After the accident he lost numbers for a while. He'd stare at the clock knowing it should tell him something important, but he wasn't able to make meaning come out of the curved and straight lines. They were just shapes like the cracks in the windshield, the blue metal ripped off and twisted, lying across the solid white line.
After the accident he learned again the words pencil and shoe and that the animal that lay across his feet in bed was a cat and it had another name, Grendel. Grendel, he said when he saw another of the animals and his wife, who had become his interpreter after the accident, always at his elbow murmuring, translating the world for him, said no, that's a cat. He stopped walking in his bewilderment while she bent down and patted the animal, cat. She lifted it up to him, cat. He nodded as if he understood and patted the black thing.
Sometimes when they were walking together, he was startled to find his wife's face at almost the same height as his own. He seemed to remember her being shorter, that he had had to look down at her to meet her eyes. He'd scrunch his face up trying to recall and his wife would pat his arm. It was a familiar pat. Headache again, she'd ask, and that was familiar, too.
After the accident he forgot names, though he knew the faces or at least knew that he was supposed to know them. His wife would lean into him as they met someone in the street or store and whisper, "She's Jerry's sister, Anne," or "Ted, from work." This loss of names upset him more than the numbers that had leapt out of his reach. Bothered him more still when he realized that the names didn't seem to congrue or attach themselves to the faces once his wife had slipped them into his ear. The names didn't stick, but floated off somewhere and on another meeting his wife would have to spoon the word into his mouth again.
Or the names seemed to clang against the face. That isn't Andrew, he said fiercely to his wife once in the bank where he used to be vice president. I know that man, his name isn't Andrew. He was almost shouting at her where they stood in front of the counter. His wife simply pointed at the nameplate in front of them. ANDREW in white letters against black. He read it, knew what it was, but then it fled. His eyes had filled with tears and the red-mustached man behind the nameplate had looked away. His wife had taken his hand as they left the bank, and he had clung to her fingers, trembling.
Lying in the hospital bed, he'd memorized his wife's name. Sarah, he whispered against the pale blue walls and the white blinds. Sarah, when he woke in the night sweating, running after words in his dream, the letters almost there, then gone, blown away. He held his hand out to her so she could pull off his leather driving glove. A wind came up and rocked the car; he swerved around a tree limb in the road, and lost control. His words had broken against the windshield like the tree's branches. His wife had a small bandage on her forehead when she visited him.
After the accident he looked down at his wife in bed as she murmured his name. Say my name, she said. Her face was blurred in the gray light. She was reaching up to him. Say it. He held her name in his mind and shaped his lips around the letters. Her hips were rocking, pulling him into their rhythm. He twisted his lips another way and said a name. She winced and he felt her hands flutter then scramble for a hold on his shoulders. He called the name again and she turned her head. No, Sarah, she said.
©CopyrightBrenda Edmands