Nick clears his throat and starts to speak. I notice a woman, standing by the hatch of the kitchen, turn toward us and I realize with sudden dread I know her. I rack my mind for who she might be, how I know her. She’s looking back toward the doors now, frowning. She’s waiting for someone. I struggle to focus on Nick’s words.
“—enormously lucky to have her with us. So, if you could all give a big hand to Dr. Emma Lewis, I’ll turn this over to her.”
I find myself stepping forward to join Nick, my eyes still locked on the woman. Then her eyes find mine, she gives me a tight smile before her gaze is pulled away by a younger woman sidling up beside her and I suddenly realize how I know her. It’s the receptionist from the lobby downstairs. Jesus. That’s how I know her.
I need to calm down. I need to stop being paranoid. Everything is fine. The relief I feel is overwhelming and I can’t hold back a smile. I let my body relax ever so slightly, take in my expectant audience, and begin.
19
THE MAN
DAYS 3–6—PATIENT
Rhoda sits patiently by while Matthew undergoes further scans on day three. He is assessed by multiple doctors, none of whom fully understand his problem, and none of whom manage to pry a single word from him.
He is moved to the psychiatric ward.
Rhoda moves with him. She plumps his pillows, she changes the dressings on his head wound, she brings in more library books and together they sift through the dry pages, hoping to find a glimmer of recognition in the darkness.
There is a small piece in the local paper that evening, an article about the man found on the beach. The patient doesn’t see it but Rhoda does. She particularly likes the photograph they used. The picture shows Matthew in the distance, a blurred dot, Officer Graceford with him and Officer Poole running toward the camera, caught in the moment, Poole’s mouth half open, shouting something at the photographer. The picture has an otherworldliness to it, like a painting.
She takes the evening paper home and carefully cuts the article out with her kitchen scissors. When this is all over, she decides, when he’s better, she’ll give Matthew all his cuttings, if he wants them. The picture is beautiful, she thinks. The great sweep of Holkham Beach, dunes she recognizes even without the caption under the photo.
The article beneath is about Mr. Garrett, how Matthew saved the day, right after being admitted to Princess Margaret’s. The article mentions how Matthew hasn’t spoken a single word since they found him. Portrayed as a mysterious hero, and easy on the eye, Rhoda can see how that would make a good story. Like a fairy tale, there is a magic to it, as delicate as filigree, and she feels that magic around him too.
Whoever wrote the article got it right, she decides.
Another day passes. It’s day four and Rhoda administers Matthew’s meds. He takes the pills from her trustingly, as if knowing in his heart she wouldn’t drug him. He doesn’t trust the doctors, he doesn’t know why exactly. He goes along with their tests, he tries to listen to their words, to what they say, but he is really only waiting. Waiting for everything to come flooding back in, like it should, soon. And he is waiting for her to appear. He knows she will come. It is just a matter of time.
To Matthew’s mind the psychiatric ward isn’t that much different from the ward he was on before. He knows there is something wrong with his brain, with his memory, and he’s picked up enough from his interactions to see the move coming. But the doors aren’t locked here, and his room isn’t padded, it’s just another blank hospital room.
There’s a courtyard garden on this ward, which Rhoda takes him out to if it’s not raining. She brings him in a puffer jacket from home. It smells of talcum powder and geraniums and it’s not new, but it keeps him warm, for which he is grateful.
He’s felt the cold more since the beach. He wonders if that might be because he’s not used to the weather here. Perhaps he comes from somewhere warm. There’s no way to be sure, it’s just a thought that occurs to him. He’s had so many fleeting notions of what his life was, is, but they float away as they come to him with nothing substantial to anchor onto.
He looks at the books Rhoda brings, the words in them, and he waits for the moment when they fall into place, as he knows they must.
* * *
—
That afternoon Rhoda finds another story in the papers. The tone suddenly different from before. They use her name. She realizes that the questions she was asked in the lobby by the reporters on that first night have been threaded into this article. She knows now she shouldn’t have spoken to those reporters. Her words sound foolish at this remove.
Thankfully, she sees it first, before the rest of the hospital staff. She’s set a Google alert, to know when to get the paper; her niece had shown her how to over Christmas.
Somehow they’d managed to get a picture of Matthew walking in the garden. He’s not wearing his puffer jacket in the picture, so it must have been taken the day before, the day he moved to the psychiatric ward. She has no idea how they took the photo; no one noticed a photographer on the closed ward. You’d think someone might have seen them, she thinks, but then that wasn’t usually something they had to worry about at Princess Margaret’s. That would have to change from now on.
The article accompanying the picture was wrong, Rhoda thought. This time they hadn’t got it right.
The picture was misleading. It showed Matthew, his dark hair tousled, his jaw stubbled, standing in the ward’s garden, his face contented, calm, his good looks somehow more pronounced against the rich greens of the bushes. And in his hand, its text clearly visible, one of her books from the library, a book she knows he only happened to be holding, just one of many language books he’d tried to look through that day. In the picture Matthew is holding a Ukrainian language book.
On the fifth day the story hits the national headlines. More details about Rhoda herself, about Matthew’s new name, make their way into and across the tabloids and broadsheets. The story of a wandering man with no name found on a beach, a man who did not speak but could disarm a man and defuse an incident. Theories. Appeals to anyone who might recognize him. Questions about how the patient was being dealt with in the hospital.
A video of Rhoda talking to the reporters appears online.
When Rhoda is called into Nick Dunning’s office on the patient’s sixth day and ushered into a seat next to someone from HR, she realizes what the full impact of her words may have been, that she might be part of something much bigger than she had anticipated. The hospital isn’t angry with her, how could they be, she hadn’t been aware that the reporters she’d spoken to had been filming her, on a phone, as she spoke to them. That much was clear from the footage, but as Nick explained firmly, “This can’t happen again.”