Sally winces, and Mr. Scott sits up, alarmed.
“I’m so sorry,” she whispers in as soothing a voice as she can manage, “I didn’t mean to wake you.”
“You didn’t.”
It is the first coherent thing he’s said since he told her, back in the box, that he wasn’t much for plays, and she is so glad for it, she allows herself a real smile. “Well, maybe not. But lie back down anyway. Before you pop your sutures.”
“Sutures,” he repeats, like he is trying to summon the memory of a bad dream. He returns his head to his pillow.
“They’re on your back.”
He moves a hand to his face and touches the chalk. “And this?”
“It’s a burn.”
“A bad one?”
“I’m not a good judge, but I suspect your days of growing a beard may be behind you.”
“Hmmm,” he says as he absentmindedly strokes the hair on the good side of his face. “It’s a good thing I was never very attractive.”
“So, youdohave a sense of humor,” she says with a laugh. “I was worried.”
“Have I been that bad?” he asks, and she just shakes her head and pours him a glass of water.
He drains the glass, then hands it to her and looks around the room. “Where am I?”
“Mary Cowley’s. Do you know her?”
“I’m afraid not.”
“She lives near the green and took in a number of injured people the night of the fire.”
“I’m grateful.”
“Do you remember getting here?”
Mr. Scott shakes his head apologetically.
“That’s probably just as well,” says Sally, but a tiny part of her regrets his lapse in memory. “What’s the last thing youdoremember?”
He closes his eyes, as if he has to think hard to come up with something. “I was in the box. Trying to calm the young woman with the big brooch, from Fredericksburg. What was her name?”
She was there with a pair of sisters, none of them older than twenty, but Sally can’t remember her name. All she remembers is that Tom had been flirting with her, mercilessly, before the curtain rose.
“When she saw how crowded the hallway was, she panicked,” says Mr. Scott. “I couldn’t get her to move.”
Sally cocks her head, as if a different angle will allow her to see the man in front of her more clearly. “So, you stayed?”
He nods, then tries to shift in the bed, but moving seems to be painful. “By the time I convinced her she wouldn’t be trampled to death, I couldn’t see six inches in front of me.”
Even now, Sally can smell the smoke, can taste the hot tar in the back of her throat. She wonders if what he’s saying is true, or if he is like every other man she knows—incapable of telling a story in which he is not the hero.
“Do you know what happened to her?” she asks.
He shakes his head. “We were in the corridor, that’s the last thing I remember.”
Sally would like to reassure him, to tell him that she remembers seeing the girl with the brooch—in one of the windows, or later, on the green. But she can do no such thing, so she changes the subject instead.
