to shake uncontrollably.

‘What is it, Constanzia? Admitted June 29, 2004. What’s wrong?’

How was it possible? How could it be happening to me?

‘I went,’ I tried to say but my breath was coming short and fast, making it hard to speak, my chest rising and falling hysterically, ‘I
went to Venice in October. After 9/11. We thought about not going, well he didn’t, but before that, because of 9/11, we thought about not going, Signora.’ Oh, where was Tom?

‘Calm down,’ she said, ‘is all right. You take vacation whenever you like, Constanzia. Lots of people do. 9/11 don’t stop vacations.’

‘
No
!’ I cried. ‘You don’t understand. I was just there. Just before the hospital. I hurt my head in Venice. Before the coma. Where’s the paper? Where’s the newspaper, Signora? I need the newspaper. I need to make sure.’ I was sobbing now, flailing around in the bed.

‘You must stay calm, Constanzia,’ Signora Marinello told me as she moved around the bed. ‘You do no good like this. Ssshhhh. No good.’ She fished around until she found the
New York
Times
and shook it out, holding the front page up to me. ‘You want this?’

I nodded and reached for it, bringing it close to my eyes. The type was blurry — through the tears or the fog in my head I couldn’t tell — but the date at the top of the page was coming slowly, slowly, slowly into focus, emerging out of a shadowy nondescript inkiness to read, clear as a bell, just as Signora Marinello had told me, Thursday, July 23, 2004. I threw the newspaper on the floor, opened my mouth and howled.

My brain had eaten two years and nine months of my life.

I had left on my second honeymoon in October 2001 and now it was July 2004. There was something wrong with my memory after all: a big chunk of my life had disappeared into a black empty void, starting with my trip to Venice and ending with waking up in hospital.

‘But why would that happen?’ I sobbed, my head resting on the billowing cushion of Signora Marinello’s breast, my tears soaking into the cotton of her shift, my heart pumping with fright. ‘Why would that be?’

‘Hush,’ she comforted me. ‘Hush. Don’t be afraid. No two people is the same, Constanzia. No two people have the same injury, no two people get better the same way. I see Dr Scarpa before, maybe
I get him to come and talk to you. The brain has her own way of getting better, of protecting herself. Those years, they will come back. They are not gone forever. Hush, now. Hush.’

Signora Marinello kept trying to calm me down, to reassure me that it didn’t matter, that the missing years would return — but I was beyond comforting on a rational level. I mean how rational is it to have almost three years of your life sucked into some vacuum and never spat out? It was terrifying, and I had had enough of being terrified. I needed safety. I needed rescuing, which I think Signora Marinello recognised and managed in a small way by administering extra medication. I can’t specifically remember her doing so but I know that I sank back into unconsciousness. In fact, I wanted to be unconscious. I may even have hoped for another coma; one from which I could awaken and know everything there was to know about me, not just the bits some invisible foreign hand had picked out.

I’m still joining the dots a bit here, you need to understand that. My mind was still operating on its own timetable and I am very aware that I recall some large chunks of time just as fleeting moments and some fleeting moments as large chunks. It is in retrospect that I have pieced it all together to make sense. So what I remember is slipping back into blissful unconsciousness and waking up again some time later, could have been minutes, could have been hours or days, to find Mom sitting there, knitting furiously and staring at me with those beady little eyes of hers. I assumed Signora Marinello had caught her up on the latest catastrophic development. And as I looked at her I couldn’t believe that I hadn’t noticed how she had aged. Thirty-three months at her age made quite a difference. Her skin, of which she had always been deservedly proud, seemed puckered and uncharacteristically dry, there were wrinkled black pouches beneath her eyes and her blush was on the heavy side.

‘I went to Venice,’ I said, croakily, a tear slithering out from the corner of my eye and down toward my ear. We had never been the types to trade secrets or confidences, but she was the only person there
and I was so full of grief and despair I had to unleash it on someone. ‘But Tom never came, Mom, he let me go there all on my own. That’s the last thing I remember. Being in Venice all on my own.’

My cheeks were wet, my pillow soaking up the spillage. I had rarely wept in front of my mother as she’d long since proved indifferent to tears, mine anyway. But the pace of her knitting slowed and I saw something flit across her face then, some stealthy emotion chasing itself away. ‘Well,’ she said, ‘I will never understand you, Mary-Constance, not as long as I live.’

I wanted Tom then like I’d never wanted him before. Despite our problems, our differences — his shortcomings, my guilt — he’d always protected me from my mother, soothed me after her outbursts, buffeted me from the pain she could cause.

