Page 57 of Maybe in Another Life

Iwake up to the sound of someone fumbling around in the dark. But I don’t see anyone. I only hear them.

“Henry?” I ask.

A figure pops up from the floor.

“Sorry,” he says. “I can’t find my cell phone. I thought I might have dropped it in here.”

“It’s weird to think that you’re here, hovering over me when I’m sleeping,” I tell him.

“I wasn’thovering,” he says. “I was crawling.”

I laugh. “Much worse.”

“You didn’t see it, right? My phone?” he asks me.

I shake my head.

“Dammit,” he says, and I watch as he absentmindedly pulls at a few hair ties around his wrist.

“You told me you’d explain the hair ties,” I say. I point to my own head. The one he gave me is the one I’m still using to keep my bun together. Luckily, I can now do it myself with little fanfare. But I still don’t have a mirror, so I can’t be sure it looks good.

He laughs. “Good memory. A lot of car accident patients struggle to remember basic details.”

I shrug. “What can I say? I’ve always been ahead of the rest.”

“I started finding hair ties all over the hospital where I worked back in Texas,” he says. I find myself smiling as he sits down. I like that he sits down. I like that he is staying. “And I didn’t want to throw them away, because they seemed like they would be useful to somebody, so I started collecting them. But then no one ever asked for one, so they just kept piling up. And then, one day, my boss asked me to do something, and I didn’t have a piece of paper to write on, so I put a hair tie around my wrist to remind me, sort of like someone might do with a rubber band. Then I started to do it all the time. And then I started to do it for more than one thing at a time. So if there were four things I needed to remember, four hair ties. If I had two things to do and someone gave me a third task, another hair tie.”

“How many times have you stood staring at your wrist trying to remember what one of the hair ties was for?”

He laughs. “Listen, it’s not a perfect system.” He bends down for a moment. I assume he thinks he sees his cell phone.

He stands back up. He must have been wrong. “Anyway,” he says, “that’s my hair tie organizational system.”

“And the plus is, you have a hair tie for any woman who needs one.”

“Right,” he says. “But no one has ever asked for one but you.”

I smile at him.

“How are you feeling?” he asks me. “OK? No more spasms?”

“No more spasms.”

“Good,” he says as he looks around the room some more for his phone.

“We could call it,” I offer. “Your phone, I mean.” There is a hospital phone next to me, on the bed table. I pull it toward me and pick up the receiver. “What’s the number?”

I can’t quite interpret the look on his face.

“What did I do?” I ask him.

“I can’t give you any personal contact information,” he says. “It’s against the rules.”

I am feeling ever so slightly embarrassed. I put the receiver back in the cradle to save face. “Oh, OK. Well, you can dial yourself,” I say. “I’ll close my eyes.”

He laughs and shakes his head. “It won’t do much good anyway,” he tells me. “The ringer’s off.”

I can tell that both of us want to change the subject. We just aren’t sure how.

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