Anne Tyler: Noah's Compass

“Your mom has a boyfriend?” Liam asked.

“Or something like that.”

“I didn’t realize.”

But Kitty was punching phone keys. “Hey,” she said. “What’s up.”

Liam collected himself with some effort and rose to see about supper.

The smell of vinegar persisted. It seemed to emanate from his own skin. He asked Kitty over supper (canned asparagus soup and saltines), “Do I smell like vinegar to you?”

“Huh?”

“I keep thinking I smell like vinegar.”

She fixed him with a suspicious stare and said, “Do you know what year this is?”

“Stop asking me that!”

“Mom told me to. It’s not my idea.”

“Half the time I don’t know what year it is anyhow,” he said, “unless I take a minute to think. The years have started flying past so fast that I can’t keep track. You’ll see that for yourself, by and by.”

But Kitty appeared to have lost interest in the subject. She was crushing saltines into her soup with the back of her spoon. Her fingers were long and flexible, ending in nail-bitten nubbins-lemur fingers, Liam thought. He wasn’t sure she had taken so much as a mouthful of soup yet. When she felt his eyes on her, she looked up. “I’m going to have to sleep in the room he broke into, aren’t I,” she said.

“Pardon?”

“The room where the burglar came in. I saw that door! That’s the one he entered through, isn’t it.”

“Well, but then it wasn’t locked. Now it is,” Liam said. He had checked the lock himself, earlier. It was a little up-and-down lever arrangement, not complicated at all. “If you like, though,” he said, “I can sleep there.”

So much for letting his memory come back to him in the dark. But already he had begun to admit that that wasn’t likely to happen.

“Seems to me you’d be scared too,” Kitty told him. “I would think you’d have the heebie-jeebies forever after! Living in the place where you were attacked.”

“Now that I have been attacked, though, I somehow feel that means I won’t be attacked again,” he said. “As if a quota has been reached, so to speak. I realize that’s not logical.”

“Durn right it’s not logical. Guy breaks in, sees all the loot, doesn’t have time to grab it… More logical is, he decides to come back for it later.”

“What loot?” Liam asked. “I don’t have any jewels, or silver, or electronics. What would he come back for, except that wallet with seven dollars in it?”

“He doesn’t know it’s seven dollars.”

“Well, I hardly think-”

“Is seven dollars it?”

“What?”

“Is that all you’ve got in the world?”

Liam began to laugh. “You’ve heard of banks, I trust,” he said.

“How much do you have in the bank?”

“Really, Kitty!”

“Mom says you’re a pauper.”

“Your mother doesn’t know everything,” he said. And then, “Who is this so-called boyfriend of hers?”

Kitty batted the question away with a flick of her hand. “She’s worried you’ll end up on the streets, what with getting fired and all.”

“I wasn’t fired, I was… downsized. And I have a perfectly adequate savings account. You tell her that. Besides which,” he said, “I did turn sixty in January.” He let a significant pause develop.

The pause was for Kitty to realize that she had forgotten his birthday. His whole family had forgotten, with the exception of his sister, who always sent a Hallmark card. But Kitty just said, “What’s that got to do with it?”

“After fifty-nine and a half, I’m allowed to draw on my pension.”

“Right; I bet that’s a fortune.”

“Well, it’s not as if I need very much. I’ve never been an acquirer.”

Kitty dropped another saltine in her soup and said, “I’ll say you’re not an acquirer. When I went into the den I was like, ‘Whoa! Oh, my God! The burglar guy stole the TV!’ Then I remembered you don’t even own a TV. I mean, I knew that before but I just never put it all together. I’m going to miss all my shows while I’m here! There isn’t a single TV anywhere in this apartment!”

“I don’t know how you’re going to survive,” Liam said.

“I’ll bet the burglar looked around and thought, Great; someone’s beaten me to it. Everything’s already been ripped off, he thought.”

“Funny how people always assume a burglar’s a he,” Liam said. “Aren’t there any women burglars? Somehow you never hear of them.”

Kitty tipped part of her milk into her soup. Then she started stirring her soup around and around, dreamily.

“I keep trying to put a face on him. Or her,” Liam said. “I’m sure it must be somewhere in my subconscious, don’t you think? You can’t imagine how it feels to know you’ve been through something so catastrophic and yet there’s no trace of it in your mind. I almost wish you all hadn’t cleared away the evidence. Not that I don’t appreciate it; I don’t mean that. But it’s as if I’ve been excluded from my own experience. Other people know more about it than I do. For instance, how bad were my bed sheets? Were they soaked with blood, solid red? Or just spattered here and there.”

“Yuck,” Kitty said.

“Well, sorry, but-”

A throaty rasp started up, like the sound a toad or a frog would make. Kitty lunged out of her chair and grabbed her cell phone from the coffee table. “Hello?” she said. And then, “Hey.”

Liam sighed and set his spoon down. He hadn’t made much headway with his soup, and Kitty’s bowl was fuller than when she had started-a disgusting mush of crackers and swirled milk. Maybe tomorrow they should eat out someplace.

“Oh…” she was saying. “Oh, um… you know”-clearly responding in code.

Liam’s hands had a parched look that he had never noticed before, and his fingers trembled slightly when he held them up. Also, the vinegar smell was still bothering him. He was sure it must be obvious to other people.

This was not his true self, he wanted to say. This was not who he really was. His true self had gone away from him and had a crucial experience without him and failed to come back afterward.

He knew he was making too much of this.

Liam had once had a pupil named Buddy Morrow who suffered from various learning issues. This was back in the days when Liam taught ancient history, and he had been paid an arm and a leg to come to Buddy’s house twice a week and drill him on his reading about the Spartans and the Macedonians. Anyone could have done it, of course. It didn’t require special knowledge. But the parents were quite well off, and they believed in hiring experts. The father was a neurologist. A very successful neurologist. A world-renowned authority on insults to the brain.

Liam liked the phrase “insults to the brain.” In fact it might not be a phrase that Dr. Morrow himself had used; he might have said “injuries to the brain.” He’d said neither one to Liam, in any case. They’d talked only about Buddy’s progress, on the few occasions they’d spoken.

Still, on Tuesday morning at 8:25 Liam telephoned Dr. Morrow’s office. He chose the time deliberately, having given it a good deal of thought in the middle of the night when Dr. Morrow’s name first occurred to him. He reasoned that there must be a patients’ call-in hour, and that probably this was either prior to nine a.m. or at midday. Eight a.m. until nine, he was betting. But he had to wait till after Kitty left for work, because he didn’t want her overhearing. She left at 8:23, walking to the bus stop beside the mall. He was on the phone two minutes later.

He told the receptionist the truth: he was Dr. Morrow’s son’s ex-teacher, not an official patient, but he was hoping the doctor might be able to answer a quick question about some aftereffects of a blow to his head. The receptionist-who sounded more like a middle-aged waitress than the icy young twit he’d expected-clucked and said, “Well, hold on, hon; let me check.”