ever guaranteed, Mateo. If I get through the day, tomorrow will take care of itself.”
“Well, I like seeing ahead. And now, even behind.”
“To each his own,” she said nonchalantly.
“Which implies what?” he asked, feeling a smile slowly crossing his face. Lizzie was...fun. Straight to the point. And challenging.
“You know exactly what it implies, Mateo. In your effort to see ‘behind,’ as you’re calling it, you’re driving the staff crazy. They’re afraid of you. Not sure what to do with you. And that false smile of yours is beginning to wear thin.”
“Does it annoy you?” he asked.
“It’s beginning to.”
“Then my work here is done,” he said, folding his arms across his chest.
He wanted clothes—real clothes. Not these blue and green things that were passed off as hospital gowns. Those were for sick people. He wasn’t sick. Just damaged. A blood clot on his brain, which had been removed, and a lingering pest called retrograde amnesia. That kind of damage deserved surfer shorts and a Hawaiian shirt, seeing as how he was in Hawaii now.
“And my work has nothing to do with you. I was just trying to be friendly, but you’re too much of a challenge to deal with. And, unfortunately, what should have been a simple yes or no is now preventing me from seeing my patients.”
She sure was pretty.
It was something he’d thought over and over about Lizzie. Long, tarnished copper hair. Curly. Soft too, he imagined. Brown eyes that could be as mischievous as a kitten or shoot daggers, depending on the circumstance. And her smile... It didn’t happen too often, he’d noticed. And when it did, it didn’t light up the proverbial room. But it sure did light up his day.
“And how would I be doing that? I’m here, wearing these lovely clothes, eating your gourmet green slime food, putting up with your hospital’s inane therapy.”
“And by ‘putting up with,’ you mean not showing up for?” She took a few more steps into the room, then went to open the blinds.
“In the scheme of my future life, what will it do for me?”
“Maybe nothing. Maybe everything.”
“No vagaries here, Lizzie. Be as specific as I have to be every time I answer someone’s orientation questions. ‘Do you remember your name?’ ‘Where are you?’ ‘What’s the date?’ ‘Who’s the current President?’”
“Standard protocol, Mateo. You know that.” She turned back to face him. “But you make everything more difficult than it has to be.”
She brightened his day in a way he’d never expected. “So why me? You’re not my doctor, but you’ve obviously chosen me for some special attention.”
“My dad was a military surgeon, like you were. Let’s just say I’m giving back a little.”
“Did he see combat?”
“Too many times.”
“And it changed him,” Mateo said, suddenly serious.
“It might have—but if it did it was something he never let me see. And he never talked about it.”
“It’s a horrible thing to talk about. The injuries. The ones you can fix...the ones you can’t. In my unit they were rushed in and out so quickly I never really saw anything but whatever it was I had to fix. Maybe that was a blessing.”
He shut his eyes to the endless parade of casualties who were now marching by him. This was a memory he didn’t want, but he was stuck with it. And it was so vivid.
“Were you an only child?” he asked.
Lizzie nodded. “My mom couldn’t stand the military life. She said it was too lonely. So, by the time I was five she was gone, and then it was just my dad and me.”
“Couldn’t have been easy being a single parent under his circumstances. I know I wouldn’t have wanted to drag a kid around with me when I was active. Wouldn’t have been fair to the kid.”
“He never complained. At least, not to me. And what I had...it seemed normal.”
“I complain to everybody.”
In Germany, after his first surgery, it hadn’t occurred to him that his memory loss might be permanent. He’d been too busy dealing with the actual surgery itself to get any more involved than that. That had happened after he’d been transferred to Boston for brain rehab. Then he’d got involved. Only it hadn’t really sunk in the way it should have. But once they’d got him to a facility in California, where the patients had every sort of war-related brain injury, that was when it had occurred to him that he was just another one of the bunch.
How could that be? That was the question he kept asking himself over and over. He had become one of the poor unfortunates he usually treated. A surgeon without his memory. A man without his past.
“You’re a survivor who uses what he has at his disposal to regain the bits and pieces of himself he’s lost. Or at least that’s what you could be if you weren’t such a quitter.”
“A quitter?”
Maybe he was, since going on was so difficult. But did Lizzie understand what it was like to reach for a memory you assumed would be there and come up with nothing? And he was one of the lucky ones. Physically, he was fine, and his surgery had gone well. He’d healed well, too. But he couldn’t get past that one thing that held him back...who was he, really?
Suddenly Mateo was tired. It wasn’t even noon yet and he needed a nap. Or an escape.
“That walk this evening...maybe. If you can get me some real clothes.”
Lizzie chuckled. “I should say you’ll have to wear your hospital pajamas, but I’ll see what I can do.”
“No promises, Lizzie. I don’t make promises I can’t keep, and who knows what side of the pendulum my mood will be swinging on later.”
“Whatever suits you,” she said, then left the room.
Even though he hated to see her go, what he needed was to be left alone—something he’d told them over and over. He needed time to figure out just how big a failure he was, medically speaking. And what kind of disappointment he was to his mother, who’d worked long and hard to get him through medical school. The arthritis now crippling her hands showed that.
There was probably a long list of other people he’d let down, too, but thankfully he couldn’t remember it. Except his own name—right there at the top. He was Dr. Mateo Sanchez—a doctor with retrograde amnesia. And right now that was all he cared to know. Everything else—it didn’t matter.
She was not getting involved. It didn’t usually work. Didn’t make you happy, either. Didn’t do a thing. At least