‘I don’t care why he didn’t come,’ I sobbed. ‘I forgive him. I forgive him for everything. I just want him to come and get me and take me home. I don’t know what the hell is going on. I want Tom. Why didn’t he come and find me?’

My mother gave a dry little cough. ‘Why didn’t he come and find you, Mary-Constance? I’ll tell you why. Because someone went on a second honeymoon to Venice, yes, that’s true, you’ve got that right. You’ve remembered that. But it wasn’t you. It was Tom Farrell.
He
was the one stranded in a foreign city he never even cared two hoots to visit in the first place, with the rest of the world going to hell in a handbag and you gallivanting around New York City with your fancy man. Lord knows I was never crazy about the man, you could have done better, I’ve always thought so, but he deserved better than that. A bum lying down on the street covered in old pages of the
New York Post
deserves better than that. Of course, he moved on just fine, but why shouldn’t he? You certainly had no problem in that department.’

I screamed then, as loud as I could, although it didn’t come out the way I wanted it to. It emerged as more of an animal moan, but a moan of such ferocity, of such depth and anguish, that Signora
Marinello, who must have been out in the hall, came racing in as quickly as her bulky body could carry her.

‘Lois!’ she called out over her shoulder as she approached. ‘Lois!’

A young pink-faced nurse with messy strawberry-blonde hair appeared at the entrance to my room, her face crumpled in irritation or something like it.

‘Yes?’ she asked Signora Marinello. ‘What is it?’

How I pitied my poor jumbled brain then. How I wished I could scoop it out of my dented skull and kiss it better. How I wanted to roll the clocks forward or backward or any which way to a time when I knew what was what and who was whom. For I knew Lois already. Only slightly, but slightly was enough. She was none other than the waitress from Bentigodi in the Cannaregio, the one who had told me she had seen my brother.

I cried out even louder from my bed and she looked at me, her face straightening into a sympathetic smile as she recognised me.

‘Well, hello, stranger,’ she said. ‘Nice to see you with your eyes open.’

I felt a whoosh of comprehension lift me up and spin me around then, but the force of it confused me and I lost my train of thought. I had glimpsed the truth for a moment but it had been a long, long way away and I couldn’t see it any more. I was speechless, wordless, thoughtless. I felt like my whole body was one big black gaping howl of rage and misery.

It’s hard to explain exactly what it is like having a brain injury. I mean, it’s easy enough for me to do now because the pieces of the puzzle all fit snugly into their right places again or if they don’t, I can plug the gaps using common sense. Like I say, it’s joining the dots. But at that time, when I was trying to recover whatever was left of me, unsure of what was real and what was not, I was jamming round pegs into square holes all the time. How could the waitress from Bentigodi be in the hospital, I hear you ask? And I was asking myself that too, but not in a ‘yeah, right’ sceptical way, rather in a ‘how could
that possibly
be
’ way. I just didn’t get it. I just couldn’t unravel it.

And I suppose that seeing and knowing Lois highlighted, at that point, the matter of Signora Marinello herself. How could she have been at Do’ Mori and right there in the hospital in New York? I had gotten used to her and stopped wondering about that, such was my need to just soak up her loving attention. But if I was to believe my mother I had never been to Venice — yet I had. I was sure I had. I replayed the events of my short stay there like a movie in my head and it was picture-perfect. But what had Mom being doing there at the end, at Luca’s boatyard? This unnerved me. And what had Ty Wheatley been doing there? When I tried to think how all these things could be, how these people could jump around the world and turn up in my life no matter what my state or location, my thinking could only go so far and then it stopped. I met a brick wall in my mind and banged my head against it, so to speak.

‘I know you,’ I said to Lois. ‘You were there. We were there together.’

‘Go get Dr Scarpa,’ Signora Marinello told her. ‘I see him before. He is upstairs. Constanzia should see him.’ And off Lois went, before I could stop her, before I could demand an explanation that my exhausted grey matter could absorb.

‘Is it true?’ I asked Signora Marinello, even though I wasn’t sure what I was referring to. ‘I was in Venice, wasn’t I? We had cichetti at Do’ Mori. I can remember what it tasted like. The polpette!’ My mouth failed to water at the prospect but I saw those luscious meatballs in my mind as clear as those round white plates.

‘I don’t know,’ Signora Marinello answered me, shaking her head and then turning to glare at my mother. ‘You know, Constanzia need rest, Mrs Conlan. Maybe you give her space now.’

