Chapter 2
“And then I told the doctor I can’t be in Boston since I haven’t actually moved to Boston yet.
But he said the reason I don’t remember the move or where I live or why I cut my hair is probably because the injury to my brain caused some kind of retrograde amnesia.
So now I don’t know how much of my memory is missing, which sounds impossible.
I mean, not impossible, obviously, but it’s not exactly something you hear about people experiencing on a regular basis, you know?
But maybe the reason we don’t hear about it is because this type of thing goes away so quickly.
Maybe people lose their memories but get them back so often that, in the grand scheme of things, it’s not a big deal. That’s a possibility, right?”
The radiographer—whose name is Ryan, according to the badge clipped to his scrubs—stares down at where I’m lying in front of him, his eyes wide.
Even my broken brain knows this diatribe has reached peak levels of crazy, but I can’t help it.
When I was wheeled into the CT scanning room a few minutes ago, Ryan had seemed so friendly as he helped me get situated on the machine’s narrow bed.
Then he made the mistake of asking how my day was going.
In my defense, that’s probably not the best question to pose to a person who’s about to have a brain scan.
But in the moment, it didn’t feel awkward—it felt like a lifeline.
For a fleeting moment, I thought this man who takes pictures of brains for a living might be able to offer some solace.
Maybe he sees this type of thing all the time.
He might even tell me there really is nothing to worry about.
Instead, he looks like a deer caught in my proverbial headlights.
“Right,” he finally replies, then clears his throat. “So… have you had a CT scan before?”
According to Dr. Buterman, I have. Two, in fact. But I don’t remember them, since I was technically unconscious for both, so I don’t know if that counts. I’m also too self-conscious at this point to ask, so I just say, “I don’t think so, no.”
“Well, it’s pretty straightforward,” he says, reaching up to press a few buttons above my head. “This bed here is going to feed you into the center of the machine, which will capture some images of your brain for the doctor to review. It’ll only take a few minutes, and then you’re good to go.”
“Okay,” I say, staring up at the ceiling panels above. “And what do I do while I’m in there?”
“Nothing,” the radiographer says. “Just relax and let the machine do its magic.”
My heart does an odd stumble at the word “magic.”
But what if I don’t believe in magic anymore?
I want to ask, but Ryan disappears from sight before I can.
A moment later, the long table I’m lying on begins to slide backward.
Then the CT machine whirls to life around me, and for the first time in years, I wish all those things my grandmother told me were true.
The world is full of magic, Marnie, her voice whispers in my head as I close my eyes to keep from panicking. The magic is the universe’s way of telling you which way to go. All you have to do is trust it.
When I was little, I believed her. It was hard not to—everything else had just been so confusing.
At six years old, I didn’t understand why my parents never came home from their trip to San Diego, or why the strangers who tried to explain it to me—opaque stories about drunk drivers and tragic accidents—always seemed so uncomfortable.
But I understood when my grandmother sat me down on the floor of her bungalow in Malibu with a cup of tea and told me about real-life magic.
That, despite how awful things seemed, how much I missed my parents, and how unfair losing them was, the universe had a plan for me, a destiny just waiting to reveal itself.
Sitting there across from her, with jagged pieces of moonstone and rose quartz lined up on the windowsills and the smell of patchouli and sea salt in the air, it felt impossible that she could be wrong.
There had to be some big, universal plan because that’s the only way anything made sense.
Because a world without that kind of magic was just too bleak and scary.
“You’re doing great, Margaret,” the radiographer’s voice echoes out of a speaker nearby.
It’s Marnie, I want to say. But instead, I lie still just like he told me and wait for the magic to work.
Overboard has apparently ended and started again from the beginning by the time Brenda wheels me back into my hospital room an hour later.
“Dr. Buterman has scheduled a few more cognitive tests for this afternoon,” she says as she helps me get situated.
The irony of a movie about traumatic brain injury and severe memory loss airing on a loop seems lost on her.
“Nothing too crazy; they just want to get a better understanding of the extent of your memory loss. In the meantime, can I get you anything?”
I pick up the remote control and turn the television off. I don’t need Goldie right now. I need something familiar. I need Matt.
