Your Heart Belongs to Me

beside the examination table, holding my wrist, checking on my pulse.”
    With a note of bewilderment, Kyra Whipset said, “But throughout the procedure, you were hooked up to an electrocardiograph.”
    He tried to recall. The memory wouldn’t clarify.
    Nurse Whipset said, “An electrocardiograph with a video display. A machine monitored your heart activity, Mr. Perry.”
    Ryan remembered the fluoroscope on which he had watched the tedious progress of the catheter as it followed his jugular vein into his heart.
    He could not recall an electrocardiograph. He could not say for certain that she was wrong, and he had no reason to suspect that she might lie to him. But what he remembered instead of the ECG was Ismay Clemm.
    “After the procedure, I had to lie down on the bed in the prep room, to let the sedative wear off. She checked in on me a few times. She was very kind.”
    “I looked in on you a few times, Mr. Perry. You were dozing.”
    Staring at the death portrait in the ring binder, he said, “But I remember her clearly. Ismay Clemm. I can see her face now.”
    “Can you spell the name for me?” Nurse Whipset asked.
    After he spelled it, she spelled it back to him to make sure she had gotten it right.
    “Listen,” she said, “I suppose it’s possible for some reason she briefly visited the diagnostics lab during the procedure, and I was too busy to pay much attention to her, but she made an impression on you.”
    “She made an impression,” he assured Kyra Whipset.
    “Because of the sedative, you might not recall it clearly. Your memory might have exaggerated her time in the room, the level of her involvement.”
    He did not disagree with her, but he knew it had not been that way, not that way at all.
    “So,” she said, “give me a number where I can reach you. I’ll make a couple of calls to people at the hospital, see who knows this woman. Maybe I can get contact information for you.”
    “I’d appreciate that. Very kind of you,” he said, and gave her his cell number.
     

     
    Rap-rap-rapping: George Zane and Cathy Sienna testing walls, testing cabinets.
    Ryan removed Ismay Clemm’s death portrait from the plastic sleeve in the ring binder and put it on the desk.
    The sharpening wind was a scalpel now, stripping the skin off every tract of bare land it found. Beyond the window, trees shuddered in clouds of yellow dust, in the acid-yellow light of late afternoon.
    From the manila envelope that he had brought with him, Ryan took the photos of Teresa Reach and Lily X. He lined them up with the death portrait of the woman who looked like Ismay Clemm.
    He knew now a disquiet that was different in character from any he had known before.
    This journey had taken him from dead-center in the realm of reason, where he had lived his entire life, to the outer precincts, where the air was thinner and the light less revealing. He stood on the borderline between everything he had been and a new way of being that he dared not contemplate.
    He had half a mind to return two photos to the ring binders and leave at once with just the picture of Lily.
    The problem with that was—he had nowhere to go except home, where sooner or later he would be slit open and have his heart cut out of him again, this time without anesthetics.
    After a while, the air acquired a faint alkaline taste from the dust-choked wind that relentlessly groaned and snuffled at the windows.
    When eventually Ryan’s cell phone rang, the caller was not Kyra Whipset, but a woman named Wanda June Siedel, who said that she was calling on Nurse Whipset’s behalf.
    “She says you want to know about Ismay Clemm.”
    “Yes,” Ryan said. “She was…very kind to me at a difficult time in my life.”
    “That sounds like Ismay, all right. Sure does. She and me were eight years best friends, and I don’t expect ever to know somebody sweeter.”
    “Ms. Siedel, I’d very much like to talk with Nurse Clemm.”
    “You call me Wanda June, son. I would sure like to talk to Ismay myself, but I’m sorry to tell you, she’s passed on.”
    Gazing at the nurse’s photo on the desk, Ryan avoided for the moment his most important question. Instead he said, “What happened?”
    “To be blunt, she married wrong. Her first husband, Reggie, he was a saint to hear Ismay tell it, and I expect he must have been if half her stories about him were true. But Reggie, he died when Ismay was forty. She married again seven years later, that was to Alvin, which