The Memorist

Chapter 45

Tuesday, April 29^th-10:14 a.m.

As Meer traveled from the elevator down the long hospital corridor checking the numbers on the doors of the rooms, she tried not to look inside as she passed. She didn’t want to spy on strangers suffering in their sickbeds, helpless to shut their doors if nurses had left them open. Their fear and distress would stay with her for days if she glimpsed it because she knew too well what they felt. Though she’d only been nine, the long weeks she spent lying, immobilized in a bed, unable to protect herself from the prying eyes of the people passing by her room, were seared in her memory.

The door to room 316 was open wide enough to reveal a white-coated doctor standing beside her father’s bed. The woman’s back was to Meer so she couldn’t see the expression on her face but her tone sounded serious-too serious for a situation her father had manufactured on the spur of the moment.

“Excuse me,” Meer said from the doorway.

The doctor turned, annoyance clearly visible on her face, and said something in German that Meer didn’t understand.

Jeremy sat up straighter in the bed, spoke to the doctor in German and then to Meer. “Come in, sweetheart. This is Dr. Lintell. Dr. Lintell, this is my daughter.”

Now the doctor offered a smile. “Hello,” she said, extending her hand.

Meer shook it and asked, “How is my father?” Even though she knew nothing was really wrong, she needed to keep up the charade.

“We need to run some more tests.”

Surprised, but trying not to show it, Meer looked over at her father. “Tests? Why?”

Jeremy smiled. “Even though the doctor thinks it was just an anxiety attack she wants to torture me a bit more.”

Meer didn’t understand. She and her father had planned his attack in the crypt during a minute-long whispered conversation after she’d realized-suddenly amazingly known-there was a clue buried in the crypt and where it was. She’d asked her father if he could distract the monk so she could search for it. A panic attack, her father had whispered back, and she’d understood. He’d done it before, and it had been one of her favorite bedtime stories…how he’d outsmarted a border guard in East Germany by faking a heart attack that was then diagnosed as a panic attack. All without arousing suspicion.

“He told you he’s had panic attacks before, hasn’t he?” Meer asked the doctor.

The doctor nodded.

“How many tests do you have to give him for anxiety?”

“Actually we need to rule out some other possibilities, too.” She was very brusque. Not cold, but not offering up one word more than was necessary. Meer wasn’t sure if this was a Germanic trait or a bad bedside manner.

There was a third possibility too.

“Dad, is there something really wrong?”

He laughed in that reassuring way of his that made the most monumental problem appear under control. That laugh was one of the things she missed the most when he moved out of the apartment when she was twelve. That laugh, and the relief she felt when she swam in its wake. “No, sweetheart. There’s nothing really wrong. The tests are all routine, isn’t that right, Doctor?”

The doctor responded to him tersely in German. And he replied, but also in German.

All her life Meer had hated secrets. Her mother used to catch her listening on phone extensions, hiding behind doors eavesdropping, always trying to find out what they weren’t telling her. There was so much they hid. So much her own mind hid from her. Images and sounds wrapped up in blankets of fog, memories just beyond reach.

Meer wondered if it was her imagination but her father seemed frailer here, as if the last hour had sucked the energy out of him. After the doctor left she was about to question him again but was interrupted when Sebastian and Malachai came in.

“Are you all right? What happened in the crypt?” Sebastian asked.

“You were with the doctor for a while,” Malachai said. “What’s the prognosis?”

Jeremy explained that Meer needed some time to look inside one of the urns and he’d faked the attack to draw attention away from her. “Even so, I have to stay for some tests. I’m at that age when they won’t just let me out of here without making sure every part of me is working right. In the meantime, we need to figure out what Meer found, what it means, and what we need to do next.”

Meer understood why her father included Malachai in this effort but not Sebastian. She glanced over at him and found him watching her and met his eyes. Once again she felt that push-pull of being both drawn to him and repelled at the same time. Comforted to see him. Frightened that he was there. She turned to Malachai. “What did you say?”

“I asked you what you took.” His ebony eyes were gleaming with anticipation.

Reaching into her pocket, Meer pulled out the object she’d extracted from the ninth silver chalice in the Heart Vault. No more than an inch long, it was made of tarnished metal, silver perhaps, pitted with black. She examined the small tube that had a hole in the top and one notch on the side. There were no other markings on it and it was cold to the touch, a cold that traveled through her fingertips, up her arms, down her neck, across her back. As she shivered, the small object trembled in the palm of her hand.

“What is that?” Sebastian asked.

“Did you know you were looking for a key when you went down there?” Malachai asked.

“No. I had no idea.”

“Do you have any idea what it’s for?” he asked.

She shook her head.

“We have to figure out what the key’s for but we aren’t going to be able to do that from here,” Jeremy said. “Sebastian, are you free today? Can you help?”

“I have to go to the Musikverein for a rehearsal for Thursday’s performance but not until seven.”

Jeremy was perplexed. “I don’t have tickets for Thursday night?”

Sebastian explained and then looked at Malachai. “If you’d like to come also I think I can get one more ticket. I’d be pleased to have you as my guest. We’re doing Beethoven’s Eroica.”

“I’d love it,” Malachai said enthusiastically.

Meer wasn’t listening anymore. Hearing the maestro’s name she was visualizing his tombstone yesterday. And Margaux’s.

“Are you remembering something?” Malachai asked.

Meer heard the desperate searching in his voice, the leitmotif of her childhood. Malachai and her father, trying to sever what they believed was the membrane that kept her past from spilling into her present. “You’ve worked with thousands of children,” she said to him. “Haven’t they given you enough chances to find the proof you want?”

“A memory tool would be validation of a very different kind.”

“If there really is such a thing, how would it work?” Sebastian asked. “Do you imagine the sound of the music will be enough to bring back someone’s memory?”

“That’s what the legends claim,” Malachai answered. “Either the music or the vibrations made when the flute is played.”

“And if there was an actual physical way to manipulate time like that would it work with the more recent past too, or just the deep past?”

Meer understood what Sebastian was asking, even if Malachai didn’t. He was wondering if the flute might be able to help his son, Nicolas. She could tell from the shift in his voice, the desperation under the words. Sebastian was scavenging for information that might enable him to help his child. She wished she could aid him too but she was thirty-one years old and hadn’t yet been able to help herself.

She shivered and this time the cold was like a blizzard of emotion, freezing her own heart. The taste of metal filled her mouth. Her father and Malachai and Sebastian were shimmering as if they were no longer solid forms. No, not here, not now, she thought as she tried to stop the images from forming in her mind, but they were coming too fast and with too much force.