“Thanks for this,” I say. “I really needed to get out.”
“Hey, what are friends for?”
Trina’s words are meant to cheer me, but I have to turn my face to the window to make sure she doesn’t see the tears I’m certain glitter in my eyes. That’s how I see that Harriett watches us until the curve in the driveway takes us out of sight.
Trina catches me up on the small-town gossip as we drive. She even runs the library book inside for me, along with the money for the fine. She drops me at Dr. Levitt’s office, promising she’ll be back in an hour.
The office is outfitted with a low leather couch. Such a cliché. I’ve never lain on it, even though the pillow and fuzzy throw blanket look comfortable enough; it’s just too hard for me to get up and down into a prone position. At home I have to use a huge wedge pillow to sleep, and getting in and out of bed requires an entire rigamarole.
Instead, the doctor and I usually sit in the overstuffed chairs facing each other. She always offers hot tea served in a delicate teacup, but that would mean taking an arm out of the sling to drink it, and today I’m saving up all my aching and paining for those glasses of wine with Trina.
When I tell her this, Dr. Levitt chuckles. “Can’t say I blame you. A glass of wine with a friend is usually worth more than a session with me.”
“I haven’t been out in forever. I always thought I was a homebody until I couldn’t leave on my own. I was really glad she called me.”
I don’t mention that Trina and I had become much closer over the years that Val lived away. When Val moved back to good old Lebanon, Pennsylvania, to take care of her dad and then stayed because she lost her job in New York City, I’m ashamed to admit that Trina and I stopped getting together as often.
We talk a bit about my forced convalescence. Dr. Levitt says to focus on my progress instead of the setbacks. I can text now, carefully, if I don’t overdo it. I can read books on my tablet since I only have to tap the screen instead of turning a page. I can feed myself if I’m careful to eat things that don’t require a lot of cutting and I take it slow. That’s a lot better than the first week or so, when I mostly ate soup or drank milkshakes through a straw. Every day, I’m closer to being out of the slings and back to my independence. We talk a lot about how important that is to me. Being able to take care of myself.
We haven’t really started talking about why relying on others is such a hardship for me. To do that, we’re going to have to delve deeper, and since I’ve only had three appointments so far, Dr. Levitt’s barely had time to scrape the surface of what seems to be a disturbingly deep well of psychological issues. I mean, we all have them. You don’t get through life without baggage. I’m sure it’s all going to come up, but so far we’ve been focusing on the present.
Eventually, Dr. Levitt steers the conversation to my memory loss. There’s not much she can do to help me regain my lost memories. Anesthesia-induced amnesia is a medical condition, not the same as a trauma-induced memory loss, even though the circumstances surrounding the loss were traumatic. She’s here more to help me with my emotional reactions to finding a sizable blank space in my brain, to teach me how to cope, and to monitor the meds I’m on as part and parcel of all of this.
And to talk about the dreams.
“I didn’t have the nightmare last night,” I tell her. “That’s three nights in a row without it. Maybe they’re going to stop.”
“Maybe.” Dr. Levitt inclines her head toward me as she takes down a note or two on the pale lavender legal pad in her lap. I want to ask her where she got it. It looks just right for making a lot of lovely lists—once writing with a pen is no longer the equivalent of tearing myself to pieces.
My chuckle lifts on a sigh. “You don’t think so.”
“I think your nightmares are part of your emotional reaction to the stress and trauma of what happened. Even if your mind can’t actively remember the night of the accident and the surgery, your body does. It can scarcely forget, after all. You’re still in pain every day.”
“But I’m also getting better every day. Do you think when I stop hurting, I’ll stop having the dream?”
“I don’t know,” Dr. Levitt says. “It would be out of line for me to even guess at that. But I do think, Diana, that dreaming about burying someone in your back yard is a reflection of your frustration with your physical condition and your inability to remember such a significant portion of time. Now, I don’t put too much stock in dreams as a whole. But in your case, it seems fairly obvious to me.”
Oh, it’s obvious, all right. Dreaming about having killed someone? I know exactly why I dream that. Just not why I’m dreaming about it now.
“I just feel like, if I only try harder …” My fists both clench, and I wince, making sure to relax my hands. “My memories are in there. If I can just get to them, I’ll be able to remember.”
“Your condition was caused by the anesthesia you were given for the surgery, not any head trauma.” Dr. Levitt says. “You may regain them someday, but it might help you to stop thinking of your memories as being buried. The harder you try to dig for them, the farther away they’re going to feel. Instead, perhaps try to think of them as being covered by water. Give them time to float up of their own accord.”
“Great—then I’ll start dreaming about drowning.”
She laughs. “We’ll deal with that when we get there. Okay? Anything else you want to talk about?”
There’s always something, even if I haven’t managed to bring myself to talk about it yet. But we started this therapy to help me figure out how to deal with my memory loss, not to negotiate the scorched wasteland of my childhood and adolescence or the current shambles of my marriage. Most of the time, Dr. Levitt reminds me that everything that happened in my life brought me to this point, and so whatever is going on with me now will always be tied to what happened to me then, much like anything that happens to me moving forward is likely to be affected by my amnesia and how I’m reacting to it. Memory loss is traumatic. It leaves scars.
“It’s hard. Feeling so dependent on Jonathan. I mean, he’s always made more money than I do.”
She wrote something on her pad. “You weren’t completely dependent on him before—you had a career and your own income. You even kept your own name, Sparrow, when you married. But now you feel as though you need him more than you want to. It’s been rough on you, having to rely on someone else to do what you feel you should do for yourself. It would be hard on anyone.”
“He’s the one who really encouraged me to leave GenTech during the restructuring. It was supposed to be supportive. You know, giving me the chance to ‘retire’ early, so to speak. A chance to find out if I wanted to do something different. He’d take care of all the money, you see, so I didn’t have to worry …” I stop myself from straining to see what she’s writing.
“And you don’t feel it was?”
I’m silent for a moment or so, struggling to put my thoughts into place. “I guess I’m just feeling stuck. That’s all. And yet it’s lucky I’m not working right now, because of all of this. The injuries would be bad enough, but I’m pretty sure amnesia would really mess me up at work.”