tried to stand up from a chair, his legs would not obey.
If people hadn’t kept telling him such things were also happening to other flu victims, he might have gone out of his mind for good.
Nurse Asparagus told him about a famous writer who’d been a child math prodigy until he came down with a case of common flu and mysteriously lost his gift. “We can’t explain it, but we know a fever high enough to cause delirium can scorch things right out of the brain.”
The boy in the bed next to Cole’s had spoken both Spanish and English before he got sick but now could speak only Spanish. Another nurse translated: “Where are my parents?” “I see cockroaches!” “No more needles, they hurt!”
And Cole would hear many other stories like this, including stories of people who’d come through the flu blind or paralyzed or mentally retarded, or who’d go on to develop symptoms of parkinsonism. And the more he heard, the more he understood that he had been lucky.
It was Tracy who said putting Cole on a live radio show might not be such a good idea.
“Why not?” demanded Boots, bean eyes jumping with irritation, and when Tracy replied that she wasn’t quite sure: “In other words, no reason at all? Just women’s intuition or some like nonsense?”
Tracy knew better than to argue with Boots. And since she believed firmly in a wife’s biblical duty to submit to her husband’s authority in all things, she did not challenge PW’s view that she was just being an anxious mother hen.
But as late as the day of the broadcast—that morning—she reminded Cole that no one was forcing him; he could still change his mind.
“Maybe it’s just me, Cole-cakes, but I don’t think I’ve ever seen you look so pale. And I know you haven’t been sleeping so good.”
But Cole couldn’t imagine surviving the shame if he backed out now.
It was true he’d been sleeping poorly all week, but it was not just at night that his mind was unrestful. The thought of the upcoming show—“We’ll keep it real easy and relaxed. Just you and me for about fifteen minutes, then we open up the phones to questions”—had naturally got Cole wondering what he might be asked and how he was going to answer. And it was as if a fissure had opened in him out of which more and more of his past life seeped through.
Now that his memory was so much better, he was able to see how the false had got mixed in with the true. No dog named Zeppo, but his father had hit a dog with his car one time. And Cole remembered lying to his new classmates about wanting a sheepdog, and then wondering why he’d lied. He remembered the first day of school and the last day of school and all the chaos in between. Dogs: the chocolate Lab that belonged to the man who lived on their street, the old man who’d helped his mother carry Cole’s father to the car but refused to go with her to the hospital—he remembered all that. He remembered wanting to hurt that man.
Cough, cough, cough, cough, cough. That sound lived so deep in him he didn’t see how he could ever have forgotten it, even for a while. But then, forgetting your own name—how unlikely was that?—and he had done that, too.
His mother at the kitchen table, buttoned up in her winter coat—had she ever finished writing that message to Addy?
I’m sorry for your loss. A man—not a doctor or a nurse—a man dressed in street clothes. Visitor’s badge, hair-choked nostrils, crooked brown teeth. A man with a laptop. We need to talk about next of kin.
Cole was still feverish, his head was like a noisy machine churning mud. He tried to churn up answers. Somewhere in Florida were his grandparents: his father’s father who had Alzheimer’s, and his father’s mother, paralyzed from a stroke. In a home for old people but—and this had always puzzled Cole—not the same home. He could not remember the name of the town or the last time he’d seen them.
No brothers or sisters on his father’s side; on his mother’s side only Addy. When the man asked him where Addy lived, Cole slipped and said Chicago. Sometime after his second, more severe, bout of illness, he was told his aunt had not yet been found. He was confused; he had no memory of telling anyone about Addy.