Nick was stealing my husband. I had the motive.
Oddities for which I’ve invented excuses flash in my mind. I see David’s confusion after the police couldn’t find my gun followed by Sergeant Perez’s satisfaction as he insisted that I’d become a good shot. David really hadn’t appeared to know the location of my Ruger, and he isn’t an actor. Perez had been so sure that he’d seen me at the academy, and he’s trained to differentiate between similar people. What if I had taken my gun? What if I did go to the range? What if I suspected the affair and took protection into Nick’s rough neighborhood to stake out his apartment and catch David in the act?
But why wouldn’t I remember?
I writhe on the mattress as the answer rips through my brain. The hormones! Dr. Frankel warned me that they could cause memory loss. And they’re still in the experimental stage. What other side effects might they have that she doesn’t even know about?
I bring my forearm to my face. My throbbing vision makes the white lines sink deeper into my epidermis. I’d been willing to sacrifice anything—even my sanity—for a baby. But I’d never imagined the drugs could make me a murderer.
*
I call the fertility clinic from the cab. The secretary tries to push me off until my next appointment. “I need them out now,” I yell. “You don’t understand. I have to be seen now. I’ve got to remember. I have to know.”
Panic prevents me from controlling my volume in the vehicle’s small interior. The driver checks the rearview mirror to monitor me, as though he fears I could start ripping apart the plastic seats or throw open the door and run before paying the fare. I hear the child locks click.
“Okay, Ms. Cole. Please calm down. We will fit you in right away.”
A nurse is waiting for me at the clinic door. She rushes me through reception into a private room as though my hysteria is contagious, capable of infecting the developing fetuses swelling in all the successful trial subjects waiting for Dr. Frankel’s glowing smile. The needles burn beneath the skin. I claw at my bicep, turning those faint raised lines into raw red tracks. The nurse keeps her distance as she tells me to sit on the examination chair and wait for the doctor. She sounds like a dog trainer.
I’m not to disrobe. I keep on the denim shirt dress that I threw on before racing out of my apartment. I take off my purse and place it beside me.
Clothed, I can appreciate the room in a way that I never could while shivering in a paper gown atop wax paper, bracing for a probe. I smell urine masked with lemon-scented disinfectant. The sonogram cart appears ancient. Its monitor is scuffed black around the edges. The urine collection cups have a gray film of dust outside. A hair clip lies on the counter, dark strands clinging to a knot inside it. Did the staff not have time to get the room ready for me, or has it always been this way? Did my hope for the treatment make me view this place as a state-of-the-art medical center when it was really a dirty lab with human rats?
Dr. Frankel’s smile is even more strained than usual when she enters. My chart is already under her arm, and a laptop is balanced on her left palm. Instead of inquiring how I am doing, she asks, “What seems to be the problem?”
“It’s the forgetting,” I say, still scratching at the injection site like a cocaine addict. “I am doing things that I can’t remember. I need these needles out. I need you to take them out today.”
She rolls her stool from beneath a desk and sits down, placing the laptop on her thighs. “What, specifically, have you forgotten?”
Frustrated tears fill my eyes. How can I explain this? Saying that I killed my husband’s gay lover and forgot doing it sounds insane. She might have me committed rather than remove the implants.
She stares at me from above her monitor. Waiting.
“The other day, a friend said he saw me at a gun range. I can’t remember going in the past year.”
Computer keys clatter. “Maybe he was mistaken? Did he talk to you at the range?”
My throat tightens. I shake my head.
“Did you check if you had signed in there, or did anyone else see you there?”
I have to come up with something that has proof. My gun is not in the apartment. That’s a demonstrable fact. “I can’t find my handgun either. I’m always very careful with it. I keep it in a lockbox on a high shelf in my closet. But it’s not there.”
“So you think that you misplaced it?” Dr. Frankel’s mouth rests in the same sympathetic pose as always, but I detect a spark of amusement in her eyes. She thinks I am freaking out over a general distractedness—the kind that anyone might experience when also battling headaches and low-grade nausea, working on a tight deadline, and juggling fertility clinic visits.
“You don’t understand. I have no idea where it is. None at all.”
“Hormones do impact memory, and I can understand it being disconcerting. When I was pregnant, I’d have my keys in my hand one minute and wouldn’t remember for the life of me where I put them the next. I thought I was going nuts. My husband thought I was bonkers.”
She smiles. I want to slap that practiced empathy off her face. I want to shake her until she understands that I am not talking about keys or leaving out a carton of milk or misremembering where I left the car in the mall parking lot.
“I’m not talking about little things.” My voice rises in pitch and trembles, an opera singer sustaining a shrill high note. “I’d never leave a gun lying around.”
“Maybe you hid it in a new spot that you thought was safer, and then it slipped your mind.”
I want to scream. “It’s not only the gun. I’ve learned things—important facts about people that I care about—that I can’t remember knowing at all. I may have done things—life-changing things—that I can’t remember doing. I’m not forgetting details; I’m forgetting days.”
Dr. Frankel’s curls shake as her head turns from side to side. She shuts her laptop with a decisive clap. “Hormones impact short-term memory, Liza. Small things. Forgetting major events or a day’s worth of activities are not side effects that could be caused by any hormonal imbalance from this medication. What you’re talking about would be evidence of a psychotic break or brain trauma from an accident.” Her eyes narrow. “Or excessive alcohol consumption.”
Dr. Frankel’s arched eyebrows raise. “Have you been drinking on this medication?”
“Not really.”
She looks disbelieving. In her mind, my rushing here in a frantic state is probably a classic symptom of substance abuse. I run a mental tally of the alcoholic beverages that I’ve consumed in the past week: a few glasses of wine with Christine, a half bottle on the plane with Trevor, a cocktail the Sunday evening of the conference. Health questionnaires put five or more drinks per week as the highest answer on the multiple choice asking how often you imbibe. Circling it is a sign of a problem.
“I had a writers’ conference recently that involved a bit more wine than is usual for me. But the forgetting was happening before.”
My doctor’s brow furrows. “You never mentioned memory loss as a problem before.”
“I didn’t realize that I was losing time until recently.” The words fight their way from my closing throat. “But some of the things that I’ve forgotten happened more than a month ago. I’m only now realizing that I might have done them, that I could have done them.”
Tears spill from my lower lid. “Please.” My voice breaks. “I need the hormones out.”
Dr. Frankel frowns at me for the first time ever—that I can remember. She stands and walks over to me. “Lay back.”
I do as I’m told. A small penlight shines in her palm. She instructs me to open my eyes wide. Her face hovers above mine as she flashes the beam in my pupils. “You’re retinas are responsive,” she says, waving her fingers for me to sit back up.
“What does that mean?”