A Diagnosis with Locks

The clock in Dr. Sable’s office read twenty minutes past four. Celia had last checked her watch at ten past three, before she laid a finger on the tenth salt page.

Her watch agreed with the clock.

There was grit beneath her nails. A narrow red mark crossed her palm where she had pressed it against something hard. The page lay inside its oilcloth on the chair beside her, and her measuring chain was coiled under the chair. Someone had brought both in. She had no account of doing it.

“Your name,” Sable said.

“Celia Marrow.”

“Where are you?”

“Your office.” She glanced at the bottles along the wall. “Unless you’ve moved your office into the quay.”

“I haven’t. The date?”

She gave it. He wrote it down, then passed her a glass of water. Its rim was cool against her lower lip.

“Did I answer those before?” she asked.

“Twice. The first time, you gave me another name.”

His pen stopped. Celia set the glass down without drinking.

“Whose?”

“I don’t know yet. You also asked me to fetch a child from an address I could not find. When I asked whether the child was yours, you said I had the wrong woman.”

The red mark on her palm deepened as she curled her fingers. An hour was too large a gap to leave blank. She could account for a dropped minute, even a confused ten. Not this.

“Was I able to walk?”

“Yes. You came here on your own. You gave the porter your name and asked for me.”

That ought to have helped. It did not. Her body had carried her through the streets while her mind had answered to someone else.

Sable moved the page farther from her with the end of a ruler. He did not open the oilcloth. “How much contact?”

“I don’t remember putting my hand on it.”

“Before the missing time.”

“Two fingers. No glove. There was water on the edge.” She looked at him. “I know the handling was foolish.”

“Then I can spare us both that lecture.” He washed her palm with clean water, working salt from the crease below her thumb. His touch was firm and ordinary. “Any pain behind the eyes?”

“No.”

“Do you remember arriving on the island?”

“Yes.”

“Your mother?”

Celia’s gaze went to her coat, hung beside the door. The folded letter was in its inner pocket. “Yes.”

“Good. I’m asking about what remains available to you now, not deciding whether your account of the page is true.”

He dried her hand and tested her pulse. Outside, a cart rattled across the cobbles. She counted six hard knocks before it passed beyond the window.

“Wet crystal carries a donor’s recollection,” he said. “Not just words or a picture. You may take in the weight of a tool in a hand, the taste of a meal, the fear attached to an address. A reader can lose track of which life supplies the next thought.”

“An hour.”

“In your case, an hour. For some people the boundary returns slowly. For others, certain memories do not return at all.” He released her wrist. “Those are different outcomes. I will not tell you which one yours will be on the strength of one examination.”

She reached for her notebook. He let her take it. Her figures from the morning held steady on the page, each in her own cramped hand. Beneath them was a line she could not recall writing: Ask whether she came home. No address. No name.

Sable waited while she shut the book.

“I’ve read dry copies without this,” she said.

“Dry marks can give you a route or a line of script. They don’t give you the life caught in the salt.” He tapped the oilcloth with his ruler. “Keep this covered. No more direct reading today. Eat something, sleep, and come back tomorrow so I can check what you still remember. If the borrowed name returns, or you lose your way in a familiar room, send for me.”

Celia looked toward the door. “Mira asked me not to come here.”

“Then she had a reason. You’re entitled to ask her for it.” He put down the ruler. “I won’t tell the warden she’s ill because you came to my office.”

He said it before she could make the request. She studied the ink on his cuffs, the tired care with which he had written each answer rather than fitting it into a ready-made judgment.

“You called my account a symptom,” she said.

“I recorded what you said and what you could not recall. I haven’t examined the page.” He glanced at the notebook in her hand. “Nor can I examine the woman whose memory you may have read.”

From the hall came the scrape of a bolt. Celia had heard it twice since entering. The second time, someone beyond it had begun singing and stopped halfway through a word.

Sable followed her glance. “There is something I can show you. Only from the hall. No patient names.”

She could have refused. Instead she put the notebook away and stood, bracing one hand on the desk until the floor held still.

