to believe that possibility. No one knew that that was one of the worries that kept him awake at night.
Trissa, more than Fitapaldi, seemed to be in charge of his recuperation and therapy. Though Fitapaldi would walk with him each evening in the garden and talk about the old days as if they were old chums and not psycho and head shrink. But Trissa was the one who sat and talked with him hour upon hour, kissing and touching him as if he were Nicholas and nothing had changed. She would bring down his portfolio of photographs and use them like flashcards, drilling him on memories. After three or four times through she began marking them with tiny pencil scratches on the back corners. He saw later that the marks were N's or C's according to his response.
When he tired of the game or had nothing to say, she would read to him, newspapers and folktales. The newspapers included not only the current one but others she had somehow collected from days that were gaps in his memory, of plane crashes and elections, of the Viet Nam War and the War on Poverty and the roller coaster stock market, of overthrown governments, baseball games, celebrity marriages, divorces, and deaths.
"Ladd? Alan Ladd died?"
She nodded solemnly, "Of undisclosed cause, January twenty-ninth. I saw him in Shane on the Late Show once. Was he a favorite of yours?"
"I liked him well enough. He had a struggle growing up, I heard. Like me. In This Gun for Hire, he acted madness better than most of us can live it."
The folktales she chose at random, letting the thick, old book from Augusta's library fall open in her lap where it might and delving into it backwards and forwards from the page she'd found. Why folktales, he never asked. It was enough to listen to the lilting cadence of the words in her sweet, soft voice, to laugh with her at the humorous ones like Lazy Jack or The Pig-Headed Wife, to hear her sigh at the romantic ones like Beauty and the Beast, to see secret tears sneak from her eyes when the stories told of estranged fathers and daughters, or lost loves never found again.
"I know it's silly. I'll read something else tomorrow, something more manly. Ernest Hemingway? Ian Fleming? Non-fiction maybe?"
He took the book from her lap and leafed through it. "Actually, I'd prefer Finn MacCoul and the Fenians of Erin, followed by The Giant Who Had No Heart in His Body, if we have time." He closed the book and winked at her, not knowing that it recalled Nicholas to her so sharply that she had to look away for a moment. "Trissa, you could read the telephone book and I would enjoy it. I like the sound of your voice."
"Do you? Finn MacCoul it is then. By special request. Good night, Nicholas I mean, Cole." She kissed him as she always did before they parted for the night, then left him behind in dizzy shambles to lie awake all night, or if he slept, to dream of her in ways that went beyond kisses. It couldn't be that he was falling in love with her. That was something that Cole just could not do.
Chapter Eighteen
Augusta lifted the black linen pillbox from Trissa's head and tried the felt cloche. She pursed her lips and frowned at the hat's reflection in the mirror. It had a large onyx and rhinestone hatpin and rhinestone-clustered netting that was all wrong for someone so young. "Are you sure you won't listen to reason and stay home?"
"Augusta, I'm not going to miss my father's funeral just because we can't find the right hat." Trissa angled the cloche forward making the net dip past her chin. She grimaced and removed the hat and handed it back. "Maybe no hat at all would be okay. Or I could just wear a scarf."
"There has to be something here that's appropriate. But why in the world..." Her voice grew muffled as she burrowed through the hatboxes in the deep recesses of her closet. She emerged in a moment with three more boxes balanced precariously in her arms and two hats perched atop her own head. "A mother who would abandon her own daughter is beyond me."
"Please, I've already explained. My mother and I were both victims." In the long, dark hours while they waited at Nicholas' bedside, Trissa had confided a bit of her own story to Augusta, a condensed version