Read Online Amnesia by G. H. Ephron - Free Book Online Page A

the grass. There’s someone, a man, in the shadows. He shoots me in the head.”
    â€œCan you see who the man is?”
    â€œI don’t want to believe. It just can’t be.”
    â€œWhat can’t be?”
    â€œThe person I keep seeing. It can’t be him.”
    â€œWho is it?”
    â€œI think it’s Stuart.”
    In the days that followed, Sylvia Jackson filled in the details of what she now referred to as a vision. A month after she woke from her coma, she announced that she was sure. Stuart did it.
    All of the police interview reports had the same signature. Detective J. MacRae.
    Two things struck me. First, Sylvia Jackson had lived through the kind of traumatic head injury that would have killed most people. And second, given the extent of her injuries, I would never have expected her to be able to recall what happened to her an hour, a day, or even a week before she was struck down. I wondered, how disoriented was Sylvia Jackson when she came out of the coma? How susceptible to suggestion as a result? Had she imprinted herself on her daily interrogator like a baby duck on its mama?
    I surveyed the wreckage in my study. Papers and manila folders were strewn everywhere. An empty coffee mug rested on the wide, flat arm of my leather-cushioned Morris chair. I leaned
back, marveling as I always did at how perfectly the chair suited my oversized body. I’d acquired the chair years ago at a yard sale, before people knew what Mission furniture was and before furnituremakers started knocking off reproduction pieces like parts of a Model T. Then, when it became an in thing, I haunted furniture auctions. That’s where I met Kate. She was looking at pieces of art pottery that were being made at the same time the Stickley brothers were inventing the Mission style. She showed me a vase at that auction that she didn’t have the money to buy. She thought it was exquisite. I thought it was squat and plain. Over the years, she taught me how to see texture, subtle nuance of color, sinuous curve. I taught her to appreciate the straight, elegant lines of the furniture and how to spot an original.
    As I reassembled the stacks of paper and tucked them back into the envelope Annie had brought them in, I realized how engrossed I’d become. I hadn’t once thought about my own pain. The clinical detail and detached tone of the reports allowed me to intellectualize without having to connect emotionally with the horror of the crime. In fact, there was a weird pleasure to it, almost like running your tongue over and over an empty socket where there was once a tooth.

7
    AT NINE-THIRTY, I was weaving my way into Somerville, dodging pedestrians and wondering what traffic planning genius had synchronized the lights so it was impossible to go more than three blocks without hitting a red.
    I turned off the four-lane boulevard, zigged over one block, and ended up at a messy merge of competing streets. A little later, the road detoured left, then right, then narrowed. As I drove, I registered the changes that mark the transition from Cambridge to Somerville. Brew pubs became Irish bars. Gourmet food stores turned into meat markets and delis. It was possible, once again, to find a parking spot.
    Somerville had been my home when I first moved to Boston. I could take the trolley to MIT and I could afford the one-room, third-floor walk-up that overlooked an alley behind a Portuguese restaurant. The apartment smelled perpetually of linguica, potatoes, and grease. I waxed nostalgic as I drove past the spot that had once been home to Steve’s Ice Cream. I yearned for a scoop of their vanilla ice cream, smashed onto a marble board, then sprinkled with chocolate-covered toffee and kneaded with a metal paddle until the two became an entirely new thing, neither
ice cream nor candy, but a comfort food in a league of its own. I’d tried to re-create the effect with Breyer’s vanilla, a Heath Bar, an ice