Page 123 of The Wild Beneath

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 eyesare 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.”