When God Was a Rabbit

Her name was Grace. Grace Mary Goodfield, to be exact, and she was a registered nurse, and had been for twentysix years with no thoughts yet of retiring. Her folks were from Louisiana and she still holidayed there.

‘Have you ever been?’

‘No, not yet,’ said Charlie, the first day they met.

She lived alone in Williamsburg, had the ground floor apartment in an old brownstone, a happy place, good tenants above and below. ‘Space enough for me,’ she’d said. ‘Kids long since flown; man long since gone.’

Like so many others she wasn’t supposed to be at work on 11 September. She was doing mainly night shifts that week, and her morning was to be spent changing over the curtains to heavier ones in preparation for the coming fall. But even before the Towers fell she rushed to the hospital to take up her position like all those others, waiting for the mêlée of survivors and their tales of luck from those upper floors. But, as we know, that didn’t happen.

She wasn’t needed in ER, and so she went to her office on the ICU floor, and went around the rooms to boost morale, to hand out cookies, and always with a smile, because she was the best shift leader and she knew her staff and she knew her patients. Just not the new one, though, not the unconscious one. No one knew him.

She called him ‘Bill’, after an old boyfriend who liked to sleep. She would sit with him when the others had visitors, and she would hold his hand and tell him about her life or tell him about what she’d cooked the previous night. She’d tried to look for him on the Missing Persons websites, but it was useless because thousands were missing. The police wanted to help but there was nothing they could do whilst he was under, their minds and resources directed elsewhere; directed to the horror unfolding beyond those safe walls.

She looked at his clothes, those meagre belongings bagged in his locker, and she could piece nothing together of his life. This useless anonymity scared her. She worried he might die lost, with no one knowing; parents and friends not knowing. I’ll be there for you, she said one night, as she left after a particularly hard shift.

She brought in different smells and oils and placed them under his nose, anything to flick the switch of memory. She introduced lavender and rose and frankincense to his mind, coffee too, and her latest perfume – Chanel No 5 – which Lisa from emergency had brought back from Paris. She encouraged the other four patients to talk to him if they felt well enough, and soon stories of wars and sex and baseball rebounded across the floor, and only quietened if a nurse was present, something more reminiscent of an old bar than the care unit it was. Sometimes she would bring in music and hold a headphone gently to his ear. She thought he was in his thirties and calculated what songs may have travelled with him throughout his life. She played Bowie and Blondie and Stevie Wonder – all borrowed from her neighbour’s collection, the neighbour who lived upstairs.

Almost three weeks later she got the call. Janice ran in and said Bill had woken up. Grace called for a doctor. When she entered he was grabbing for his breathing tube, panicking, his left arm sluggish. ‘It’s OK,’ she said. ‘It’s OK,’ and she stroked his head. He tried to sit up on his own and he asked for water. They told him to sip it slowly, they told him not to speak. His eyes darted around the room. Gerry in the bed by the door said, ‘Welcome back, son.’

When he was strong enough, the police returned.

‘What’s your name?’ they asked.

‘I don’t know.’

‘Where are you from?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Where do you live?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Is there someone we can contact?’

He rolled over.

‘Don’t know.’

He did well over the next few days. Ate well, slowly started to walk, but still remembered nothing. He recognised the Twin Towers as structures of architecture, not as places he’d visited for meetings, places that housed people he’d lost. They moved him out of ICU to a single room. They heard nothing from the police. Grace kept an eye on him, tried to see him most days, took him flowers and kept calling him Bill; he didn’t mind. And they would talk about magazine articles and watch films. He watched a film with the actress Nancy Portman and he decided he liked her and thought she was funny, and he would have been thrilled at that moment, had he known she was his aunt, but he didn’t, of course. He remained locked into a world solely of the present.

When he improved, Grace knew he’d eventually be transferred to a public psych hospital, and that would conceal him deeper, mire him further in a system from which, without memory, he could never return.

He was standing at the window, a forlorn sight, singing a tune he’d picked up from TV. He turned to her and smiled.

‘Know how you lost that tooth?’ she said, pointing to his mouth.

He shook his head. ‘A fight probably.’

‘You don’t seem like a fighter,’ she said. ‘Too gentle.’

Then one night, as he lay sleeping, Grace went to his locker and took out his clothes for the last time. They were the only clue she had. She picked up the faded red T-shirt and saw again the faint drawing of a woman – a starlet maybe? – with the words Six and Judy’s above it, barely visible. She turned it over. Could hardly read it: Sing with all your Hear across the back.

It was all she had.

She typed in Six Judy’s and pressed SEARCH. Waited. Nothing on the first page. She reached for her coffee. It tasted stale. She stood up and stretched.

Clicked on the second page.

The word was Heart. It was the nineteenth entry:

Choir Sings for Sweet Charity

The Six Judy’s are an all-male choir specialising in show tunes and the era of Old Hollywood. We are a non-pro fitmaking group and have supported various charities, including Unicef, HelpAge USA, Coalition for the Homeless, Cancer Research Institute, as well as more personal projects like fundraising for kidney transplants and heart by-passes. If you’re interested in us, please contact Bobby on the number below.

It was late, too late to call, but she called anyway. A man answered. He wasn’t angry, just tired. She asked him if any of his singers were missing. One, he said. I think I’ve found him, she said.

‘He has a gap in the front of his teeth.’