Eating With the Angels (12 page)

‘Don’t you have a home to go to?’ I asked her. ‘You’re always here.’

She laughed. ‘I work 12-hour shift,’ she said, ‘but you don’t know how much you sleep at night when I’m at home. Maybe 15 hours!’

‘I was in Venice, with Marco,’ I told her, desperate to sift something sensible out of the muddle in my mind. ‘I know I was. There are things I know about him, Signora. Things that I am sure I didn’t dream. Private things. You know. Very private.’

Her smile was so kind, I felt better for having it pointed in my direction.

‘Constanzia,’ she murmured. ‘You must understand …’

And there it was, all of a sudden: proof!

‘Constanzia!’ I said. ‘You see! He called me Constanzia. He gave me an Italian name.’

But Signora Marinello simply nodded. ‘We give all patients Italian names,’ she said. ‘Is a hangover from another doctor who used to work here. Was his little joke.’

‘But how would
I know
he called me Constanzia?’ The fog in my head had lifted enough for me to know this was important. I clung to it as if to a bright light at the end of a long dark tunnel but Signora Marinello just nodded expectantly again.

‘No matter how much we know about the brain,’ she said, ‘is still only tiny little piece of what there is to know. And you think there is a lot to learn about her when she is awake? Well, try her when she is asleep. Even more! No one really knows what happens in a coma.’ Her voice was conspiratorially low, as though she were telling me secrets she didn’t want real brain experts to hear. ‘But your ears? They the last thing to go to sleep, Constanzia. This we do know. I say just because your brain is asleep doesn’t mean your ears aren’t listening. I never tell you anything when you sleeping that I don’t want you to hear if you are awake. Dr Scarpa, now, he chit and chat and call you Constanzia. Tell you he’s going to take care of you. Maybe your ears take this to your brain and mix it with morphine and other sleeping drugs until you have a little cocktail of real things and dream things going on. You know those first few of days after your surgery we wake you up to see how you responding, then put you back to sleep again. No one knows what goes on in there during this time.’ She put her cool hand on my forehead again. ‘Not even you.’

I turned this over. She made it all sound plausible enough, she really did, yet I had tasted things in Venice that were as real as anything I had ever tasted anywhere else. I thought of the stuffed sardines at Bentigodi, sitting succulently in front of me, that heavenly stuffing of breadcrumbs, pine nuts and parsley bursting to get out.

‘But how would I know what Marco looks like?’ I asked her. ‘And you? How would I know that?’ I remembered her so clearly, leaning over the counter at Do’ Mori, her smooth voice telling me
that I was going to be fine, that I was going to be better than I was before.

‘Constanzia, how long you been awake?’ she asked quietly.

‘Three days,’ I said, although I thought it might have been four.

‘Three
weeks
,’ she corrected me. ‘You been awake more than three weeks. But those first days you don’t remember. You see me and Dr Scarpa plenty before you know that’s what you are doing. This is a strange time for you, Constanzia, I know this. But you going to be fine. Will not always be like this. Will be better. Easier. You one of the lucky ones.’

That old chestnut. If I was that lucky, surely I would have skipped the whole blow-to-the-head coma thing and just gone on to be a supermodel. Signora Marinello sensed my scepticism.

‘Besides,’ she said casually, ‘you not the first person to wake up thinking you seen more of Dr Scarpa than you should have.’

‘I’m not?’

‘No!’ She was quite sure of it. ‘It happen all the time. But you don’t have to be in a coma to dream of that one, either. He’s a
nice-looking
man, no?’ She shook her head. ‘I think half the nurses in this place are dreaming of him as well as the patients, although if you ask me he’s —’ she thought better of what she had been about to say. ‘Never mind. Some people just like that, just made to dream about.’

‘Well, I dreamed of you too, Signora. Has anyone done that before?’

‘I don’t think it happens so often, my love,’ she answered, ‘so thank you. I always say you are a nice girl.’

I slept on and off for most of the day, waking in the afternoon as the door quietly opened. There was Fleur, my real best friend; not looking perfectly put together like Paris but radiantly beautiful, just the way a best friend of mine should look. Actually, she seemed different, quite different, but I couldn’t put my finger on why. Then I reminded myself that of course she would have changed — it was nearly three years since I could remember seeing her. The night
before I was to fly to Italy we had gone out, just the two of us, so we could discuss my plan of action for the second honeymoon. Fleur had always had excellent advice on underwear — it was she who had gotten me into a thong — and actually, when I came to think of it, the whole second honeymoon thing had been her idea in the first place. I’d always confided my woes to Fleur. She was the best listener and despite her ingrained natural flirtation skills, at heart she could be relied on to be a girl’s girl, a true friend, a best friend.

