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“Kennedy,” I whispered. “My name is Kennedy.”
Carrie stared at the necklace for a second, then her face lit up with joy as she realized what it was. She reached to hug me, and I hugged her back, clutching the name necklace so tight that it bit into my palm.
“It’s nice to meet you, Kennedy,” Carrie told me. “See? Everything is going to come together.”
“Maybe it will,” I said.
“Let’s go out for a walk,” Carrie said. “Maybe we’ll see someplace you’ve been before. Someplace that jogs a memory. And at a bare minimum...I can get a Diet Coke.”
I had never met anyone who loved Diet Coke the way Carrie did.
We found a 7-11 for her to get a fountain drink, which she insisted tasted better than it did from a bottle, but we didn’t find any memories.
Still, as we wandered the city, a thrill ran through me.
I could turn any corner and be walking down a street I’d walked down before, and suddenly, part of my memory would snap back into my brain like a rubber band.
Any day now, any block I walked, I’d be closer to knowing who I was.
* * *
Five years later
“He took me on the worst date the other day,” Carrie told me as the two of us walked down the street. “What mother of two wants to go to a hockey game? I spend my days trying to get people to stop screaming, to stop fighting–”
I raised an eyebrow. “At the hospital or with…”
I tapped the handle of the stroller she was pushing as the two of us walked. Somehow Carrie set a breakneck pace even when she was pushing a double jogging stroller and simultaneously drinking Diet Coke.
“Both!” she said.
“I’m sorry your adoring husband took you on a boring date,” I teased her. “I don’t know why he didn’t bring the puppets I gave him.”
Carrie had kindly included me in their Christmas dinner celebration every year. I had kindly gifted them a set of puppets at the last one, which had made both of us double over in laughter while her husband gave us the worried look he so often did.
“Really, the worst date he ever gave me was a trip to the hospital to give birth to twins,” she muttered. “Although I’m so glad they’re here!” she added loudly to her babies, even though at eighteen months, I doubted she was creating any lifelong trauma.
“We walked there too, and I wore high heels, and it was so cold—”
“Did he carry you? Piggyback? Give you his coat?”
“Yes,” she admitted, and I laughed. Carrie’s bad dates had all been worth it in my opinion, because she had found the best, most adoring man I could imagine. He was a little boring for my tastes, but then, I hadn’t found anyone in my own dating life who wasn’t.
“See, there it is.” She pointed at the enormous building spreading in front of us, the city’s professional hockey arena. Carrie had moved to a new neighborhood recently—and a cute little townhouse because their growing family needed more space—and I had taken to driving over there for our weekly walks because otherwise she complained endlessly about getting the stroller in and out of her Honda. “And you know how far we’ve walked today!”
I stopped on the sidewalk.
“I don’t understand why you throw the pacifier and then scream at me; there’s a more efficient path here,” she told Charlie, then turned back to me. “What’s up?”
Then her face lit up. “Do you see something familiar?”
“No,” I said. “No, probably not.”
She looked so disappointed.
I didn’t want to get her hopes up—like in the great mall incident of 2023—so I let it go.
But there was something about the arena.
