“You mean chemistry,” Mom corrected. “Summer school.”
I fastened my eyes to hers, unsure. “I’ve never gone to summer school.”
Mom brought her hand to her mouth. Her skin had blanched. The only sound in the room was the methodical tick of the clock above the window. I heard each tiny chime echo through me, ten times, before I found my voice.
“What day is it? What month?” My mind spun back to the cemetery. The composting leaves. The subtle chill in the air. The man with the flashlight insisting it was September. The only word repeating over and over in my mind was no. No, it wasn’t possible. No, this wasn’t happening. No, months of my life couldn’t have just walked off unnoticed. I shoved my way back through my memories, trying to grasp anything that could help me bridge this moment to sitting in Coach’s biology class. But there was nothing to build on. Any memory of summer was completely and utterly gone.
“It’s okay, baby,” Mom murmured. “We’re going to get your memory back. Dr. Howlett said most patients see marked improvement over time.”
I tried to sit up, but my arms were a tangle of tubes and medical monitoring equipment. “Just tell me what month it is!” I repeated hysterically.
“September.” Her crumpled face was unbearable. “September sixth.”
I sank back down, blinking. “I thought it was April. I can’t remember anything past April.” I threw up walls to block the outbreak of fear banging inside me. I couldn’t deal with it in one great flood. “Is summer really — is it over? Just like that?”
“Just like that?” she echoed in a detached voice. “It dragged on. Every day without you … Eleven weeks of knowing nothing … The panic, the worry, the fear, the hopelessness never ending …”
I mulled this over, doing the math. “If it’s September, and I was gone for eleven weeks, then I went missing—”
“June twenty-first,” she said blandly. “The night of summer solstice.”
The wall I’d built was cracking faster than I could mentally repair it. “But I don’t remember June. I don’t even remember May.”
We watched each other, and I knew we were sharing the same terrible thought. Was it possible my amnesia stretched further than the missing eleven weeks, all the way back to April? How could something like this even happen?
“What did the doctor say?” I asked, moistening my lips, which felt papery and dry. “Did I have a head injury? Was I drugged? Why can’t I remember anything?”
“Dr. Howlett said it’s retrograde amnesia.” Mom paused. “It means some of your preexisting memories are lost. We just weren’t sure how far back the memory loss went. April,” she whispered to herself, and I could see all hope fading from her eyes.
“Lost? How lost?”
“He thinks it’s psychological.”
I plowed my hands through my hair, leaving an oily residue on my fingers. It suddenly dawned on me that I hadn’t considered where I’d been all those weeks. I could have been chained in a dank basement. Or tied in the woods. Clearly I hadn’t showered in days. A glance at my arms revealed smudges of dirt, small cuts, and bruises all over. What had I gone through?
“Psychological?” I forced myself to shut out the speculations, which only made the hysteria clamp down harder. I had to stay strong. I needed answers. I couldn’t fall apart. If I could force my mind to focus despite the spots popping across my vision …
“He thinks you’re blocking it to avoid remembering something traumatic.”
“I’m not blocking it.” I closed my eyes, unable to control the tears leaking from the corners. I sucked in a shaky breath and clamped my hands into tight balls to stop the awful trembling in my fingers. “I would know if I was trying to forget five months of my life,” I said, speaking slowly to force a measure of calm into my voice. “I want to know what happened to me.”
If I glared at her, she ignored it. “Try to remember,” she urged gently. “Was it a man? Were you with a male this whole time?”
Was I? Up until this point, I hadn’t put a face with my kidnapper. The only picture in my head was of a monster lurking beyond the reach of light. A terrible cloud of uncertainty loomed over me.
“You know you don’t have to protect anyone, right?” she continued in that same soft tone. “If you know who you were with, you can tell me. No matter what they told you, you’re safe now. They can’t get you. They did this horrible thing to you, and it’s their fault. Their fault,” she repeated.
A sob of frustration rose in my throat. The term “blank slate” was nauseatingly accurate. I was about to voice my hopelessness, when a shadow stirred near the doorway. Detective Basso stood just inside the room’s entrance. His arms were folded over his chest, his eyes alert.
My body reflexively tensed. Mom must have felt it; she looked beyond the bed, following my gaze. “I thought Nora might remember something while it was just the two of us,” she told Detective Basso apologetically. “I know you said you wanted to question her, but I just thought—”
He nodded, signaling that it was okay. Then he walked over, staring down at me. “You said you don’t have a clear picture, but even fuzzy details might help.”
“Like hair color,” Mom interjected. “Maybe it was … black, for instance?”
I wanted to tell her there was nothing, not even a lingering snapshot of color, but I didn’t dare with Detective Basso in the room. I didn’t trust him. Instinct told me something about him was … off. When he stood close, the hairs on my scalp tingled, and I had the brief but distinct feeling of an ice cube slithering down the back of my neck.
“I want to go home,” was all I said.
Mom and Detective Basso shared a look.
“Dr. Howlett needs to run a few tests,” Mom said.
“What kind of tests?”
“Oh, things related to your amnesia. It’ll be over in no time. And then we’ll go home.” She waved a hand dismissively, which only made me more suspicious.
I faced Detective Basso, since he seemed to have all the answers. “What aren’t you telling me?”
His expression was as unfaltering as steel. I supposed years as a cop had perfected that look. “We need to run a few tests. Make sure everything is fine.”
Fine?
What part of any of this seemed fine to him?
CHAPTER 3
MY MOM AND I LIVE IN A FARMHOUSE NESTLED between Coldwater’s city limits and the remote outback regions of Maine. Stand at any window, and it’s like a glimpse back in time. Vast unadulterated wilderness on one side, flaxen fields framed by evergreen trees on the other. We live at the end of Hawthorne Lane and are divided from our nearest neighbors by a mile. At night, with the fireflies lighting up the trees in gold, and the fragrance of warm, musky pine overwhelming the air, it’s not hard to trick my mind into believing I’ve transported myself into a completely different century. If I slant my vision just so, I can even picture a red barn and grazing sheep.
Our house has white paint, blue shutters, and a wraparound porch with a slope grade visible to the naked eye. The windows are long and narrow, and protest with an obnoxiously loud groan when pushed open. My dad used to say there was no need to install an alarm in my bedroom window, a secret joke between us, since we both knew I was hardly the kind of daughter to sneak out.