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  That night she was dressed in a faded blue T-shirt with a Nike logo on the front. At first Dan had brought in some of his best T-shirts until Lisa told him she had meant it when she said she wanted old. ‘These look too good to be old.’ She much preferred the ones he’d brought her since, and Dan much preferred the way she looked in them compared with him. For some reason the sight of her in his old jogging tees looked way more sexy than when she wore one of the slinky satin nightdresses, because the soft cotton material played peek-a-boo with her curves, moulding and cupping breasts, hips and the curve of her ass before falling away again when she moved. Dan was beginning to develop a fetish for baggy T-shirts.

  ‘Who did you want to visit you?’ he asked coolly. He’d come straight from the children’s hospital and was dressed for work in a dark suit, pale-blue shirt and Lilo and Stitch tie.

  Lisa shook her head, already regretting the question. The last thing she wanted was a visit from somebody from Linda Brogan’s past. ‘Nobody. Forget I ever said it; I don’t know why I did,’ she muttered hastily, and looked at the large bunch of long-stemmed pink roses in the vase on the windowsill. They had arrived this afternoon without a card. ‘I wonder who sent those,’ she said to change the subject.

  Dan had looked at the roses for a long time when he’d first arrived and had asked the same thing. When Lisa told him they’d arrived without a card he had looked like he wanted to tip them in the rubbish bin. ‘A secret admirer, I guess,’ he said flatly, drawing a puzzled frown from Lisa.

  Mary, the ward clerk, tapped on the open door. ‘Lisa? You didn’t fill out your menu for tomorrow.’

  Dan hated hearing her called Lisa, but like the ward staff he did it to humour her.

  ‘Oh. Thanks, Mary.’ Lisa dug her hands into the mattress, pushing herself higher against the pillows. ‘I’ve been lazy. Nancy or Chris always does it for me.’ And true to form, the hospital food was revolting. There was never any meat on the plate.

  Lisa saw the way Mary looked at Dan as she came into the room—like he was a Christmas present she wanted to unwrap somewhere nice and private.

  She felt a surge of irritation. Dan Brogan was supposed to be Linda’s husband. It struck Lisa as really rude to ogle another woman’s husband whenever he made an appearance. At times she felt like a teenager with a crush when Dan came into the room or she heard his voice. The realization made her even more awkward around him.

  Lisa had to force herself not to snatch the menu off Mary when she handed it over, all the time smiling at Dan. She didn’t notice the tension in Dan’s face as she took the piece of paper. It was the first time Lisa had had to write anything since she’d woken up.

  ‘Have you got a pen, Dan?’ she asked and was perplexed by the reluctance he displayed in handing it over. Looking down at the menu she blinked. There were three columns she guessed must be for breakfast, lunch and the evening meal.

  Lisa raised the piece of paper and peered at it more closely. For some reason, breakfast looked like dreakfast and dinner looked like binner. The longer she stared at the words, the less sense they made; in fact, they began to wriggle about, and the white spaces between the black print began to form patterns like rivers trickling down the page. She gasped. ‘What the—?’

  Dan reached over and tried to take the menu off her. ‘Give it to me; I’ll do it for you.’

  Lisa eluded him. ‘No! This is amazing!’

  ‘Linda, you’ll only get upset. Let me do it for you,’ Dan insisted, watching her face anxiously. She looked like somebody who was having an epiphany.

  Lisa clutched the menu against her chest and stared at him, her blue eyes wide and wondering. ‘Linda was dyslexic, wasn’t she?’

  Dan didn’t know what to make of the next half hour.

  First of all Linda kept referring to herself in the third person. Try as he might, he still thought of her as Linda and had to work hard to remember to call her Lisa. Whenever he messed up, she would give him such a disappointed look that he felt like a heel.

  She continuously fired questions at him. When was she diagnosed? How was she affected? Did she suffer with nausea? Was she affected with motion sickness? Was she accident-prone (she rolled her eyes when she asked that one) and best of all—what educational programmes had she attended?

  ‘You attended lots of them when you were a child,’ Dan said, trying hard to keep his cool. He wasn’t telling her anything she didn’t already know.

