Free The Memory Book by Howard Engel

volunteers who tried to treat each request, however confused, with cool clarity and simplicity.
    We walked outside and found a wooden bench facing a children’s playground. The toys inside the enclosure— tricycles, wagons, and kiddy-cars—were mostly broken, mangled by use or neglect.
    “Tell me about it,” I said at last.
    “There’s not much to tell. Didn’t your police friends …?”
    “Not a word. Just her name as they went out the door. They must have been testing me. I don’t know.”
    “Flora McAlpine was a teacher at one of the colleges. Properly, she was Doctor Flora McAlpine. She was forty-five, unmarried, and by all accounts a good teacher. She lived in Clarendon House. She also had a head injury, same as you, but hers was fatal. I don’t know any more than that, Benny. I’m sorry.”
    By the time Anna delivered me back to my room, I was completely exhausted. I was less than my usual affable self when I pecked her on the cheek and waved her away. The ping of the elevator bell sounded with finality as she vanished. My shirt was wet through across the shoulders and down my back.
    I must have broken some speed record when I pulled the bedcovers around me and surrendered myself to forty winks that lasted through the whole of the late afternoon. I slept through both speech and occupational therapy, waking only when the occupational therapist came to see if I was still breathing.
    “I’ve been out for a walk,” I explained. “My first, as far as I remember. Sorry I missed those classes. Can I make them up in some way?” The young woman, whose name I still managed to forget, instructed me in hospital policy, and I returned to sleep for another half hour. It seemed to me that most of my day was pieced together from naps and rests and sleeps and lie-downs of varying seriousness. I guess there was healing going on somewhere in my head and I needed more sleep than normal. When I finally woke up, it was close to dinnertime. The whole day, like so many that had gone before it, had fled like retreating guerrillas before a massed attack of infantry with armoured support.
    Dinnertime found me with the gourmets at the table farthest from the television set. The Czech who’d been a United Nations representative was there too, and he turned out to have an interest in crime fiction. I’d read abit myself, and so I encouraged him in his attempts to move the conversation away from the best place in the Dordogne to find a truly outstanding cassoulet. My new friend shut the others up saying that nobody in the Dordogne has any business looking for a cassoulet in the first place. He’d be better off looking for a superior hot dog. We all laughed, but one of the gourmet crowd was mildly injured by the remark.
    I became anxious after dinner. When I had eliminated all the other possible sources, I was troubled by the knowledge that Anna might be poking around that university residence on her own. I was anxious both for her personal safety and for the scraps of information she might have come across. Anna had helped me out in the past, but usually I was with her or the situation was less sinister.
    Under the surface of my concern for Anna’s fair hide was a large ration of guilt about the way our close relationship had stalled. There had been no way to turn my job into a nine-to-five operation, and I had missed more dates and appointments. To stay alive a relationship has to grow and expand, or it dies of neglect. One night, looking in a drawer for a stamp, I found a clutch of theatre tickets that she had bought for the two of us. In each case I failed to show up. And through it all, she pretended to shrug off my habitual delinquency. Anna was a remarkable woman.
    I wondered whether I could slip away from the hospital long enough to make sure she was safe. By day, shewould be fully visible to all; by night, her flashlight might attract the U of T campus police. Or she might surprise the guy who hit me.
    I stopped myself.