A Clean Slate (27 page)

I
heard the low murmur of whispered conversation. I tried to blink, but my lids felt glued to my eyes. I kept working on them until at last they opened a crack, revealing hazy light, a dark shape coming clearer.

Laney, I realized. It was Laney. She was sitting next to me, trying to smile, but her eyes were worried and red.

“Did I get my period?” I said. It was the first thing that came to mind.

Laney's eyes went wide. She made a weird-sounding laugh, then looked over her shoulder at someone standing behind her. That person nodded, said, “Yes,” and I felt utter joy at the confirmation that I was not having Sam's baby. But then I realized how odd that was. Why was I asking her whether I'd gotten my own period? Why was Laney asking someone else? Who else would know but me?

The questions made me tired, made my head hurt. My
eyelids fell shut again like heavy cellar doors. I let my mind roam vaguely, a hazy search for context, but before I could set anything straight, I focused on the sound I'd just heard—“Yes”—and the figure behind Laney who'd said it. Although it was only one word, I recognized that voice from my dreams.

I forced open my eyes again, forced myself to look at the figure, to focus. It was surprisingly difficult. I felt as if I was looking through binoculars that wouldn't cooperate. I kept staring, willing my eyes and my brain to play nice together, and finally, slowly, the figure came clearer. Tall, male, pale skin, and two freckles under his left eye. I made my own eyes open wider. It was him. I had a momentary fantasy that he was here to save me from something, maybe myself, but then he smiled, and I took in the whole of him—the broad shoulders, his rippled dark hair, his white lab coat. And that's when something crystallized. Actually, that's when many things—details, snapshots, flashes of feeling—rushed into my brain as if the dam that had been holding them back had finally given way, and yet none of them seemed in context or in the right order. I could see my hand shoving the key in my mailbox, the key refusing to budge; I could see Sam in my hotel bed; the image of Ben through my viewfinder; a doctor's office; Ellen Geiger's front room; the feel of me crying, and crying, Laney bringing me Chinese food.

I opened my mouth. “What's going on, Lane?”

“You fell, sweetie.”

“Where? Where did I fall?”

“At Cole's,” she said.

“Oh.” I tried to make the images stop and focus there, on Cole's studio, and I remembered quitting, the room being too hot. Cole's face too close, the dizziness, the floor swooping up toward me. “Am I okay? Did I hurt myself?”

I wriggled my toes under the sheet. They seemed to work
all right, but my back felt creaky, my head ached. And beyond that, I had the feeling that something more was wrong. There was that scared look in Laney's eyes, the look she could never hide from me.

“The fall didn't cause any injuries,” Laney said. “But…” She stopped and looked over her shoulder again at the two-freckled guy.

“Can I have a moment alone with Kelly?” he said.

“Oh, sure,” Laney said. She leaned toward me, over me, and that's when I realized that I was lying down. “I'll be right outside,” she said, brushing her fingers against my forehead.

“Okay.”

“I mean it. I won't leave, you know?”

“Sure. Thank you.” My voice sounded weird, formal.

Laney stood, and I saw then that Cole was standing on the other side of her. He grinned at me. “Feel better, Kelly Kelly,” he said.

They both turned away, and as they left the room, I could have sworn I saw him take her hand.

 

The two-freckled man sat on the edge of my bed. Up close, he wasn't quite as sexy as I'd made him out to be in my daydreams. The dark hair had shots of gray through it, which made me think of Sam, but his nose was thick and coarse, his ears jutting too far from his head.

I scooted around on the bed, trying to find a comfortable sitting position, but my back still ached and my head hurt like hell. It was strange to be talking to this guy from my dreams while he was fully clothed and I was in a thin cotton gown.

“Do you know your name?” he said.

“Kelly McGraw.”

“And do you know mine?”

“Dr. Sinclair. Neurosurgeon.” I actually surprised myself with that last bit. The details, images, bits of information
kept swirling round and round, waiting for me to catch them, to call upon them.

“Do you know where you are?”

I glanced around, seeing a tiny white TV extended from the ceiling on a steel arm, a pink plastic pitcher on a cart near my bed, a basket of daisies, a half-empty IV bag hanging from a steel stand. “I'd say a hospital.”

A debilitating wave of terror rushed in as I spoke the words out loud, the realization hitting me at that instant. It was as if this fear had been waiting for me all along, like the dark form of a man waiting in the shadows.

“And do you know why you're here? Aside from the fall, I mean.”

I waited a moment for the particles of information to form into whole concepts. Some were clearer than others, some too far away to reach, and the answer to his question was out of my grasp. I shook my head.

“Kelly, do you remember seeing me in my office back in May?” Dr. Sinclair asked.

May, May, May,
I chanted in my head. The month of my birth, the month Ben had broken up with me, the month I'd been fired from Bartley Brothers. I had a flash then of Dr. Sinclair, my two-freckled man, sitting in a lab coat on a little stool, me above him, wearing only a sheet. No, it was a gown, similar to the one I had on now. But when was that?

“I don't know,” I said, and I felt tears well in my eyes.

He patted me awkwardly on the arm. “Do you feel up to this conversation? It can wait until tomorrow.”

How tempting it was to accept his offer. I could push away his questions, along with the ones of my own that were racing about in my mind, mixing with the jumble of random information. It felt familiar, somehow, the concept of putting off something that was simply too hard to deal with. And yet I sensed that I had already shoved too many matters far away. They wouldn't stay there, obediently, any longer.

I wiped at a tear that had dripped down my nose. “No. Please tell me.”

“You were referred to me by Dr. Markup,” he said.

