But I understood all the dialogue.
I wasn’t sure if Shannon had chosen a creepy foreboding movie on purpose or if it was just difficult to find a French film that didn’t fit that mold, but I nearly leaped off the sofa when Shannon came down the stairs during an intense scene. It didn’t help that he moved as stealthily as the cat did.
He went to the kitchen for a glass of milk and then came back out into the living area. He wore pale gray pajama pants that showcased his tan and no shirt. The white cat jumped down off the chair and took the opportunity to weave in and out of his legs, leaving her scent on him. She stared at me pointedly while she did it. As if I were going to rush over there and fight for cuddle privileges with perhaps the least cuddly person in the world.
“Est-ce que tu t’es rendu à l’histoire du chien dans la scène du d?ner?”, Shannon said.
“Ne me gache pas tout.” Even though I knew I understood French, it still shocked me when I spoke it. Or did it shock me that Shannon spoke it? Maybe he’d just learned the one phrase. But his accent and enunciation were impeccable.
“Interesting,” he said. “Have you read all of the file yet?”
“Not yet. I wanted to watch the DVD, and then I got sucked in.”
He nodded. “It’s a good film. You should read the rest of the file. I think this confirms a theory I had.”
“And what theory was that?” I asked, trying not to look too eager.
“You’ve clearly got retrograde amnesia, but your skills and general knowledge seem to be intact, just not specific autobiographical memories. That’s generally how it works. So you’ll find you know things but you won’t know how you know them. Like with the French.”
“Do you think I’ll ever get my memories back?”
Shannon shrugged. “I’m not a doctor. But I did a lot of research on the condition when I was collecting information. Realistically, probably not. If you’ve gone this long with memory loss this severe, you’re probably stuck with it. Anything’s possible, but this isn’t a movie.”
A part of me had been living in fear of memory recall. I’m not sure why. I’d also equally been harboring the fear that my memories wouldn’t come back but someone else would show up claiming to be a husband or a friend or a relative and feed me bullshit stories that weren’t real, or else feed me real stories that still smelled like bullshit. I worried that over time I would hear stories about myself so much that I would start to believe them and start to imagine them. Maybe I would even reconstruct them in my mind and think they were true memories.
If there was little hope for recovery, I was glad Shannon had spared me the police and media circus. Surely someone real or fake would have shown up claiming to know all about me, and then it would just be Trevor all over again, only without the apocalyptic backdrop.
“Why didn’t anybody call about me?”
“I don’t know. Maybe someone did. But the authorities only wanted family—someone who could legally take responsibility for you. You know how the hospitals are. They weren’t going to just send you home with any random person who knew you for five minutes in some vague capacity.”
I looked back down at the papers. Shannon had discovered my mom was a single mother who had me young and had died from complications of the flu a few years ago.
“If I was raised by a single mother, how did I live without a job and have no student debt?”
“That’s where it gets interesting. You have or had a mysterious benefactor. I think it’s your father. I think he set you up for life to avoid a scandal. That makes him a powerful politician or someone famous whose brand would be damaged by an illegitimate child. Whoever it was is as much of a professional as me because the trail runs cold.”
“He didn’t call when my face was all over TV, though. Did he not recognize me?”
“Oh, I’m sure he recognized you, and equally sure he considered his problems over, with the woman he knocked up dead and the inconvenient child he didn’t want no longer a problem.”
I wondered if I’d known who my father was before the amnesia.
“Do you remember anything from your childhood at all?” Shannon asked.
“I... I’m not sure.” Honestly, at this point I wasn’t even sure what a memory felt like. At least not an old one. The whole concept seemed too wispy to nail down into anything solid. I did occasionally get a few images, bits of conversation and activity. It could be from my childhood. It definitely wasn’t anything recent.
“The farther back the memory loss goes, the more serious the case. Recent memories are lost first.”
So even if I remembered stuff from my childhood, it didn’t mean I’d remember everything or anything else.
“How much money do I have?”