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It’s quiet in the ER, only a few people sitting among rows of empty chairs. Wren goes right up to the two male nurses behind the desk and that weirdly mellifluous voice of hers breaks out in perfect French. I stand behind her, catching enough of what she says to get that she is telling my story, mesmerizing them with it. Even the people in the chairs are leaning in to hear her quiet voice. I have no idea how Wren even knows the story; I didn’t tell her. Maybe she picked it up at breakfast or among the others. She finishes, and there is silence. The nurses stare at her, then look down and start typing.
“How do you speak French so well?” I whisper.
“I’m from Quebec.”
“Why didn’t you translate at the other hospital?”
“Because it wasn’t the right one.”
The nurses ask me his name. I say it. I spell it. I hear the tap of the computer keys as they input it.
“Non,” one nurse says. “Pas ici.” He shakes his head.
“Attendez,” the other says. Wait.
He types some more. He says a bunch of things to Wren, and I lose track, but then one phrase floats to the top: a date. The day after the day Willem and I spent together. The day we got separated.
My breath stops. He looks up, repeats the date to me.
“Yes,” I say. That would’ve been when he was here. “Oui.”
The nurse says something and something else I don’t understand. I turn to Wren. “Can they tell us how to find him?”
Wren asks a questions, then translates back. “The records are sealed.”
“But they don’t have to give us anything written. They must have something on him.”
“They say it’s all in the billing department now. They don’t keep much here.”
“There has to be something. Now’s the time to ask Saint Jude for help.”
Wren fingers the charm on her bracelet. A pair of doctors in scrubs and lab coats come through the double doors, coffee cups in hand. Wren and I look at each other, Saint Jude apparently deciding to bestow twin inspiration.
“Can I speak to a doctor?” I ask the nurses in my horrible French. “Maybe the . . .” I turn to Wren. “How do you say ‘attending physician’ in French? Or the doctor who treated Willem?”
The nurse must understand some English because he rubs his chin and goes back to the computer. “Ahh, Dr. Robinet,” he says, and picks up a phone. A few minutes later, a pair of double doors swing open, and it’s like this time Saint Jude decided to send us a bonus, because the doctor is TV-handsome: curly salt-and-pepper hair, a face that’s both delicate and rugged. Wren starts to explain the situation, but then I realize that, lost cause or not, I have to make my own case. In the most labored French imaginable, I attempt to explain: Friend hurt. At this hospital. Lost friend. Need to find. I’m frazzled, and with my bare-basics phrases, I must sound like a cavewoman.
Dr. Robinet looks at me for a while. Then he beckons for us to follow him through the double doors into an empty examination room, where he gestures for us to sit on the table while he settles on a rolling stool.
“I understand your dilemma,” he replies in perfect British-accented English. “But we can’t just give out files about a patient.” He turns to look directly at me. His eyes are bright green, both sharp and kind. “I understand you’ve come all the way from America, but I am sorry.”
“Can you at least tell me what happened to him? Without actually looking into his chart? Would that be breaking protocol?”
Dr. Robinet smiles patiently. “I see dozens of patients a day. And this was, you say, a year ago?”
I nod. “Yes.” I bury my head in my hands. The folly of it hits me anew. One day. One year.
“Perhaps if you described him.” Dr. Robinet feeds me some rope.
I snatch it up. “He was Dutch. Very tall, six foot three—it’s one point nine in metric. Seventy-five kilos. He had very light hair, almost like straw, but very dark eyes, almost like coals. He was skinny. His fingers were long. He had a scar, like a zigzag, right on the top of his foot.” As I continue to describe him, details I thought I’d forgotten come back to me, and an image of him emerges.
But Dr. Robinet can’t see it. He looks puzzled, and I realize that from his point of view, I’ve described a tall blond guy, one person among thousands.
“Perhaps if you had a photograph?”
I feel as if the image I’ve created of Willem is alive in the room. He’d been right about not needing a camera to record the important things. He’d been there inside me all this time.
“I don’t,” I say. “Oh, but he had stitches. And a black eye.”
