No, not here…
An overwhelming mental image came to her, of slamming their heads together over and over until their skulls broke and the seawater inside them ran out red and thick. She almost screamed before she realized it was only in her mind.
“Didn’t expect to find you in the archives.” Cal’s voice brought her back, her heart racing sickeningly. His eyes were focused too tightly on her. As though he knew what she was thinking.
“Don’t tell me somebody stuck you on research duty,” the engineer said with a laugh.
“I’m here by choice, believe it or not.” Catherine faked a laugh with him although she was trying not to vomit. The archives? She had no reason to be in the archives. How the hell had she gotten down here? “I— I had to look something up and it… wasn’t in a digital file yet,” she stammered. “It’s a nice change, though; it’s quiet here.”
“Too quiet. Gives me the creeps.” The engineer was a round-faced, cheery sort, and she was grateful he was there to act as a buffer to Cal, who hadn’t said anything further.
“Yeah, that’s for sure.” She took a step backward, hoping her legs didn’t tremble beneath her. “Well, I’ll let you both get to it.”
It wasn’t until she found the elevator that she thought to check her cell phone. Maggie had left her office around two thirty.
It was nearly four in the afternoon.
That was impossible. Her phone was wrong.
She got off the elevator on the ground floor and checked one of the clocks showing the world’s various time zones.
Her phone wasn’t wrong.
An hour and a half of her day had vanished in the time it took her to walk through a doorway.
7
SHOULD I EVEN be driving? Catherine gripped the wheel as she drove in alone to JSC the next day, focusing on the things that were real: the firm steering wheel against her fingers, the sun coming through the car window, hot against her skin despite the fierce air conditioner.
For the past eighteen hours, Catherine had been clinging to reality like a life preserver. She focused on sensory input as much as possible, trying to ground herself in things that were unmistakably real, like counting the mile markers on the side of the highway as she drove. Watching them reassured her that she wasn’t losing track of time. As far as she knew, the loss of time hadn’t happened again, but the constant vigilance to try to prevent it was exhausting. Especially since she had no idea how to prevent it. She found herself checking her watch every few minutes, making sure the time that had passed felt like the right amount of time.
It had been worse last night. David let Aimee go out with friends after dinner. On a school night. She didn’t get home until eleven, and every minute she was gone seemed to stretch, further distorting Catherine’s sense of time.
Focus on the steering wheel and the warm sun. Let everything else go. And don’t tell a soul.
She wasn’t sure what would happen if she did, but she couldn’t bear the thought of going back to isolation, of losing the freedom she’d so desperately yearned for while she was in quarantine, and, before that, all those years alone…
She still hadn’t decided what to tell Dr. Darzi when she sat down in her office for her therapy appointment. Compared to the rest of JSC, Dr. Darzi’s office was warm, homelike. In a hive of squared-off, sharp-edged scientific minds, clinical surroundings, and industrial buildings, hers was the one place that was soft and quiet. The overhead fluorescents stayed off in favor of incandescent lamps, and the cinder-block walls were covered in peaceful artwork and soft fabric hangings. Catherine often wondered if her male counterparts were comfortable in these surroundings.
Still, Catherine had liked Dr. Darzi from the start. She didn’t dress or act like most of NASA’s administration, favoring long, flowy skirts and dresses, and wearing her tightly coiled black hair short. She didn’t take any bullshit from anybody, Catherine included.
“It sounds as if you’re settling in well at home.” Dr. Darzi sat across from her in a wingback chair while Catherine perched on the edge of a love seat, not quite able to relax.
“It’s good to be back with my family,” Catherine said. “David and I are… we’re in this weird place where we’re getting reacquainted, but it’s going okay.”
“And with Aimee?”
“It’s amazing,” Catherine said. “She’s great. I just… have to keep reminding myself that she’s not a little girl anymore. And David’s a little more lenient than I would be.”
“Are you feeling out of control?”
“No, it’s not that,” Catherine insisted. “I just… want her to be safe.”
“Of course you do, but it’s also natural to want to reach out and grab on to what we’re certain of, what we know we have control over.” Dr. Darzi peered at Catherine over her glasses. “There’s an awful lot in your life that you can’t control right now.”
Did she know? How could she know? Suddenly the draped office felt suffocating. “I don’t feel out of control,” she lied. Was that it? Did she want to be controlling at home to make up for everything else?
Dr. Darzi didn’t answer.
“I don’t— I mean, I’m not, necessarily. I mean, no more out of control than anybody else, right? Things are going great here. I’m fine. I’m settling in, like you said.” The longer Catherine lied, the more desperate she felt, needing to believe it herself. Maybe more than she needed Dr. Darzi to believe it. She stopped trying and went quiet, staring at her hands.
The silence spun out until Dr. Darzi said, “Sooner or later you’re going to have to talk about you, Catherine. Not your family. Not your job. You. I know you feel like you abandoned Aimee and David, but you were abandoned, too, in a way.”
“Me? By who?”
At first Catherine thought Dr. Darzi wasn’t going to answer. Instead, she asked, “How long did you know Commander Gidzenko?”
“Ava? We met in training.”
“And the rest of your crew?”
Catherine realized where the doctor was going. “They didn’t abandon me. They died.”
“You lived with them for three years. Trained with them for how long before that?”
“I don’t know, several years.”
“The six of you experienced something no one else has ever experienced. Ever. You lived together like a family. And now you’re the only one left.”
“But we weren’t like that,” Catherine protested. “Ava and I were close, yes, but the others, they were just my coworkers.” Sure, your coworkers, like Tom. The guilt was like a gut punch.
“Catherine?”
“I’m fine.” She tried to smile, and felt it falling flat.
“Are you sure?”
“Yes.” Catherine closed her eyes for a moment and took a breath. “Doctor, am I ever going to get my memory back?”
Dr. Darzi sat back in her chair, crossing her legs. “It’s hard to say. I know that’s not what you want to hear. Retrograde amnesia is tough to treat in the best of cases. You went through an enormous emotional trauma; it was six years, and for all we know you could have experienced some sort of physical trauma as well. Plus, we knew ahead of time that traveling through ERB Prime can have some effects on memory.”
“Yeah, but I didn’t know it would be like this. Did Iris Addy ever get any of her memory back?”
Dr. Darzi flinched so imperceptibly that Catherine wondered if she’d imagined it. “Iris Addy was a special case.”