When the woman woke, she was instantly alarmed. For one thing she was tied to the bed so she couldn’t move. For another, she didn’t know where she was. Hospital, obviously by the white interior of the room and the beeping, blinking equipment, but how did she get there? She rang for a nurse. There didn’t seem to be one around. She rang again and tried to reach the plastic cup of water on the stand adjacent to the bed. Why must hospitals always arrange for things to be just out of reach? No one answered. No one did anything about it. Fingers touched the plastic cylinder just enough to spin it off the edge. Cup, melting ice and straw crashed to the floor. I bet they come now. Hospitals cannot abide mess. Her thought proved to be prophetic. A nurse followed by an orderly with a broom and dustpan arrived almost instantaneously. They were followed by a distinguished looking older man she presumed to be the doctor. Older than the nurse and orderly, but about the right age to be of interest to the patient. Everyone got busy sweeping and clearing, checking her pulse and looking into her eyes with one of those penlights her boyfriends used on dates in automobile backseats. When the doctor placed the cold stethoscope on her left breast, she tingled with thoughts of being in love.
“How do you feel, Miss —uh, I’m sorry, we don’t know your name,” the doctor inquired while the nurse continued making adjustments to this and that thing and writing notes on a clip board.
“My name is —, never you mind. Who are you? Where exactly am I?” the woman demanded to know.
“You are in hospital, of course. You’ve had us all quite concerned. You took a dangerous fall.”
“Fall? When? I don’t remember no fall! How long have I been here? What day is it?”
“Your accident occurred three days ago. You have been here for two. Today is Monday.”
“That means I fell sometime Friday?”
The doctor nodded.
“So where did this fall take place?”
“You apparently fell on the steps outside the St. Louis Cathedral and hit your head so hard you’ve been unconscious until now.”
“I don’t understand. If I hit my head, why are you giving me blood?”
“Like I said, you took a really critical fall. You lost a lot of blood.”
“What was I doing at the cathedral? I had no reason to be going there on a Friday —was it afternoon or evening, Doctor? See? I don’t even know what time of day I was supposed to have fallen.”
“Evening. Perhaps you were going to confession?”
“Confession? Oh, doctor, you truly do not know who you’re speaking to,” the woman laughed. “Confession is no place to go for fun on a Friday evening!”
“Perhaps with more rest, you will remember more about what happened.”
‘Wait, Doctor, before you go. Have I had any visitors? I mean, does anyone I know know I’m here?”
“Sorry, no visitors. Like I said, we don’t know your name so we don’t know who to notify. Do you think maybe you’re a tourist? Might you have been coming from or going to a hotel in the area? If you’re not from here it would explain why no one has called looking for you.”
“I don’t know. I-I just don’t know. I guess this is what being a foundling feels like. The babies are lucky. They don’t know what they don’t know.” Tears began to trickle down the woman's cheeks.
“Try and get some rest. Often in cases like yours the memory comes back just like that.” The doctor snapped his fingers. “Don’t worry yourself. This is normal for this kind of injury. You’ll be fine. You’ll see.”
Everyone aside from the patient cleared the room. The doctor dimmed the lights and quietly closed the door.
In the hallway, the doctor said, “Nurse, a word, please.”
Taking the woman by the arm, he led her a few feet away from the door and spoke very quietly. “I want to know the moment this patient wakes again. If her memory returns, we can begin therapy. If not, so much the better. She will still need therapy, but of a completely different nature. Understood?”
“Yes, sir,” the nurse replied.
♠♥♦♣
As the patient closed her eyes for sleep, she sighed I’ve been dealt baby hands before and won the game. What I need now is to draw a wild card. Yessir, a one-eyed Jack could be my knight in shining armor.
Slowly her chin rolled into her shoulder. Her breathing slowed.
Instead of the soft bed, she is laying on something hard. Someone’s stoop. She is cold on stone in front of a building somewhere. The sun is just starting to dawn. She is cold. Of course she is cold. She has no blanket, not even any clothes. Suddenly, she is being lifted and held. A man is talking baby-talk to her asking her where she came from. She wants to tell him, but she doesn’t know. She coos and dribbles instead. That seems to satisfy him. He carries her to a house where he lays her on a bed. He places pillows all around so she can’t roll off the edge of the bed. He leaves her there. Scared, she cries. She wails actually, close to screaming.
The man comes back. He picks her up and holds her and says he is sorry. He had gone next door to borrow a baby bottle. He says the lady warmed some milk for her. It tastes good. As he holds her and she sucks on the nippled bottle, she notices that the man has a patch over one eye. Otherwise a noble and kind face.
Later when she learned about playing cards, she called one-eyed jacks “Daddy” cards. As a youngster she didn’t know that one-eyed Jacks were considered to be so lucky that gamblers had them tattooed on the wrist of the hand they held their cards with. She just knew meeting her Daddy with one eye was the luckiest day of her life. She was a born winner.
When she woke the next morning, she still didn’t know who she was. She just wasn’t scared anymore.
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