Four hours later, Ray sat across the desk from Dr.
Lawrence Greenfield, the neurologist who'd just finished
Grace's workup.
The six cups of coffee he'd downed had sobered him up,
but his stomach lining felt like he'd been drinking battery
acid.
"So she's going to be okay?" Ray had been through such a
wild range of emotions in the five hours since Grace had
dropped her bombshell, he didn't know how he felt about
this news. Christ, he didn't even know how he was supposed
to feel. He eyed the doctor, who looked way too young to be
fooling around with anyone's grey matter. "She'll walk away
with no real injury?"
"I wouldn't go that far. At least not yet. She did
suffer a Grade Three concussion." Dr. Greenfield leaned
forward in his chair, steepling his hands. "Brain injury is
more of a process than an event, Detective. It can escalate
over as much as seventy–two hours, so we'll have to
wait and watch for the next little while. What I can tell
you is she has no focal injury we can pinpoint with
conventional imaging."
"Focal injury?"
"No concentrated damage in any one area. The scans were
clean. On the other hand, any time a patient loses
consciousness, we have to be suspicious."
"What do you mean, suspicious?"
"She could have a diffuse injury, where the pathology is
spread throughout the brain, rather than focused in a
specific spot. We'll have to follow her for a while to rule
out more subtle brain injury."
Ray slouched back in his chair, kicking a leg out
carelessly. "She's conscious now?"
"Yes. And anxious to see you."
Ray rubbed a hand over the back of his neck. "Then I
think I'd go back and look at those scans again, Doc."
"I'm sorry?"
"She can't possibly want to see me." He congratulated
himself on how matter–of–fact he sounded. "She
left me tonight. She was on her way to join her lover when
she had her accident."
Dr. Greenfield blinked. "She told me she was coming home
from an interview with a man who raises miniature horses,
and that you'd be worried that she was late."
The pony interview? "Doc, that interview was a week ago.
The story ran on Monday."
"I see." Dr. Greenfield leaned back. "Well, this puts
things in rather a different light."
"What are you saying?"
"I'm saying we could be looking at a retrograde amnesia."
Amnesia? Oh, Christ, he was in a bad novel now. "But you
said she'd escaped injury."
"Amnesia can accompany any loss of consciousness,
however brief, although I thought we'd ruled it out."
Greenfield removed his glasses and polished them. "She
identified the date and day."
"Couldn't she have picked that up from the EMTs or the
hospital staff?"
"Absolutely. Amnesia victims can be very good at
deducing such things from clues gleaned after the accident.
But she correctly answered a whole host of other questions
for me, including the results of Tuesday's municipal
election."
Ray digested this information. "Is it possible she
remembers some things, but not others?"
"Oh, yes. In fact, it's quite probable." Dr. Greenfield
replaced his glasses. "Amnesia can leave holes in the
memory, with no predicting where those holes will appear.
The location of the gaps can be as random as the holes in
Swiss cheese. In fact, we call it Swiss cheese memory."
Terrific. Freaking wonderful. "So she might remember the
election results, but not the fact that she's taken a
lover?"
"I suppose it's possible."
To his credit, Greenfield's gaze remained steady, but
Ray could read his eyes. Faint embarrassment, carefully
masked empathy for the cuckolded husband.
"Or she may not have forgotten Romeo at all, right,
Doc?" he rasped. "Just the fact that she told me about him."
"That's also a possibility," the neurologist
conceded. "Whatever the case, Detective, I can vouch for
the fact that she seems genuinely anxious to see you. She's
very much in need of some sympathy and support."
Ray made no comment, keeping his face carefully blank.
"I should add that new memories are especially
vulnerable, since it takes a few days for your brain to
move them into permanent memory." Dr. Greenfield hunched
forward again. "Do you use a computer, Mr. Morgan?"
Ray struggled to follow. "Of course I do. Who doesn't?"
"Well, to make a very crude analogy, fresh events,
whatever might have happened in the last couple of days,
are to your brain what random access memory, or RAM, is to
your computer. If the computer unexpectedly loses power
before a bit of data gets stored on the hard drive, it's
lost. You can boot up again, but whatever was in the RAM
has been wiped out. Thus, with any loss of consciousness,
it's possible to lose memories that were in transition."
Great. She'd probably forgotten she'd dumped him.
Ray stood. "Well, no time like the present, is there,
Doc? Let's go see my darling wife."
Dr. Greenfield's eyes widened. "Surely you don't plan to
tell her ... I mean, you won't —"
"Won't what? Suggest she call her boyfriend so she can
cry on his shoulder instead?" Ray drew himself up, growing
in height and girth, and let his expression go flat in the
way he knew inspired fear. "Why shouldn't I? She chose him."
Dr. Greenfield looked singularly unintimidated, no doubt
because he'd already seen the raw edge of Ray's anguish.
Damn you, Grace, how could you do this to me?
"The fact remains that she seems to need you right now.
She's quite distraught. The last thing she needs is to be
upset any further. If a diagnosis of retrograde amnesia is
confirmed, I'd like to give her a chance to recover her
memories on her own." Dr. Greenfield's intense gaze bored
into Ray. "Can I have your cooperation on that point?"
Ray stared back at the doctor, unblinking. "I hear you,
Doc. Now, take me to her."