Chapter 49
Before
The sun rises as Aiden delivers the unconscious woman to his own hospital, one hundred kilometres away.
Against the whop-whop-whop of the helicopter rotors, he tracks her pulse under his fingers. They land with a clunk. He wheels her across the landing
pad and through the sliding doors into the emergency department.
Doctors descend. They’re his friends, his colleagues, and they pat him on the back like he’s a hero. Blood draws, an oxygen
mask covering her face, a papery hospital wristband. Her heart beats across the telemetry screen in a faint green tracing.
Her lab results unspool from the printer.
“This woman is either very sick or a medical marvel,” Sally, a senior nurse, says. Her reading glasses look as if they’re
about to fall off the tip of her nose. “Her hemoglobin is off the charts.”
Aiden sits beside her in a plastic chair. Her skin is pale and hot. She’s running a fever. More nurses come and go. A chest
X-ray film is pinned on the light board behind him. Her heart is bigger than normal.
“She needs an ICU bed,” Aiden’s colleague, Dr. Chris Calhoun, says. He wedges the phone between his ear and shoulder. “Get
critical care on the line. We need to transfer.”
Another airlift. They move her to a bigger city hospital before she wakes up.
Aiden goes along, because otherwise, there would be no one with her.
That feels intolerable to him for a reason he can’t pinpoint.
He doesn’t leave her side, can’t extract himself.
She is beautiful, alone, and he feels responsible.
When she does wake up briefly the following day, Aiden’s busy looking at every detail of her face. The soft curve of her jaw
and her porcelain skin. So he’s the first one she sees when she opens her eyes. She smiles at him as if she’s relieved. Faint
lines gather beside her twinkly eyes.
“Who are you?” he asks. He hadn’t planned what to say. His question feels strangely anticlimactic. She looks at him for just
a moment, before falling back asleep.
Doctors come and go, medical students and residents and specialists of all breeds, flipping through chart pages, examining.
More blood draws, lengthy discussions at the bedside and shrugging of shoulders. CT scans and an echocardiogram.
When she wakes again twenty-four hours later, Aiden has prepared his questions. They’re a waterfall: “Where did you come from?
How’d you end up canoeing so far out on the coast?”
She reaches up and puts a hand onto his throat while he talks. He’s taken aback by her touch, but he doesn’t stop her.
“What’s your name?” he asks.
“What’s your name?” she echoes.
He tells her, but she asks the same thing again like she enjoys the sound of the question.
Over a span of days, she starts saying more words. They don’t string together.
“She told me where to go,” she says.
“Who told you?”
“The water.”
“Yes, that’s where I found you.”
Is she dreaming or awake? Half the time her wide, grey eyes are closed.
He thinks back to the broken oar. Was she canoeing?
She says the oar is not hers, but he calls her Mara anyway.
She smiles at him often. She reminds him of when he was a child on the bow of his Uncle Henry’s fishing boat, his face in the wind.
It has the same feeling. He’s mesmerized by her voice.
But he can’t get a coherent story out of her.
Her doctors don’t understand. Her fever breaks and her red blood cell count normalizes. They transfer her back to Aiden’s
hospital and put her in the psych ward. Amnesia, they say, delirium. Anoxic brain injury. Cardiomyopathy. She has nowhere
to go; she can’t look after herself.
Aiden doesn’t know what to believe.
He loves her voice and the way it flows over his skin. A longing for her assembles itself. Each moment away from her he feels
a bit unbalanced. He can’t remember feeling like this before, this level of connection.
He sits beside her. Her words are clearer now, but all she’s talking about is getting out.
“I’m stuck in here,” she says.
“Where do you want to go?”
“I can’t breathe. It’s so dry.”
He tries to hand her some apple juice in a flimsy paper cup.
She covers her face with the blanket.
“They’re looking after you. You need to be here,” he says.
“Do you belong in here?” she asks from behind her shield of bedding.
The paper cup dents between Aiden’s fingers and juice overflows, dripping onto the floor.
Locked in the ward, she gets more and more desperate. But she has no paperwork, no formal identity, no place to go, and no
plan. And even though she looks well, is she still sick? What about the oversized heart and the slow heartbeat?
A few days later, Mara tries to leave. She bangs on the Plexiglas barrier of the nursing station.
They drag her back to bed and put her in wrist restraints. She cries. He holds her warm hands because she wants him to. He listens to her breathe, wipes away her tears.
“It’s okay,” he soothes.
“I don’t think this is okay.”
It’s a month more of legal wrangling with the public guardian and trustee before Aiden is able to negotiate her release. He
works his shifts, he wrangles, he sits with Mara. He tries to get her to drink water from a polystyrene cup, through a bendy
plastic straw. None of his colleagues understands why he’s so attached to her. They gossip about her in the hallways.
“Are you thinking straight, man?” Chris says outside the ward. He puts a heavy hand on Aiden’s shoulder, gets close like he
doesn’t want to embarrass him.
“I’m fine.”
“She’s psychotic,” he says quietly. Aiden flinches. “And she doesn’t even know who she is.”
But when he sits next to her: Mara makes him feel . . . arrived, like he’s come back into his own flesh.
He finally succeeds in having her released in November. She’s elated, if a bit shocked, to leave the hospital. She walks out
with a list of follow-up appointments in her hand: a cardiologist, a psychiatrist. She crumples the piece of paper and throws
it in the nearest trash can. Aiden hesitates, then leaves it there.
“Can we go to the beach?” she asks.
They walk to the end of the pier. They’re alone. He wants to let her find her feet. Maybe she’ll start to explain, maybe there’ll
be some answers for him.
“Will you stay with me?” he asks. It seems the only thing worth asking.
She looks at the horizon and says: “I can’t leave yet.”
“Then stay.”
Mara turns and leans into him, nestles her whole body against him. She looks up at his face. How perfect she feels, like a piece of himself returned after being lost. He can’t help it. He leans down and presses his lips against hers.
She kisses him back and twines her fingers through his hair.
Her slow heart beats against his chest.
The two of them together. Aiden has never felt more right about anything.