As she spoke, Vivien thought of the obituaries she’d written. So many of them! Thousands of words, all of them trying to capture grief, to show the world what had been lost.
“Yes,” Vivien said softly. “I understand.”
“How I wish that the man in that room is your husband,” the woman said. “But as weeks pass, it seems less likely that he belongs to anyone.”
The woman shook her head. She looked at her clipboard, taking the pen she kept tucked behind her ear and preparing to write.
“Your husband’s name?” she asked.
“David. David Gardner,” Vivien said.
The woman wrote the name down. “San Francisco, California?” she said.
“Yes.”
“I’ll come in the room with you. I have to,” the woman said. “It’s hospital policy. If I didn’t, you could tell me that he recognized you even if he didn’t and we could release him to the wrong person. We’re not doubting your integrity—”
“You’re just recognizing our desperation,” Vivien interrupted.
“Well,” the woman said.
“May we go inside now?” Vivien asked.
“Of course.”
She put her hand on the doorknob, but hesitated. “We call him John Doe,” she said. “For obvious reasons.”
Vivien nodded and the woman opened the door at last.
The room looked very much like the waiting room where Vivien and the other women had been. Loveseats and chairs lined up against the walls. A hooked rug on the floor and a window looking out at the city.
Sitting on one of those chairs, reading a book, was the man.
When Vivien saw that the book was Jack London’s The Call of the Wild, hope fluttered weakly in her chest. David would be reading Jack London.
“John,” the woman said. “Here’s our next guest.”
The man lowered the book and looked wearily at the woman and Vivien.
He had blue eyes, gray hair that needed to be trimmed. A scar on his forehead. Could he be David? Vivien wondered, moving closer to him. It had been thirteen years. A lifetime. Still. Wouldn’t she know him right away?
“I’m Vivien Lowe,” Vivien said, watching for some flicker of recognition on the man’s face and seeing none.
He smiled sadly.
“I wish I could tell you that means something to me,” he said.
His voice reminded Vivien of parchment paper, of something old that hadn’t been used in a long time. Once she had seen someone pull an old letter from her purse and it had turned to dust when she opened it. His voice was like that. David’s had been strong, deep.
“I see you’re reading Jack London,” Vivien said. “I used to see him at a restaurant in San Francisco. Coppa’s,” she added hopefully.
Again she waited for a reaction. Again she got none.
“It was sitting over there,” the man said, motioning to a bookshelf in the far corner of the room. “I just picked it up.”
Vivien read the titles on the shelf: the Complete Works of Shakespeare and Henry David Thoreau’s Walden and The Scarlet Letter. Did it mean something that of all those books, he had chosen The Call of the Wild? Or was it just happenstance, like so many other things in life? She remembered the man who had come to her to write an obituary for his wife who had died suddenly. They had finished dinner and she sat down to her sewing and when he looked over at her she was dead. “The only thing we can count on in life,” he had told Vivien, “is unpredictability.”
“May I sit?” Vivien asked the woman with the clipboard.
When she nodded, Vivien sat across from John Doe so that she could see him better. If David were older and thinner, if he had gone through terrible things for all these years, might he be the man before her now?
“Do you know him?” the man was asking. He held up the book. “Jack London?”
“Oh, no. He just frequented a restaurant where we used to go,” she said. “He died a few years ago,” she added.
“Did you go there, to that restaurant, with the man you’re looking for?” he asked.
Vivien looked into his eyes. They were dull and vacant, as if the life had been knocked out of them.
“You have a hotel key,” she began.
“Mrs. Lowe,” he said, “I don’t remember why I have that key or how I ended up in Denver. Nothing. My mind is completely blank.”
“I see,” she said.
Over all these years she had read so much about amnesia, but nothing had explained what was in an amnesiac’s mind, only what wasn’t there.
The woman with the clipboard stood. “Last week, a Miss Minnie Nash came from Cheyenne and she could not be certain if John Doe was her fiancé or not. She went back to Wyoming to retrieve some documents. Photographs, that sort of thing. If you can’t be certain, you can do the same.”
“David had a scar,” Vivien said. “Under his chin.”
Even as she said this, Vivien knew it was pointless. This man was not David. This was not the face she had stared at as he slept, the mouth she had kissed with such youthful passion.
The woman turned to John Doe.
“I do have a lot of scars,” John Doe said. “Apparently I’m quite accident-prone.”