"Well, if it isn't my favorite niece."

"I'm your only niece, Aunt Harley."

        As Harley Cooper Spaulding stooped to embrace little Marina, that familiar rat-a-tat laughter cut through the din of the party.  "Is she a Cooper or is she a Cooper?" Buzz chortled uncontrollably at the quip of his raven-haired granddaughter.

        "Champagne got broken out a little early, eh Buzz?" Philip Spaulding nudged his father-in-law as he handed him his camel hair coat.

        "Early?  You're late!  I thought we'd be seeing in the millennium without 
you!" Buzz chided them as he embraced his daughter.

        "I'm afraid you will be, Dad," Harley said.

        "Whaaaat?"

        "The kids are with Alan..."

        "Watch it, Buzz," Philip wryly warned his gaping father-in-law.

        "Aw, that's too bad," commiserated Selena Davis on her way by them to answer the door.  It was Frank and Eleni, their arms filled with platters of food for the New Year's Eve bash at the firehouse, December 31, 1999, the beginning of a new age.  With them came a freckle-faced young man, friend of Jesse Blue's, whose name Buzz didn't know.

        "Where's your wife want me to put this?" he asked Buzz, gesturing to Selena, who had retreated towards the kitchen.

        "My wife?" Buzz's head snapped around.

        "Yeah.  Where she want me to put this?"

        Buzz hesitated, seemingly confused, not about what the boy had meant, but at what he should reply.  "She's--not my wife," he finally explained, so quietly that only the boy and Harley could hear him.  "She's just a friend...I mean, she lives here, but she's not my wife.  I'm a widower."

        With that, Buzz turned, slightly bent over and breathless as if he'd been punched in the stomach, and started up the stairs.  Only the little group of Philip, Harley, Eleni, and Frank had seen what had happened.

        "I thought he was over it," a grim-faced Harley muttered, almost to herself.

        "Don't worry," Eleni whispered, grasping Harley's freezing hand.   "It's just that New Years are hard for him."

        "New Years?" Harley frowned.  "Why?"

        "You weren't there, Sis," Frank explaind to his sister.  "It was New Year's Eve when Jenna lost her baby."

        "We walked right in on it," Eleni told her, "your mother, Frank, and me.  Jenna was on that couch with the paramedics around her, and your father, standing right where you are, just staring..."

        Rather as he stood now, at the windows at the top of the stairs, looking blankly outside, the tears gathering thickly in his eyes, his soul approaching the land of the dead.  The weatherman had been right; it was commencing to snow.  It was falling on every part of the town, on the great houses on the top of the hill, and the burned out hulk of a diner on 5th Street; and westward over the plain, over the churchyard where Deenie, and his mother and father, and Jenna, lay buried.  And
the snows drifted over the farmland, and the valleys and the rivers, and the outskirts of another town, far away, where a lonely woman sat, dying faster than anyone had a right to, and mourning not even for herself.

Molly Patterson sat at a bare table, in a dingy, dirty, overheated room, trying to figure out what had happened to her life.  Trying...but the images just kept flashing incoherently through her mind: of school, her first date, a torn nursing uniform, her first fix.  And of the pusher whom she owed, and the money she didn't have, and all the time that had slipped away when she just wasn't looking.

        And she just didn't care...

        Molly grabbed the hypodermic needle in front of her and plunged it straight into a vein.  It was a clean needle, she'd never used a dirty one, and no trouble finding the right spot.  She was a good nurse still.

        That was the final earthly thought of Molly Patterson.  With an inscrutable smile, her head slumped to the table; then her unconscious body lost its balance and fell to the floor, banging Molly's head against a wooden leg as it landed.  She lay still.  Outside, the fireworks started.  A new millennium had arrived.

        Hours, or minutes, or seconds, or maybe it was an eternity later, a pounding broke through the universal hubbub, a fist rattling the frail door to its hinges, and Julio's curses filled the corridor. One mighty kick, and he was inside.

        Julio paused only a second to take in the scene: Molly's body lying on the floor, a needle on the table above her, next to it an empty vial.  He wasted no time, rifling through the bureau drawers, searching the closet, the medicine cabinet, anything to get some kind of return from this lousy investment he'd made.  Nothing! Not even any junk jewelry he could pawn.  The tramp on the floor had made a fool of him in the end.

        The wail of sirens in the night convinced Julio that this was not a place he wanted to be found.  Slipping stealthily away, he left ajar the door, which soon creaked halfway open of its own accord. Returning from a lucrative evening, the adjacent apartment dweller, one 'Candy' by professional appellation, happened to look inside.  By the time she'd called for an ambulance, Molly Patterson was, for all
intents and purposes, dead to the world.

"D.O.A."

        "Oh dear, oh dear," Dr. Karshish muttered in a staccato accent.  "And this one was...?"

        "The OD.  Overdose," the paramedic explained irritably.  This chubby angel of mercy possessed something of a prejudice against foreign born doctors, and spoke to Dr. Karshish in particular as if he were a slightly dense child.

        "Yes, the drug overdose."  The good doctor was about to add, 'Just as well, we are too busy tonight,' in an effort to project the hard-boiled cynicism that so often passed for intelligence in his adopted land, when he stopped short.  So sadly wasted, this woman, yet she must have been very beautiful once.  Dr. Karshish, a rather romantic soul, couldn't bear to make more than a cursory check for a pulse.

