The Perfect Couple

by Lexi Landsman

  I sat at my desk and powered up my computer, and sighed with relief that there were no emails from the media with probing questions about my announcement. If I emailed them now, they’d probably see both emails at the same time and wouldn’t read into the postponement. Sarah’s accident was simply a delay in making our discovery known and we could still savour in the glory of announcing the news to the world.

  I typed quickly. Due to some unforeseen circumstances, we will be postponing the announcement of an exciting discovery that was planned for today to a more suitable time. We will update you on the new date as soon as possible.

  I hastily sent it to my media contact list and our team, and then headed to the safe. I had an excited, almost nervous feeling, like I was meeting a past lover for the first time in years. I entered in the code, the lock releasing, and reached my hand inside to retrieve the ebony box. But instead, I could feel only the objects that had been there for months – pottery shards and coins.

  I bent down so I was eye level with the safe and searched inside, anxiety beginning to well within me. Sarah and I had definitely placed it in the top right-hand corner. But now … that exact spot was empty. I frantically searched every crevice of the safe. It had to be there. We locked it in the safe together and left the lab at the same time. No one had been there since.

  I felt sick and dizzy. The euphoria I had experienced in this very spot last night had swiftly been replaced with an unshakeable sense of trepidation. What on earth had happened? My eyes had to be deceiving me. It had to be here.

  Today was supposed to be the greatest day of my working career, but it was quickly becoming the worst.

  My hands trembled as I stared inside the safe at the empty space, willing the necklace to materialise before me. I felt my way over the same areas again and again, only to come to the terrifying realisation that the San Gennaro necklace was gone.

  SARAH

  I don’t know where I am. Fear takes hold. I hear blood pulsing in my ears. My heart is beating outside of my chest. It feels like my left eye has been sewn shut. I try to turn my head but it’s heavy. I just want to keep sleeping but I’m fighting against it. Something is very wrong. I can’t think clearly. It’s like my mind is clouded by fog. My lungs feel bruised. My forehead is throbbing. I reach my arm up to touch the source of discomfort and cry out in agony as a searing pain shoots through my wrist. There’s something in my throat, it’s itchy and uncomfortable. I try to pull it out but I can’t.

  It’s only then that I hear voices around me. Soft and hushed, as though they are speaking to me from underwater. Take it easy. The anaesthetic is wearing off. Then a hand takes the fingers on my other arm and holds them gently. You’ll be okay now, Mamma. More voices, more whispers.

  I feel like I’m stuck in a nightmare that I can’t wake up from. It’s like a form of sleep paralysis and it’s terrifying. I try to fight the fog but it’s so heavy that I keep drifting back into a dreamless sleep.

  I don’t know how much time has passed when I start to wake up again. Now the whispers are clearer. I know them. They said it will take time to wear off. It’s Daniel’s voice. How will we know if there’s any … you know … brain damage? Emily.

  Brain damage? The fear rises up again, palpable and choking. Where am I and what has happened? Did I fall? Was I mugged? What if I’ve got locked-in syndrome and I can’t tell them I can hear everything?

  I start breathing heavily and then something beeps loudly, an echo of my rising fear. It’s a heart monitor. I must be in a hospital. I try to talk but there’s a metallic taste in my mouth and my throat is dry.

  I squint through my right eye and try force the other one open, but it stubbornly remains closed. A doctor comes into my view. She has a kind face. ‘You’ve been in a car accident,’ she says. ‘You’re in hospital and your family is here with you. I need to examine you, and ask you a few questions to see how you are doing. Please try your best. Can you close your eye?’

  I close it. ‘Good, Sarah, very good. Now can you show me your thumb?’

  I can’t speak, so I point with my hand that doesn’t hurt to my left thumb.

  She continues to instruct me to lift my right arm, then raise my legs one at a time. A bright light shines in my eyes and then the doctor asks me to follow her finger up and down, left and right, and then to move my eyebrows.

  ‘Good, well done,’ she says. ‘We’re going to take out the breathing tube now, okay?’