She shot me a hesitant smile from the door and I beckoned for her to come closer. I wondered if she had known that I was thin and blonde or if that was a surprise to her as well. I could not get past that, I really couldn’t.

‘Fleur,’ I said. ‘Thank God you’re here.’

‘Oh, Connie,’ she cried and flew towards me, flinging herself on the bed and enveloping me in her arms. ‘I’m so sorry. Jesus, I’m so sorry.’ We wept together then, the way old friends do, loudly and gushingly, until the tears slowed and turned to embarrassed laughter and finally dried on our cheeks.

‘Your mom says you’re a little out to lunch,’ Fleur said, sniffing.

‘Out to lunch? Gee, that’s the nicest thing I think she’s ever said about me,’ I kidded but anxiety quickly sucked the laughter out of me. ‘I can’t remember the right things,’ I blurted out. ‘And the things I can remember aren’t true. It’s awful, Fleur, I don’t know what’s happening. I don’t know what’s happened. Real life is all jumbled up with dream life in my head and it’s horrible.’

Fleur wriggled up the bed until she was lying next to me and hugged me close. She had lost weight in the missing years or rather changed shape — that sexy butt of hers was smaller but her boobs were bigger, her waist thicker and that fabulous hair was even curlier and more lustrous than before.

‘Is it true you’ve lost your memory?’ she asked.

I nodded miserably. ‘Some of it. So they tell me. I mean it’s not like the guy in
The Bourne Identity
or anything, I know who I am,
sort of. Or who I used to be. But the past few years are gone. I mean I didn’t know at first, I thought it was still back then. I thought I was okay, that everything was okay, that I was lucky to be alive but I just couldn’t figure out the date. It’s so weird, Fleur. I can remember going to Venice, so freakin’ clearly, like it was yesterday, but Mom says I didn’t go. You and I went out the night before I was supposed to fly out, remember?’ I thought back to the table at the Gotham Bar and Grill where Fleur and I had split a bottle of South Australian chardonnay and a plate of Alfred Portale’s Maine lobster tails with roasted fingerling potatoes while we discussed marriage-renewal tactics.

‘I remember the restaurant,’ I told her, ‘but not much afterwards.’

‘Oh, Connie,’ Fleur sounded as heartbroken as I was. ‘So much has happened since then. Jesus, you couldn’t just break your leg like a normal person?’

‘But look, I’m thin,’ I said, throwing back the bedclothes and showing her my bony body.

‘It’s disgusting,’ she agreed.

‘I know, and it’s not even the weirdest thing that’s happened. Did you know about it?’

‘The thin thing? Oh, gee, um …’ she hesitated. ‘There’s a lot of catching up to do, Connie …’

‘So, catch me up then.’

I detected a certain reluctance.

‘I don’t know where to start,’ she said.

‘Well, do you know about my accident?’

‘Uh-huh.’

‘Start there.’

She seemed slightly relieved and shifted in the bed to get comfortable, hoisting herself up on one elbow. ‘Well, the story was that you were running by the Boat House in Central Park when you saw Woody Allen and you slipped on something, fell over and hit
your head on a rock.’ She stopped to have a good look at my scar, her face scrunched up in sympathy. ‘He had a bagel or something, Woody Allen did. They think that’s what distracted you. No, it was a pretzel, a soft pretzel. Anyway you must have been real hungry because despite being unconscious you apparently wrangled it off of him somehow. You had it in the ambulance. In fact, they had to prise it off you in the hospital.’

We were both silent for a moment. She waiting for my reaction, me hoping I had mis-heard what she said. My near-death sounded like a bad joke.

‘I stole Woody Allen’s pretzel?’ I asked her. ‘Why would I do that? Did he take it from me in the first place?’ I wanted to say that I didn’t even like pretzels but I was pretty sure there were photos to the contrary. Pushcart pretzels, in my opinion, while not truly a New York invention were definitely one of the reasons to live there. And I bet I knew where Woody Allen got his too because there was a grouchy woman sold them at 72nd Street and Central Park West … Hers were much better than the ones you could buy from the franchised carts in the park itself: hotter and she used a finer salt. I would dearly love to believe there was no truth in such a ridiculous explanation of how I jumbled my brain but sadly there was nothing unlikely about me nearly killing myself lusting after somebody else’s pretzel at all. It was exactly the sort of thing that would happen.

