“One wore a ponytail,” he said, “stringy hair. You know the type.”
“What else?”
“One night I heard this runt below my window calling out. ‘Draz,’ ” he said.
“Draz?”
“That’s all I understood. Then this gorilla, this Draz with the ponytail, beat him into pulp against the wall.”
René said, “Here’s my card.” He knew Aimée handed hers out all the time. It looked professional. And ran up a high printing bill. “Please call if you remember anything else.”
By the time René reached his car, the line for the outdoor soup kitchen, part of a network organized by Coluche the comedian, snaked up boulevard Beaumarchais. He knew authorities left a Métro station open when severe cold hit. A well-kept secret among the clochards and junkies. He hoped Madame Sarnac wouldn’t end up there.
Thursday Evening
IN THE HÔPITAL QUINZE-VINGTS waiting room, Aimée heard the evening sounds from Bastille and inhaled the Seine’s scent from the open window. She remembered seeing a teddy bear floating in the swollen Seine in the spring. After so much rain, the river had overflowed the quais. The image haunted her all day . . . had a child dropped it from a bridge, a spiteful older brother tossed it? Did wet tears soak a pillow and an anxious parent rush off to the Samaritaine Department store to replace it . . . as her father had tried?
When she was ten, her doudou, a ragged mouse named Émil, dropped from her bookbag into the Seine. Émil was the one thing left from her mother. The only thing her father hadn’t had the heart to throw away. Stained and threadbare, with missing whiskers, Émil had been the subject of her mother’s drawings and stories. The day he fell from Île St-Louis ranked as the second worst day in her life. The first was when her mother left and never came back.
Émil had fallen at twilight; the dusk, a rose-violet slash under the fingernail crescent of a moon. Her papa had told her the moon’s lit face always turns toward the sun. And to imagine Émil in the turquoise-green Mediterranean enjoying the sun-baked sand. She’d shaken her head stubbornly.
She’d begged her papa to call Captain Morvan, an old colleague and police diver, who’d checked with the Seine dredgers. After he’d reported no luck, she insisted they search the water-treatment plant beyond Bercy. But Émil must have floated away.
Then one day a package had arrived, covered with British stamps, official customs forms, and coarse brown twine. It was addressed to her. In it, she found a toffee-furred bear wearing rainboots, blue slicker, and luggage tag from Paddington station, London, on it, saying “Please take good care of this lost bear.”
After her father’s death, in his drawer, she’d found a yellowed receipt from an English department store for a stuffed bear for a Mademoiselle Leduc. And after all these years, her Paddington Bear still stayed on her bed.
Her dog Miles Davis and the stuffed Paddington Bear were the only men in her life. But wasn’t that how it turned out . . . a successful career and money, but a sour love life, or conversely, madly in love, business falling apart and broke?
Was it just her? Or the fact that bad boys were her downfall?
The last time she’d been happy had been with Yves, now a news bureau chief in Cairo. A problematic relationship at best. Then a few flings, all disasters.
Her tastes were simple. Someone who could make her laugh, had nice eyes, and had the same taste in champagne. Veuve Clicquot. And a bad boy side that made up for any other deficiency.
A nurse’s voice interrupted her thoughts. “Dr. Lambert’s ready. I’ll help you to the MRI.”
Why was she thinking about men? It wasn’t as if she’d had a future with anyone before, and now the prospect seemed even more remote. Zero. She couldn’t see and didn’t know if she ever would.
“Nervous?”
“Me?” she said, hoping her voice didn’t crack with tension.
Chantal had taught her to endow someone with a face or a feature, to “give looks to voices.” She turned to the voice and nodded. The movement felt more natural, less odd than before.
“Ba wey,” said the young nurse for bien oui, with that hesitant Parisien drawl. Aimée felt her slowly expelled breath. “Can’t stand enclosed spaces myself, but Dr. Lambert will be staying with you. That’s quite unusual, you know.”
An eye surgeon and head of the department at the MRI? Didn’t they have technicians for that? But she was reassured. She wouldn’t mind having him explain what he saw or giving her the chance to ask questions.
A buzz of voices met them in the imaging department.
“Dr. Lambert, the cranial sac shows distension . . .”
“Here’s the case we’re going to study: female suffering severe blunt trauma to the head, partial asphyxiation, and subsequent vision blurring and loss.”
Great. She was to be his guinea pig for students. And he hadn’t even told her.
“You forgot the resulting concussion, Dr. Lambert,” she said.
Silence.
“So I did, Mademoiselle Leduc,” he said. “Anything else slip my mind, or does that about cover it?”
A snicker came from somewhere in the shuffling group she felt standing ahead of her.
“You’re the doctor,” she said. “I hope you explain everything. And the real prognosis.”
“This is the type of patient, doctors, that will be your rare curse and luck to treat,” he said, his voice serious. “Strong-willed and a fighter.”
What about smart?
And despite the fear gnawing at her insides, she focused on his voice explaining the neurons, ganglia, arteries, veins, and whatnot causing the trouble. Or what seemed to.
“Notice the nice embolizing technique of Robards, the neurologist at hôpital Saint Antoine,” Dr. Lambert said. “He redirected the bloodflow and supported the blood vessel at the weakened site. Not in a textbook, but it makes good sense. Remember that.”
Aimée concentrated on Dr. Lambert’s words, but even with a few years of pre-med, she felt lost. Nevertheless, she could appreciate Lambert’s observations, his way of injecting guidance, of teaching them to think. Maybe if she’d had a professor like that in the école des médicins she’d have stayed. But then the dissection of corpses had gotten to her.
She took a deep breath as the gurney wheeled ahead. They wrapped sheets over her and slipped her into something that echoed. Drafts of air shot across her. And from all around the noise of the giant machine, as it powered up, enveloped her. As if she’d been shoved inside a wind tunnel.
From outside came the muted clacking of equipment, moving of knobs and other adjustments.
“Try these earplugs; it gets noisy,” said a loud voice. “Small space bother you?”
“A little.” She was terrified.
“Try to remain still.”
The nurse had given her small sponges, telling her to let out her tension by squeezing them. At least they kept her fingernails from digging into her palms.
THE STUDENTS had gone and Dr. Lambert stood near her. Elevator bells pinged down the hallway. The smell of the hospital laundry soap clung to his lab coat. She managed to sit up, then to stand.
“Got a clearer idea of the problem, Doctor?”
“Right now I’ve got a clearer picture of what’s not the problem,” he said. “The brain stem’s a complicated highway. But, to tell you the truth, the doctor who reads the MRIs won’t analyze the films and report until tomorrow.”
Great. Her knowledge had increased by zero.
“Let me reexamine your eyes. I want to check something,” he said. “Tell me if anything changes.”