Page 29 of Hello Stranger

Six

RUNNING INTO THEWeasel in the elevator was not the worst part of coming home from the hospital.

The worst part of coming home was Lucinda.

Who had decided to try to help me.

Of all things.

Starting with forcing me into accepting a ride home.

To be honest, I hadn’t even noticed Lucinda when she’d first arrived that morning. That Pepto-Bismol-pink cardigan she’d chosen was almost the exact shade as the nurses’ scrubs, and I just assumed she was one of them. She chatted with the nurses a good while, and I didn’t catch on until she came over and said, “Ready to go?” You’d think I might have recognized the voice ofthe person who ruined my lifepretty easily… but I didn’t.

She could have been anybody.

Dr. Nicole had explained about voices, too—that my brain was used to all my senses working together in an ecosystem. Having one sense out of whack could throw the others off, too, for a while. So it mighttake some time to learn to recognize voices without the usual visual clues of the face. Over time, she promised, I’d get better at voices alone.

“You might even wind up better at recognizing voices than you were before. Eventually. If—” But she stopped herself.

“If I don’t get the faces back?” I finished.

She nodded. “Be patient with yourself,” she said. “Your brain has a lot to adjust to right now. We think of the senses like they’re separate, distinct things. But they’re really interconnected. It’s going to be chaos in there until things settle. Even easy things will be hard for a while.”

“How long?” I asked.

But I knew the answer, even as she said it. “We just don’t know.”

Anyway, that could turn out to be an upside, in a way.

I was in no hurry to recognize Lucinda’s voice.

I’d agreed to the ride only after I made her swear up and down that she would drop me at the door—only—and not come up.

“But I have to get your prescriptions,” she protested.

“I can get my own damn prescriptions,” I insisted.

But one guess for how the drop-off went down.

That’s right. She picked up my prescriptions without permission and then came up to my hovel un-frigging-invited.

I hadn’t been home fifteen minutes when she showed up.

I was still standing in the entryway, trying to adjust to the unfamiliar silence. Peanut was still being boarded. There was no jangle of tags or scuttling of dog paws as he scrambled to greet me at the door, wagging his tail so hard he bapped himself on the ears. There was no—hopefully still-recognizable—loving little dog face to make me feel like everything could be okay.

It was bad.

And then, suddenly, there was Lucinda. Knocking on my hovel door.

Even worse.

After a lifetime of trying to hide my extreme lack of life success from both her and my dad, her arrival was pure insult to injury.

I thought about ignoring her. But then I decided not to prolong the agony.

“This is where you live?” she asked, stepping in as I opened the door.

“I thought you went home,” I said.

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