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She’d been eighteen when her parents died, so even though Uncle Ted and Aunt Millie had come to the funeral, they evidently considered her a full adult because they hadn’t offered any aid other than a “call us if you need anything” platitude before they were on the plane going home. She’d been on her own. The mortgage on the house had been paid for by her parents’ life insurance policies, plus she’d had a chunk of change left over in addition to her college fund, so she hadn’t been in any financial difficulty.
Emotional difficulty, yeah. To be suddenly severed from her family ties had been an unbearable shock. For a year, she’d mostly stayed in the house, talking to her friends sometimes, but gradually that contact had dwindled down to almost nothing. She hadn’t wanted to leave the last place on earth where she’d felt safe, hadn’t wanted to socialize, hadn’t laughed even though she’d spent hours in front of the TV watching sitcoms that had presented an unrealistic and sometimes twisted version of what her life had been before her parents died in a mass of twisted steel and plastic.
Eventually her friends had stopped calling. Slowly but surely, though, she’d begun to pull herself out of the abyss. Her mom and dad wouldn’t have wanted her to drown in grief, to stop living her own life because theirs had ended. They’d been investigating colleges with her, talking about where she might like to go, what she was most interested in doing as a career. So, at nineteen, she’d started sending out feelers to the real world, in the form of college applications. Before the accident, she’d really wanted to go to Southern Cal, to stay near home, and because the house was now paid for that still seemed like the most practical option. Forcing herself out of her cocoon wasn’t easy, but she’d done it. Her friends from high school might have faded away, but once she began living a real life again, she made new ones at college. Funny how they’d dropped away, too, except for a very occasional—as in maybe once a year—e-mail or Christmas card.
From Uncle Ted and Aunt Millie, there had been nothing, and for a while that had really hurt. Now, though, they seldom even crossed her mind. When they did, she’d feel nothing except distaste. She didn’t want to have anything to do with them; what kind of asshole jerks would leave an eighteen-year-old on her own like that, without even a weekly phone call to check how she was doing? To hell with them and their kids, the cousins whose names she couldn’t remember. When she’d left college and sold the house, moved to the other side of the country, she hadn’t bothered to send them her new address.
Which, in a way, brought her back full circle. She remembered her life, remembered the details, the emotions, all of the big things and some of the little ones, like snapshots in her head. So why didn’t she remember going to work at Becker? And why didn’t she remember buying this house? It was her house. She made payments to the bank every month. But—no. Nothing.
She stared up at the ceiling. Just how big was this gap in her memory?
Very methodically she started back at the beginning. Okay, so there was nothing for the first two years. How many people remembered anything from their babyhood, anyway? Very damn few. She’d met only one, as a matter of fact, a—
The pain that exploded in her head was blinding, leaving her clutching her head and moaning. Right behind it came a rush of nausea. She shot out of bed, stumbled and lurched to the john, hung over the toilet for what felt like an endless amount of time. This was the worst episode yet. It left her wrung out and weak, sitting on the cool bathroom floor with weak tears running down her cheeks.
She hated feeling like a wuss.
But—damn, hadn’t this episode been triggered by some elusive memory that seemed to be knocking on the door of her consciousness, trying to get in? Like the reason why she hadn’t set herself up with a new primary care physician. She didn’t try to pull the memories up, didn’t try to isolate them, because that would just set off another episode. Instead she tried to think around them, to isolate the problem, just as she’d been doing when she’d gotten sidetracked by that baby-memory thing.
She leaned her head against the wall. If she was going to do this, she probably should stay near the toilet.
So, what was her first memory?
Maybe when she was three, she thought. She remembered a gorgeous pink and white dress with a big flirty skirt that she’d worn for Easter; she even remembered a picture of her with her mom when she was wearing the dress, her arm stretched up as her mother held her hand. Besides remembering the photo, she also remembered being in the dress, admiring how the skirt kicked up with every bouncing step she took. She’d bounced and jumped a lot.
Okay, that year was taken care of. How about four?
She remembered starting kindergarten. Or maybe it was prekindergarten. Whatever. She’d sat in a teeny chair at a small round table with a girl who had fat red ringlets, and a boy named Chad whom she’d hated because he kept picking boogers out of his nose and wiping them on her, at least until she punched him in the nose. There had been other kids, of course, but all she remembered was the girl with red hair and booger-wiping Chad, the little shit.
When she was five, she’d learned how to read. She’d sat at the kitchen table and proudly traced her finger from word to word, sounding them out, while her mom cooked supper.
Six—first grade, and a fight with a bigger girl who called her a name and pushed her down, making her skin her knees. She’d jumped up and tackled the girl and pulled her hair.
Seven—some first grader had thrown up in the school lunchroom and set off a massive chain-reaction of vomiting that had even involved some of the teachers.
Year by year she went, sometimes remembering what her schoolmates had done, sometimes what she’d done, and sometimes the memory had been rooted in her parents. The year she was nine, her parents had taken her to her grandparents’ house in Colorado for Christmas, and the snow had been amazing.
There was something for every year, until five years ago.
She skirted around a wall in her memory, sensing that it was there but afraid to try tearing it down because whatever was behind those walls caused the headaches and nausea. Five years ago, there was nothing.
Four years ago, there was nothing.
Three years ago, suddenly she was living here, and working at Becker, going about her placid routine as if the two-year gap in her life didn’t exist.
Could a tumor cause such a clearly defined memory loss? Wouldn’t it be more spotty, and include more recent memories? Short-term memories were the hardest to retain—hence the “short term.” But moving to a new location and getting a new job were important things that would jump the short-term and go straight into the long-term memory bank. Some things just did.
Where had she moved from?
She remembered that. She’d been living in Chicago at the time, having moved there when she was twenty-three.
Except … maybe she hadn’t moved directly here from Chicago. She didn’t remember. What had happened during those two years that had wiped out her memory of them? And what the hell had happened to her face?
Suddenly she thought of a way she could verify that her face wasn’t hers, which was an incredibly weird concept. Grabbing the edge of the bathroom vanity, she hauled herself to her feet and stared at the face that wasn’t her. On the off-chance she might have had some horrific accident herself and had to have reconstructive surgery, she pulled her hair back from her face and leaned close to the mirror, looking for scars.
There. Oh my God, there.
In her hairline, faint but definitely there. She pulled her ears forward, trying to see behind them, which was kind of an exercise in futility. Frustrated, she grabbed a hand mirror and held it so it reflected behind her ears, and—yes. More scars.