“Do you happen to know where my phone is?” I ask, working hard to offer her a smile.
“I’m not sure. It might be with all your personal belongings that were collected at the ER. Do you need to call someone?”
“My boyfriend. Matt Amos,” I manage to reply.
“I can ring him from the nurse’s station and send the call in here. How does that sound?”
“That would be great, thank you.”
“Anything else?”
I want to ask for a cup of tea—chamomile with a touch of honey is my usual go-to during stressful situations—but I don’t want to be too demanding. Despite whatever overwhelming fear and panic might be coursing through my body, the last thing I need is for the nurses to not like me.
“No, I’m okay,” I reply.
She smiles back and leaves, closing the door behind her so I’m alone for the first time all day.
I stare at the dark television screen for a long moment, and suddenly I want to cry.
I can already feel a sob rising in my throat.
Which is odd, because I’ve never been a big crier.
Even when my grandmother died, I don’t remember crying.
Her funeral was full of smiles and laughter, a celebration of a life that was anything but somber.
No, the only time I really cried over losing her was a year earlier, when I finally moved her into assisted living and had to sell her old bungalow in Malibu to pay for it.
I stopped by one last time to find it hollowed out, crystals and rainbows gone, and I felt hollowed out, too.
Suddenly, years’ worth of fear and sadness and grief flowed out of me in sobs so overwhelming I thought they might never stop.
But they had. By the time the Realtor arrived to pick up the keys, I had somehow swallowed the tears back, covering the red splotches on my skin with some well-placed makeup so she didn’t even notice.
I don’t think I can swallow back the tears now, though. Everything feels too unfamiliar, too overwhelming. Too much. And I have no idea what to do with that.
The phone beside my bed starts to ring. I reach for it, so desperate to grab the receiver that my hand gets tangled in the various tubes and wires hanging off my body before I can finally pick up.
“Hello?” I answer.
“Marnie?” Matt’s voice fills the line, soft and familiar.
That’s what finally does it. I burst into tears.
“It’s okay, Marn,” he says soothingly. “Don’t cry, it’s okay.”
But it’s not okay, I want to say. It’s so far from okay that I don’t know how I’ll ever find my way back again.
Unfortunately, I’m in the middle of that embarrassing part of crying where I can’t quite form words around the sobs, so I don’t even try.
“Just take a deep breath,” he says. “In and out. That’s it.”
I do, one after another, before I manage to eke out, “They said I hit my head. Twice.”
“That’s what they told me, too.”
“The first time caused my brain to start bleeding, but I must not have known it was bleeding, because I didn’t pass out until hours later after the pressure built up in my skull.”
“I know.”
“And now I’m in a hospital. In Boston.”
He lets out a long sigh. “Yeah.”
Somewhere in my head I had been holding out hope this was all some elaborate misunderstanding. That my injury had somehow made everyone else confused about my location, not me. But Matt’s confirmation destroys it, and I let out another sob.
“I don’t even remember what happened!” I cry. “Did I fall at our apartment? Was it when we were moving in? Did I trip over some boxes or something?”
“I don’t think that was it,” he says.
“Why not?”
Another sigh. Over the past two years, I’ve become an expert in Matt’s catalogue of sighs, how a slight change in the inflection can switch the tone from sympathetic to uneasy. “Because we moved to Boston a while ago, Marnie.”
Something heavy falls in the center of my gut. “A while ago” sounds substantial. An amount of time too great to be measured in days or weeks or even months.
“How long ago?”
A moment passes before he replies. “A year.”
My brain trips, like a bicycle skipping a gear.
We moved to Boston a year ago? But that’s impossible.
A year ago, Matt and I drove up to Big Sur for Sara and Garrett’s wedding.
I had moved in with him just a week before and had barely unpacked before we had to leave.
Matt was the best man and I was the maid of honor, and we wrote our speeches together on the drive up, detailing the love story of how Sara and Garrett met at a bar in Santa Monica, how they were so full of love they set up their two best friends—me and Matt—in the hope that we’d share that same sort of love, too.
