Chapter Five
FIVE
In the shower, I repeat Miguel’s words like a mantra. It’s going to be okay. It’s going to be okay.
A knock comes on the door. “You doing okay in there? You’ve been in for a while.”
“I’m fine,” I call, shutting off the water.
“I’m coming.” I must have lost track of time in the shower.
I wrap myself in a towel and enter the bedroom, so grateful that Miguel is here, that he came back from Rehoboth early.
He’s so good in situations like this. My mind wanders back to the time Rachel cut her foot in the yard and needed stitches.
I pause. That memory is so clear. How Miguel took charge, comforting both Rachel and me, cracking jokes as he drove to the emergency room.
Why am I able to recall something that happened ten years ago in such vivid detail, yet last night eludes me? Is this a stroke?
It’s going to be okay. It’s going to be okay.
Quickly, I change into clean clothes and head downstairs. Miguel is waiting by the front door, holding my cell phone in one hand and jiggling the car keys in his other.
“Where did you find my cell phone?” I ask.
“It was in the kitchen. Why? Where did you think it was?”
“I just … I’m not sure. Why didn’t I have it on me?”
“I don’t know. Let’s go.” His voice is calm, but I sense an underlying anxiety in the way he keeps jiggling his keys. After two decades together, I know him. He’s more worried than he wants to let on, and that scares me.
“Do you remember anything about last night?” he asks as the car rounds Westmoreland Circle and turns down Dalecarlia Drive. The hospital is only a few minutes away, thank God.
“I remember the party,” I say. “At the Allards’.”
“And do you remember leaving the party?”
I squeeze my eyes shut. “Not really. I feel like I went home and got Kugel, but…” I shake my head. “I don’t know. It’s not clear.”
“You were wearing that dress last night, right? The same one you were wearing this morning.”
“Yes.”
“What about that guy, Finn? Where did he find you?”
I have no answer and it terrifies me. “All these questions, all this trying to remember hurts my head.”
“You don’t remember where you met him? The guy who had a job interview at six AM on a Sunday. That was less than an hour ago.” A slight edge in his voice unnerves me. I can’t tell if it is panic or annoyance.
“I know that. Don’t you think I know that?
” I feel defensive. I stare out the window, terror gripping me.
There’s something wrong with my brain. I’ve never been a sickly person, never even broken a bone or had allergies.
Outside of my pregnancies, I’ve only been hospitalized once, when I was thirty and needed an emergency appendectomy.
But a person could live without an appendix. Who was I without my memory?
“Sorry,” Miguel says, turning into the Sibley Hospital parking lot and following the signs to the emergency room. “I didn’t mean to say it like that. I’m sure there is a perfectly good explanation. You can lose some memories if you hit your head, right? I mean, that happens.”
We’ve been seated in plastic chairs in the waiting room for about ten minutes when a nurse steps out from the back and calls my name.
We follow him through a door, past bays divided by curtains until he comes to an empty one.
After taking my vitals and asking some basic questions, he leaves, assuring us that someone will be with us shortly.
I sit on the hospital bed, hands tucked under my thighs, while Miguel paces, arms crossed. For the next twenty minutes we sit and listen to the beeps and shouts of the ER that the curtains do little to muffle.
“So why did you come back from Rehoboth so early?” I ask. “I thought you were staying until tomorrow.”
“Started raining in the middle of the night,” he says. “Woke me up. I couldn’t sleep. And there’s no point in trying to redo the deck if it’s raining. So I drove home. I’ll head down next week and do it.”
“I’m glad you were here,” I say.
He stops pacing and comes over to me. “Me too, carino.” He kisses the top of my head. “I’m so glad.”
A young man in a white coat enters and introduces himself as Dr. Malik. He takes two pumps from the large jug of hand sanitizer sitting by the sink.
“So, Caren, it says here you had a fall.” Dr. Malik places the clipboard he is holding on the counter and approaches me with a reassuring smile. “Let’s take a look at that head.”
As he examines me, the doctor asks me to tell him what happened.
I explain everything as best as I can, but a feeling of shame invades me as I speak.
My story sounds much worse out loud—that I was drinking at a party last night and then the next thing I remember is wandering around the neighborhood this morning, still wearing last night’s clothing.
I sound like an alcoholic who’s blacked out, but I know that’s not what happened.
“I know what being hungover feels like for me,” I say. “It’s a feeling I’ve had many times. And I am not hungover.”
“But you have no recollection of where you spent the night?” Dr. Malik asks me in a nice, neutral tone, although there’s no escaping the meaning behind the words.
“No. None.”
I search his face for assurance that this is no big deal, but he’s perfected a mask of kind yet distant professionalism.
What if Rachel came home with a story like this?
I would flip out. And for good reason. I could have wound up lying in a ditch last night, vulnerable to anyone who happened along.
But when I chase after a glimmer of a memory, it feels like I’m heading straight into a pitch-black tunnel.
Emptiness. Not even a shred of light to illuminate the way.
“All right,” Dr. Malik says. “I think we better run some tests.”