The Last Thing She Remembered

Chapter One

The whiteboard by the door had her name on it in dry-erase marker, SOBOL, and under it the date, and under that the name of the nurse who had her until seven. Nadia read all three every time she surfaced, the way she used to read the caption line before a witness was sworn, and the reading steadied her, because a name and a date and a person responsible for you were three facts, and three facts in a row were a record, and a record was a place to stand.

It was the fifth morning. She knew that not because she felt five days of it in her body, though she did, a soreness that had moved from her throat down into the muscles of her shoulders and back as if the thing done to her neck had been done to all of her, but because the board had been wiped and rewritten four times that she'd been awake to see, and each wiping was a day, and she had counted them. She counted most things now. She had caught herself at three in the morning counting the holes in the ceiling tile, thousands of them, and had made herself stop, because she knew what the counting was, the mind reaching for anything with an order to it, a banister in the dark, and she did not like to watch herself reach for it.

Her throat was the color of a plum gone soft. She had seen it on the second day in the bathroom mirror, one hand on the IV pole for the small distance between the bed and the sink, chin lifted under the strip light: the ring of it, thumb-shaped on the left side, four smaller ovals stepping around toward the back where the fingers had gone, and above the ring a scatter of red pinpricks like something flicked off a wet brush. Petechiae, one resident had said to another across her bed on the first clear day, both of them reading her chart and not her face. Burst capillaries, the second one had said, from the pressure. It tells you how hard and how long. And Nadia had lain still and taken the word and kept it, petechiae, because a word was a thing you could hold, it stayed the same size in your hand, it did not get better or worse in the night.

They had explained the rest to her in pieces, when she asked, because she always asked. The strangulation had cut the blood to her brain long enough to put her out and long enough to take something with it when it went. Not the memory of her life. She had all of that, her mother's maiden name and the smell of the courthouse elevator and the exact feel of her machine under her hands. What it had taken was a window, the last few minutes before the dark, the way a power cut takes whatever you hadn't yet saved. The brain had been without air, a doctor named Adeyemi would tell her later in a clean office by the bay, and a brain without air does not always come back with the same furniture in the same rooms. For now it was only the window. Five minutes, they thought, give or take, and Nadia lay in the tilted bed and thought that five minutes was nothing, that you could lose five minutes standing in line at the pharmacy, and that she would have given a year off the far end of her life to have those particular five back, and that the wanting them was its own kind of injury, one no chart had a word for.

She knew the shape of the days behind the window because she had built them back, brick by brick, the only way she trusted anything. The twenty-sixth of December, a Tuesday, the courthouse closed for the storm and closed again the day after, the whole city stopped under a snow that had not stopped for four days and would not stop for two more. She had gone in for her materials. She could give you the cold of the key fob through her glove and the particular dark of the parking deck at five in the afternoon with the lake throwing snow sideways through the open sides of the structure, orange where it crossed the one sodium light still working on the second level. She could give you the sound, somewhere below her, of a plow blade dragging concrete, a sound she had felt in her teeth. She could give you her car twenty feet off, already a white mound losing its shape. And then the record thinned, the way a tape runs to its end, and there was a place where it should have kept going and did not, and after that place there was nothing, and after the nothing there was here, the tilted bed and the whiteboard and the plum-dark ring around her throat.

Chapter Two

"You're awake for real this time." The nurse came in with the little paper cup of pills and a chart she was already reading. Renata, the board said, until seven. She was broad through the shoulders and unhurried in a way that read as competence rather than slowness, and she talked to Nadia like a person, which not all of them did; some of them talked to the chart, or to the injury, or to the sad idea of a woman who'd been choked in a garage. Renata talked to the woman in the bed. "Doctor wants you sitting up more today, and walking to the window and back twice before I'm off. You want the bed up, or you want to fight me on it."

"Up is fine."

"Smart girl." She thumbed the control and the bed folded Nadia gently toward the window, and the movement pulled at the sore ladder of her back, and she breathed through it as she'd learned to in five days. Outside, the city was buried to the sills. The plows had cut one lane down the middle of the street and heaped the rest into a wall taller than the parked cars, so the cars were only humps now, a row of white barrows, and the sky over them had the flat pearl glow it got when there was more snow in it and it was only deciding when. "Sixty-eight inches since Christmas Eve," Renata said, following her look, hanging a fresh bag. "They're saying it's a record for the state. My road still isn't touched. Yours either, probably, wherever you keep yourself."

"East side. Off Parade."

"Then no." She said it kindly, checking the line, writing the number off the pump onto the flowsheet clipped to the rail. Everything she did she wrote down, and Nadia watched her do it with the old dumb comfort of it, a person leaving a trail so the next person would know what was true, the whole quiet architecture of care resting on somebody bothering to keep the record. "Nobody's getting over to the east side till the weekend, hon. You picked a bad week to need somebody to come to you."

Nadia turned that over and set it down without letting it show on her face, keeping the face still while the meaning arrived behind it. Nobody's getting to you. It was true for the whole city and it had been true for her, in the deck, in the five o'clock dark with the lake unloading and the plow two floors down and no one, no one at all, coming up the unplowed ramp. She filed the fact where she filed the others, next to the cold fob and the dragging blade, in the row that ran up to the edge of the window and stopped.

"There was a detective," she said. "Petrucci. He came."

"Day before yesterday. He'll be back, they always come back." Renata capped her pen against the rail. "He seemed decent, for police. He didn't lean on you. Some of them lean."

"I don't have much to give him to lean on."

"You've got time to have more. Things come back."

"Not this." She heard the flatness in it and gentled the edge, because Renata had been kind and kindness should be met. "The memory. It's not a drawer that fills back up on its own. They already told me how it works. The part that's gone was never really written down. There's nothing to come back to."

Renata paused at the rail, the pen still in her hand, and looked at her, not at the chart. "They tell you a lot of things," she said. "I've been on this floor eleven years. I've seen people get pieces back a year on. In the shower, driving, folding a shirt. You'd be surprised what surfaces when you stop dredging for it." She straightened the blanket, a thing that didn't need doing. "Do you remember any of it? The man? Sometimes it's not the picture that stays, it's a smell, a voice."

There it was, the word, handed to her across the rail, gentle, expectant, holding the door open for her to walk through. Remember. She held it and did not use it back.

"I can tell you the last thing that was written down," Nadia said. "Four fifty-one in the afternoon, the twenty-second of December. I read the time into the record because the judge asked me for it. Four fifty-one, off the record, court adjourned. That's the last thing I've got that I know is true, because I made it true, I typed it while it was happening with my own hands." Her throat tightened around the length of the sentence and she felt the plum-soft ache of using it too long, and she stopped and let it settle. "After that it's the weekend, the storm, the twenty-sixth, the deck. Up to a point. Then it's five minutes I can't get to. Then it's here."

"Four days between," Renata said, working it out. "The court thing was the twenty-second, and the garage was the twenty-sixth."

"Four days." Nadia looked at the buried street. "The last time everything was accounted for was four days before anything happened to me. I keep going back to it. Four fifty-one. It's the last clean edge I've got."

Renata didn't try to fix that, which Nadia respected more than she could have said, and on her way out she reminded her the bed alarm was on and to ring before she tried the bathroom alone, and Nadia said she would and had no intention of it, and then she was alone with the radiator ticking and the pearl light going gray at the edges in the afternoon, early, before five, the sun gone down behind the lake without ever having properly come up.