I could sense my mother bristle. Prickly particles filled the air and stabbed at my skin. She didn’t like being treated like an ordinary person.

‘I think I know what is good for my daughter,’ she replied, her
voice deep and cold. ‘I’ve known her for more than 36 years, after all, Mrs Marinello.’

More than 36 years? I turned my face into the pillow and roared again. I was 36. Only four years shy of 40. Oh, it just got stranger and stranger.

And stranger.

The squeak of a nurse’s shoes and the clatter of someone with a firmer sole heralded the arrival of Lois and Dr Scarpa.

‘Well, look who we have here,’ a familiar voice greeted me, charm dripping from every rich rolled syllable. ‘That’s some fine handiwork you have going on up there if I do say so myself.’

My mouth dropped open as my eyes travelled up and down the handsome form standing beside me, gripped in expertly fitting black trousers and a T-shirt.

It was Marco, my gondolier.

Can you imagine what my poor scrambled self must have gone through then? It emerges from a coma it didn’t know it was in, only to find three years of its life missing. Then it’s confronted by the man who stole the heart out of its body in a whirlwind affair (that apparently never happened) in a faraway place (where it had apparently never been).

There it was, my poor muddled brain, trying its hardest to get back to a normal size and find its trusty old pathways, jump-start its nerve endings, only to be assaulted by a battery of inexplicable coincidences that just did not add up no matter how hard it tried to make sense of them all.

Now I look back and think how obvious it all was, how any idiot could have worked it out. But hindsight is a wonderful thing, right up there with insight as far as head trauma is concerned — and not everyone who has taken a knock like me gets their hindsight or their insight back. (Also, we don’t really use words like idiot.) Others less fortunate can look back all they like and still never put it all together. I know this now. I know a lot now. But all I knew then was that the Venetian gondolier I had ridden like a rodeo steer in a murky hole in a backstreet canal was now holding out his hand, gold Rolex glinting, and introducing himself formally as though we had never met.

‘Marc Scarpa,’ he said. ‘I’m your neurosurgeon.’

‘Marco,’ I whispered, the wind completely knocked out of my sails but traces of lust still unmistakably racing around inside me.

‘Yes,’ he smiled a little unconvincingly, first at me then at Signora Marinello, ‘Constanzia. Still playing your little games then. Glad to see you so alert. You managed the surgery expertly. We were extremely pleased with the result.’

He paused as though waiting for someone to back this up but everyone was too busy staring at him in adoration, even someone with a recent head injury could spot that. And who wouldn’t adore him? My Marco! Those lips! Those hips!

‘Nurse tells me there seems to be some sort of retrograde amnesia or dissociative memory loss,’ Marco said in his smooth hypnotic voice. ‘This is not my field, Connie, I’m your surgeon. I’ll consult with my colleagues but as your post-operative scans are clear, there’s nothing to suggest that you should be at all alarmed. It is very common with — Connie? Nurse, is she listening to me?’

I was transfixed by the squareness of his jaw, the depth of his eyes, the breadth of his shoulders. He was just too drop-dead gorgeous to be a doctor, he should have been an actor playing a doctor, you know, in a daytime soap like Joey in
Friends
but taller and thinner and with better hair.

‘It’s just so weird to see you here,’ I said.

Marco took no notice. ‘It’s very common with head-injury patients to have no recollection of the accident in which the injury occurred,’ he told me in a clinical voice as though nothing had ever happened between us, as though I were just anyone. It was chilling. Of course, when I thought about it, I’d seen a glimpse of Marco’s coldness (even if I hadn’t recognised it as such) when he had talked to me about his cut-price Swiss gondolas. I’d been irked by his lack of idealism. He was a fairytale hero but seemed to lack the necessary romanticism. Mind you, at the time I had considered he had enough of everything else to make up for it. I possibly still did.

‘Connie?’ He barked my name with a briskness that stank of having too much of his valuable time taken up. I nodded, feebly, deeply apologetic, and willed myself to pay better attention. ‘It is very common to have no recollection of your accident,’ he said again but with less patience. ‘The brain is an extremely complicated organ with its own way of protecting your consciousness from any undue pain or stress. It had already been through considerable trauma when you presented. You had the subdural haematoma on your right temporal lobe but were lucky to escape what’s known as a contrecoup injury at the back of your head on the opposite side. This is where the brain moves vigorously around inside the static box of your skull after the impact.’ He made a gesticulation representing my brain moving vigorously around inside the static box of my skull. ‘Obviously, that would have complicated your recovery but I am sure Nurse has been through all this with you so if there are any questions …’

I could not believe he was just standing there looking at me with nothing in his eyes but a detached sort of professional interest. Was he afraid to show affection in front of my mother? Ashamed at what Signora Marinello might think of him after he left me alone in Venice? But then I remembered with a flush of embarrassment that Venice had been a long time ago, that my mother said I had never even been there; and anyway, how could Marco be both my thigh-throbbing gondolier and my brain surgeon? I groaned. What was real?

