The Face Thief by Eli Gottlieb

Author:Eli Gottlieb [Gottlieb, Eli]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780061735059
Publisher: William Morrow
Published: 2012-01-01T05:00:00+00:00

Chapter Twenty

The rehab center was like a hospital minus all the cold medical bits. The corridors were sunnier, the smells were gentler, the sounds were softer, and the rooms weren’t filled with beaked and horrible machinery for removing parts of you. Instead, there were large, high-ceilinged spaces with mats on their floors as thick as puddings, along with piles of stretchy bright rubber bands that many of the elderly residents pulled with their knees and the dwindled chicken wings of their arms. There were shower chairs with too many armrests for putting you in and wheeling you into the shower if your legs didn’t work; heat rooms, cold rooms, weight rooms and gym rooms; rooms with plunge baths, and rooms piled full of bolsters and foam wedges like gardens of geometrical clouds.

The problem was that the staff of the facility was so nice, and so eager to help, and looked at you with such emotions of sympathy and understanding, that it was all she could do not to drive a plastic fork into their eyes. It was coming back, oh yes it was, and one thing coming with it was the feeling that the worst people were frequently the nicest, and if that were the case, then she was among some of the very worst people on earth.

Twice a day, she was scheduled to do an hour or two of therapy. Her physical therapy was all about balance, and her therapist was a little bouncing ball of a man named Nino. Under his direction, she tried—and failed—to hop like a frog, or stand on one foot and attempted to raise her other leg until it was parallel to the floor. She walked wobbling in a circle wearing special ankle weights and a weighted vest while watching the city turn in the opposite direction outside the window, many floors below. In another series of lessons she spent time on memory and cognition, rowing her mind up and down sequences of numbers, filling in the blanks, reading out loud, or doing word associations.

Too often, in the downtime when she didn’t have to do anything, and would have been happy merely to lie in bed with the past walking across her mind, Dan France was there. He was there a lot. He wore casual clothes and a permanent smile, like a plaque. He looked at her with a melting look that was clearly his idea of what cute was. He was used to being admired. He was used to being listened to. At least he was handsome. But did he know how obvious he was?

Then, one day, he tried to kiss her. She saw it coming like a sailboat over the horizon line. She sat in a chair in her room while he put his hands on her shoulders and raised himself up on his toes and gave her his warmest smile and bent over at the waist to lean in close.

On the television above her bed, tuned to the closed-circuit view of

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