The locked ward was at the back of the clinic, beyond the rooms where patients waited for cough mixtures and bandages. Sable opened the outer door with a key, then shut it behind them. Soap and boiled linen covered a faint smell of salt. A nurse carrying a tray stepped around them and greeted Sable with a nod.

Celia had expected bars. There were plain doors with high windows, a table for folding linen, and a bell cord tied where anyone in the hall could reach it. The locks were real. So were the warm stockings drying near a stove.

At one doorway, Sable stopped. A man sat inside with a spoon laid across his knee. A bowl of broth rested on the table before him.

“He was given a page by a dealer,” Sable said quietly. “He read it over several evenings. With his family’s permission, I can tell you that he used to repair nets. I won’t tell you whose memories are with him.”

The man lifted the spoon. He held it above the bowl and turned toward the window.

“Does he know them?” Celia asked.

“Some mornings. At others he calls his wife by a name that belongs to a stranger. When she corrects him, he can repeat the correction. It does not always stay.”

The nurse entered the room and placed her hand beside the bowl, where the man could see it. She said something too low for Celia to catch. He set down the spoon. Together they started again.

Sable led her on before she could watch more.

At the end of the hall, a woman sat at a table sorting buttons by size. Her hands moved with quick skill until a bell sounded somewhere outside. She swept the buttons into her apron and called for a door to be shut. The nurse reached her before she stood.

“She was reading for pay,” Sable said. “She can sew. She remembers where she lives. The bell brings back a fire from the recollection she read. We keep this door locked because she has run into the street trying to get children out of a house that is no longer there.”

The nurse drew up a chair. After a while, the woman loosened her grip on the apron and tipped the buttons back onto the table.

Celia went to the outer door. Sable unlocked it without asking her to look into another room.

Back in his office, her page still sat wrapped on the chair. A damp corner had darkened the oilcloth. She kept her hands at her sides.

“Will the man with the spoon recover?” she asked.

“He has improved. That is not the same as a promise.” Sable put a clean sheet of paper between the parcel and the chair cushion. “One man’s course is not yours, Miss Marrow. I showed you the ward because you asked what exposure can do, not because I’ve decided you belong in it.”

She had not asked in those words. He had answered anyway.

“If I hand Jonah a page,” she said, “and he puts it before a printer?”

“A printed account is not wet salt. It won’t put a stranger’s childhood in a reader’s head.” Sable paused while the singing began again in the far room. “An original page can. So can a crystal passed around to prove an account. People will ask to see it. Some will pay to read it. I cannot tell you to conceal evidence of a wrong because others may misuse it. I can tell you what I’ve treated.”

Jonah had asked for proof he could carry off the island. She had meant to give him a copy of the figures, perhaps the page itself long enough to inspect. It would have been simple to put the parcel into his hands and let his doubt become certainty.

She took a fresh sheet from Sable’s desk. “May I make a dry impression here?”

“I’d prefer you wait until tomorrow.”

“For my health, or the table?”

“Your health. The table can be replaced.”

Celia set the sheet down. Her fingers still knew how to hold a pencil; they closed around one before she caught herself.

“I need to keep working,” she said.

“I know. Today, let the figures you already have do their work.” Sable slid the pencil out of reach, not far, just beyond her hand. “Come back tomorrow and argue with me about the rest.”

Outside the clinic, the late light gave the quay a pale edge. Jonah waited by the steps with his hands in his pockets. His eyes went at once to the covered parcel.

“Well?” he asked.

“I lost an hour. Sable has told me to stop for the day.”

“Did he take the page?”

“No.” She shifted the parcel under her arm, keeping the damp corner clear of her coat. “I won’t give it to you wet.”

“I asked for the figures.”

“You asked to check them against the source.”

“I did.” He looked at her hand. “What happened in there?”

She opened her notebook to the morning’s measurements and held it out. He could read those. The line beneath them stayed under her thumb.

“We’ll need a better way to make copies,” she said.

Jonah took the notebook but did not pull it from her grip. “All right. Tomorrow, then.”

Celia let go. Across the harbor, the lighthouse lamp had begun to show in the gathering dimness. Jonah bent over her figures while she stood beside him with the wrapped page, waiting to see if any of the numbers were wrong.