  ‘But none of them worked?’ Lisa demanded.

  He shook his head.

  ‘What about as an adult?’

  He shook his head again. ‘You refused.’

  She looked appalled. ‘How did she cope?’

  ‘She—you didn’t.’

  Lisa looked at the menu and then began snatching up the magazines from her locker and peering at the print. ‘This is amazing! I’ve always wondered what it was like for the kids I taught.’

  Dan stared at her. ‘ What kids, Linda?’

  ‘I’m a teacher,’ she replied distractedly as she flipped through the magazine trying to find a page with more text, for once not noticing he’d called her Linda. ‘Primary school. I used to come across children with learning disabilities—dyslexia, dyscalculia, attention deficit disorder. I never really understood until now what they saw. Look!’ she crowed, stabbing at the page with a finger. ‘That’s “was,” isn’t it?’

  Dan angled his head to see. ‘Yes. It says “was”.’ He gazed at her in disbelief. “Was” and “saw” were words which dyslexics commonly mistake for each other. Linda had always tripped up on them. He was astonished that she had picked it out. ‘How did you do that?’ he demanded.

  She dropped the magazine and picked up the menu sheet. ‘And that’s “dinner,” isn’t it? And that’s “breakfast”.’

  Dan was stunned. Ds read as Bs and vice versa were also common perceptual errors. ‘How did you do that?’ he repeated uneasily.

  Lisa looked the most animated he’d seen her since she’d regained consciousness. ‘Have you heard of Scotopic Sensitivity Syndrome?’

  Dan nodded silently, the skin prickling over his scalp. He’d never spoken to Linda about SSS, because he knew she wouldn’t have wanted to know. He realized she was still speaking to him. ‘Pardon me?’

  ‘I said, have you heard about the Davis Dyslexia Correction Method?’

  ‘Of course!’ he snapped, thinking of all the books on dyslexia he’d read over the years in the hope of finding some way he could help Linda.

  ‘Sorry.’ She looked hurt.

  Dan sighed. ‘I shouldn’t have snapped at you.’

  She shrugged. ‘I know this is hard for you, too.’

  They sat in awkward silence for a few moments.

  Dan could see she was bursting to ask him something, and smiled reluctantly. Lisa certainly could never be accused of sulking as Linda had done in the past. ‘What is it?’

  ‘Could you…ask if the hospital could organize for me to see somebody before I go home?’ she began tentatively, speaking more quickly as her enthusiasm overflowed. ‘Flash cards with pictures are a good way of learning sentence organization and how to recognize words.’ She paused to snatch up the pen. ‘Hey! How’s my writing?’

  Dan was beginning to feel like he’d been run over by a truck. Where had all this enthusiasm come from? ‘A few sentences at a time. You suffer with dyscoordination when you write and your—’

  ‘My handwriting drifts off the page,’ she finished for him. She began to write her name in the space at the top of the page, her movements slow and awkward. After only a few letters, the tip of her tongue began to peep out of the corner of her mouth, her head tilting to accommodate the wavering, downward passage of her name.

  Dan couldn’t believe what he was seeing. Linda was trying to write with an audience. She wanted to talk about her dyslexia and seemed to know things she had specifically avoided talking about in the past. But most unsettling of all, she was writing with her left hand. And the
name she was laboriously writing at the top of each of the meal slots wasn’t Linda Brogan.

  It was Lisa Jackson.

  Dan sat in the plastic chair, his hands hanging limply between his spread knees, and shook his head wearily.

  ‘Dan?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Do they have meat on this menu?’

  ‘You’re a vegetarian, Linda,’ he replied faintly.

  Her mouth set in the stubborn line he was beginning to recognize, a rebuke in her eyes at being called Linda. ‘In a pig’s ear I am,’ she muttered.

  Throwing up his hands, Dan slumped back against the orange chair.

  Lisa raised her brows. ‘Do you eat meat?’

  ‘Of course I do!’ he snapped.

  ‘Phew! That’s a relief.’ She thrust the pen at him. ‘Can you tick some meat? Please? I was starting to think they didn’t have any on the menu.’

