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She looked around too, as if she was expecting someone else to crawl out from under the bed. “You haven't had anyone visit you, sweetie,” she told me, her voice gentle.
“Who were you talking to?” I asked, because I couldn’t deal with thinking anymore about how no one had come to be here for me.
“Oh,” she said in surprise. “That’s… you, actually. I’ve been talking to you a lot. You seemed like you needed a friend and…well, so do I.”
She picked up my hand to shake it, since I was still weak. “Carrie.”
I tried to remember my name, and a sudden headache came on, like something rupturing in my brain.
“It’s alright,” she told me, her usual frenetic energy ebbing away. She lay both our hands down on the bed between us. “I’ll stay here with you.”
And she did.
I spent the next few weeks in rehab. And the police tried to find where I’d come from.
But no one knew anything about my past, and no one came forward to claim me. Someone out there had to know me. It was so frustrating.
And humiliating.
The staff at the hospital collected the money to pay for the down payment on my first apartment. It was around the corner from the hospital—so not in the best part of town—and as I stood in the doorway a few months after I woke up, it felt like I should be somewhere else.
I should be walking into my home.
Carrie walked in with me, and somehow her usual sparkling warmth seemed to fill the small, slightly musty-scented apartment. “Let’s get these windows open. Look, we got it furnished for you. That futon came from Harley’s house, but I febrezed the hell out of it—can you explain to me how a nurse can smoke?”
“We all have our vices.”
“Except you,” she teased me.
“Only because I don’t know what they are.”
My biggest vice so far was snacks from the hospital vending machine. I’d worked my way through, trying to find what I liked, hoping something would spark a memory. Had I eaten a honey bun for breakfast rushing to high school? Jelly beans out of my Easter basket when I was a kid? Pringles while watching movies with my best friend?
But nothing jogged any of my memories loose.
I did love gummy bears, though.
That was about all I knew about who I was.
“You’ll find out,” Carrie told me. “Your memories will almost certainly come back. You’re young, you’ve got a healthy brain.”
“Maybe.” I had this weird, superstitious feeling though, like I wouldn’t be able to get my memories back until I got some pieces of my life back.
Also, maybe I didn’t have a healthy brain. That seemed like a pretty big assumption, looking around the world. Lots of people clearly did not have healthy brains.
I sat down on the threadbare couch and opened the plastic bag they’d given me when I left the hospital with my old clothes. Carrie had brought in clean clothes for me to wear out, but when I opened the bag, I expected something to happen. Memories to rush back. It felt like it should be a big moment.
Instead, I pulled out a black fleece hoodie, stiff with old blood, that smelled like death. There must have been so much blood. I felt suddenly sick to my stomach, and I stuffed it back into the bag.
“Do you want me to wash those for you?” Carrie asked.
“No,” I said. I couldn’t stand to look at the clothes anymore. I couldn’t imagine who I had been when I pulled that hoodie over my head.
But as I picked up the bag to stuff into a closet until I could bear it, something gold glinted at me from inside. I knelt on the carpet to rummage through the bag and pulled out a broken necklace.
The slender gold chain had snapped. But dangling from my fingertips was a name in cursive:Kennedy.
A sudden surge of hope rushed through my chest. I had my name, and soon I would have the rest of my life back.