‘Is there pain?’ Marco asked, coming close to inspect my stapled scar. ‘There shouldn’t be pain. What meds do you have her on?’ He checked my chart and then leaned forward to closer inspect my wound. He did not smell like the Marco I knew, the man whose salty skin sang with an intoxicating mixture of vanilla and freshly ground black pepper. This Marco had no smell at all. I sucked up another groan as he stepped back, attempting a sympathetic look.

‘Tell me what you remember,’ he said, employing a gentler tone.

I looked at Signora Marinello for help but she just smiled encouragingly and nodded at me. My mother was silently tsk-tsking
in the background. It was a non-noise I had long ago learned to ignore.

‘I remember,’ I started, ‘but then …’ I fizzled out.

‘Yes,’ Marco prompted, those eyes drawing me in. Was it a game? Did he want me to tell them?

‘I’m sure of it, you know, it’s just that …’ But I wasn’t sure. Far from it. I knew what that man tasted like, for God’s sake, yet he was a stranger to me. A total stranger.

As if to prove just that, Marco forced a tight smile, blew air out of his nose, and looked at his expensive watch, the sort of thing a real asshole would do. It was clear to me then that I was inconveniencing him and he gave a short throaty ahem no doubt intended to hurry me up.

‘I do remember,’ I said quickly, miffed but all the same not wanting him to give up on me and leave. ‘I remember
you
. The gondola, the cichetti, Do’ Mori. You said you were going to take care of me.’

Marco raised his eyebrows and opened his mouth, his tongue pressed against the back of his top front teeth. It was the sign of someone who had no time for this sort of crap.

‘I did take care of you,’ he said crisply. ‘Now if you could just tell me what you remember of the accident, Connie. There are other people in this hospital, in this ward, much worse off than you who also need my help.’

My heart broke but whether it was a fresh break or it had already been broken, I couldn’t tell. And hindsight still does not help me there. I had been a moron (oops, shouldn’t use that one either) to think I was the only one for Marco, in the real world or the imagined one.

‘I remember being in Venice, at the squero,’ I answered haltingly, breathing in unshed tears and attempting to separate this cold efficient version of my gondolier from the warm magnetic one in my memory. ‘And all of a sudden my mom was there and then I was here. In the hospital.’

‘You don’t remember running in Central Park?’ Marco prompted. ‘You were running in Central Park when you fell and hit your head by the restaurant on the lake, the Boat House. Isn’t that the story, Nurse?’

Signora Marinello nodded in agreement but I was stunned. I didn’t run. I never ran. I hated running. I didn’t have the ponytail or the breasts for it. I was a walker. But those bony thighs, that tight little butt that lay underneath me — how could I explain them? If I didn’t know better, which in fact I didn’t, I would have to admit that I had indeed woken up with the body of a runner.

‘You must remember Woody Allen,’ my mom piped up from the background. ‘You bled all over Woody Allen. He had
caramel-coloured
corduroy trousers on and you held up his film. Winona Ryder had to stay in her trailer — you know, the one that stole all the clothes. The shoplifter. It cost him $10,000.’

I closed my eyes and willed the world to go away — it was too hard to be awake in — but the world would not obey my wishes. I opened my eyes and it was still there.

‘Connie?’ Marco’s voice was exasperated again. ‘Do you remember being in Central Park?’

I felt wheels and cogs shifting slowly, rumbling loudly in my head. Of course I remembered being in Central Park. I had grown up in a grungy tenement just a few blocks to the east of it, after all, it was practically my back yard. But when I tried to conjure up my most recent memory, there was a cloudiness that I was having trouble sifting through. I saw myself walking, my coat pulled tight across my chest, my body leaning into the wind. But it was my old body, the spongy one I knew, not the tight one I had woken up with. And I wasn’t in the park, I was striding past the Magnolia Bakery. My, how I loved those cupcakes.