‘How do you know this stuff anyway?’ I wanted to know.

‘There were witnesses,’ Fleur admitted. ‘The guy who rows that skinny boat around the lake in the stripy shirt, he saw the whole thing.’

‘The Central Park gondolier?’ I asked in horror.

‘Yeah, the Central Park gondolier. He was right there. He saw the whole thing with the pretzel apparently and then you fell and hit your head and he was right there talking to you when the paramedics arrived. I think maybe it was him stole Woody’s pretzel and gave it to you to make a better story, but that’s not what it said in the paper.’

‘It was in the paper?’ I was in danger of going into shock. This just kept getting more and more unbelievable.

‘Well, yeah, of course it was. Front page. You’re a —’

‘Stop,’ I whispered. ‘Stop.’ My head needed time to catch up with what she was telling me. I had been running in Central Park; had fallen trying to steal a famous film director’s snack; then been tended to by the Central Park gondolier. Well, I didn’t need to know anything about how the brain worked to figure out how Marco got into my coma as a Venetian boatman, for crissakes. The Grand Canal felt like a long, long way away then and while I felt less lonely with Fleur snuggled next to me on the bed, I still wanted Tom. He was the rock to whom I wanted to cling.

‘Why isn’t Tom here, Fleur? What happened?’

Fleur tensed up, I felt her body stiffen next to me. ‘The thing is, Connie,’ she said and she sounded slightly out of breath, nervous, ‘I don’t know how to put this but basically you’re not married to Tom any more.’

By then, I guess I knew that but I can’t say it didn’t hit me like a sucker punch to hear it all the same. I had been avoiding the obvious but he would have been there, wouldn’t he? Signora Marinello would have spoken of him. I think I had felt as soon as I could recognise my feelings — even before Mom told me that it was Tom who went to Venice on his own not me — that he was not in my life any more. It was like a gap inside me, bigger than any gap in my head, in my memory. And emptier than any space I could ever have imagined. But the awful inescapable fact of the matter was that at just that moment I wanted to be married to Tom more than at any other moment in my whole entire life.

‘You’re engaged to be married to someone else,’ Fleur continued softly, compounding the agony.

‘Someone else?’ It seemed impossible.

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘You would be married already but your divorce hasn’t come through yet.’

The relief at hearing that flooded through me so warmly I failed to notice the catch in my best friend’s voice. ‘Then it’s not too late,’ I said, feeling a surge of determination. ‘Maybe it’s not too late. I feel like I might have made a big mistake, Fleur. I need him here. I thought he would be here. Can you find him? Tell him?’

At this, Fleur burst into tears again, turning and burying her face in the crunchy hospital pillows. ‘Oh, Jesus, this is hard, Connie,’ she said, and though her voice was muffled I could hear every word. ‘I’m so sorry. I never … Oh, shit, fuck, I’m so fucking sorry.’

I misunderstood her anguish. ‘Hey,’ I said, ‘it’s okay. It’s not your fault. It’s not anybody’s fault.’ Strictly speaking, it was Woody Allen’s fault but I wasn’t going to go there. ‘It’s just pretty weird this whole stupid coma-then-not-remembering-stuff thing, huh?’

‘Yessiree,’ she answered. ‘Pretty weird all right. And I think it’s going to get weirder.’ Her voice was all clogged up the way it gets when you’re not finished crying.

‘Is it true I never went to Venice?’ I asked her. ‘That I stood him up?’

‘You didn’t go, Connie. Tom went but you never turned up. You left him, sweetie. You left him all on his own.’

To what my mom told me I tended to add a grain of salt or a thousand, but Fleur I believed. She would not lie to me. Poor Tom, I thought, abandoned in a city he never wanted to go to without the wife who had made him go there. I wondered if he had availed himself of the local hospitality the way I had, in my dreams. My dreams? God, I was confused.

‘It’s like the shower scene from
Dallas
,’ I told Fleur. ‘I’ve woken up and none of it really happened.’

‘It’s happened all right, Connie. You just don’t know it.’ We weren’t talking about the same thing but we were both right.

Fleur cleared her throat then and when she spoke her voice was shaky and scared, not a natural Fleur state at all. Like I said, she has the confidence of a European princess. ‘Connie, if you really don’t
remember anything from the past couple of years then there are some things I have to tell you.’ She was twisting a pretty old-fashioned ruby ring on her ring finger.