“Wow, thank you.” My shoulders relax. “But why would a doctor have prescribed the meds if they interfere with the return of my memory?”
“I can’t answer that,” she says. “Maybe your anxiety trumped everything else at the time.”
“I have been anxious, so worried about everything,” I say. “I would love to understand things, like the dream. I’m in churning waters. The current is strong. I’m disoriented. I don’t know which way is up.”
“Are you having trouble breathing in the dream?”
“I think so. But I’m not suffocating. I’m definitely scared. Worried . . .”
“Are you alone?”
“I don’t know. I’m swimming, looking for someone. I don’t know who it is. It must be Jacob.”
“Do you know where you are?”
“No,” I say. “What do you feel the dream represents? Could it be related to the accident? Could my dream have actually happened?”
“Yes, of course.”
“But maybe it didn’t. I used to be able to follow my intuition, but now my intuition is muddled at best.”
“We’ll get back to that intuition. This has been a difficult time for you.”
“I don’t have an internal compass to rely on. I can’t help feeling my memories are still here, but my mind doesn’t want to remember. Could that be the case?”
“Absolutely,” she says. “It’s possible.”
“So even though the doctors said I would probably never remember everything, I could remember? They could be wrong? I mean, some moments are starting to come back. I’m remembering.”
“You definitely are,” she says.
“Is there a name for it, when your mind doesn’t want to remember . . . suppressed or repressed memories?”
“Do you mean there could be a psychogenic component to your memory loss?”
“Psychogenic.”
“Things your brain chooses to forget. Absolutely.”
“Why wouldn’t I want to remember? Could something bad have happened?”
“Something traumatic? Certainly—”
Someone rings her buzzer.
I glance at the clock. “The time went by so quickly.”
“My next client is here. Do you want to come and see me again?”
“I think so,” I say. “Yes. But I don’t want to tell my husband . . . He’s trying so hard to fix all this for me. Plus, I don’t know, this feels like it’s mine. Coming here.”
“Sure, of course.” The buzzer reverberates through the room again. She gets up, smoothing down her sweater. “We have so much more to find out. Don’t you agree?”
“I do,” I say, getting up, too. I’m oddly disappointed that our session has to end.
“Do you remember buying massage oil at Mystic Thyme?” I say in the afternoon, as Jacob drives us down the main road to explore our old haunts. I have not told him about my session with Sylvia. My talk with her feels like a special secret.
“The soap shop? We went in there a few times,” he says, looking over at me.
“I was wearing a beautiful cobalt dress. What happened to it?”
His eyes sadden. “That was one helluva dress, but it’s gone. You spilled tea all over the front. You were mad about that. It never came out.”
“Not even with stain remover?”
“It was ruined,” he says. “But wow, you remembered the dress.”
“It was last summer. We were here on vacation. I loved being here with you. The island felt like a dream. But I also had an underlying restlessness, a strange pull to go back to the mainland.”
“You were a workaholic.” He turns left at a sign reading Island Wetlands Preserve.
“It felt like more than work. I needed to set something right, correct something.”
“Like I said, work,” he says, parking in the lot next to an interpretive sign. “You were a teaching assistant. Professor Brimley expected too much from you.”
“Professor Brimley. I vaguely remember him.”
“He gave you too much to do for what you were being paid. You had to develop lesson plans, grade papers. You were pretty stressed out. Come on. Let’s walk.” He takes a pair of Audubon binoculars from the glove compartment, and we walk the trail through the wetlands. The rustle of grasses soothes my soul. Nobody will come after us here, he said to me, holding my hand.
“Who would come after us?” I say.
“What?” He gives me a startled look.
“You said nobody would come after us here. Were we fugitives?” I smile to lighten the words.
He laughs. “From city life, yes.”
“Was I recovering from something?”
He gives me a sharp look. “What makes you say that?”
“I needed spiritual healing, according to Eliza at Mystic Thyme. She gave me a bottle of essential oils.”
“Not that I remember.”
“Nothing at all? There must have been.”
“Trouble at work, maybe?”
“Trouble with us?” I say.
“You keep going back to that,” he says. “I’m starting to think you want us to have been in trouble.”
“I’m not saying that.” But maybe I’m looking for cracks in our relationship, flaws that might have compelled me to stray from our marriage.