Chapter Text
She spent her first day of freedom rummaging through a stranger’s belongings in an apartment she’d never seen. Inches-high heels were stuffed into shelves in the closet. Filmy blouses hung in perfect chromatic order from periwinkle to navy, above a rack of skirts in every cut and style imaginable. Stacks of cable knit cardigans, prim blazers, and soft, fuzzy sweaters filled the dresser drawers. Apparently the stranger wasn’t a jeans-and-tees kind of girl. She wondered if this was worth writing down in her journal. Not a jeans and tees kind of girl. It wasn’t, she suspected, the kind of thing the therapist would want to hear.
Head-voice told her that therapists gave you journals for recording your primal instincts and darkest dreams. It also told her that this was precisely what crazy people did. Not that it mattered, she told head-voice right back. Her primal instincts were no different than anyone else’s, she was sure, and of her darkest dreams very little could be recalled. Anyway, she couldn’t write. The therapist hadn’t even bothered to ask. Her guilty fingers were only good for dancing around the stranger’s things, trying not to muss up the impeccable folding and organization.
The sheer material solidity of it all astonished her. She was on medication—the one constant in her life—but whatever it was she swallowed down every day kept her alert to the realness of everything she touched. There were no fuzzy edges, no missing moments, no sideways slips between reality and the impossible.
The stranger’s apartment smelled strongly of old paper and faintly of something sweeter. In borrowed clothes and bare feet she wandered through the tiny rooms, running her fingers along the continuous tapestry of book spines lining every available wall. She thought about putting that in the journal, too, under the imaginary entry about the clothes. Reads a lot of books. They rioted through the house like an untended garden. Books on all the shelves, shelves on every wall. They ranged in size from paper-thin to elephantine, came in every color imaginable, were smooth and glossy or snagged under her touch. Paper ragbags were strewn across the coffee table, stacked on the kitchen counters, occupying cartons piled near the door, choking every imaginable space. She had to shove them out of the way just to raid the kitchen for cereal and water to take her medicine with.
After breakfast she thought about calling the therapist. He had agreed to keep the stranger’s friends at bay for her discharge, taking her to the apartment himself. He’d even looked sympathetic as he explained the rules: the pills she was supposed to take, the times she was supposed to check in with him. She pushed her chair back, washed her dishes in case the stranger appeared unexpectedly. Her head knocked against the shelf above the sink, her finger caught in the drawer as she put the spoon away. There was a phone in the apartment, hanging near the refrigerator with its cord curled around it, but instead they’d given her a shiny gadget that fit in the palm of her hand. It had the therapist’s number programmed into it, probably in case she had another fit of amnesia and forgot.
“You can reach me anytime, for anything,” he’d assured her. “No matter how small or silly you may think it is. I’m right at your fingertips.”
Primal instincts, head-voice whispered. Darkest dreams. She knew what they wanted from her, these people who insisted on calling her by a stranger’s name and putting her up in a stranger’s house. They tiptoed around her with their little offerings of help, afraid that she was sick and it was contagious, all lies and barely concealed horror.
It would hurt to see someone you love vanish, head-voice whispered, but she pushed the thought back. She was onto their game. Their love was all for the stranger, the tragic girl who’d lost her face to an illiterate woman from the psychiatric ward. She could almost envision her, this stranger. Beautiful, smartly-dressed, surrounded by friends, maybe even at peace with the pain she’d been through. For all she despised the therapist and his crowd, for all she loathed the little flickers of dishonesty in their eyes every time they spoke, she hated the stranger more. Impossible not to, really; the other woman had vanished and apparently taken the memories of everything good in their shared life with her.
Instead of calling the therapist, she looked at the journal. The first page was flush with the therapist’s neat, square print. She imagined the scratches to spell out his name, address, information about the hospital. She turned the page so quickly it ripped at the bottom edge of the binding. With shaking hands she pressed the page down into the cover, turning to the blank pages the therapist had reserved for her own list-making purposes. Jello-smooth the paper was, neatly ruled with lavender lines. She gave it an experimental press with her nails. They left tiny crescent moons up and down the margins.
“You might try writing down things you learn about yourself,” the therapist had suggested. “I know you’re concerned that you can’t remember exactly how your accident happened.”
The trouble was that she remembered everything. She began and ended in the pristine confines of the hospital, from a padded cell to waking up with an IV in her arm and phantom pains in her shoulder. Of the accident she recalled very little, and none of it with perfect clarity. A few images stood out, but they were as impossible as her nightmares. Indescribable pain in her shoulder, a mechanical scream, fire—it was no use asking for explanations. They didn’t let crazy people out of the hospital, and they had thought her crazy. There might even be a grain of truth in the idea.
Sparse flashes of color and sound stalked just out of sight around the edges of her mind, like beasts circling a campfire. She remembered details that didn’t fit into the hospital: kaleidoscopic sunlight filtering through stained glass windows; floors littered with crumpled flower petals and circles of browning stem; the taste of dust; wicked laughter; a dank, blue room. Sometimes the hospital distorted into a wasteland where time stood still for decades on end. Sometimes she recalled, with perfect lucidity, nightmarish monsters lunging out of the darkness. Sometimes she remembered scratching at stone walls until her fingers bled.
