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“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.”
“That describes a majority of the people we treat,” Dr. Robinet says. “I am very sorry.” He stands up off the stool; something clinks to the ground. Wren retrieves a euro coin off the floor and starts to hand it back to him.
“Wait! He did this thing with coins,” I say. “He could balance a coin along his knuckles. Like this. May I?” I reach out for the euro and show how he flipped a coin across his knuckles.
I hand Dr. Robinet back his euro, and he holds it in his hand, examining it as if it were a rare coin. Then he flips it up in the air and catches it. “Commotion cérébrale!” he says.
“What?”
“Concussion!” Wren translates.
“Concussion?”
He holds up his index finger and turns it around slowly, like he’s spooling information from a deep well. “He had a concussion. And if I recall, a facial laceration. We wanted him to stay for observation—concussions can be serious—and we wanted to report it to the police because he’d been assaulted.”
“Assaulted? Why? By whom?”
“We don’t know. It is customary to file a police report, but he refused. He was very agitated. I remember now! He wouldn’t stay beyond a few hours. He wanted to leave straight away, but we insisted he stay for a CT scan. But as soon as we stitched him up and saw there was no cerebral bleeding, he insisted he had to go. He said it was very important. Someone he was going to lose.” He turns to me, his eyes huge now. “You?”
“You,” Wren says.
“Me,” I say. Black spots dance in my vision, and my head feels liquid.
“I think she’s going to faint,” Wren says.
“Put your head between your legs,” Dr. Robinet advises. He calls out into the hall, and a nurse brings me a glass of water. I drink it. The world stops spinning. Slowly, I sit back up. Dr. Robinet is looking at me now, and it’s like the shade of professionalism has dropped.
“But this was a year ago,” he asks in a blanket-soft voice. “You lost each other a year ago?”
