Page 49 of Wrong Mail

"Of course," Henry says at once, all contrition. "My apologies. I wasn't aware you were in an accident. You're right. That was thoughtless of me. I'm sorry."

I wave him off. "Henry, it's fine. With David being a doctor, he tends to be slightly overprotective."

"Some would call that caring," David adds, raising his eyebrows.

I reach over and squeeze his hand. "And I love you for it, hon, but you heard Kane. I'm making progress."

I sit between the two of them, my hand over David's, pretending everything is fine, and I think, why is he so frightened of me remembering?

I mean David.

Henry says nothing. He watches my face as I search for the answer, as though the searching tells him more than the answer ever could.

After the evening is over, David steps outside with Henry. They talk on the porch, and I hear it because my good ear faces the open door, and I’ve learned in this house to listen.

I'm clearing plates I shouldn't be lifting. Their voices drift back to me in pieces over the cicadas, David's low and level, Henry's lower.

"...appreciate everything you've done," David is saying. "I mean that. Oh, and what I said earlier about not encouraging her with the Oregon thing. I realize that may have come out harsh. It's just that Mallory's fragile in ways that aren't obvious, even to her."

"How does that work, anyway?"

"It's dissociative amnesia," David says. "The trauma is walled off. She kept everything else, language, competence, the years before it. What she lost is the night itself and the months on either side."

"And it doesn't come back?"

"It can. It doesn't always. And forcing memories back can be highly dangerous and psychologically destabilizing."

I go still at the sink, listening to my husband explain my condition to Henry.

What follows is a pause and the scuff of shoes on the driveway. "It's a good life you've got here, David. Truly. The house, the view, her. A man could look at all this and understand exactly why you'd want to keep the world out of it." Another pause. "I'd protect it too. Whatever it took."

I stand in my kitchen with a stack of plates against my strapped arm and I wait for David to answer.

He doesn't.

Then a car door closes. An engine growls. I hear the gravel and see bright headlights flash across the ceiling. Then Henry is gone up the dark road. David comes back in. He doesn't look at me. He looks at the plates in my arms and lifts them from me, gently, and sets them by the sink.

"You shouldn't be doing that," he says.

"David. What was that, out there?"

"Nothing." He runs the tap. "I find Henry a little odd. Don't you?" I don't answer. David won't meet my eyes. He watches the water. "Go to bed, Mal. You look tired."

I go, because my shoulder is screaming and the wine and the pills have made a fog of me, and I can't make sense of what he just said.

But at the top of the stairs I stop and look back down at my husband standing at the sink with his back to me, not washing anything, just standing, both hands flat on the counter and his head down.

And I think, for the first time, that my husband is frightened.

Not of Oregon, but of the man we just had at our table.

Chapter Seventeen

I'm holding two jars of the same thing, reading two labels that use the same words in a different order, when a voice behind me tells me which one to buy.

"The one in your left hand separates," it says. "Looks fine on the shelf. When you open it in a month there will be oil on the top and a brick on the bottom."

I know the voice before I turn.