I glanced at the open file on my desk; checked Luminita’s date of birth. She was only twenty-eight.
“It says here that you’re a musician,” I said. “Do you do that fulltime? Or do you have other means to support yourself?”
Luminita looked at me hard. “Are you asking if I have a real job, Doc?” She didn’t wait for my response. “I was a waitress when I lived in Toronto. I came to Chicago to focus on my songwriting. I was working on an album before I woke up to this nightmare.”
Canada. I saw her face, a child’s face, staring up at me. That night in the hotel.
“I didn’t mean to offend,” I said.
“None taken.” Luminita continued to stare at the screen, transfixed by the image of her brain. She spoke about the seizure that brought her into the hospital for MRIs and EEG scans. It happened in a friend’s apartment—one moment Luminita was strumming her guitar, and the next, she was convulsing on the floor.
“The seizure changed my mind,” she said. “I haven’t been able to write any songs.”
I assured her that Agraphia was correctable through cognitive remediation. “Perhaps you should take a break for a while,” I suggested. “Focus on the here and now.”
I knew I had said the wrong thing, because she wasn’t listening. “All the music in my head just stopped,” she said.
In the beginning, Myra and I used to trade stories about our former spouses. The subject of marital failure bonded us like old war veterans.
Myra knew about her first husband’s infidelity for years.
“The divorce wasn’t as hard as I expected,” she said. “It was enduring the marriage that was the real hell. We stayed for the boys; tried to keep it together for their sake. It was different back then. People didn’t get divorced like they do nowadays.”
Her sons were grown now, both living in New York. I never fathered children. Myra was a retired math teacher, several years older than me. There was a weathered, but matronly edge to her. We met a decade after my first marriage, through internet dating. Both of us were eager to share in the comforts of a stable, married life.
But there were still roads between us, secrets we kept from one another. Before Myra, I spent as much time as possible at the hospital. In the event of spare evenings, I frequented a strip bar called Jane Park. I took trips alone to places my first wife and I had never traveled—Mexico, Canada, Germany, Prague—and claimed these countries as my own.
I tried to tell her once. Myra and I were sitting out on our back porch, drinking gin and tonics. It was late August, and the evenings were still warm. I asked her how she ever survived divorced life.
“Survived?” Myra laughed. “I have to say it was a relief to be on my own again.” She sipped her drink and thought a moment. “I just kept myself busy. Kept teaching. Took trips with my girlfriends and my sons. Dated here and there. Met you.”
“But you handled yourself well?” I asked.
Myra eyed me curiously. “I would hope so. What are you trying to say, Jim?”
We looked at one another, but Myra continued before I could respond.
“You don’t have to tell me,” she said. “Whatever happened, just leave it in the past.”
From her first marriage, Myra said she learned the value of not giving herself entirely away.
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