"So… baseball." She pursed her lips, taking a moment to prop her feet up on the metal runner of his hospital bed. "Do you have a favorite baseball team?"
"No… not that I know of."
"But you have heard of baseball?"
"Maybe." He grinned sheepishly. "I don't remember."
Dorothy rolled her eyes, even as she felt the corners of her own mouth turning upward in response. His new favorite word was maybe, and she had to admit that it was kind of growing on her, too.
She had heard a lot of maybes in the last two days, been witness to innumerable shrugged shoulders and blank stares, and they still hadn't come any closer to figuring him out. In all that time, no one had come forward to claim him or to explain what he had been doing out in that road in the middle of a storm. And he was still technically a John Doe – although Dorothy and all the third floor nurses called him Lucas now, one of them going so far as to wipe away his old name from the patient board and write the new one in its place. But a made-up name didn't do much to hide the fact that they had learned almost nothing about him since he had showed up here.
Dorothy, though, was making it her personal mission to get to the bottom of it all. Thus the questions about baseball, and just about anything else she could think of.
She had started dropping by his room during her breaks, just for a few minutes at first, but each visit somehow seemed to last a little longer than the last, until she would finally glance down at her watch and realize she had been there for far longer than she had originally intended. And with her assistance, he was already starting to take short walks around the room, into the hallway, and finally, today, down the corridor all the way to the nurses' station. His recovery was going well, although it shouldn't have been that surprising – he was young and healthy and clearly in good shape. And now that he was able to stand, she was finding it hard not to notice how tall he was, or the span of his shoulders, or the hard, lean muscle of his arms as he strained to push himself up off the hospital bed.
Today, though, his arms were covered, as he sat in bed wearing the standard hospital gown along with a gray zip-up hoodie that she had brought for him this morning. During her visit yesterday afternoon, he had complained about being cold… well, he hadn't complained exactly – he seemed more given to stoic endurance than anything else – but she could tell he was uncomfortable with just the gown and the thin cotton blankets that he had been issued by the hospital. It wasn't uncommon – a lot of patients got chilly in the rooms – but, of course, those patients also had family members to bring them something warm to wear from home.
So before she left work, she had dug around downstairs in the lost and found to see if she could find something that would fit him. There wasn't much, considering his size – for a brief moment, she did let herself think about his shoulders – but eventually she found a sweatshirt in decent condition, almost near the bottom of the bin. Of course, it needed to be washed, so she took it home and threw it into a near-full load of laundry along with some detergent and a little fabric softener. Only after it came out of the dryer did she realize that it smelled just like her own clothes, and her sheets, and the pillowcase she rested her head against as she tried to go to sleep that night.
And as the two of them had taken their brief walk down the corridor, she had caught the scent of it again. Her hands had been on either side of him for support, her face angled downward as she monitored his movement as he walked, and even so she had breathed it in, fresh and clean, finding, to her surprise – and partial embarrassment – that she could feel her heart racing just a tiny bit within her chest. It was only fabric softener, for crying out loud, she had told herself. There was no reason it should have been having any effect on her at all.
Now, at least, she was sitting far enough away from him that thankfully all she could make out was the faint scent of hospital disinfectant.
"Okay, so I have a new theory," she offered, as she snapped the elastic band off her wrist and began to pull her hair into a messy ponytail.
"Alright," he replied, his eyes glinting with amused skepticism.
"So… what if you're… a time traveler?"
To his credit, he didn't laugh, although his gaze narrowed even further in disbelief.
"No, no, wait, hear me out…" And then she couldn't help but grin. "You're a time traveler, and you somehow lost your time machine. And you're from… I don't know, the Middle Ages, with all the knights and castles and stuff."
She could hear herself getting excited and talking faster than normal, probably sounding more than a little childish and silly, but for some reason she didn't care, and the way he was looking at her, it didn't seem like he did either.
"It totally explains the sword, and why you don't have any ID… and why you don't know about baseball… and why you hate the taste of Diet Coke." She glanced over at the half-finished can of pop sitting on the table next to her; yesterday, she had offered to let him try some, with less than successful results.
"Well, I'm not sure why anyone likes that particular beverage," he said, a smirk edging across his features. "It's disgusting."
"Don't judge. Once we figure out what your favorite drink is, I'm sure it'll be terrible," she teased.
Within the space of a heartbeat, the smirk had transformed into a genuine smile, the long planes of his face curving to meet the roundness of his cheeks. His eyes were full and soft as he looked at her, the color once again drawing her into their depths, and Dorothy could feel the weight of her breath as it lingered in her throat.
"So…" she said, quietly exhaling, doing her best to ignore the growing warmth of the room. "Time traveler?"
He shrugged his shoulders. "Maybe."
She let out a little laugh and glanced away, letting the quiet settle over them for a moment. He was still looking at her, she knew, and before she looked back, she wanted to find something else to say, something more practical and direct perhaps, something that might dispel the disconcerting, although not entirely unpleasant, stricture of her ribs against her heart.
