Page 9 of Property of Prophet

I make the other. She nods once and moves on, her fingers light at my ribs, collarbone, and the side of my skull, reading me through touch the way I read her through the glass. She is checking what is broken. There is no tenderness in it, nor any cruelty. There is only the work done well.

“Follow my finger.” She lifts one and moves it slowly across my vision. I follow. “What’s the last thing you remember.”

It is not phrased as a question. None of it is. She isn’t asking me things... she’s collecting them.

“Falling,” I say. My voice surprises me. It’s rough, but for different reasons. “Light, the cold, then you.”

Her finger stops for half a breath, then it keeps moving.

She feeds me before she lets me speak again. Broth from a tin cup, held to my mouth because my hands shake too much to be trusted with it, and I let her. I am ashamed of how much I want its warmth and how little of that wanting is about the broth. When the cup is empty, she sets it aside, sits back on her heels, and looks at me properly for the first time. I have the sense of being assessed by someone who has assessed many things and trusted almost none of them.

So, I ask my questions carefully. The way you would hold out a hand to an animal that has been hurt before.

“Where am I?”

“My cabin.”

“Where is the cabin?”

“Alaska.” A pause, as if deciding how much a thing like me has earned. “Far from anywhere. That’s the point of it.”

“How long?”

“Two days. You slept through most of it.”

“Does anyone know I’m here?”

Something moves behind her eyes, quick and gone, like a fish turning under ice. “No,” she says. “Nobody knows anything is here. That’s how I keep it.”

It should comfort me. A man with no memory and a body that should be dead has reason to be glad no one is looking. Instead, her answer bothers me. There’s something she isn’t saying, and I don’t know enough yet to ask what it is. I let it lie. I am in no condition to go looking for what people choose not to tell me, and besides, she has earned her silences.

Three answers. She gives them flat, stripped down, nothing offered that I did not ask for. And still, I receive each one the way you would receive something pressed into your palm and folded closed, carefully, as though it might be taken back. I do not think she knows she is giving me anything at all. To her, they are facts. To me, they are the only solid ground in a world that has, very recently, stopped having a floor.

“Thank you,” I say.

She frowns, as if the words do not fit the size of what prompted them. “For what?”

“For telling me. For—” I stop. There is too much under it. “For staying. In the snow. You didn’t have to.”

“No,” she agrees. “I didn’t.” And she does not say why she did.

I should not call her what I call her next. It surfaces before I can examine it, the way a name will when the thing it belongs to is standing in front of you. “You were a medic,” I say. “Weren’t you, Doc?”

Her hands go still on her knees. “Don’t call me that.”

“Why not?”

“Because I’m not. Not anymore.”

A whole country stands behind those words, fenced off, posted against trespass. I do not go into it. But I look at her, the state of her hands, the way she reads my body without thinking, the order she keeps, heat then patient, sequence over feeling, and I know what I know. Somewhere in me, where the smooth, certain thing used to live, there is still a sense for what people are underneath what they will admit to.

“All right, Doc,” I say.

Her jaw tightens. She waits, I think, for me to push, the way the men who taught her not to trust must have pushed. I don’t. I just let it sit there between us, the small wrong name, gentle and unmoved.

She lets it go. She doesn’t say I can keep it. She only stops fighting it, which, out here, I am beginning to understand, is nearly the same thing.

The dog decides before she does.