Head Wounds

TWENTY-SEVEN

YOU’D THINK A FACE as big as Markham’s would be easier to read, especially when you’re sitting just across a desk from him. On top of the desk were open files and huge envelopes out of which he slipped X-rays and other gray-scale images. He had a phone up to his ear, held there with his shoulder so he could use both hands to hold the images up to the light.

On the other end of the line was the neurologist who took all the pictures. I don’t know what his side of the conversation sounded like, but Markham wasn’t saying anything that made any sense to me at all. If it hadn’t been for the occasional verb or preposition linking the technical terms, I’d think he was speaking Greek.

I’d already sat through two other calls he’d made to specialists who’d also reviewed the data. None of that made any sense to me either.

“Well, Mr. Ah-quillo,” he said after ending the call and jotting down a few notes in one of the files, “you got all dat, right?”

“Sure. Clear as a bell.”

He gathered the stuff off the desk and led me over to a row of light boxes mounted to the wall, where he took me through a tour of my skull, moving from angle to angle, from MRI to X-ray and back again. He also used anatomical drawings, cutaways also rendered from several different angles. It was pretty interesting, and would have been more so if it hadn’t been my brain at the center of the discussion.

When he finished the lecture he said, “Dis is usually when we ask the patient if he has anybody he can talk to about the situation.”

“I actually do, believe it or not.”

“Since dat’s about all you can do, I suggest you do it the next chance you get. Don’t go keepin’ dis to yourself.”

“That’s the plan. Honest, Doc. What do I owe you?”

He put out his giant paw to shake hands.

“My new bookcase is already filled up,” he said. “Got space for another just like it.”

It was hardly a fair trade, but that’s what he wanted to do and I couldn’t talk him out of it. I got him to agree to tell me if he ever needed help with anything. He shook my hand again and strode away, heading back to his trauma ward, eager to sort through other matters of life and death.

I called Amanda from the nurses’ station and told her to meet me at Hodges’s boat where it was docked at Hawks Pond. I’d asked him the day before if he’d loan it to me for the afternoon. I knew I’d have something to talk to Amanda about and wanted to be somewhere other than Oak Point. The occasion called for a different setting, equally sublime, but distinctive.

She arrived as I finished preparing to launch, dock lines untied, engine warming up, fenders stowed. She wore a broad-rimmed straw hat, yellow shorts, white top and high-heeled sandals like any sailor would. The beach basket in her hand was filled with wine and tasty things wrapped in tissue and foil.

We followed the channel markers across the pond and then out into the Little Peconic. The breeze was out of the southwest, where it would mostly stay until late August. It warmed the air and rustled the trees, and provided just enough gusto to move Hodges’s heavy cruiser at a stately pace. I was glad for that, not wanting to wrestle with anything more challenging than a corkscrew.

Amanda leaned back against the coaming and dabbed sun-tan lotion on her face and knees and gave me an update on her projects. We debated over which property to tackle next, deciding on a house between the current rehabs on Jacob’s Neck with a lease about to run out.

I had a fresh backlog of architectural details to make for Frank—gates, benches, built-ins and custom trim that would keep me busy in my shop well into the summer.

After clearing the last set of buoys, I pulled the ties off the mainsail and clipped the halyard to the head of the sail. Then I had Amanda hold us in the wind so I could raise it up the mast.

“Not as easy to steer as the Audi,” she said.

We managed it anyway, and I took the wheel from her, killed the engine and we heeled to starboard as I let the wind grip the sail and shove us back toward the north. Once the jib was out, we were fully underway at a gentle five knots. There were a few open fishing boats bobbing around the buoys, but otherwise we had the bay to ourselves.

“I spent the morning with Markham Fairchild,” I told her once we were comfortably settled into a stable port tack.

“Really.”

“I already gave him his bookcase, so he had to give me all the test results.”

“What did he say?”

“He said he had just the right spot for the bookcase and ordered another one.”

“If you aren’t going to tell me you shouldn’t bring it up.”

“I want to tell you. That’s why I wanted to get out on the water today. To talk about it.”

She looked ready to do that, but I suggested we wait for wine and cheese, having missed breakfast. She busied herself with that while I flicked on the ancient Autohelm and set a course we could hold for at least an hour.

“Okay,” she said after we clinked glasses. “Spill it.”

“Markham got the MRIs from when I got slugged by Buddy Florin back from the Town evidence room. Then he had me do it again, and took another set of X-rays. They also ran a bunch of blood and urine tests to compare with others in the past, including what I gave them the day after conking out in the shower.”

She tensed.

“You’re leading up to something.”

“I am.”

She set her wine glass on the cockpit table and sat back, folding her hands in her lap.

“Before you say anything,” she said, “I want you to know that I’ll be there for you no matter what. I know I haven’t always been. I’ve sent you all kinds of foolish mixed messages. I think I’m over that. I think you’re over doing the same thing to me. I’ve been through too much with you now to have it any other way. So whatever’s ahead, I’m seeing you through it whether you like it or not.”

“That’s fine with me, as long as you skip the cosmopolitans.”

“Sorry?”

“Yeah, keep your poisonous concoctions to yourself.” I stood up and leaned over her with as much grace as the sea motion of the boat would allow and kissed her forehead. “Now I’m confused,” she said.

“My mother told me I was allergic to eggs when I was a little kid, but I grew out of it. As far as I know she never fed me pomegranate.”

Amanda put her hand over her mouth.

“Oh my God.”

“Markham said my blood was still chock-full of histamines and leukotrienes the day after I passed out. So they ran allergen screens, including one for the component parts of pomegranate, which I told them I had the night before. Markham said it was pretty rare, but something in me really hates pomegranates. Enough to bring on anaphylactic shock. He said, ‘Don be t’inkin’ dis is all good news. Anaphylaxis do in more people every year den lightnin’.”

“What about the MRIs? What did they say?”

“He still thinks I should give up my boxing career, which I already have. But he said the latest stuff looked pretty good, that the neurologist saw little lasting damage from the last concussion. Doesn’t mean some evil crap couldn’t sneak up on me over time, but right now, all clear.”

She got up this time and wedged herself next to me behind the helm. She put her arms around my middle and her head on my shoulder and stayed like that for a long time as we reached across the Little Peconic Bay, holding hard to the prospect of peace and serenity that the sacred waters promised to bestow.