Chapter 6

The second talk happened the next day. Since Steve seemed to be anxious to move quickly through the first stages, Virginia, on impulse, brought up her double vision.

“Oh, I have that too,” he said.

Amazing! He said it as if it were perfectly normal. “Does it happen all the time?”

“Mostly when I’m tired. I think it’s funny. People with two heads. Sometimes they overlap, so it looks like a single head with three eyes and two noses. You get used to it.”

“Bzzzt!” she said.

“I mean, it begins to appear natural.”

They had agreed to work through their life stories this time, since they hadn’t gotten around to it in the previous talk. Virginia had jotted down the main points the night before, trying to put herself in Steve’s place and anticipate what he would want to know. So she was ready when he said, “Okay, you go first.”

“I grew up in a suburb of Washington, D.C. My father worked in the District and took the train every day. My mother stayed home until I was ten, then she got a part-time teaching job. I went to Carleton College in Minnesota. That’s where I met Matt, my husband. He ended up

teaching at Macalester, and I got a job at St. Cloud State, so we lived in between.”

“Sorry to interrupt, but you get a Bzzzt!”

“Oh, heck, and I even had time to think in advance about what I was going to say.”

“Maybe we should suspend the rules for a bit. I’m really interested in what you have to say.”

Another point for Steve, she thought. He’s flexible and can figure out alternatives. “Yes, you’re right. It was an okay game to play, but it gets old fast.”

Steve shot back, “You just proved your point.”

“You know what?” suggested Virginia. “This would be a whole lot easier if we could see each other. Should we maybe Skype instead?”

“Either that or we could meet at a coffee shop. Or do we have to wait for Thursday?”

Virginia hesitated. “I know, I’m retired now and I just found a place to live, so I don’t have to be so regimented, do I? I’m just not used to it yet, all this -- dare I call it -- freedom?”

Steve laughed. “Nothing wrong with the word. Unless you think it should be reserved for higher occasions.”

“No way! Retire a word that fits the situation perfectly?”

“Isn’t that what you wanted to do with the word get?”

Cool! thought Virginia. He gets it! “Touché! You know, it’s not that ‘get’ is such a bad word. It’s just that it keeps showing up uninvited, like an in-law or something. Anyway --” She reviewed quickly her yawningly empty schedule. “How about tomorrow?”

“Sunday?” he asked immediately.

The unasked part of the question echoed in her ear. Might as well get this one out of the way now. “I’m not a big church-goer. Are you?”

“Actually I belong to an Atheist group. But I don’t make my plans around their meetings. We could meet for breakfast if you like.”

They diddled around a bit picking the place, then said goodby.

Virginia realized that she was starting to look forward to meeting him. He was smart, he wasn’t hard to draw out, and, so far at least, he was fun to talk to. She reviewed briefly a few of the disastrous dates from the past year. There was the guy who thought they were made for each other because they both liked to take walks; the one who felt obligated to kiss her, even though she wasn’t encouraging him at all; the one who took her into a restaurant to sit down but wouldn’t order anything; the one who bragged about his place in Costa Rica, the one who canceled by email a half hour in advance.

She was just thinking about putting Anax on her leash when she realized that a low background murmur she had taken for a TV or radio in another room was getting louder. No one else was home. She opened the door to the room, but the sound didn’t seem to be coming from there or any other part of the house. She strained her ears, trying to pinpoint a direction. Oddly enough, she thought the sound was actually inside her head.

A word or two she caught clearly. “. . . Spaniel . . .Span! Span! . . . Rabbit-land . . . rabbit dogs.” From the rhythm of the voice she guessed that it was reading aloud, and she was fairly certain that it was a woman speaking. She wasn’t able to discern much of anything else, and eventually she quit trying. The words became even less clear, and the voice began to fade, finally diminishing to something almost inaudible that slipped over the line of her hearing at some point and disappeared.

Was this in any way related to her visual disturbances?

Hearing and sight were scarcely the kind of thing to be confused with each other. Perhaps her ears needed cleaning? Not if the words she thought she heard were entirely in her brain! Oh great, she thought. Now I’m having auditory hallucinations. Please don’t tell me to kill myself. Or to go to France and get somebody crowned, which is just the slow route to the same end.

She looked up auditory hallucinations to find out what it could be besides schizophrenia, which she really, really didn’t want to have. Apart from bipolar disorder and PTSD, which she had no reason to believe she or anyone in her family had ever had, there was a long list of conditions in which it was perfectly normal to hear voices, including migraine, hearing loss, brain tumors, and oh goody, stroke. She quickly looked up How To Tell if You are Having a Stroke. No, her face wasn’t drooping, not when she looked in the mirror. No, her arm wasn’t weak or numb. Neither arm drifted downward when she raised them both. No, she had no difficulty speaking. To prove it, she recited aloud the poem “Invictus,” which she had memorized in high school. All four stanzas. It wasn’t a poem you could mumble or slur. By the time she got to “I am the captain of my soul!” she felt invigorated and relieved. No stroke.

So, that kind of made “migraine” the main suspect. One of these days she would have to find a neurologist in the Denver area and find out if she had missed any recent advances in medical knowledge on the subject. But there was no rush. It might never happen again. In any case, why in the world should she experience a whole slew of migraine symptoms with the glaring exception of headache? Maybe it was something as simple as lack of exercise, which she had to admit she had been neglecting, or even dehydration, which everybody and their sister warned her about as soon as they heard she was new to Colorado. She went out to the kitchen and poured herself a glass of water, took one sip, set it on the counter and promptly forgot about it.

Anax was scratching at the door. It was about her time. Virginia stuffed a plastic bag in her pocket and reached for the leash. If only she herself could be as regular as her dog. Oh, and that reminded her—where did that darn pen get to? Add Prunes to the grocery list on the refrigerator door.