        "Nurse Ramis."  A skinny, blonde-haired nurse with a long nose answered Dr. Karshish's call.  "Please take this lady from ER to the morgue.  I'll fill out the papers..."

        Something in the nurse's face caused the doctor to pause, and he followed her gaze back down to the corpse.  The corpse was blinking! Dr. Karshish rushed to recheck her pulse.  Irregular but strong.  How could he have missed it?

        "Take her to pod 6A!" Karshish nearly shouted in his perplexity. "And get her on oxygen!  Her heart must have stopped for awhile."  A mere raise of the nurse's plucked eyebrow made Karshish blush from embarrassment.  He turned to the paramedic for support, but the poor fellow just stood there, utterly speechless.

Dr. Karshish sat across from the brain specialist whose name he had foolishly forgotten.  "It's been three weeks," he declared.  "In a way, her stay has been fortunate.  We've been able to clear the drugs completely from her system, and she shows no further signs of craving them. But she also shows no sign of regaining her memory."

        "Not at all?" the specialist asked.

        "Nothing."

        "Well, that's unusual."  He paused, but Dr. Karshish remained silent.  "Very unusual.  But of course, it's all psychological.  Oxygen deprivation, if any such occurred, does not cause amnesia."

        "But she did suffer a bump on the head," Dr. Karshish offered.

        "The forehead.  Thickest bone in the body," the specialist illustrated by tapping his own thick skull.  "The woman doesn't need another MRI, she needs a psychiatrist."

Molly Patterson did not stop staring at herself in the mirror as Dr. Karshish entered her room.  "I'm looking better," she said.  "I really couldn't recognize myself before."

        "You are regaining your memory?" Dr. Karshish eagerly inquired.

        "No, Doctor, it was a joke," Molly answered with a rueful smile, and sighed deeply.  Dr. Karshish still didn't get it.  "You know," she said, still looking at herself, "maybe I'll let it grow."  Molly primped the edges of her page-cut, nut-brown hair.

        "But your hair is very becoming," Dr. Karshish smiled warmly, stooping to look at Molly in her mirror.  "It makes you look like Audrey Hepburn."

        "Yes...Of course, she's been dead a few years."  Molly finally set the mirror down to look at Dr. Karshish.  "It's funny, isn't it?  I can remember movie stars, I remember how to drive a car, I can even  remember several films where the main character suffered from amnesia. Inevitably, he would be accused of having murdered someone or other."

        "You're not a murderer, Molly," Dr. Karshish pressed his patient's right shoulder.

        "No, I'm just a thief, and a drug addict, and an attempted suicide.  Just ask the police."

        "Don't worry about the police," Dr. Karshish reassured Molly regarding the only other visitors she'd had these past three weeks. "You are not a criminal, you were just ill."

        "Yes, you know, it's really something of a blessing that I've lost my memory.  These addictions, they're more psychological than they are physical, aren't they?  And really, since the physical withdrawals ended, I haven't felt the slightest inclination towards drugs. Actually, I can't believe that I ever did.  So I guess I have my amnesia to thank for something, eh?"

        "You're a very brave woman.  Most people, waking up to your condition, would be panic-stricken."

        "Thank you," Molly smiled, looking deep into his gentle brown eyes.  "You're a very kind man, doctor.  And I recognize a kind man when I see one.  I'm not quite sure why, but I'm certain that I do."

        "It is not kindness," Dr. Karshish modestly demured.

        "Oh?  What is it, then?  Why should you put so much effort into caring for me?  I have no money and no insurance, as you well know.  So why would you go out of your way to help the likes of me if not out of simple kindness?"

        "I don't really know," Dr. Karshish admitted, almost to himself.

"Perhaps it has something to do with guilt.  Don't look so surprised, Molly.  I literally declared you dead in the emergency room.  You're like a Lazarus, you know, come back from the dead.  And perhaps it's something to do with the fact that we're both foreigners in this strange land."

        "Foreigners?" Molly frowned, two creases appearing just above the bridge of her nose.  "Why would you say that I'm a foreigner?"

        "Why, your accent."

        "Accent!  Do I have an accent?"

        "Yes, a British accent, with a beautiful English lilt."

        "I-I didn't know that.  I have a British accent...Yes!  Now that I listen to it, I suppose that I do.  One doesn't normally listen to oneself speak, doctor, one merely babbles."  She laughed, he laughed, they both laughed at her extraordinary discovery.  "And if I'm not mistaken, Dr. Karshish, there's a bit of an English lilt in your voice, as well."

        "Yes," Dr. Karshish replied.  "I was taught by an English lady on the banks of the Nile."  "You're Egyptian, then?"  "Yes.  I came to this country to study medicine, intending to return.  But I never did. I tell myself that I have so many relatives to help over there that I need the money that I make to support them.  Though perhaps it's just as Thomas Wolfe once said:  You can never go home again."

        "I understand what it means to take care of your family," Molly replied wistfully.  "But I do bloody hope that bleedin' Thomas Wolfe was wrong!"