A car rounds the bend farther up the road and heads toward us. “The literature?”
“Yes. There have been a couple of case studies written about you. I got in touch with the place where you were being treated before you came to live at home.”
“Why? Why did you want to find me?”
He smiles. “Because I thought I could help you. I’ve been working with patients with these sorts of problems for a little while. I believe they can be helped; however, they require more intensive input than the usual one hour per week. I had a few ideas about how real improvements could be effected and wanted to try some of them out.” He pauses. “Plus I’ve been writing a paper on your case. The definitive work, you might say.” He begins to laugh, but cuts it short when I do not join in. He clears his throat. “Your case is unusual. I believe we can discover a lot more about the way memory works than we already know.”
The car passes and we cross the road. I feel myself get anxious, uptight. Brain disorders. Researching. Tracked you down. I try to breathe, to relax, but find I cannot. There are two of me, now, in the same body; one is a forty-seven-year-old woman, calm, polite, aware of what kind of behavior is appropriate and what is not, and the other is in her twenties, and screaming. I cannot decide which is me, but the only noise I hear is that of distant traffic and the shouts of children from the park, and so I guess it must be the first.
On the other side, I stop and say, “Look, what’s going on? I woke up this morning in a place I’ve never seen but that’s apparently my home, lying next to a man I’ve never met who tells me I’ve been married to him for years. And you seem to know more about me than I know about myself.”
He nods slowly. “You have amnesia,” he says, putting his hand on my arm. “You’ve had amnesia for a long time. You can’t retain new memories, so you’ve forgotten much of what’s happened to you for your entire adult life. Every day you wake up as if you are a young woman. Some days you wake as if you are a child.”
Somehow it seems worse, coming from him. A doctor. “So it’s true?”
“I’m afraid so. Yes. The man at home is your husband. Ben. You’ve been married to him for years. Since long before your amnesia began.” I nod. “Shall we go on?”
I say yes, and we walk into the park. A path circles its edge, and there is a children’s playground nearby, next to a hut from which I see people emerge carrying trays of snacks. We head there, and I take a seat at one of the chipped Formica tables while Dr. Nash orders our drinks.
When he returns, he is carrying two plastic cups filled with strong coffee, mine black, his white. He adds sugar from the bowl on the table but offers none to me, and it is that, more than anything, that convinces me we have met before. He looks up and asks me how I hurt my forehead.
“What—?” I say at first, but then I remember the bruise I saw this morning. My makeup has clearly not covered it. “That?” I say. “I’m not sure. It’s nothing, really. It doesn’t hurt.”
He does not answer. He stirs his coffee.
“So my husband looks after me at home?” I say.
He looks up. “Yes, though he hasn’t always. At first your condition was so severe that you required round-the-clock care. It has only been fairly recently that Ben felt he could look after you alone.”
So the way I feel at the moment is an improvement, then. I am glad I cannot remember the time when things were worse.
“He must love me very much,” I say, more to myself than to Nash.
He nods. There is a pause. We both sip our drinks. “Yes. I think he must.”
I smile and look down, at my hands holding the hot drink, at the gold wedding band, at the short nails, at my legs, crossed politely. l do not recognize my own body.
“Why doesn’t my husband know that I’m seeing you?” I say.
He sighs and closes his eyes. “I’ll be honest,” he says, clasping his hands together and leaning forward in his seat. “Initially I asked you not to tell Ben that you were seeing me.”
A jolt of fear goes through me, almost an echo. Yet he does not look untrustworthy.
“Go on,” I say. I want to believe he can help me.
“Several people—doctors, psychiatrists, psychologists, and so on—have approached you and Ben in the past, wanting to work with you. But he has always been extremely reluctant to let you see these professionals. He has made it very clear that you have had extensive treatment before, and in his opinion it has achieved nothing other than to upset you. Naturally he wanted to spare you—and himself—from any more upset.”
Of course; he doesn’t want to raise my hopes. “So you persuaded me to come and see you without him knowing?”
“Yes. I did approach Ben first. We spoke on the phone. I even asked him to meet with me so that I could explain what I had to offer, but he refused. So I contacted you directly.”
Another jolt of fear, as if from nowhere. “How?” I say.
He looked down at his drink. “I came to see you. I waited until you came out of the house and then introduced myself.”
“And I agreed to see you? Just like that?”
“Not at first. No. I had to persuade you that you could trust me. I suggested that we should meet once, just for one session. Without Ben’s knowledge if that was what it took. I said I would explain to you why I wanted you to come and see me, and what I thought I could offer you.”
“And I agreed…”
He looks up. “Yes,” he says. “I told you that after that first visit it was entirely up to you whether you chose to tell Ben or not, but if you decided not to I would call you to make sure you remembered our appointments, and so on.”
“And I chose not to.”
“Yes. That’s right. You’ve spoken about wanting to wait until we were making progress before telling him. You felt that was better.”
“And are we?”
“What?”
“Making progress?”
He swallows some more coffee, then puts his cup back on the table. “I believe so, yes. Though progress is somewhat difficult to quantify exactly. But lots of memories seem to have come back to you over the last few weeks—many of them for the first time, as far as we know. And there are certain truths that you are aware of more often, where there were few before. For example, you occasionally wake up and remember that you’re married, now. And—”
He pauses. “And?” I say.
“And, well, you’re gaining independence, I think.”
“Independence?”
“Yes. You don’t rely on Ben as much as you did. Or me.”
That’s it, I think. That is the progress he is talking about. Independence. Perhaps he means I can make it to the shops or a library without a chaperone, though right now I am not even sure that much is true. In any case, I have not yet made enough progress for me to wave it proudly in front of my husband. Not even enough for me to always wake up remembering I have one.
“But that’s it?”
“It’s important,” he says. “Don’t underestimate it, Christine.”
I don’t say anything. I take a sip of my drink and look around the café. It is almost empty. There are voices from a small kitchen at the back, the occasional rattle as the water in an urn reaches boiling point, the noise of children playing in the distance. It is difficult to believe that this place is so close to my home and yet I have no memory of ever being here before.
“You say we’ve been meeting for a few weeks,” I say to Dr. Nash. “So what have we been doing?”