Noah's Compass Read Free Page B

expressionless. “How am I?” Liam was forced to ask finally.
    Dr. Wood said, “We’ll need to keep you here another night just to be on the safe side. But if all goes well, we can release you tomorrow.”
    “Tomorrow!” Xanthe said. “Are you serious? Look at him! He’s weak as a kitten! He looks like death warmed over!”
    “Oh, that will change,” the doctor said offhandedly. He told Liam, “Nothing to eat today but liquids, I’m afraid, in case we have to take you very suddenly to the OR.” Then he nodded in Xanthe’s direction and left the room.
    “Typical,” Xanthe muttered when he’d gone. “First he says they’re booting you out and then in the same breath he says you may need emergency brain surgery.”
    She spun away with a flounce of her skirt. Liam feared for a moment that she was leaving too, but she was only going over to the corner for a green vinyl chair. She dragged it closer to his bed and plunked herself down in it. “I hope you’re satisfied,” she told Liam.
    “Well, not completely,” he said drily.
    “I knew you shouldn’t have moved to that place. Didn’t I tell you when you signed the lease? A sixty-year-old man in a rinky-dink starter apartment directly across from a shopping mall! And then to leave your door wide open! What did you expect?”
    He hadn’t left his door wide open. And he hadn’t meant to leave it unlocked. He hadn’t known it was unlocked. But it was his policy not to argue. (An infuriating policy, his daughters always claimed.) Arguing got you nowhere. He smoothed down his bedclothes with his good hand, accidentally tugging the tube that ran from his arm to the IV pole.
    “A sixty-year-old man,” Xanthe said, “who can still move all his belongings in the very smallest size U-Haul.”
    “Next smallest,” he murmured.
    “Whose so-called car is a Geo Prizm. A used Geo Prizm. And who, when he gets hit on the head, nobody knows where his people are.”
    “How did they know?” he asked. It only now occurred to him to wonder. “Who called you?”
    “The police called. They’ll be in to question you later, they said. They got my number from your address book; I was the only entry with the same last name as yours. I had to hear it over the phone! At two o’clock in the morning! If you don’t think that’s an experience …”
    He was accustomed to Xanthe’s rants. They were sort of a hobby of hers. Funny: she was so completely different from her mother, his first wife—a waifish, fragile musician with a veil of transparent hair. Millie had taken too many pills when Xanthe was not yet two. It was his second wife who’d ended up raising Xanthe, and his second wife whom she resembled—brown haired and sturdy and normal-looking, pleasantly unexceptional-looking. He wondered sometimes if genetic traits could be altered by osmosis.
    “And here’s the worst of it,” Xanthe was saying. “You invite a known drug addict into your home and give him total access.”
    “Excuse me?” he said. He was startled. Had there been some whole other episode he had lost to his amnesia?
    “Damian O’Donovan. What were you thinking?”
    “Damian … Kitty’s Damian? Kitty’s boyfriend?”
    “Kitty’s drug-addict, slacker boyfriend whom none of us trust for an instant. Mom won’t even let them be alone in the house together.”
    “Well, of course she won’t,” Liam said. “They’re seventeen years old. But Damian’s not a drug addict.”
    “Dad. How can these things slip your mind? He was suspended last year for smoking pot backstage in the school auditorium.”
    “That doesn’t make him an addict.”
    “He was suspended for a week! But you: you’re such a patsy. You choose to forget all about it. You say, ‘Oh, here, Damian, let me show you where I live. Let me point out my flimsy patio door that I plan to leave unlocked.’ In fact I wouldn’t be surprised if he unlocked that door himself while he was there, just so he could get back in and mug