“Can you hear me, Matthew?” she says.
And just like that her name comes back to him.
* * *
—
Emma can’t quite make out what he says, it’s mumbled. The patient’s breath coming in loud snatches as he tries desperately to stay conscious. She leans in closer to catch it, her ear close to his lips.
He says it again.
“Marn?”
She pulls away sharply to look at his face, her eyes wide in shock; she needs to see the look in his eyes as he says that, to see who he is, to see what he means. But she is too late. As she pulls back, he crumples down in front of her, unconscious.
Emma orders the junior doctor to monitor the patient; blood pressure and vitals are taken. According to the patient’s notes he’s blacked out three times since he was admitted eight days ago. Emma reassures the ward staff that the patient’s losses of consciousness are most likely the result of stress response. But she instructs them to test for the usual physical causes—cardiac, neurological, orthostatic, metabolic, or drug-related—to be safe.
She doesn’t mention the look the patient gave her just before he collapsed. And she certainly does not mention what he said to her, or that he spoke at all.
As people had rushed to assist them it became clear that no one else had seen, or heard it. She had barely heard it herself.
If she heard it at all, she thinks. Because he couldn’t have really said that, could he?
He couldn’t know that name. They’ve never met; she’d remember meeting someone who looked like him. Besides, he would have been too old to have been at school with her back then, he’s about ten years older than her. The first time she saw him was online two days ago, when she googled his case after speaking to Joe. All her knowledge of her patient comes from her research, the grainy YouTube footage from the beach, the photos in the newspapers, and his medical records.
But then, why would he say “Marn”? She blinks back the emotion. She hasn’t heard that name for years.
She casts her eyes quickly around the busy ward; other patients are filing into the dayroom from breakfast. Is it a joke? she wonders. A prank? But that would be in pretty poor taste. And patients don’t tend to lose consciousness as a joke.
She’d been doing so well. She hadn’t recognized a single face in the crowd gathered upstairs in the canteen. No telltale eyes boring into her. She’d been starting to think everything might just be okay.
Marn. The name burns in her brain. He knows her. He knows who she is. She tries to push it from her mind as she heads back toward the nurses’ station.
Perhaps he didn’t say “Marn,” she thinks. Surely she misheard. He could have mumbled anything. But the look of recognition in his eyes…well, patients with memory loss often pretend to recognize new people. Why should this patient be any different?
The duty nurse pulls up the patient’s notes on the system. “I’d be interested to find out exactly what happened just prior to his previous losses of consciousness,” Emma prompts the nurse, her voice steady. “What exactly the context was.”
The nurse nods and taps away at the keyboard.
As Emma waits, her phone vibrates. She turns away and fishes it out of her pocket. It’s a text message.
Any miracles yet? Lol
She stares at the message, her pulse racing. She reads it again. Her thoughts whir as she tries to process the words. Who sent this? She reads the message again, slowly; she checks the number, it takes her another second to register that it’s just Joe. Joe’s new number. She represses a sigh. Miracles, of course. It’s just her brother trying to be funny. She lets out a dry chuckle at her own paranoia and the nurse looks up at her in inquiry.
“Sorry,” Emma blusters, smiling. “Just got a text.”
“Ah, I see. Good news, I hope.” The nurse smiles and turns back to her screen.
Emma looks down at Joe’s text, her thumb poised over the keys, unsure if she should tell him what just happened. How could her patient have known that name? She wants to share the burden of it with every fiber of her being.
But what if she misheard? Joe will think she’s gone completely nuts if she tells him what she thinks she just heard, she knows it. How would she even explain it to him? That somehow her new patient, who has no memory of who he is himself, or where he comes from, somehow seems to know her name? Her real name.
Marn. Marni. Her name. Her old name, before it happened, before they changed it, before their whole family had to move.
Or perhaps the patient had thought she was someone else called Marn?
Oh, come on, that’s ridiculous, it’s hardly a common name.
She used to spend half her time before the name change explaining that she wasn’t named after Hitchcock’s Marnie, she’d been named after the actress Marni Nixon. Nixon, “the hidden voice of cinema,” the woman who sang the role of Eliza Doolittle in My Fair Lady, Maria in West Side Story, Anna in The King and I, and countless other roles when starlets didn’t have the voice for them. A ghost singer. A Marni with an “i.”
Now, her thumb suspended over the phone, she hesitates. She can’t tell Joe what just happened. He’ll think she’s cracking up, cracking up again, now that she’s back here. She can’t tell Joe what she thinks her patient said, and she absolutely cannot tell him who her patient reminded her of, because that really would sound crazy. That person died, a long time ago. Best not to say anything yet, not until things start making more sense.
She exits the messages app and slips her phone back into her pocket.
She can’t tell anyone, she realizes, because the first thing anybody will try to find out is who, or what, “Marn” means. She needs to work this out herself.
She thinks of Joe’s text, she thinks of miracles. Of what happened eight days ago on the ward. But that wasn’t a miracle, she reminds herself, because there are no miracles—there are only people and their actions.
21
DR. EMMA LEWIS
DAY 8—ABOUT MATTHEW
“Has he spoken?” I ask carefully. “At all? To you? Has he said anything?” I’m sitting across from Rhoda Madiza in the hospital canteen. I want to keep the conversation as informal as possible, since I’m sure she’s wary of talking to anyone after the media mauling she’s been through over the last week.
As far as I can tell from the medical notes, Rhoda has been the patient’s primary caregiver for the duration of his stay here, which is highly unusual in an NHS hospital. Nurses tend to stick to departments, seeing whoever whenever; they do not move around with a particular patient. But Rhoda is the only person who’s been able to communicate with the patient since his arrival. And I need to know if I’m the only one he’s spoken to yet. If anyone could tell me, it would be her.