Pictures of You

Chapter 9

9

Drew

Why am I offering her days ?

I’m promising to help her unravel a mystery I already know the solution to. I could level with her right now. But I’ve dumped big news on someone once before. I can’t go through fallout like that again. Surely it’s safer to let the truth sneak up on her in gentle little episodes, however her mind wants to piece it together. Preferably in the company of her parents. Not me. I’m the last person she should lean on. The last one she’ll want to lean on, once she remembers …

And now a jolt of guilt slices through me. What if I’m not protecting her at all, but selfishly carving out time with “the old her” while she stays ignorant? A precious limbo, before everything crashes in and we’re back where it all exploded.

She used to be strong. The Evie I first met in boarding school, at sixteen, was the most focused person I knew. The kids around her didn’t know their plans for the weekend; Evie had hers locked in years ahead. She had every course in her undergraduate degree selected before Sydney Uni even established a timetable. Ironclad rules that would lead her straight to the goals she’d tacked on her bedroom wall in Castle Hill.

Now she’s staring at the schooner of beer on the trestle table, all wide-eyed and incredulous, like I’ve asked her to swallow poison. The whole vibe of the place—wooden floors, loud music, massive stainless-steel fermenter tanks—seems overwhelming to her and I’m gripped with guilt. Should we be somewhere this stimulating so soon after her hospital visit? A kid topples a massive wooden Jenga puzzle, pieces clattering onto the floorboards near us, and she jumps.

“We don’t have to stay,” I tell her, looking for the nearest exit.

She snaps her attention back to me. “I’m not sick. I wasn’t badly injured.” She tugs at her shirt sleeve to cover the purple bruises on her wrist, wincing. “The doctors said there wasn’t a head injury. They did a whole lot of imaging to prove it.”

Surely that’s impossible. The woman has lost her adult life. She’s adrift in a world that has stormed forward and left her without the experience she needs to wrestle reality. Even if she did have her full faculties, this situation would be a struggle—the sudden loss of the only partner you’d ever known.

“They think the amnesia is psychological. Apparently my conscious mind wants me to forget my life.” She shivers at the admission.

I take a long sip of my beer, not prepared to admit I’m partly jealous. It’s the whole fresh-start thing. The blank slate. You could create something completely new. Forget every mistake you ever made. A lowlight reel of my own mistakes blasts across my mind. Some of them make my heart plunge. One, in particular.

“They call it dissociative amnesia ,” she proceeds. “You’re able to function pretty much normally in the present. You’re still yourself and you know who you are. You can remember parts of your life, but there’s a localized memory gap about a certain event, or series of events.”

“Right.”

“Thirteen years’ worth of events, in my case.”

Almost half her life. A lot to lose. “What triggered it? The accident?”

She shrugs. “I guess so. They said it can come on from extreme stress. Or trauma. I did plunge down a cliff in a car.”

And whatever came before that.

“It will probably come back soon.” She looks around the room as if she’s expecting her memory to walk in the door, pull up a seat, and explain itself. If I could march outside, wrestle with it in the alley, and drag it in here for her, I would. But after that, I’d have to walk out of this brewery, break the lease on my Surry Hills apartment, and bolt straight to New York. If anything could boost the allure of the job offer I’ve been tossing up, it’s this unwanted minibreak with the one who got away.

“Did the doctors say how long it might take?”

How long am I going to be responsible for you? That’s what I’m really asking, isn’t it? Because if we can’t find answers tomorrow, what am I going to do? Abandon her?

“They couldn’t be sure. It might be sudden and complete, or gradual, in pieces,” she tells me. “It’s not like the memories have been corrupted. They’re all still there. I just can’t access them right now.”

Let me get this straight. At any moment, and in one crashing hit, she could retrieve every second we’ve ever spent together? Our lives flash before my eyes and I picture an unthinkable scenario in which they suddenly flash before hers. All of it. From our fraught first day through to that last heartbreaking email. I need some sort of emergency exit. An ejector seat, for the moment Evie Hudson looks into my eyes, sees the truth, and hits the roof that I didn’t tell her.

“Is everything all right, Drew?” She must clock the fight-or-flight I’m battling. I used to be better at hiding how I felt.

Everything is not all right. A collision of memories can pound into you, sweeping away in an instant all the ground you gained in the time it took you to systematically forget.

“Is there any chance you won’t remember at all?” I ask. Please.

I don’t really want to rob her of a decade of her life just to make mine easier, but the older you get, the less space a batch of years takes up in your timeline. Plenty of people want to forget their twenties, don’t they?

“Psychotherapy should help me join the dots.”

All those dots will lead to Oliver. Once she met him, he filled almost every moment of her waking consciousness. The Evie I first knew, as determined as she was, still basked in the bright light of her boyfriend’s existence. She was supporting actor to his leading role. It was a miscasting right from the start, in my opinion, not that my opinion on Evie’s romantic choice was ever popular.

“So I’m meant to stick to routine,” she explains.

I don’t see how fleeing a funeral and gallivanting up the coast with me could be classified as routine, but I hold my tongue. She takes a sip of her beer. Struggles with the taste. Takes another sip. Sets it down on the sticky table.

“Looks like beer is not your thing,” I say, although I’ve seen her drink it before. Maybe her taste buds have amnesia too. “I can get you something else.”

“It’s okay. I just don’t know …”

… who she is as an adult.

She reaches into her luxury handbag and pulls out a notebook, scoots closer, and pushes a cloud of Chanel into my nostrils. I reach for her discarded drink and drain about a third of it. The woman has no idea what she’s doing to me, every unintended touch like a spider’s silk, dragging me back into the web we spun together—an invisible structure that held me safe, then entrapped me.

“I’ve started taking notes. Trying to piece it together,” she explains.

It’s like watching someone drown. I could piece a lot of it together for her in minutes, but who am I to ride roughshod into her brain and do the psych’s job? I know from experience how much damage you can do when you raise the past. It’s damage I refuse to inflict twice.

“I’ve scrolled back years,” she explains. “Looks like I’m one of those people who routinely deletes everything and starts again, and apparently I have this whole curated color scheme going on.” She holds out her phone and shows me the coastal neutrals of her Instagram feed.

“Artistic.” I’m glancing at tiles I already scrolled through last week when news broke about the accident.

“I have two accounts,” she explains. “The other one I can’t even look at. It’s all criminology, linking to my podcast. I watched one of the videos …” She shudders. “I can’t bear seeing evidence of all the knowledge I had. Being an expert in forensic linguistics is everything I always wanted.”

I know. And she’d been brilliant at it.

“You’ll get your expertise back,” I promise her, though it’s unfair to be so confident when I have no idea which parts of her memory will return, or when.

“Anyway, there’s no reliable record on my socials from early on, but from what I can tell from my in-laws, I met Oliver when I was seventeen,” she says.

Sixteen.

I watch her pore over patchy notes in handwriting as familiar to me as the focus on her face while she scrambles for answers.

But you met me first.