How the four of us became our own unit: Matt and Marnie, Sara and Garrett.
Then, after we delivered those speeches during their sunset reception, when all the guests took to the dance floor, everyone had asked when it would be our turn, and we’d laughed awkwardly to avoid answering.
Except… that wasn’t a year ago. There’s apparently a missing chunk of time in between, a gaping hole that’s not only swallowed up our move to Boston, but everything that’s happened since.
“I forgot an entire year?” I ask, my voice going screechy with panic.
“But there’s a good chance you’ll get it back,” Matt adds quickly. “I talked with your nurse earlier, and she said you just need to rest and your brain will heal itself. You might even be able to go home in a few days.”
“A few days?” I shriek. Who approved that? What was their barometer? Because the more aware I am of just how jumbled my head is, the more I’m convinced I am absolutely not well enough to do anything except sit in this hospital bed and watch Goldie Hawn’s entire filmography.
“I know it’s a lot, but try not to get upset—”
“I’m not upset. Honestly, I’m not upset,” I reply, my voice sounding increasingly upset.
“I just don’t understand how I can go home when I don’t even know where we live.
And what about my job? I know Probus transferred me to the Boston office, but I don’t know my manager’s name there.
Do they know I’m in the hospital? What if they fire me?
What if I lose my health insurance? Is this hospital bill going to bankrupt us, or—”
“Everything is going to be okay,” Matt cuts in. “I’m in Toronto for a conference, but let’s meet up for coffee when I’m back so we can talk about everything. Sound good?”
I take a deep breath in, trying to calm down… until my broken brain finally processes what he just said.
“Why would we have to meet up for coffee?”
He pauses. “Sorry?”
Something is telling me to stop, turn back, there’s danger ahead, but I barrel on. “Why would we have to plan to meet up? We live together.”
“Shit,” he murmurs to himself, like he’s been caught in a lie he’s been trying to maintain since he got on the phone. Then there’s a long moment as he seems to summon the courage to continue. “We don’t live together, Marn.”
“What are you talking about?”
Silence. The worst gut-wrenching silence in the history of silences, before he finally says, “We broke up six months ago.”
My pulse tumbles as I stare at the blank television screen ahead. This can’t be right. How could I spend an entire year in a new city, six months without the man I moved here with, and not remember any of it? “But I came to Boston with you.”
“Yes—”
“We signed a lease on an apartment in Beacon Hill.”
“I know—”
“Then what happened?” I ask desperately. “Something must have happened, right? Was the apartment awful? Did we have a big fight about something? What?”
“It wasn’t one specific thing, Marn,” he says. “We just… didn’t work anymore.”
One of Matt’s signature nonanswers. They had never really bothered me before, just a form of people-pleasing I recognized. Sometimes I almost found it endearing. But now that I’m on the receiving end, the vagueness feels weak, like the worst kind of appeasement.
I want to call him out on it, force him to list all the details so I can pick them apart, but there’s a loud knock on the door. A moment later, Brenda appears again.
“Sorry to interrupt, but I need to bring you downstairs for those cognitive evaluations,” she says. Her smile is entirely too bright, considering the situation.
“I have to go downstairs for some cognitive evaluations,” I parrot back into the phone, my voice despondent.
“Okay, I’ll let you go,” Matt says, voice taking on that soft, soothing tone again, except now it sounds almost condescending.
“But call me when you get home. I’m serious about meeting up.
I know this is a lot to process, and I’m here for whatever you need.
In the meantime, your nurse said the hospital would organize a car service for when you’re discharged.
You’ll feel better when you’re home, I promise. ”
That seems like a pretty bold promise when I don’t even know where “home” is.
The world outside feels upside down, and every answer I get seems to only spawn a bigger question.
Or maybe it’s just that my brain is so broken, I can’t make sense of it.
And if that’s the case, how do I even begin to try?
But instead of saying that, of admitting just how terrified and confused I am, I reply, “I hope so.”
Because, honestly, I do. Despite my fears and doubts, I need to feel better. Because if I don’t, then there’s a very real possibility that the world is just as bleak and scary as I always feared.
And no amount of my grandmother’s moonstone can change that.