“Of course they do,” she says gently. “They would frighten me, too. It might take us a while to figure this out, but we’ll figure it out, okay?”
“I hope so,” I say, feeling somewhat reassured. “I know the doctors told me why this is happening . . . but then I couldn’t even remember what they said. I don’t understand my own brain and what’s going on with my head.”
“I don’t have a lot of experience in this arena, but I do know that people who suffer from a head injury might forget the accident itself and have difficulty retaining new memories afterward. This is called anterograde amnesia. Or they can’t retrieve memories from before the accident—this is called retrograde amnesia. They might forget many years or only a few months, possibly only a few hours. Generally, the pivotal moment is the accident itself. But in your case, you’ve forgotten four years before the accident, the accident itself, and you had trouble forming new memories afterward, transferring them from short-term to long-term storage.”
“Two kinds of amnesia.”
“Both anterograde and retrograde. But it seems you’re beginning to retrieve memories from before the accident, in pieces, and you can form new memories fairly well now, with some gaps.”
“I seemed to start remembering new things all of a sudden. On the boat ride here, to the island, I woke up, almost as if I had been asleep for years. But at the same time, I knew I’d been here before.”
“Sometimes it can feel sudden, when memories come back to you. This happens, even when the memories might be coming back gradually.”
A stress headache pushes at my temples. “There are so many strange things. I felt like I knew Van Phelps. I was attracted to my husband’s friend in a photograph. It’s all a jumble. Frustrating.”
She looked thoughtful. “It does sound frustrating.”
“I have a recurring dream. I’m diving in murky water. I’m swimming against a current. I’m wearing a scuba suit and a mask. But I don’t remember learning how to put on all that equipment. I don’t remember the dive in Deception Pass or getting rescued. Sometimes I wonder if I’ll ever remember.”
“It’s possible,” she says. “Generally speaking, in the case of traumatic head injury, the event itself rarely returns. But memories from before or after could keep coming back.”
“You’re saying I might never remember hitting my head?”
“When you jar your brain, all the neurons and synapses get shaken up pretty hard. Quite often, the trauma itself and events close to that time are lost forever.”
I look out at the roiling sea, the whitecaps hurtling toward shore. “I’m not sure what happened out in the pass. I’m not sure what happened before. I’m not sure of anything. I don’t remember what Jacob tells me about our plans. For a family. Children. I’m impatient to get back to what I wanted.”
“What’s important is what you’re going through right now.”
“I suppose I’ve wanted it all to come back all at once. I want to know everything, and it frustrates me that I can’t. But maybe I don’t need to know everything so fast. I don’t need to be so impatient.”
She gives me a reassuring smile. “Sounds like you put a lot of pressure on yourself.”
“I’ve always been this way,” I say. I tell her about my childhood, my high-achieving parents expecting perfection from me. Then my parents were gone, and their expectations no longer mattered. I was grieving, bereft, and adrift with only my Uncle Theo to console me. He helped me, supported me. “Now he’s sinking into dementia. He’s in a nursing home in Oregon. The only other person I’m still close with, who still knows me well, is in Russia. Her name is Linny.”
“Are you in touch with her?”
“We email each other.”
“Brothers and sisters?”
“None, and no cousins or aunts or uncles anywhere near here. No close friends that I can remember from the last few years. I was always a bit of a loner. Linny and I—we’re similar that way.”
“And what about your husband? Did you say his name is Jacob?”
“We’ve been married about three years. We dated for six months. Whirlwind courtship, apparently.”
“Sometimes it happens that way.”
“So we could’ve known right away.”
“Sure.”
“From what I understand, last summer, we visited the island for a few months, and we made a plan to move here. After that, we went back to the mainland. Then the accident happened. I was in the hospital and rehabilitation center for almost ten weeks. Then Jacob brought me here two weeks ago.”
“Are you on any medications?”
“I was, but I stopped taking them.”
“Do you remember what they are?”
“Two antianxiety medications and a sleep aid. Do you think I should still be taking them?”
“You made a good decision to stop taking them. Some medications can actually impede the return of your memory.”
A sense of calm returns to me. “So you think it’s okay.”
“Yes, I think it’s perfectly okay. In fact, I recommend you stop taking the medications.”