A Quiet Death

NINE

The Peace Corps has a headquarters building on 20th Street between L and M, a comprehensive library, a website, a blog and a fan page on Facebook. They even Tweet. When you show up with no more than a person’s nickname, however, it’s one great big Dead End.

Reluctantly, I put Zan on the back-burner.

Besides, I was distracted. My cast – colorful as it was, and decorated with drawings by my talented grandchildren – hearts and flowers, and airplanes shooting down other airplanes with ack-ack fire – was driving me crazy.

‘It itches,’ I complained to my husband a little over three weeks after the accident as I scrabbled in the utility drawer looking for a chopstick. I was seconds from inserting the chopstick between the cast and my skin so I could indulge myself with a good scratch, when Paul snatched the chopstick out of my hand.

‘No, you don’t! Technical foul! If you open up the skin under there, you’ll be in big trouble, missy.’

The cast cramped my style in the bath, too. No more long, hot, semi-submerged soaks. My cast was supposed to be semi-waterproof, but that didn’t mean that I could go deep-sea diving in it.

In desperation, I sweet-talked a receptionist into moving up the appointment I had made with an orthopedic specialist at the sports medicine center favored by a number of Naval Academy athletes. If they could put an injured quarterback back in action in time for the Army-Navy game, couldn’t they work miracles for me, too?

After taking some X-rays and clucking inscrutably over the results, the doctor made my day by powering up a cast removal saw and releasing me from bondage. Scratching furiously (but oh so gently!) at the skin which had been covered by the cast for so long, I felt like Scarlett O’Hara being released from her stays. The doctor replaced my cast with a brace similar to those used to treat severe cases of carpal tunnel syndrome. Had I died and gone to heaven? Oh yes, indeed, I had.

‘Don’t twist your arm,’ the doctor warned, ‘No screwing, or you’ll be back in my office in no time.’

I nearly fell off the examination table. ‘What?’

‘No screwing.’ He demonstrated, extending his hand and twisting it as if working a screwdriver.

I felt my face redden. ‘Thanks,’ I chuckled. ‘I won’t.’

Having tabled Zan, I decided to run down every lead I had on Lilith before allowing myself to give up on her, too. She’d stayed in a dozen hotels, at least, and I Googled every one. For those hotels still in business, I jotted down their phone numbers and gave them a call:

Mlle Lilith Chaloux, s’il vous plaît,

Por favor, Señorita Lilith Chaloux,

Fräulein Lilith Chaloux, bitte.

I spent a good five minutes practicing my French on the woman who answered the phone at L’Hotel de la Belle Aurore in Ste Maxime – une coude maison rêve sur son rocher au bord du golfe de Saint-Tropez. Ooh la la! I thought I’d hit the jackpot at the posh seaside resort, until the switchboard put me through to a Mlle Lili Charlotte who mistook me for some lackey setting up her photo shoot for a spread in Paris Match. ‘Mille pardons,’ I groveled, and hung up.

I tried snail-mailing the hotels, too. I included a photo of Lilith and a personal note, asking her to get in touch with me so that I could reunite her with her letters and photographs.

It was early days yet, but no dice.

Still no word from Skip, either.

Reluctantly, I packed everything away neatly in the box it had come in and tucked the Garfinkel’s bag away in the closet where I kept my knitting. Winter was coming. If I hurried, the sweater I was working on might be done in time for Christmas.