Neither of them speaks until they’ve left the building and crossed the street away from it. There’s a thin gray cast over the sky that makes it seem later than it is.
“So that was the big expert on amnesia,” Helena says, trying to keep the relief out of her voice. For a while there, she really thought she was going to get caught. But of course no expert could see into her thoughts, and it would be hard to prove she was faking such a tricky condition. “Talk for an hour a day. I could’ve thought of that.”
“Still…” Joachim says, but doesn’t continue.
She doesn’t ask what he wanted to say. She doesn’t really want to know.
“Should we catch a cab?” he asks after a while. “I would’ve called one but I didn’t know what time we’d be out.”
“That’s okay.”
They stand for another moment without moving. But it’s okay; it really is. No matter where they go from here, for the moment, everything’s okay.
“Are you able to walk a bit?” he asks.
“Sure,” she says.
They start in the general direction of the apartment. It doesn’t make sense because there’s no way they can walk the whole way, and he was supposed to go to work after, but for some reason, it’s the only thing they can do.
They’re far out in the West in a residential area interrupted only by businesses that don’t rely on foot traffic: an architect’s office, a divorce lawyer, the doctor they just left. Most of the windows on the ground floor have flower boxes on the sills. Geranium, impatiens, geranium, geranium, pansy, and then an empty one. A convenience store next to a jack-of-all-trades cobbler whose sign features pictures of all the things he can repair: high heels, boots, belts, locks, keys, knives, razors.
“Just a minute.” Joachim deposits Helena against the brick wall of the shop and steps inside.
His absence startles her, as if he’d vanished while they were walking side by side. She knows he didn’t drop her roughly against the wall, but when she replays the scene to herself, it seems like he did. The whirr of machinery inside the shop cuts through the songs of invisible birds. And they’re supposed to talk for an hour this evening. About that other girl, or how there wasn’t one.
His reappearance startles her as much as his disappearance. She shifts her weight back onto her crutch and they walk another few steps without speaking.
“It was something I was meaning to do,” he says when they reach the end of the block. “You know, since yours got lost in the accident.” He hands her a set of keys.
“Thank you.” She has the terrible feeling that this gesture means more than it seems to, that something incredibly important is happening now, but she can’t grasp it. When they happen across a taxi letting someone out, Joachim waves to keep the driver from pulling away. He has the cab drop him at his office before taking Helena home.