Read Noah's Compass for Free Online

the parking booth before he spoke again. “It is not just as well,” he said. “I’m missing a piece of my life. I lie down one night; I go to sleep; I wake up in a hospital room. Can you imagine how that feels?”
    “You don’t have any recollection whatsoever? Like, hearing a suspicious noise? Seeing somebody in the doorway?”
    “Nothing.”
    “Maybe it will come back to you when you get into bed tonight.”
    “Ah,” he said. He thought about it. “Yes, that makes sense.”
    “You know how sometimes you dream about someone, and you forget you dreamed at all but then you happen to see that person and this sort of inkling will flit across your mind …”
    “Yes, it’s possible,” Liam said.
    They stopped for a traffic light, and he suddenly felt impatient to be home. He would lie down on his bed immediately and see if the memory wafted up from his pillow the way his past dreams often did. Probably nothing would come until dark, but it wouldn’t hurt to try earlier.
    “If it were me, though,” Barbara said, “I’d be happier not knowing.”
    “You say that now. I bet you wouldn’t feel that way if it really happened.”
    “And how about your nerves? Do you really think you’ll be able to sleep comfortably in that apartment again?”
    “Of course,” he said.
    She sent him such a long doubtful glance that the car behind them honked; the light had changed to green. “I’d be terrified, myself,” she said as she stepped on the gas.
    “Well, I will lock the patio door from now on. Do you know how you would lock one of those plate-glass doors that slides sideways?”
    “There’s a thingamajig, I believe. We’ll look.”
    This implied that she would be coming in with him, and he was happy to hear it. It wasn’t fear of another breakin he felt so much as distrust of his own capabilities. He had lost his self-confidence. He wasn’t sure anymore that he was fully in charge. Intruders were the least of his worries.
    Barbara parked in the proper lot without his directing her. Obviously she had grown familiar with his apartment. And she had his keys in her purse—his worn calfskin key case with his car key and his door key. She took them out as she was waiting for him to inch forth from the passenger seat. (Standing up too fast made his head go spacey.) “Want an arm?” she asked him, but he said, “I’m all right.” And he was, once he’d waited for the amoebas to clear from his vision.
    The pine needles gave off a nice toasty scent in the sunshine, but the foyer smelled as cold and basement-like as ever. Barbara unlocked his front door and then stood back to let him go first. “Now, the girls and I did clean up a little,” she said.
    “Did it need it?”
    “Well, somewhat.”
    He wasn’t sure what she meant when he first entered, because the living room looked just the way he’d left it: more or less in order if you didn’t count the few unpacked cartons lined up along one wall. He moved down the hall past the den, Barbara close on his heels, and saw nothing different there, either. But when he reached the bedroom, he found a runner of brown wrapping paper on the carpet leading toward the bed. And the bed was fitted with linens that he had never seen before—an anemic light-blue blanket, slightly pilled, and sheets sprinkled with flowers. He had avoided patterned sheets ever since a childhood fever in which the polka dots on his sheets had swarmed like insects.
    “We rented one of those carpet shampooers from the supermarket,” Barbara said. “But the carpet’s not completely dry yet; you’ll have to walk on the paper a while. And your sheets and blanket were, well, I’m sorry; we put them in the trash. I didn’t know where you kept your extras.”
    “Oh,” he said. “I see.”
    He stood there in a daze, looking slowly from bed to window to closet. Everything seemed benign and ordinary and somehow not quite his own. But maybe that was because it wasn’t quite his own; he had