Eating With the Angels

by Sarah-Kate Lynch

  Actually, I hadn’t been talking about the scar. I had been talking about my hair.

  ‘No, how did this happen?’ I asked her, pulling on what was left of my tresses. My hair had been shoulder-blade length since I was 12 years old and unless I blow-dried it for half an hour it tended to waviness. But it now felt short. And straight.

  ‘No, we shave for your surgery over this side,’ she ran her fingers gently over the bumpy scar, ‘but otherwise hairstyle not included in the price!’

  A sherbet of dread was fizzing in my brain like a fuse about to blow, nibbling at the corners of my mind. Something was wrong. I brought my hands back down from my head and held them out in front of me, turning them over, watching the knob of my wrists, the bones of my knuckles, the pale translucent skin of my forearms. They were attached to me, I knew they were, I was making them do things, but they did not look like my arms. They looked like someone else’s. I clawed, suddenly fearful, at my throat, my fingers sliding over the ugly tracheotomy scar I was expecting and moving on to my collar bones where they moved like a piano player over sharp angles that stuck out between square unfamiliar shoulders. I ran my hands down my torso, rippling over ribs that protruded rudely beneath the skin and then fumbled under my hospital gown to feel my hipbones. My hipbones? They jutted out like the Swiss Alps. I slid my hands across the smooth skin between them as it fell from the points of the bones. From the points of the bones. My belly was concave. Positively concave.

  There were no two ways about it. I was thin.

  I grappled underneath myself to feel my butt. I just didn’t recognise it. It had no give, no bounce, no softness; it was hard and small. I felt my thighs. They were bony. Really. Bony. Even on the inside. I mean who had bony inner thighs? No one, that’s who. Certainly no one who could eat a hot-dog from a pushcart followed by a triple-scoop ice cream followed by two slices of clam pie — all within the space of an hour.

  My circuitry was flipping out. I could almost hear the crackle and zzzzz of things going haywire in my head. I had been beginning to understand my predicament, get a grip on it, but now I was completely thrown. The me I knew myself to be did not have a tight butt and pointy hipbones. I had spent my whole life lamenting the absence of those very things. So, perhaps I wasn’t Connie after all. Perhaps I was this mysterious Emsie who the frightening Paris had mistaken me for.

  ‘How much do I weigh?’ I asked Signora Marinello, who was washing my boyish hairdo, a plastic sheet under my head, her fingers gentle on my scalp, unaware of my panic.

  I heard her scoot away in her chair so she could read something pinned up on the wall. ‘You 130 pounds when you come in and 123 pounds now.’

  I could hardly believe my ears. I mean, I couldn’t remember the last time I weighed 123 pounds. I must have been about seven. But even worse, I couldn’t remember the last time I weighed 130. All I knew was that a month ago I had been struggling to fit into my size-11 jeans and cursing the state of my soft spongy belly. It just didn’t make sense.

  ‘Are you sure I weighed 130 when I came in?’ I asked.

  She laughed. ‘You nothing but itty-bitty skin and bone, Constanzia. And I think you are really blonde until Brazilian grow back. You know, we Brazilians are also good at football, fast cars and dancing. Such a shame we get famous for hair removal.’

  Blonde? Brazilian? Was she drunk? I could hardly bear to get my legs waxed let alone my you-know-what. My hands floundered beneath the bedclothes again, scrabbling at my crotch like hungry mice. Oh my God! I was a thin blonde with a Brazilian!

  At that point I thought that maybe I was still in a coma after all. That the dream-like emergence into consciousness had itself been a dream. But my eyes were open, my body was obeying instruction, my mind was following acceptable sequences of thought. I lifted my hand up to my head again and felt Signora Marinello’s fingers pulsing different spots on my poor battered skull. I pressed down on them, stopping her.

  ‘It’s Thursday, isn’t it?’ I asked, dread gnawing a hole in my gut.

  ‘It is,’ agreed my nurse.

  ‘It’s a Thursday in,’ I thought about when I had gone on vacation, ‘in November?’

  ‘Is July, Constanzia. Thursday, July 23rd,’ she said softly. ‘Is summer. Eighty-five degrees today. You have to know this. About the month. About the day. You have to know this three times in a row. Then we know your progress is made.’

  July? What the hell? My head whirred. I had gone to Venice in October. And it was now July. How was that possible?

  ‘I don’t get it,’ I said, my voice sounding frail and wobbly. ‘I went on vacation in October. I’ve been here for nearly a month so it should be November, shouldn’t it?’ I wondered if my brain had muddled up how the months worked but I ran through them and they all seemed there: January, February, March, April, May, June, July, August, September, October, November, December. July definitely came before November, not after.

  ‘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 greet
ed 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.

  Eight

  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.’