“The stories say she came back hearing voices,” Catherine pressed.
“Are you hearing voices?”
Catherine thought about the moments when she heard Ava’s voice in her mind, as clear as if she were standing right next to her. But that felt different somehow, more like grief, like she was trying to keep Ava with her. She shook her head.
Dr. Darzi put aside her notepad and leaned forward. “The astronaut screening program isn’t perfect, and sometimes things slip past the tests. Yes, Iris Addy came back with some issues, and yes, some of those issues were similar to yours. However, she refused to let NASA help her with them. Our hands were tied.” She smiled. “You, clearly, aren’t making the same mistakes she did.”
“Well, I’m trying not to.” Catherine tried to return the smile, though she couldn’t help but hear a faint warning in the doctor’s words.
“Memory loss is upsetting and disconcerting, I know. What you’re experiencing is normal, Catherine. You just have to give yourself time to recover.”
“But how long?”
The doctor laughed, but gently. “It’s been little more than a month since you got home. I promise you, you’re making great progress. If I see a problem, I will tell you. All right?”
“Yes. Okay.” Catherine didn’t feel any better. Dr. Darzi wasn’t seeing the things she was. Dr. Darzi didn’t know everything.
“What are you afraid of, Catherine?”
“What am I not afraid of,” Catherine said with a laugh. “That list would be a lot shorter.”
Dr. Darzi didn’t laugh, but kept looking at her with patient brown eyes.
Catherine sighed. She wasn’t getting out of this, not unless she wanted to spend the rest of her session in silence. She couldn’t make the words come out at first. “What if something went really wrong up there? What if… what if the reason I can’t remember anything is that I’m the reason it went wrong?”
Admitting that took all the willpower she had, and she held her breath waiting for the response.
“That’s a normal feeling.” Dr. Darzi folded her hands on her lap. “Something did go wrong up there. Very wrong. As the sole survivor of a tragedy, you’re going to feel guilty. You’re going to look for reasons why you were the one who survived when no one else did. For some people, this manifests as a drive to find their purpose in life, for others, it’s proof they were somehow responsible for the tragedy.”
Despite Dr. Darzi’s reassuring words, Catherine couldn’t help remembering how badly she’d wanted to hurt Cal and the engineer when they’d found her in the archives. Not just hurt them—destroy them. And then there was the missing time…
“I… there has to be some reason I survived and they didn’t. Any sort of destruction of the Habitat… I would have been there, too. Or else, someone would have survived with me if we were on an expedition when it happened.” Catherine fumbled along, trying to explain the fear that had been hovering in the back of her mind. “If it was some sort of sickness, what are the odds that I was the only one to survive? And I suppose there’s a chance that I just took off and left them behind, but… I think the five of them would have been able to stop me.”
Dr. Darzi put aside her notepad again and looked at Catherine seriously. “When we go through trauma, afterward we try to make sense of it. We look for signs, for some pattern to show us the meaning behind what happened. But Catherine, often there is no meaning. Bad things just happen.”
“But… since I’ve been home, I’ve… I’ve had thoughts. Frightening thoughts. About hurting other people. Not my family,” Catherine was quick to reassure her. “It’s like… like it’s someone else having those feelings.”
“I see. Do you feel threatened by the people you want to hurt?”
“Well, I… yes. Yes, they seem dangerous.”
“Those are called intrusive thoughts, Catherine. They’re not uncommon with PTSD, but they’re just thoughts. Most likely, the people who trigger that response in you somehow remind you of whatever happened on TRAPPIST-1f, and your mind instantly wants to defend you from the danger. Pay close attention to when it happens; try to figure out what those people have in common. It may yield some insight.”
“But—”
“If they continue to trouble you, we can look at starting you on some medication to stop them.”
Catherine fought back a sense of frustration, of not being heard. Finally she admitted, “I’m… still forgetting things sometimes.”
“More amnesia?”
“No, not exactly. It doesn’t feel the same as what happened on the ship.” She’d lost years of her life then, a vast yawning emptiness. Losing an hour here and there couldn’t be the same thing—could it?
Dr. Darzi reached for her notepad again. “I see. What sorts of things are you forgetting?”
Catherine laughed lightly, waving a dismissive hand. She should never have brought this up. “Oh, it’s just silly. Like forgetting that I put something on the stove, that sort of thing.”
“Hmm. What does it feel like when that happens?”
“Nothing, really,” Catherine said. Half-truths were her home these days. She was getting very good at telling them. “Just like… I disconnected for a little bit, distracted.”
“It might be some mild dissociation. That’s also not uncommon with PTSD. Are you frightened by it?”
“A little.” Catherine didn’t tell her about the nearly obsessive way she was watching clocks, or the constant worry that she was living in a moment she’d soon forget.
“Dissociative responses often come in response to a trauma trigger. Can you think of anything that might have happened before you dissociated?”
Had something happened? Before the incident here at Johnson she’d talked to Maggie, and it started with the planetary simulation. “Maybe, yes. But…”
“But what?” Dr. Darzi prompted.
“What if it keeps happening?”
Dr. Darzi sighed. “I wish I could promise you that it won’t, but chances are very good that it will. The good news is, the further you get from the original trauma, and the more work we do here, the less frequent and less severe your symptoms will be.”
“I just… I just keep thinking that if I could remember what happened on the mission, all of this would get better much faster,” Catherine said.
“I know, Catherine. But that may not ever happen, and you need to work on accepting that.” Dr. Darzi’s voice was soothing. “I think our time might be better spent if we start focusing on the here and now. You may never fully recover your memories, but you can—and should—live in the now.”
Dr. Darzi’s words made sense, but something didn’t ring true. “But what if there’s something important that I’m forgetting?”
“Catherine. This is becoming counterproductive for you. It’s time to stop focusing on the past and focus on the present and the future. Trying to relive what happened isn’t going to fix anything. You’re back, you’re alive, you’re a hero. Don’t let your mind trick you into poking holes in that.”
Catherine was growing to hate the word hero. It wasn’t just that she didn’t feel like one. It was that NASA pulled that word out whenever they wanted her to stop thinking about what had happened on the mission. It was like a code phrase: “No, everything is fine, nothing went wrong that we can’t fix, you’re fine, now be fine so there are no loose ends.”
But at the same time, Dr. Darzi was right. There was no way for her to force the memories to come back. All she could do was fix what was happening now.
“I’m trying, Doc. I really am.”
“I know, and you’re doing great, Catherine. This is hard, scary work that you’re doing. The good news is you’re not alone anymore. You have a miraculous second chance here. We’re going to help you make the most of it.”