“I mean really,” she said. “Think about it. Have you been there? To Jamaica? The Caribbean.”
He thought about it. “I think so,” he said. “To Haiti, anyway.”
“Well, let’s think about it! See what you can remember.”
He savored another spoonful of rice and beans, then closed his eyes, and sipped his beer. Finally, he said, “Big, white house. Verandah. Palm trees.” He stopped for a moment. He could hear the traffic in the street, the dull roar of white noise. “When the wind came up and blew the palms around,” Duran said, “it wasn’t a soft sound, like wind moving through the leaves. It was a thrashing sound.” He paused, and then went on. “There was a gardener who used to climb the trees when a storm was coming… “ He fell silent.
“Why?” Adrienne prompted.
“To cut the coconuts—so they wouldn’t damage the verandah.”
“Keep going,” Adrienne encouraged. She put the chopsticks down. “It’s like when we were playing chess. Remember? The rum, the heat, I think—”
Across from her, Duran’s face had been relaxed, with just a tiny frown of concentration pinching at his eyes. Suddenly, he was on his feet, eyes wide.
“What’s the matter?”
He shook his head, looked away, then took a couple of deep breaths. Finally, he turned to her. “Sometimes… when I start to remember things… I see this room—and it scares the shit out of me.”
“What room?”
He shook his head, and walked to the window. Looked out. “I don’t want to talk about it.”
“You have to.”
He kept looking out the window, as if he was searching for something. A minute passed, and then he said: “I’ve been trying to figure out the color.”
“What color?”
“Of the room. It’s not yellow, but… ochre. And there’s blood everywhere.” He heaved a sigh. “I really don’t want to think about this.”
“But you should, that’s exactly what you should do—you should think about it. Keep going. Maybe—”
“No!”
“Fine,” she said, picking up her chopsticks again. She ran them through the reddish sauce, then concentrated on capturing a single black bean.
“I’m sorry” Duran told her. “I just can’t do it. It’s… I don’t know. I can’t explain it.”
“No problem,” Adrienne replied in a dismissive tone. “Whatever.”
“Look—”
“I just think, you know, you’ve got some kind of memory trace there, something important happened—I’d think you’d want to go with it.”
He didn’t say anything for a while. A lock of his dark hair, which he kept combed back, had fallen down onto his forehead and he pushed at it with his fingers. “I’m not explaining this very well, but it’s like—I can’t go with it. I can’t stand it.”
She sighed.
“I see that room and… it’s like I’m going to pass out,” he told her. “It’s like I want to pass out.”
She shook her head, as if it were a way to change the subject. “I guess you’ve got enough on your mind,” she told him.
He looked puzzled.” I do?”
“Well, brain surgery.” She placed the pointed end of one chopstick atop a single black bean, punctured it, then tried to obscure what seemed like an unfortunate metaphorical action by messing around with the rest of the food on her plate.
“Do you always do that?” he said after a while, his tone light.
“What?”
He indicated the little mounds of rice and vegetables she’d constructed. “Because Dr. Freud has some pretty interesting opinions about that kind of thing.”
She laughed. “Playing with my food,” she said, pushing the food into a single mound, then squaring it off. “My detractors would say it’s the only kind of play I’m capable of.”
“You have detractors?”
She drew diagonal paths through the square of food, separating it into four triangles. “Ummmm. ‘I’m not much fun. I’m a worker bee. I’m all business.’”
He laughed. “I think your detractors are jealous.”
She smiled. Said, “Thanks.” Thought, Uh-oh.
She was starting to get attached to this guy. In fact, she was starting to like him—and maybe more than like him (which would be a real disaster). Probably the Stockholm Syndrome, she thought. While Duran wasn’t her captor, they were captive together in this weird situation, and it was natural, she supposed, that she would begin to feel that they were some kind of… team. She ran her thumb down the side of the Tsing Tsao bottle, leaving a clear path through the condensation. Then she picked it up and drained it.
An hour later, she was standing in the kitchen, washing up, when she heard him make a call. Turning off the water, she set the plate in the drainer, and listened.
“Yeah, Doc,” he said, “It’s Jeff Duran… right. Fine, thanks. Listen, I just wanted to say—I’ve thought it over, and… I’m in.”
Chapter 27
Shaw telephoned at eight in the morning, waking Adrienne even as Duran pulled a pillow over his head.
“We can do it on Tuesday,” he told her. “I’ve got Nick Allalin on board—he’s the neurosurgeon—and I’m lining up the O/R. I may have to do a bit of camel-trading, but… we’re there.”
Adrienne swung her legs out of the bed, and sat up. “Tuesday?”
Shaw could hear the disappointment in her voice. “Best I could do,” he said. “Even that—”
“Tuesday’s fine,” she decided. “It’s just that… I was wondering what we’d do in the meantime. New York’s so expensive, and—another three days…”
“Why not go home? Tell Jeff to put his feet up for a while, and—I’m sure you’re missed at Slough, Hawley.”
“Mmmnnn…”
They rolled into Bethany at dusk, and stopped at the supermarket, first thing.
“I wish I could cook something fabulous,” Adrienne said, as she requested a rotisserie chicken from the clerk—who expertly plucked it free of its metal prongs and slipped it into a bag lined in aluminum foil. They continued down the aisle, stopping to get a prepackaged salad. “But the truth is,” she continued, “the kind of things we ate at home, well, I’m not sure you’d be too happy.”
“What,” Duran said. “You mean, like meatloaf? I happen to like meatloaf.”
“Meatloaf—that would be haute cuisine. My personal specialty was tater-tot casserole,” Adrienne said. “And Hamburger Helper was pretty big. Tuna wiggle. Chicken à la king. And you know that thing with marshmallows and coconut that someone always brings to potluck dinners? I used to love that.”
“What’s a tuna-wiggle?” Duran wondered. “Sounds like—”
“Don’t ask. You need noodles, and cream of mushroom soup. And lots of Ritz crackers.”
Returning to the cottage, parking behind it, hearing and feeling the familiar crunch of the pea gravel under their tires—all this gave Adrienne a brief flush of pleasure, a spurious (she reminded herself) sense of coming home.
When they’d eaten, she changed into jeans and a sweater and, accompanied by Duran, went for a walk on the beach, braving the cold. She loved the smell of the sea, the thump of the surf, and the clatter of pebbles dragged by the undertow. But the air was freezing. She could see her breath, and it made her shiver. Noticing this, Duran put his arm around her shoulders, even as he lowered his head against the onshore wind. For a moment, Adrienne stiffened—then, warming, relaxed, sagging into him ever so slightly.
After a while, she asked, “Are you worried about the surgery?”
Duran shrugged.
“You’d be crazy not to be.”
He chuckled. “Well, that’s the point, isn’t it?”
After a couple of hundred yards, they returned to the house, invigorated. “I want to take another look at this,” Adrienne said, sitting down at the dining room table with Nikki’s computer. “I’m sure there’s something on it that I missed.” She waited for the machine to boot up. “You any good with these things?”