Sometimes she remembered the smell of oil on the highway and a man who held fire in his hands.
And then, there was this. The apartment hunched in a blind spot, its smart shoe collection and sea of books silently waiting for the stranger to wake up inside her head. It didn’t matter how concrete and touchable it was; it was foreign. Not even the most well-worn book had the familiarity that her fragmented memories of the accident did. They had explained everything away in the hospital, of course. Discharged months ago. Healthy life. Fulfilling job. Sudden accident. Head trauma. Amnesia. Entirely logical, the whole damn thing, and full of ends neatly tied by her medical inability to pass sound judgment.
“There are treatments we can try, and you’ll have the support of everyone in town. You have many friends here. In time, you may even remember,” the therapist had said.
Even the half of her lacking memories of human interaction had recognized him for a liar. Whatever they wanted from her, they didn’t want her. She threw the journal across the room, where it crashed into a stack of paperbacks. The whole stack exploded onto the floor in a furious flurry of paper. The apartment screamed.
She staggered from the couch with her hands over her ears, slamming into one of the bookshelves. Books rocketed around her in concert with the shrill shriek coming from the kitchen. She gasped and lunged after the stranger’s books, but pulling her hands away to catch them exposed her ears to the incessant, undulating screaming, an over-and-over-and-over noise like the beeping of the hospital machines first aggravated and then magnified. She stumbled over the books and into the kitchen, slipping on something here, something digging into her insole there. The telephone thundered in its cradle.
This is how crazy people react, head-voice said smugly. This is what crazy people do. They can’t handle reality when it invades, or they find it full of phantoms.
“I’m not crazy,” she sobbed, but whatever comfort she’d expected from the words was drowned out by the last notes of the telephone. The apartment was silent except for the muted thuds of books toppling off the sideways shelf to join their companions on the floor. Then, three imperious knocks resounded through the little hallway. There was someone at the door. She breathed deeply and sank into one of the kitchen chairs, her hands slowly going back up over her head as she drew her knees to her chest, flexed her toes on the edge of the chair. Breathe, breathe, she told herself. Breathe. Only a noise and no-one is coming for you.
There were footsteps outside the door. She closed her eyes and froze into the chair. It was an old trick, the freezing. Close your eyes, slow your breathing, calm your heart, fade into the furniture. Don’t notice them noticing you. Be still. Listen.
Back and forth the footsteps paced, uneven in cadence and tone, sometimes soft and sometimes thudding, as if many pairs of feet waited beyond the door. A door was nothing to them. The nurse must have called a doctor, she realized. She steeled herself. Any minute now the door would open and they would rush in with the needles. This was all her fault for thinking about the accident, for trying to make sense of it.
You’ve really done it this time, head-voice said, gleeful with horror. They’ll come in with the tranquilizers and make you forget it all. Everything will be jumbled; you’ll have to sort out the memories all over again and it will hurt. You’ll wake up uncertain of what’s real and what’s not, and when you’ve finally pieced it back together, they’ll know. They’ll come back. They’ll make you think you’re crazy.
“You’re just confused,” the nurse said. “Imagining things.”
It’s all your fault, head-voice said. You shouldn’t have thrown the journal. You should have called the therapist.
“Sometimes tranquilizers have this effect on people,” the nurse said. “They distort your memories and make you think you saw things you didn’t really see.”
If it was all her memories that were tangled together, how could any of it have been unseen?
She shook her head and sucked back a sob. The footsteps stayed outside the door. The edge of the chair cut into her bare feet as she gripped it with her toes. Safe in the stranger’s kitchen, she reminded herself that the footsteps were outside, on the welcome mat the stranger had kept clean and tidy in front of the door. Out in the hallway the footsteps drew close and then quieted. There was a thud, a clink, then the slow stump-stump of feet receding.
Not crazy, she reminded herself. She knew what she had seen. Not crazy. Not even for all their needles and confinement. Shaking, she leaned into the edge of the stranger’s kitchen table and reminded herself that, at least for the moment, she was real. Maybe it would all come back. Maybe she would wake up one day and find herself to be the stranger, or maybe the stranger would wake up one day and she would never find herself at all. Maybe she would simply vanish. Either way, there was no use in dwelling on a life she couldn’t remember. Slowly, she unwound herself and slid off the chair, testing her feet against the floor. There was no-one but her, and nothing to remember except the hospital and the accident.
“I’m not crazy,” she said again, with a fierceness in it. She could play the silence game, she could smile and nod and pretend to wait for the stranger’s miraculous reappearance. She could bite her tongue about the accident. They couldn’t make her forget it, no matter how incredible it sounded. She stretched her now-aching arms out and bent to the task of picking up the books, moving them into some kind of passable order. The shelf was beyond repair, so she piled the books into lopsided stacks against the far wall, out of the way. Later she would find a way to take the telephone apart and keep it from screaming. Still later, she would work up the courage to look outside the apartment door. And none of it would need to be recorded for someone else. She would remember.