  Dan watched her little face with its bright eyes looking back at him so trustingly and slowly he reached out to take the pen from her. He began to tick everything with meat, saying, ‘You’ve been a vegetarian for eight years, Linda.’ He didn’t think he could take any more surprises.

  ‘Yeah, well that’s eight years too long in my opinion,’ she replied cheerfully. ‘I’m afraid this herbo just fell off the wagon.’

  Dan raised his head. ‘Herbo?’ What the hell was she going to say now?

  ‘Herbivore.’

  As soon as she’d spoken, Lisa seemed to deflate, all the vivacity and sparkle draining from her. She suddenly looked as drained and tired as she had when Dan had first walked in. He stood up, wondering what he’d done to puncture her bubble of happiness, and wishing he hadn’t been so judgmental and negative, but hell, it was damned hard not to react that way when your wife of eight years suddenly does a complete about-turn over a personal issue she has tried to hide from her entire life and insists she eats meat when in the past she only just tolerated cooking some for Dan a few times a week.

  ‘You’re tired,’ he said.

  She nodded and slid down in the bed, her expression so bleak that Dan had to fight the urge to scoop her up and hug her.

  ‘I’ll let you get some sleep.’

  Again, Lisa nodded and, closing her eyes, turned her face into the pillow. ‘Thanks, Dan. Goodnight.’

  ‘Night.’ He watched her for a few moments longer before reaching over to dim her bed light. The room became bathed in a soft glow, an oasis within the bustle and noise coming from the corridor beyond.

  On the way out of the ward, he dropped the menu off at Mary’s desk, scarcely hearing the ward clerk’s effusive thanks. He headed out of the hospital, feeling every bit as desperate as Lisa seemed to be.

  Lisa told herself she wouldn’t cry, but it was so hard not to. The herbivore joke was what had done it this time. She wished she could tell Dan that she and her sister Sherry always called vegetarians ‘herbivores’. Sherry would always demand, ‘Do I look like a caterpillar?’ if the subject of vegetarianism ever came up.

  The loneliness and misery came back to haunt Lisa as she thought of her sister. She slid down in the bed and closed her eyes. She knew Dan had watched her in silence for a few moments before saying goodnight and leaving the room. He seemed to recognize when she needed to be left alone and never made any fuss. When it happened, she always used the excuse of sleep to get rid of anybody who was around.

  Ever since Linda had regained consciousness, nothing had added up.

  Things didn’t add up.

  When she’d first woken up, she had struggled to form words and her speech had been difficult to understand. Dan had wondered if there had been some damage to the part of her brain that was responsible for speech, but the CAT scans showed that there had been no bleeding or swelling in the area. When she finally did speak it was with a Kiwi accent, her speech casually sprinkled with local expressions. She didn’t seem to care less about her appearance; so long as she was clean and fed, she was relatively happy. She’d talked about having corrective surgery for a club foot as a child. And now she had written a stranger’s name using her left hand.

  Linda had always been right-handed.

  Dan felt totally out of his depth. He actually liked the new Linda more than he’d liked the old one. But when he saw things like the ostentatious bunch of roses, he remembered just what she’d been capable of in the past. He didn’t doubt that the roses had come from Jack Millar. The cowardly bastard just wouldn’t leave it alone. Dan had deliberately bumped into Janice Millar at the main hospital and passed on the information that Linda had suffered significant memory loss since the accident. It was one way to ensure that Jack heard about it. Dan had thought about going to his house and confronting him, but knew that this time he would have ended up taking the guy apart as well as upsetting Janice and the kids. He’d been sorry to see how thin and anxious Janice had looked when he spoke to her. It couldn’t be easy knowing that your husband was unfaithful. Dan could sympathize.

  Lately he’d been thinking a lot about the young woman who had died. He didn’t know her name, hadn’t wanted to know her name. But he knew that she lived in the same area as them and that she’d been twenty-seven years old, two years younger than Linda.