"Have you thought any about what you're going to do after you're discharged?"
"What?" he asked, his brows knitting together in confusion.
"Well, you can't stay here forever, you know," she said. "Maybe tomorrow, or the day after, they're going to release you from the hospital."
His gaze swiveled down towards his lap and then over at the far wall, formless and empty as he considered her words. The smile had now faded entirely from his lips, the warmth in his eyes siphoned away, and she felt a tiny chill racing down her spine. But he had to have known this was coming, she reasoned. No one could possibly imagine that they would get to stay in a hospital as long as they wanted. But the lost expression on his face made her wonder if that was, somehow, exactly what he had thought.
"Hey, it's okay," she said, in an attempt to sound comforting. She hadn't meant to worry him – although clearly she had – and now she felt that familiar tug of responsibility, the one that urged her to find some way to make it better.
"Look, there's a social worker on staff. Her office is downstairs." She pulled her feet off the bed so that she could lean forward onto her elbows, and with that, managed to catch his attention again. "Why don't I go talk to her, see if she has any advice, okay? I'm sure we'll be able to figure something out," she added, offering an encouraging nod.
His gaze was still wary, but he nodded briefly in return.
But that look on his face – an unsettling mixture of uncertainty and fear – was never far from her mind, remaining with her throughout the rest of her visit, even as she said her goodbyes and told him she would see him tomorrow, even as she went through her afternoon rounds and changed clothes and finally made her way over to the first floor administrative offices.
What would he do once he left the hospital? The options seemed pretty slim, now that she was actually thinking about it, and could only hope that the social worker would have a few ideas of her own that might be helpful.
The door was half-way open and she gave it a quick knock, finding herself quickly met with a pair of bespectacled brown eyes as they looked up from a desk full of paperwork.
"Hey… do you have a minute?" Dorothy asked as she stood in the doorway.
"Sure, come on in." The woman nodded to the chair right next to her desk. "Here, grab a seat…"
"Thanks," said Dorothy, letting her bag slide from her shoulder onto the ground as she dropped easily into the chair.
"So what's going on?"
"Um, so I don't know if you know about the patient that was admitted a few days ago, the one with retrograde amnesia…?" She launched into the details of his case – how she had found him and brought him in, his recovery from the abdominal wound, the memory loss, and perhaps most important, the fact that no one seemed to have any clue who he was. "He's gonna be discharged in a day or two," Dorothy added, "and I just thought you might have some ideas about what he can do after that."
The social worker let out a long breath and began to wearily rub her fingers against her forehead.
"Honestly… there's not a lot in terms of options," she said and then, as some measure of consolation, offered Dorothy a small, sympathetic smile. "He doesn't have a name or a home or a job – or even a social security number. As a hospital, we're not really equipped to deal with this sort of thing. Because, in most cases, patients with this kind of memory loss… well, their families normally come forward and then they have a place to go."
"So there's nothing we can do?" Dorothy asked.
The other woman paused for a moment, and then opened up one of the drawers in her desk and began fishing around inside.
"I've got a friend who runs a halfway house in Colorado Springs. Mostly ex-cons, former addicts. Not ideal, but you might try giving him a call. He sometimes has a space open." She handed Dorothy a business card, with a name and a telephone number printed in blue ink at the bottom. "That's about the best I can offer," she sighed. "I'm sorry."
"That's okay," Dorothy replied, glancing down at the card one more time before she slipped it into her pocket. "Thanks for this."
It was hard to not to be distracted by the thoughts that were burbling up inside her as she made her way down the hallway and towards the exit to the parking lot. Within a few days, he would be gone, thrown out into the world with nothing but a sweatshirt and a made-up name, and with nowhere to go, he would probably just end up on the street or in a homeless shelter. Even the halfway house, as awful as it sounded, would be a step up from that.
For some reason, though, she didn't want to imagine Lucas in any of those places. She didn't want to think about him on his own, having to figure out this world – and himself – with no help from anyone. Because even if this hospital felt no responsibility for him, she realized that she did, and it pained her to imagine him out there, all alone.
A part of her would miss him when he left, miss his stupid shrugs and his ridiculously beautiful eyes, miss all the times he pretended not to understand her jokes just so he could get a reaction out of her. As much as she had known in her head that he would eventually leave, her heart was finding it much harder to accept the quickly-approaching reality of it.
God, it was too bad she didn't know anyone in town who was hiring, she thought, who might be willing to take on the mother of all undocumented workers.
And just like that, as she was pulling the keys to her truck out of her bag, a thought struck her, one that she knew was quite possibly the stupidest, most preposterous, most far-fetched idea she had ever had. Because it was absurd: they wouldn't ever agree to it. He wouldn't ever agree to it. But even so, as she turned the notion over in her mind, giving it shape and weight, filling in all the gaps and necessary details, Dorothy found herself at turns nervous and excited, and then a little embarrassed about how excited she was getting. And then she couldn't get into her truck fast enough, her foot pressing heavily on the gas as she steered her thoughts towards home.