‘I’m not sure,’ I said. ‘I’m not sure about anything. I remember walking but not running and that was the old me not this one. You weren’t in Venice?’ I just couldn’t believe I had dreamed it. ‘At the
Rialto?’ I knew details of this man’s anatomy that I just didn’t have the experience to conjure up unaided. I had felt him and smelled him and tasted him and a host of other heavenly morsels. I could not have made it all up. I could not have. ‘It all seems so real.’

Marco turned to Signora Marinello, his luscious eyebrows raised. ‘I think we need a neuro-psychological consult on this one, Nurse, it’s out of my hands now. The wound is healing satisfactorily and the CT scans show that the swelling is no longer a risk to her health so I think it’s appropriate that I leave her to you.’

With that he turned on his heels and left the room.

All eyes watched his delectable back as it disappeared. Even my mom had a sort of hungry look she didn’t normally possess. Not for long though.

‘Really, Mary-Constance, you couldn’t have made more of an effort?’ she admonished me before the sound of his feet had even faded away. ‘He saves your life and all you can do is babble on about who knows what and ask him stupid question after stupid question. What will he think? What do they say about manners, Mrs Marinado? Do they say when you come back mean you leave your manners behind as well?’

‘Time for Connie to have some rest now, Mrs Conlan,’ my nurse said. ‘Remember what I tell you about her brain. Needs quiet.’

I felt the dry chafe of my mother’s lips on my cheek and the loneliness of my predicament suddenly overwhelmed me. ‘Mom, can you get Tom to come in?’ I pleaded, grasping at her arm and pulling her back to me. ‘I need him here. I don’t know what’s happening to me. I’m scared.’

My betrayal of my husband, if indeed it existed, itched at my insides but I still needed him there with me, despite what I had or hadn’t done, what he had or hadn’t done, to navigate me through the awful fog in my head. My mother resisted my pull, straightening up and stepping away from me.

Paris chose that moment to stride into my room on ridiculously
high heels, looking positively airbrushed and brandishing a Kate Spade paper shopping bag. ‘Darling!’ she cried,
‘C’est ici!’

I burst into tears. ‘Please go away,’ I sobbed, my chest heaving with despair. ‘I want Tom. And Fleur. Where’s Fleur? I need Fleur. Mom, will you tell her? Please, please, please.’

‘Well, I doubt whether she —’ my mother started in on me.

‘Really, there’s no need to —’ Paris spoke over the top of her.

‘QUIET!’ Signora Marinello roared with admirable authority. ‘Everybody out of this room right now. Leave Constanzia alone. She need REST. She need QUIET.’

‘Her name is Mary-Constance,’ my mother chipped in as she was herded from the room.

‘Although her fans know her as Emsie,’ Paris retorted.

This last comment lingered in the room after Paris had vacated it. Mary-Constance. Emsie. MC. The penny dropped. Paris was calling me MC. I felt ridiculously relieved. This skinny person with a new name quaking here inside me, unable to stop crying, a large chunk of her life disappeared into thin air, was really me. I was the right person! But I had preferred the name Connie for as long as I could remember so it was a mystery to me why I would have changed that. Only my mother called me Mary-Constance and I had never cared for it.

At that point in my recovery, by the way, I should mention that I was no longer entirely bedridden. You could be forgiven for thinking that I had been lying in bed all that time moving nothing but my tear ducts, my mouth and on a couple of occasions my hands but this is purely because, in the interests of a good story, I have chosen to leave out the details of my physical recovery. It mostly involves tubes and excretions that are frankly best not talked about.

In a nutshell, by the time I knew what was happening to me, by the stage I am telling you about now, my body had already been rehabilitated to an acceptable level. I no longer required a catheter nor round-the-clock intravenous support and monitoring. I needed
assistance to get into a wheelchair and go to the bathroom but this was really a precaution, as I was pretty steady on my feet (despite the fact that my legs seemed barely big enough to hold the rest of me up). And I had suffered no injury but the one to my head, which apparently left me streets ahead of other inhabitants of Neurological Intensive Care, most of whom had been in car wrecks and were badly banged up. I was, indeed, one of the lucky ones.

Of course, I didn’t feel lucky. Quite the opposite. I was terrified by the notions that time had been lost and what I thought true had been imagined. What could I trust? To whom could I turn? Marco, my lover, appeared not to know me from Adam and my husband, according to my mother, was no longer my husband — I knew it was a bad sign that he had not been there already, that his name had not been mentioned. But how I yearned for him. Truly, madly, deeply, desperately yearned for him.

I slept after Paris and my mom left. It had been a huge day. When I woke up, it was Friday. I felt calmer. Signora Marinello was still there, shuffling around the room, waiting for me to wake.