  I try to nod.

  ‘We’ve reduced the medicine that made her sleep,’ she says to someone beyond my view. ‘She’s slowly waking and she doesn’t seem agitated, so we’re going to monitor how she goes. She’s alert and her cranial nerves and pupils are normal, which are all good signs.’

  Suddenly, there is a team of people in the room. I feel an uncomfortable tug deep down my throat and I gag, and then see a tube coming out of my mouth. I take a deep breath of air and cough. They place an oxygen mask over my face.

  I feel something rise fast in my stomach and I lift the mask to lean over to vomit. ‘It’s okay,’ one of the nurses says. ‘You’ll feel better soon. Try to relax.’

  I lie back down, feeling terrified and groggy. My head is pounding. I fall back asleep.

  I don’t know how much time has passed when I start to come to again.

  ‘She’s waking up. Go and get the nurse,’ I hear a deep voice say. It’s Marco. When I attempt to open my eyes, the left one feels like there is a heavy weight on it. I force my right eye open and see the blurry figures of my children and husband standing around me. I blink a few times until my vision in the right eye becomes clearer. I take in the look of concern on their faces and my daughter’s tears, and I know something horrific has occurred.

  I pull the mask off my face. ‘What’s happened?’ I ask, though it comes out in a mumble of sounds.

  Marco strokes my hair gently. ‘You’ve been in a car accident,’ he says tenderly. I struggle to compute what he’s saying. I search my mind for a memory, a picture, a sound, anything to make me believe that what he’s just told me is true and that I’m not still trapped in this nightmare. But nothing comes. Just blank space in place of a recollection.

  Panic rises through me again. What if I’ve had a limb amputated? What if I’ve been in a coma for weeks or months?

  I lift my legs and exhale with relief when I can feel them move. I lift my arm to my head instinctively, forgetting about the pain I felt before, and it shoots through me again. I cry out.

  ‘You’ve broken your wrist, Mamma,’ Emily says softly as she leans over the bed in order to come into my field of vision. ‘Try to relax. You’re in hospital.’

  I feel so confused, so afraid. How could I have been in a car accident and have no memory of it?

  ‘How long have I been asleep?’ I mumble, struggling to get the words out. I’m terrified to hear the answer. By the look on their faces, the accident must have been serious.

  Daniel answers now, his voice calm and soothing. ‘About twenty-four hours,’ he says. ‘You’ve been in an induced coma. They were worried about the swelling on your …’ He doesn’t finish his sentence but I know what he was going to say.

  It can’t have been that serious, I reassure myself. I want to sit up, but everything hurts.

  A doctor walks into my room. She smiles warmly. ‘Hello Mrs Moretti. I’m Doctor Garber, a neurologist. I was told that a fellow Australian expat was here,’ she says, and I’m comforted by the familiarity of her accent. ‘I’m glad to see you awake. Your family has been very worried about you.’

  She looks at the screen and notes down my blood pressure. ‘Do you feel up to answering some questions?’

  I gaze at her and feel so helpless. I desperately want the fog in my mind to clear so I can make sense of what’s happened.

  ‘Can you tell me your full name?’

  ‘Sarah Moretti,’ I mumble.

  ‘What is your date of birth?’

  ‘Twenty-second of September,
1972.’

  ‘Do you know why you’re here?’

  ‘I had a car accident,’ I say, looking over at Marco for reassurance.

  ‘Do you remember the car accident?’

  I shake my head and wince in pain. The movement, though slight, makes me dizzy and nauseated. Fear grips me again. My memory has always been infallible, so how can every trace of what happened to me last night have been wiped clean from my mind? I can feel its absence. The outline of what’s missing remains but the core has been engulfed. Swallowed whole. A sinkhole of lost time.

