Dr. Wood said, “We’ll need to keep you here another night just to be on the safe side. But if all goes well, we can release you tomorrow.”

“Tomorrow!” Xanthe said. “Are you serious? Look at him! He’s weak as a kitten! He looks like death warmed over!”

“Oh, that will change,” the doctor said offhandedly. He told Liam, “Nothing to eat today but liquids, I’m afraid, in case we have to take you very suddenly to the OR.” Then he nodded in Xanthe’s direction and left the room.

“Typical,” Xanthe muttered when he’d gone. “First he says they’re booting you out and then in the same breath he says you may need emergency brain surgery.”

She spun away with a flounce of her skirt. Liam feared for a moment that she was leaving too, but she was only going over to the corner for a green vinyl chair. She dragged it closer to his bed and plunked herself down in it. “I hope you’re satisfied,” she told Liam.

“Well, not completely,” he said drily.

“I knew you shouldn’t have moved to that place. Didn’t I tell you when you signed the lease? A sixty-year-old man in a rinky-dink starter apartment directly across from a shopping mall! And then to leave your door wide open! What did you expect?”

He hadn’t left his door wide open. And he hadn’t meant to leave it unlocked. He hadn’t known it was unlocked. But it was his policy not to argue. (An infuriating policy, his daughters always claimed.) Arguing got you nowhere. He smoothed down his bedclothes with his good hand, accidentally tugging the tube that ran from his arm to the IV pole.

“A sixty-year-old man,” Xanthe said, “who can still move all his belongings in the very smallest size U-Haul.”

“Next smallest,” he murmured.

“Whose so-called car is a Geo Prizm. A used Geo Prizm. And who, when he gets hit on the head, nobody knows where his people are.”

“How did they know?” he asked. It only now occurred to him to wonder. “Who called you?”

“The police called. They’ll be in to question you later, they said. They got my number from your address book; I was the only entry with the same last name as yours. I had to hear it over the phone! At two o’clock in the morning! If you don’t think that’s an experience…”

He was accustomed to Xanthe’s rants. They were sort of a hobby of hers. Funny: she was so completely different from her mother, his first wife-a waifish, fragile musician with a veil of transparent hair. Millie had taken too many pills when Xanthe was not yet two. It was his second wife who’d ended up raising Xanthe, and his second wife whom she resembled-brown haired and sturdy and normal-looking, pleasantly unexceptional-looking. He wondered sometimes if genetic traits could be altered by osmosis.

“And here’s the worst of it,” Xanthe was saying. “You invite a known drug addict into your home and give him total access.”

“Excuse me?” he said. He was startled. Had there been some whole other episode he had lost to his amnesia?

“Damian O’Donovan. What were you thinking?”

“Damian… Kitty’s Damian? Kitty’s boyfriend?”

“Kitty’s drug-addict, slacker boyfriend whom none of us trust for an instant. Mom won’t even let them be alone in the house together.”

“Well, of course she won’t,” Liam said. “They’re seventeen years old. But Damian’s not a drug addict.”

“Dad. How can these things slip your mind? He was suspended last year for smoking pot backstage in the school auditorium.”

“That doesn’t make him an addict.”

“He was suspended for a week! But you: you’re such a patsy. You choose to forget all about it. You say, ‘Oh, here, Damian, let me show you where I live. Let me point out my flimsy patio door that I plan to leave unlocked.’ In fact I wouldn’t be surprised if he unlocked that door himself while he was there, just so he could get back in and mug you.”

“Oh, for heaven’s sake,” Liam said. “He’s a perfectly harmless kid. A little… vacant, maybe, but he would never-”

“I don’t want to say you had it coming,” Xanthe said, “but mark my words, Dad: ‘Those who cannot remember history are condemned to repeat it.’ Harry Truman.”

“The past,” Liam said reflexively.

“What?”

“‘Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.’ And it’s George Santayana.”

Xanthe gazed at him stonily, her eyes the same opaque dark brown as her stepmother’s. “I’m going to find someplace where my cell phone works and let the others know how you’re doing,” she said.

Even though she could be a bit wearing, he was sorry to see her leave.

His head was pounding so hard that it made a sound inside his ears like approaching footsteps. His injured palm was stinging, and something seemed to be wrong with his neck. A twisty pain ran down the left side.

He had fought with someone? Physically struggled?

Let’s try this again: he had gone to bed in his new bedroom. He had felt grateful for his firm mattress, his resilient pillow, his tightly tucked top sheet. He had looked out the window and seen the stars sprinkled above the pine boughs.

Then what? Then what? Then what?

His lost memory was like a physical object just beyond his grasp. He could feel the strain in his head. It made the throbbing even worse.

Okay, just let it go. It would come to him in good time.

He closed his eyes and slid toward sleep, almost all the way but not quite. Part of him was listening for Xanthe. What was she telling her sisters? It would be nice if she were saying, “Such a scare; we almost lost him. I’ve been out of my mind with worry.” Although more likely it was “Can you believe what he’s done this time?”

But it wasn’t his fault! he wanted to say. For once, he wasn’t to blame!

He knew his daughters thought he was hopeless. They said he didn’t pay attention. They claimed he was obtuse. They rolled their eyes at each other when he made the most innocent remark. They called him Mr. Magoo.

At St. Dyfrig once, invited to view a poem on the English department’s computer, he had clicked on How to listen and been disappointed to find mere technical instructions for playing the audio version. What he had been hoping for was advice on how to listen to poetry-and, by extension, how to listen, really listen, to what was being said all around him. It seemed he lacked some basic skill for that.

He was hopeless. His daughters were right.

He reached for sleep as if it were a blanket that he could hide underneath, and finally he managed to catch hold of it.

When he opened his eyes, a policeman was standing at his bedside-a muscular young man in full uniform. “Mr. Pennywell?” he was saying. He already had his ID card in hand, not that one was needed. Nobody would mistake him for anything but a cop. His white shirt was so crisp that it hurt to look at it, and the weight of his gun and his radio and his massive black leather belt would have sunk him like a stone if he had fallen into any water. “Like to ask a few questions,” he said.

Liam struggled to sit up, and something like a brick slammed into his left temple. He groaned and eased himself back against his pillow.

The policeman, oblivious, was tucking away his ID. (If he had given his name, he must have done so before Liam woke up.) He took a small notebook from his breast pocket, along with a ballpoint pen, and said, “I understand you left your back door unlocked.”

“That’s what they tell me.”

“Pardon?”

“That’s what they tell me, I said!”

He had thought he was speaking quite loudly, but it was hard to know for sure inside all that gauze.

“And when did you retire?” the man asked, writing something down.

“I’m not exactly calling it retirement yet.”

“Pardon?”

“I’m not exactly calling it retirement yet! I’ll have to see how my money holds out.”

“When did you go to bed, Mr. Pennywell. On the night of the incident.”