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 in her case it never had.
Lizzie’s mom had walked out when she was barely five, so no involvement there. And her dad… Well, he’d loved her. But her father had been a military surgeon, and that had taken up most of his time. While he’d always said he wanted to spend more time with her, it hadn’t happened. So no involvement with him, either, for a good part of her life.
Then there had been her husband. Another doctor, but one who wouldn’t accept that she didn’t want to be a surgeon like him. He was a neurosurgeon and, to him, being a primary care physician meant being…lesser. He did surgeries while she did cuts and bruises, he’d always say. Brad had never failed to show his disappointment in her, so she’d failed there, too. Meaning, what was the point?
None, that Lizzie could think of. But that was OK. She got along, designed her life the way she wanted it to be, and lived happily in the middle of it. Living in the middle was good, she decided. It didn’t take you far, but it didn’t let you down, either.
She wondered about Mateo, though. She knew he watched her in the garden every morning. Knew he’d asked questions about her. But the look on his face…there was no confidence there. Something more like fear. Which was why she’d asked him out for a walk this evening. He needed more than the four walls of his hospital room, the same way her father had needed more.
But her father had been on a downward spiral with Alzheimer’s. Mateo was young, healthy, had a lot of years of life ahead of him—except he was getting into the habit of throwing away the days. It was hard seeing that, after watching the way her father had deteriorated.
But to get involved…? They weren’t friends. Weren’t even doctor-patient. Weren’t anything. But she’d been watching the watcher for weeks now, and since she’d be going on holiday shortly what would it hurt to get involved for once? Or, in this case, to take a simple evening walk?
Watching Mateo walk toward her now, she thought he struck her as a man who would have taken charge. His gait was strong, purposeful. And he was a large man—massive muscles on a well-defined body. He’d taken care of himself. You didn’t get that physique by chance. Yet now he was stalled, and that didn’t fit. To look at him was to think he had his life together—it was in the way he carried himself. But there was nothing together about him, not one little piece. And he was sabotaging himself by not trying.
Many of the staff’s morning meetings lately had opened with: “What should we do about Mateo?”
The majority wanted him out of there. Even his own doctor didn’t care. But Lizzie was his advocate because he deserved this chance. Like her dad had, all those times someone had tried to convince her to put him away. That was exactly what they wanted to do with Mateo, and while neurology wasn’t her specialty, she did know that some types of brain trauma took a long time to sort themselves out.
But beds here were at a premium. The waiting list was long, and military veterans always went to the top of the list. There was no guarantee they’d stay there, though, especially if they acted the way Mateo did.
He was never mean. Never outright rude, even though he was always on the edge of it. In fact, he smiled more than anybody she’d ever seen. But he refused to try, and that was ultimately going to get in the way, since
