catch up on all the shows I’ve missed because I’ve worked crazy shifts and hours for the last seven years.”
“Wow, that’s . . . that’s a change.”
“My work colleagues can’t understand it. Going back to school at this age and changing professions, but I think if you want to do something, something else, why not? You only have one life, right?” He paused for a while and a tiny flash of something moved across his face, so briefly that you might even have missed it. But I hadn’t. It was like a tiny cloud sweeping across the sun and disappearing quickly. “Some people don’t even get a life to live, or their lives get cut short. You know?”
I nodded. Even if I didn’t really know. I knew nothing about life and living it, or not living it. Some of these thoughts must have shown on my face.
“Sorry, I didn’t mean to . . . I forgot that you—”
“I forgot too. I really forgot,” I joked, trying to make light of it.
He smiled. I think it was only for my benefit, going along with me trying to inject some lightness into my situation. I knew this because his smile seemed uncomfortable. As if it didn’t quite fit on his face in the same way his other smiles did. The ones where you saw the little gap in his front teeth.
“So . . .” Noah declared, walking into the middle of the room, swinging his arms. “Want to go and have some lunch?”
“Lunch? Isn’t it morning?”
Noah pointed at a clock on the kitchen wall. It read twelve. “We both overslept.”
“Oh.” I felt embarrassed for some reason. Or maybe I felt bad. Maybe Noah had things to do in the mornings and I, with my late-night shenanigans, had caused him to miss those.
“It’s cool. I needed it, though. First day of my break.” He grabbed his wallet off the kitchen counter and it dawned on me again.
“Uh . . . I don’t have any money. I don’t know why I didn’t have a bag with me when you found me. Who doesn’t have a bag?”
“It was pretty chaotic there when I arrived. Maybe one of the other women picked it up . . . no, but then they would have returned it.” He shrugged. “Do you remember anything about the accident at all?”
“Nothing.” I felt that darkness come back, pulling on me, and I swear, I felt a chill in the air that hadn’t been there a second ago. I clasped my hands to my body.
“So, lunch. Let’s go.” He clapped his hands together, changing the mood back to how it was before the darkness reared its head.
“Sure.”
“I just need to change and put Chloe outside while we’re gone.” Noah stuck his finger out and Chloe climbed on. I followed him out of the kitchen into the small back garden, and when I saw what it looked like, I gasped.
“Wow! Is this all for Chloe?” I looked at the massive cage that took up most of the garden. It looked like it had been landscaped to resemble something tropical. Grass on the floor, a little pond, trees and shrubs planted inside and plenty of swings and things for her to climb on. The only other furniture in the garden was a small table and two chairs, but they were completely dwarfed by the cage in front of me.
“I built it for her. I hate the idea of animals in captivity, but she’d been in a cage all her life.”
I remembered the panda in the cage at the zoo. I remembered the hospital room and the windows that didn’t open, and a strange, anxious feeling gnawed at me once again.
Noah walked into the cage and put Chloe onto a swing. And when he walked back out he looked at me, curiously. “You okay?”
“I don’t know. I have this memory—well, I think it is anyway.”
“Of what?”
“A panda. In the zoo. I think.” I looked at Chloe through her bars. She was happily pulling at the leaves now and jumping from branch to branch. The feeling I got from watching her was nothing like the one I got when I thought of that panda. Or the feeling I got when I thought of hospital windows that didn’t open.
“I don’t think I like animals in captivity either,” I said, although I don’t think this was the full truth of the memory I was having. I think the truth was more along the lines of I didn’t like