Hello Stranger

Really? Now he was ruining Shakespeare?

I went ahead. Walking a little faster than I really wanted to, trying to leave him behind.

But he followed me. “Do you rent the place on the rooftop?” he asked then as I paused to work the door code to the rooftop stairwell.

Obviously. “Uh-huh,” I said.

“We’re neighbors,” he said, and gestured at the next closest door. “I’m right here. Just under you.”

Could he hear himself?

I nodded without looking up. No eye contact.

“I’d love to get a look at your place sometime,” he said then. “I’ve always wanted to see what it’s like up there.” Then he added, “Especially when you’re clomping around on my ceiling.”

Nope. No thanks. There was no way this wanker was ever going to “see what it’s like up there.”

I turned to face him, double-checking the name on his pocket.

“Look, Joe,” I said, poking my finger—hard—into the embroidered name on his jacket so he’d know I knew it, “I’m not going to be inviting you up to the rooftop.” Then in a tone that very unmistakably said I know what you did to that one-night stand and you’re a terrible person and we both know it, I added, “That’s not going to happen. Okay?”

That shocked him a little—which reminded me of something else Dr. Nicole had said.

During our lengthy coping-skills session before I left the hospital, as she tried to argue that face blindness was not going to be as debilitating as I feared, she told me, among many other things, that even though I couldn’t see faces, I would still be able to read the emotions on them.

“So if someone is shocked or embarrassed or angry, you’ll still be able to tell,” she explained. “You won’t see it, but you’ll know it.”

“How is that possible?” I asked.

“It’s two different brain systems.”

“But how can I read faces if I can’t see faces?”

“You can still see faces,” Dr. Nicole said. “There’s nothing wrong with your eyes. Your brain just doesn’t know how to put them together to show them to you right now.”

Her tone of voice was so reasonable.

But nothing about this was reasonable.

“The faces aren’t gone,” Dr. Nicole tried again. “The faces are still there. And another part of your brain can read the emotions on them just fine. Just like always.”

“I’ll have to trust you on that,” I’d said, not trusting her at all.

But it turned out—as it would often turn out with Dr. Nicole—she was right.

Because when I sharply rejected the Weasel’s invitation for me to invite him over, I shocked him. I couldn’t see it, but I could feel it: that unintelligible face of his was surprised. And a smidge taken aback—most likely having lived his whole life as a complete jerk without encountering nearly enough repercussions. And he was now, at last, ready to withdraw all that inappropriate warmth.

Fine. Great.

He might have fooled that poor one-night stand of his. But he wasn’t fooling me.

I lowered my eyes to his jacket pocket, letting them rest on that cursive Joe until he looked down at the word, too.

Much too nice a name.

I might have to be his neighbor. I might have to bump into him in the elevator. I might have to carry the memory of him saying the word blubber for the rest of my life …

But I did not have to invite him up to my hovel.

Joe the Weasel nodded and stepped back. “Got it.”

And it sounded like he really did.





Six


RUNNING INTO THE Weasel in the elevator was not the worst part of coming home from the hospital.

The worst part of coming home was Lucinda.

Who had decided to try to help me.

Of all things.

Starting with forcing me into accepting a ride home.

To be honest, I hadn’t even noticed Lucinda when she’d first arrived that morning. That Pepto-Bismol-pink cardigan she’d chosen was almost the exact shade as the nurses’ scrubs, and I just assumed she was one of them. She chatted with the nurses a good while, and I didn’t catch on until she came over and said, “Ready to go?” You’d think I might have recognized the voice of the person who ruined my life pretty easily … but I didn’t.

She could have been anybody.

Dr. Nicole had explained about voices, too—that my brain was used to all my senses working together in an ecosystem. Having one sense out of whack could throw the others off, too, for a while. So it might take some time to learn to recognize voices without the usual visual clues of the face. Over time, she promised, I’d get better at voices alone.

“You might even wind up better at recognizing voices than you were before. Eventually. If—” But she stopped herself.

“If I don’t get the faces back?” I finished.

She nodded. “Be patient with yourself,” she said. “Your brain has a lot to adjust to right now. We think of the senses like they’re separate, distinct things. But they’re really interconnected. It’s going to be chaos in there until things settle. Even easy things will be hard for a while.”

“How long?” I asked.

But I knew the answer, even as she said it. “We just don’t know.”

Anyway, that could turn out to be an upside, in a way.

I was in no hurry to recognize Lucinda’s voice.

I’d agreed to the ride only after I made her swear up and down that she would drop me at the door—only—and not come up.

“But I have to get your prescriptions,” she protested.

“I can get my own damn prescriptions,” I insisted.

But one guess for how the drop-off went down.

That’s right. She picked up my prescriptions without permission and then came up to my hovel un-frigging-invited.

I hadn’t been home fifteen minutes when she showed up.

I was still standing in the entryway, trying to adjust to the unfamiliar silence. Peanut was still being boarded. There was no jangle of tags or scuttling of dog paws as he scrambled to greet me at the door, wagging his tail so hard he bapped himself on the ears. There was no—hopefully still-recognizable—loving little dog face to make me feel like everything could be okay.

It was bad.

And then, suddenly, there was Lucinda. Knocking on my hovel door.

Even worse.

After a lifetime of trying to hide my extreme lack of life success from both her and my dad, her arrival was pure insult to injury.

I thought about ignoring her. But then I decided not to prolong the agony.

“This is where you live?” she asked, stepping in as I opened the door.

“I thought you went home,” I said.

“I picked up your prescriptions,” Lucinda said, like she’d done me a favor.

“Didn’t I tell you not to do that?”

But Lucinda was looking around. “It’s very … bohemian,” she said, like that was the nicest thing she could come up with.

“How did you get up here?” I demanded.

“Mr. Kim gave me the code.”

“You met Mr. Kim?”

She nodded, still looking around. “He kept calling me Martha Stewart.”

At that, I stifled a smile. Mr. Kim always had everybody’s number. I sighed. “That’s actually a great nickname for you.”

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