“The headaches,” I said, suddenly remembering Dr. Markup's office, the pounding pain in my brain that had brought me there. The headaches were intermittent and very brief at first, so that I could chalk them up to stress. Eventually, though, they'd stuck around longer, become nearly unbearable. They made dim light seem searingly bright and painful. They made me nauseous and anxious.

“That's right,” Dr. Sinclair said. “Do you remember the tests we did? What we found?”

It was something horrible. I could sense that, and it seemed closer now, refusing to go away this time. “I don't think so,” I said.

“We diagnosed you with AVM. Arteriovenous malformation.”

“Bleeding in the brain.” I spit out the phrase forcefully, like a game show contestant who has finally came up with the winning response.

“You remember this now?”

“A little. Not really.” Had I actually known this all along but been ignoring it? No. It was something I'd learned in the weeks after my horrid birthday, and I truly had forgotten it—maybe I wanted to forget it—starting that day at the dry cleaners.

“Well,” Dr. Sinclair said, “an AVM is a very tricky condition. We don't know why these bleeds start, nor do we truly know how to treat them.”

I looked away from him, toward the tiny white TV on the arm high above my bed. I wished it was on, showing something inane like
The Price Is Right
or an infomercial for knives that cut through beer cans, something mundane and ordinary. But it was just a dusty gray screen, and I couldn't stop the awareness that was growing in my mind,
the processing. A few more errant pieces seemed to fall into place—my flashes of the two-freckled man, the whiteness surrounding him. The vision of myself in that bath. The way I'd passed out at Cole's with my legs “flopping,” as he'd put it. The headaches, the queasy stomach. They'd all been memories or symptoms of my AVM, ones I'd been able to chalk up to hangovers or ignore altogether.

Dr. Sinclair consulted something in his chart. “We treated you as far as we could back in May and June, and you were told to follow up with us in a few months. When we didn't see you, we called and you said that you might go elsewhere for a second opinion. Did you do that?”

“Not that I know of.” I got a vague image of myself in the month after my birthday, moving numbly through my old town house, trying to fathom the massive earthquake-like shift in my life. No job, no Ben, compounding the fact that there was no Dee, and then this hideously surreal news from Dr. Sinclair.

“Your friend informs me that you've had some memory issues for the last month or so.”

“Mmm-hmm.” I sounded like Ellen Geiger.

“Why didn't you come to me when it happened?” Dr. Sinclair asked.

I turned to him again. “Because I didn't remember you.”

“That makes sense.” He smiled, his teeth unnaturally white and ruler straight. He seemed to me like the kind of man who works very hard at his looks, who maybe isn't as self-assured as the image he puts out to the world, and that made me like him. He asked me all sorts of questions about the memory loss, rarely responding to my monosyllabic answers, just making notes, nodding encouragingly. I wished Laney was with me. I wished
someone
was here other than the two-freckled man and myself.

There was a quiet moment while Dr. Sinclair flipped
through the chart and wrote something one place, flipped again, wrote more.

A nurse in pink scrubs came into the room. “Oops, sorry, Dr. Sinclair,” she said. “We've got lunch when she's ready.” She gave me a cheery, condescending smile.

He twisted around in the chair to see her. “Thank you, Shelly. I'll let you know.” He twisted back to me. “Well, it seems that some of your memory has returned, and you're very lucky in that respect.”

I felt like laughing.
Lucky?
Instead I said, “But why did it leave to begin with?” The words came out loud, strained, and he looked startled. “Is it just the AVM or is it something else, something I did?” I wasn't sure what I meant, but I felt culpable.

He dropped his chart in his lap and leaned forward. “Your bleeding was rather widespread, so it's very likely that the bleed is what caused your memory loss.”

“But it could be something else.”

“I'm not sure what you mean.”

“What else could it have been?”

“In all likelihood, your medical condition is the reason you suffered the memory loss.” He pursed his lips. “Your friend Laney also tells me that you've experienced a great deal of emotional loss this year. Is that right?”

“Yes, I lost my job and my boyfriend.”

“And your sister some months before, correct?”

I nodded.

“It's possible that stress played a role in your AVM, and your memory loss, as well,” he said. “Clinically speaking, stress has biophysical ramifications. It causes narrowing of the blood vessels and therefore can be a triggering event in AVM bleeds. Also, psychologically speaking, sometimes when the mind has too much to deal with, it can shut down or seal off a portion of itself. And yet it's unlikely that anyone will ever be able to tell you for certain what the precise causes were.”

I leaned my head back on the pillow and closed my eyes, feeling stupid and yet brilliant at the same time. I might have triggered my AVM with the stress in my life, and at the same time might have caused the memory loss that made me forget the AVM.

I recalled now how I had felt I had something awful in my brain, not just the bleeding but the news of it, the reality, something rotting and stinking that could change me. I'd pushed that reality further and further from the front of my mind, and didn't tell anyone about it, not even Laney or Ellen Geiger, because I didn't want it to be true. I'd simply refused to accept the rumble of another earthquake. It made me feel even more out of control than I already was, made me feel on the brink of pure craziness.

I'd seen Ellen because I knew I needed help, but I could never bring myself to tell her about my diagnosis. She knew something unsaid was bothering me, but all I would tell her was that I was worried about someone's opinion. It was true enough. I was terrified about Dr. Sinclair's opinion, about what horrible news might pour from his mouth to destroy me. I wouldn't go any further with Ellen. I'd wanted her to work her magic on the other parts of my life, to focus on the more banal day-to-day issues I'd always taken for granted, to help me forget about the new, scarier cloud looming over me. And it had worked. Somewhere along the way my mind had finally cooperated, and I'd forgotten it all.