Remarkably, Nomi follows his instructions. He makes hot tea, because it turns out she has loose-leaf tea and milk that’s not out of date. She sips the tea, relaxing with the medication. She has no interest in eating, which is probably for the best.
He lights a cigarette—his first in hours—and settles back on the brown lounge chair. When he informs her that he’s staying in her living room tonight, to keep an eye on her, she puts up surprisingly little resistance.
“I mean, I haven’t done a sleepover since junior high, but fine.”
“What’s a sleepover?”
“Y’know, you act so normal, and then you say shit that reminds me you don’t remember growing up American ...” She regards him over the lip of her mug. “Don’t you have work?”
“Nope. I don’t work Monday mornings.”
“Convenient.” Her tone is dry, but she’s almost fully reclined on the leather sofa, a pillow under her head and a gray crocheted rug over her lap. She sighs. “Should’ve known that fucking guy wasn’t a courier.”
“Live and learn, right?”
She sets her mug on the coffee table and rolls to face him. “I just figured it out.”
“What’s that?”
“‘Noone’—it’s a compound of ‘no one.’ Your surname means ‘no one.’”
“Wordplay in place of wit—that’s me,” Simon admits. He sips his tea. “And is Pace your real surname?”
“Pacek. But I don’t use my father’s name.” There’s a dullness in her eyes when she talks about it. She blinks it away. “What’s Guatemala like?”
He ashes his cigarette in the nearest pot plant, then eases back, watching the smoke eddy up. He’s never really explained his experience of Guatemala to anyone before. It wasn’t the standard tourist encounter.
“Well, at first,” he says quietly, “it’s just a small, white-washed room with a dark curtain over the window. Then, when you stop drifting in and out of consciousness, it’s a gruff old man who brings you maize soup and speaks to you in a variety of languages until you recognize one. He explains that you were found by the edge of the river. That when you arrived at his village clinic, he had to jigsaw your head back together with superglue, and he thought you would probably die.”
“But you didn’t die.” Nomi’s voice has a lazy burr, her head cushioned on the pillow. “And there’s really nothing from before that you remember?”
“No.” Simon tilts his head at her. “What is it about the amnesia that you find so fascinating?”
“Ah, it’s just ...” Her body shifts as she looks away from him, toward the ceiling. “We all have memories we’d like to get rid of, right?”
Do we?Simon wonders which of Nomi’s memories she’d like to obliterate.
“I’m afraid that’s not how amnesia works—you don’t get to choose.” He takes a drag, examines his cigarette as he explains further. “I mean, in the beginning, I couldn’t even retain basic information. I’d wake up in a panic every morning, not knowing who or where I was. Flores had to reintroduce himself whenever he came into the room, had to explain the same stuff over and over—I am a doctor. You are in Guatemala. You have a head injury. For the time being, your name is Haw.That first month, I’d go sit outside on the porch, and neighbors passing by from the village would remind me that we’d met before. It took a while for my brain to remember how to remember.”
Simon hears his own voice develop the gentle rolling intonations and cadences of the storytellers in Piedras Negras. He ashes his cigarette once more.
“Amnesia is hard to describe. Physically, it feels as if your head is full of cotton—that was my experience, anyway. Your normal state is astate of confusion. It’s like you’ve lost traction, lost your foothold on the world. Like you’re just an outline of a person. Even after the physical symptoms fade, you experience moments when everything around you feels unreal. Or maybeyoufeel unreal. Does that make sense?”
But when he looks over, Nomi’s already asleep.
Chapter Eleven
September 1987, Monday
When she opens her eyes, the first thing Nomi sees is Simon Noone in her living room.
He’s stretched out in her brown leather lounge chair, knees loose, eyes closed. Hands flopped over his stomach, chest rising and falling with the deep rhythms of sleep. The top of his white Henley has pulled away from his collarbones; he’s got a puckered silver scar that she hasn’t noticed before in the right-side hollow there. His head is canted at an awkward angle—he’s going to wake up with a crick in his neck.
Nomi won’t be the one to wake him. Mainly because she’s nervous about how he might react.
Which is, thinking about it, a dozen different kinds of fucked up. She’s let him into her confidence on the Jackson case. She’s let him sew her up—and with the reaction she experienced during the stitching, boy, wasthatawkward. Now the guy’s asleep in her living room: She’s allowed him into herhome. But she still can’t read him. She hasn’t been able to get a read on him from the start. And that’s a giant red flag, because with her upbringing and line of work, reading people is supposed to be one of her primary skills.
But Noone is like a goddamn Easter Island statue.