  The police had already been to see him. They had wanted to interview Linda, but so far her doctors’ explanations of her mental state and loss of memory had held them off. They were worried about how she would deal with the knowledge that her reckless actions had contributed to the death of another person when she was obviously so depressed. However, if Dan had thought there was anything to be gained for the dead woman’s family, he would have considering letting the police speak to Linda, who would have to face up to what she’d done at some stage. There would definitely be a coroner’s case, and Linda would at the very least get a fine and community service for driving without a licence, but it appeared that the other woman was to blame for the accident.

  The blue car had been Jack’s. He had let Linda drive it, knowing full well she didn’t have a driver’s licence. Her dyslexia had prevented her from even contemplating sitting the test back home, despite Dan’s assurances that thousands of people suffering from dyslexia passed their driver’s licence every year. Linda had refused and had called him a bully. She either caught cabs or rode a mountain bike when he wasn’t around to drive her. When Dan first knew her, they had both enjoyed mountain-biking together, but gradually due to Dan’s work commitments it was something they shared less and less often.

  Linda was very health-conscious and kept herself extremely fit. One of the things Dan had used to entice her to come to New Zealand had been the promise that they’d have more time to take up their hobby again and add a few more. They had for a while, but Linda decided that she preferred to spend time at the gym instead.

  ‘You’re not interested in the same things as me,’ Linda increasingly complained.

  Dan made the mistake of snapping, ‘What you mean is, I don’t want to get acrylic nails or talk about how many butt crunches I can do or which hem length is in this season.’

  He instantly regretted saying it, because he knew by attacking her intelligence he had hurt Linda deeply. He tried to apologize, but it was impossible to apologize to Linda because she couldn’t ever forgive you for making the mistake in the first place.

  He wondered a lot about the young woman who had died, trying to imagine his life ending when he was only twenty-seven. Trying to imagine the pain and devastation of her mother and father having to bury their child. She had sustained serious head injuries, and had died soon after arrival in the Emergency Department from the huge blood loss from liver lacerations. When Dan looked at Linda he wondered if there was anybody up there with a plan. He would never have wished for her death, but he wondered how big a hole Linda would have left behind in people’s lives compared with the one that had possibly been left by the death of the other woman.

  7

  Lisa’s need for her parents was becoming desperate. She burst
into tears at the drop of a hat, but continued to refuse the antidepressants Craig Fergusson recommended. There wasn’t a drug big enough to take away the pain inside her.

  Dan always left her enough loose change to buy a morning paper if she wanted one, and a phone card for the public telephone by the elevators outside the ward. Lisa wondered who on earth he thought a woman with amnesia would call, while Dan wondered why a woman who could barely read would want to buy the New Zealand Herald.

  The day before Lisa was due to leave the hospital, the need to speak to her family became overwhelming. She hobbled the length of the ward to the telephone. Once there, she could hardly push the buttons to dial her home number because her hands were trembling so badly. It rang for such a long time that Lisa was just about to hang up when she heard her mother’s subdued voice say, ‘Hello?’

  Lisa let out a great, shuddering sob and clung to the receiver, unable to speak.

  ‘Hello?’ her mother repeated, sounding slightly irritated.

  ‘Muh—’ Lisa gulped. ‘Mum?’

  ‘Who is this?’ her mother demanded shrilly. ‘Who are you?’

  ‘Ohhh!’ Lisa wailed softly. ‘Mum!’

  Her mother’s voice cracked. ‘Who are you? Why are you doing this?’

  There was the muffled sound of voices in the background. Lisa could hear her mother saying, ‘It sounds like Lisa! It sounds like Lisa!’

  Her father came on the line, spitting furiously, ‘Who are you? I swear I’ll get this call traced and make a complaint to the police! Is this your idea of a joke?’

  ‘Dad!’ Lisa sobbed, clinging to the plastic canopy on the wall above the telephone with one hand. ‘Dad! Please don’t hang up!’

  There was a shocked silence then her father moaned, ‘No! Oh no! Please leave us alone!’

  He hung up.

  Lisa slid to the floor whimpering like an animal, the receiver still gripped in her hand. A passing visitor rushed to get a nurse. They wheeled her back to her room and called Dan, who had to leave his registrar to finish the ward round he was doing and hurry up to the main block.