  The doctor smiles at me reassuringly. ‘The good news is that there are no signs of a neurological condition such as epilepsy or stroke that may have caused your accident,’ she says. ‘However, as a result of the knock to your head, you’ve suffered a traumatic brain injury.’ I lift my right hand and touch the bump on my head over the bandage as she speaks. ‘You’re incredibly lucky to have woken up this soon. You could have been in a coma for a few more days, or weeks, or indefinitely. How are you feeling now?’

  ‘I feel groggy and nauseated and my head is pounding, but I just feel so thankful to be alive.’

  ‘The nausea will pass, as will the groggy feeling, but you may have a headache for some time. We can give you some medication to ease the pain and sickness.’

  ‘Thank you,’ I say.

  She sits down on a chair. Her voice is calm and soothing, and she makes eye contact with me when she talks. ‘Sarah, what’s the last thing you remember before you woke up in the hospital?’

  ‘I was here in Florence. We’ve been working on the excavation of a castle in Fiesole.’ I scan my memories looking for something concrete, something recent. ‘I had an early-morning coffee yesterday at Caffè Giacosa on Via della Spada,’ I say, feeling almost proud of myself that a memory has returned.

  ‘What’s the next thing you remember? Where did you go after that?’

  I open my mouth to answer but when I think back, I can see myself sitting inside on the red leather lounge against the wall filled with black-and-white photography. I see a snapshot of myself sipping my coffee, paying and then getting up. And then nothing. There’s a hole in place of where my memory should be.

  ‘You would have gone to the excavation site,’ Marco says, his tone frustrated. I can see the concern in his face. He knows how out of character this is for me. I don’t forget things.

  The doctor turns to my husband. ‘It’s best that your wife answers for herself.’ She looks back at me, her voice calm and patient. ‘So, Sarah, what did you do after you had coffee?’

  I shrug, forgetting how the slightest movement seems to cause a ripple effect of agony through my body. I breathe through the pain and trace my mind back, but when I do, I get a disturbing sensation. My skin feels cold. It’s like my body has been somewhere and my mind refuses to process it. I imagine this is how sleepwalkers feel, having woken up in a strange place, with no recollection of how they got there. ‘I don’t remember,’ I admit.

  Her tone is warm. ‘Okay, so what’s the next thing you can recall?’

  That at least is easy to answer. ‘Waking up here, in hospital,’ I say without hesitation. ‘So, did I have the accident on the way home from coffee?’

  I watch her write down some notes. Her expression doesn’t change but I still search her face, looking for signs of what my diagnosis might be. ‘What is the date today, Sarah?’

  ‘It’s the day after I had coffee, so the fifteenth of July 2017.’

  She shakes her head. ‘Don’t be alarmed, but it’s actually the seventeenth of July.’

  I shudder. ‘That’s impossible.’

  ‘You must have had coffee on the fourteenth of July; your accident happened the following evening – well, into the next morning, at two am, on the sixteenth of July. You were in a coma for twenty-four hours and so today is actually the seventeenth.’

  ‘You mean I’ve lost my memory of two full days?’

  ‘You appear to be suffering from post-traumatic retrograde amnesia. It’s a very common type of memory loss in people who have experienced a traumatic brain injury.’

  I stare at her, confused. ‘What does that mean?’

  ‘Retrograde amnesia means you’ve lost the memories from the past, in this case from the time immediately before your head injury. As you’ve told us, you have no memory of the car accident or the forty-eight hours preceding it. In this type of neurological disorder, you can remember everything else – who you are, your family, your past. It’s your recent history that’s gone. In most cases of retrograde amnesia, the events nearest in time to the cause of memory loss may never be recovered. We call this Ribot’s Law.’

  ‘That doesn’t sound right,’ Marco says, interjecting. He seems unsettled, agitated. ‘My wife has a remarkable memory. Surely it’s possible that she will regain them?’

  The doctor turns to my husband now and seems to register his unease. ‘Anything is possible,’ she says in a measured tone, ‘but it’s still incredibly unlikely. Patients who present like Sarah rarely regain the memories they’ve lost. Let me explain in simple terms. There are different types of memory. For instance, your working memory allows you to recall a phone number in the few minutes after it’s told to you until you can write it down. But then, because you don’t need that memory, it’s discarded because it’s not deemed important enough to commit to long-term memory.’

