“One o’clock.”
He consults his smartphone with a single hand, and then tells me that I will have to take Mia to the appointment alone. He says there is a trial, which he cannot miss. And besides, he says, he’s sure I can handle this alone. I tell him that of course I can handle it, but I lean in and whisper into his ear, “She needs you now. You’re her father.” I remind him that this is something we discussed and agreed to and how he promised. He says that he will see what he can do but the doubt weighs heavily on my mind. I can tell that he believes his unwavering work schedule does not allow time for family crises such as this.
In the backseat, Mia stares out the window watching the world fly by as we soar down I-94 and out of the city. It’s approaching three-thirty on a Friday afternoon, the weekend of the New Year, and so traffic is an ungodly mess. We come to a stop and wait and then inch forward at a snail’s pace, no more than thirty miles per hour on the expressway. James hasn’t the patience for it. He stares into the rearview mirror, waiting for the paparazzi to reappear.
“So, Mia,” James says, trying to pass the time. “That shrink says you have amnesia.”
“Oh, James,” I beg, “please, not now.”
My husband is not willing to wait. He wants to get to the bottom of this. It’s been barely a week since Mia has been home, living with James and me since she’s not fit to be on her own. I think of Christmas day, when the tired maroon car pulled sluggishly into the drive with Mia in tow. I remember the way James, nearly always detached, nearly always blasé, forced himself through the front door and was the first to greet her, to gather the emaciated woman in his arms on our snow-covered drive as if it had been him, rather than me, who spent those long, fearful months in mourning.
But since then, I’ve watched as that momentary relief shriveled away, as Mia, in her oblivion, became tiresome to James, just another one of the cases on his ever growing caseload rather than our daughter.
“Then when?”
“Later, please. And besides, that woman is a professional, James,” I insist. “A psychiatrist. She is not a shrink.”
“Fine then, Mia, that psychiatrist says you have amnesia,” he repeats, but Mia doesn’t respond. He watches her in the rearview mirror, these dark brown eyes that hold her captive. For a fleeting moment, she does her best to stare back, but then her eyes find their way to her hands, where she becomes absorbed in a small scab. “Do you wish to comment?” he asks.
“That’s what she told me, too,” she says, and I remember the doctor’s words as she sat across from James and me in the unhappy office—Mia having been excused and sent to the waiting room to browse through outdated fashion magazines—and gave us, verbatim, the textbook definition of acute stress disorder, and all I could think of were those poor Vietnam veterans.
He sighs. I can tell that James finds this implausible, the fact that her memory could vanish into thin air. “So, how does it work, then? You remember I’m your father and this is your mother, but you think your name is Chloe. You know how old you are and where you live and that you have a sister, but you don’t have a clue about Colin Thatcher? You honestly don’t know where you’ve been for the past three months?”
I jump in, to Mia’s defense, and say, “It’s called selective amnesia, James.”
“You’re telling me she picks and chooses things she wants to remember?”
“Mia doesn’t do it—her subconscious or unconscious or something like that is doing it. Putting painful thoughts where she can’t find them. It’s not something she’s decided to do. It’s her body’s way of helping her cope.”
“Cope with what?”
“The whole thing, James. Everything that happened.”
He wants to know how we fix it. This, I don’t know for certain, but I suggest, “Time, I suppose. Therapy. Drugs. Hypnosis.”
He scoffs at this, finding hypnosis as bona fide as amnesia. “What kind of drugs?”
“Antidepressants, James,” I respond. I turn around and, with a pat on Mia’s hand, say, “Maybe her memory will never come back and that will be okay, too.” I admire her for a moment, a near mirror image of myself, though taller and younger and, unlike me, years and years away from wrinkles and the white locks of hair that are beginning to intrude upon my mass of dirty blond.
“How will antidepressants help her remember?”
“They’ll make her feel better.”
He is always entirely candid. This is one of James’s flaws. “Well hell, Eve, if she can’t remember then what’s there to feel bad about?” he asks and our eyes stray out the windows at the passing traffic, the conversation considered through.
Gabe