  Marco stands up and starts pacing around the room. The neurologist keeps her attention fixed on me as she continues. ‘If memory is important enough to keep it goes through your main memory centre, your hippocampus, where it’s bound and stored throughout your cortex; what we call consolidation. Consolidation takes time. For instance, if you were studying for an exam, on the first day you may not remember what you’ve read, but by the third day of learning the same thing, the memory has strengthened and you remember it better. For memories to be permanently stored in your brain, that process needs times to reinforce itself – and you didn’t get that time because your brain received a traumatic injury in the accident.’ Her tone changes and becomes more delicate. ‘Fortunately, it’s only two days prior to your accident you can’t recall. Some people lose weeks or even years of their life. So, in a lot of ways, you’re very lucky.’

  My mind might not remember what happened, but it’s as if my body recalls what I cannot, because when I think back, my skin goes cold, I’m overcome with a disquieting feeling, an overpowering wave of a fear, a sense that things are not what they seem.

  For the first time in my life, I feel like my memory is an artefact I’m searching for. It’s lost, buried in some unknown location. What explanation would it offer as to why I was on that road alongside the Mugnone River at two in the morning, alone? What story would it tell?

  MARCO

  My wife had nearly died in a car accident and all I could think about was the missing necklace. We were the only two people in the world to have seen it for the first time in over two hundred years, and now not only had it vanished overnight but only one of us could attest to ever seeing it. Given my wife’s photographic memory, I refused to believe the doctor’s diagnosis of post-traumatic retrograde amnesia. I was sure that once the sedation fully wore off, the memories would return. It took every ounce of my self-control to not blurt out news of the necklace and probe my wife to see if she could recall anything. But it was almost impossible to get a private moment with Sarah, given that our kids and the hospital staff were constantly around.

  I kept replaying our departure from the lab. We checked the necklace was locked in the safe three times, so how could it have vanished?

  Having one of the world’s most valuable jewels stolen while in our care could have us imprisoned. We could lose our jobs, our careers, our reputations, our freedom. Would they even believe that it was stolen or would suspicion fall on us? A chill ran through me.

  I sat beside Sarah’s bed but couldn’t bear to look at her swollen eye and the bloodied bandage on her head. I was
so thankful that she was alive. I ran my hands down my face, unable to believe what was happening.

  ‘I’m okay, Marco. You don’t need to worry about me,’ Sarah said, hearing me sigh.

  Guilt stabbed at my chest. I took Sarah’s uninjured hand and stroked it tenderly. ‘It’s such a huge shock seeing you like this,’ I said, looking into her eyes. ‘It’s heartbreaking. I’m so relieved you’re okay.’ I leaned down and kissed her head. ‘I love you. You know that, right?’

  Sarah smiled. ‘Of course I do.’

  I did love her, without reservation. But it was a different sort of love. It was companionship, an admiration for her intellect, her grit, her passion for the work we did. It was not a sensual love, not any more. Not since I met her.

  You don’t plan for these things. They just happen. That probably sounds like a weak excuse and I suppose it is, but there’s no other way to put it. She was a student in one of the guest lectures I gave on the catacombs of Rome and Naples. She approached me after my talk and said she had read my paper on the San Gennaro necklace. She was fascinated by it and she seemed genuinely impressed by my work. I’ll admit that I’m a sucker for flattery, especially if it’s coming from a woman in her late twenties, with hair the colour of wheat and a voluptuous figure that oozed sensuality. So, when she asked if I needed a student on the Fiesole excavation site, I couldn’t say no. After a few weeks of working together, she joined me for a swim at Le Pavoniere pool. I used to beg Sarah to come swimming there with me. I wanted my wife to appreciate the serenity and escapism of being immersed underwater, buoyant and free. There’s a sense of peacefulness, of nothingness underwater, there are no voices to take hold of you. But Sarah didn’t care much for swimming.