by S. F. Kosa
Spit pooled under Maggie’s tongue. “I’m going to throw up.”
“I won’t let you turn this around on me,” Ivy was saying, her voice a quiet venom that no one in the hall would ever hear. “If you decided to live in sin with some man…”
Maggie wasn’t listening anymore. She was too busy leaning over the other side of the bed rail, reaching for the kidney-shaped basin on the bedside table. She yanked it over beneath her chin and began to heave. The world turned black, and her body folded in on itself. She imagined the tiny creature inside her, pushing its way up through the coils of her organs, forcing itself along the tunnel of her throat, climbing from her mouth in all its malevolent and bloody glory. It was all noise and chaos and way too much light, and she had nothing to shield herself. Everything burned. Everything hurt.
And then, second by second, the pain receded. Her exhausted muscles went loose, and she sagged against the pillow. Jamie had reappeared and was holding the basin for her now. Her mother was stroking Maggie’s stringy, greasy blond hair away from her face. Both were making sympathetic, comforting noises, and the mismatch between her mother’s tone in this moment and the last few was so jarring that Maggie started to cry.
“My poor baby,” whispered Ivy, still stroking. “My poor, poor baby.”
Jamie offered a cup of water, poking its straw at Maggie’s dry lips. Maggie took a weak pull and let her head fall to the pillow again. “I’m tired.”
“Of course,” her mother said. “Of course you are. You’ve been through so much.”
“I want to sleep.”
“I’ve got my Bible study tonight anyway,” her mother said. “I can come back afterward. Nurse, can you roll in one of those sleeper chairs for me?”
“We don’t generally allow visitors to sleep—”
“I’m her mother.”
“Mom,” Maggie rasped. “Go home. I’ll be fine.”
“We’ll be watching over her tonight, Mrs. Gainer.”
“Wallace-Gainer,” her mother corrected. “I want you all to call me if there’s any change. I’m all she’s got.”
Maggie put a hand on her belly. It felt hollow now. She glanced at the basin, which Jamie had set over on the counter near the sink. She’d been invaded, and it would take a lot more than a few heaves to have her body to herself again. She rolled on her side and pulled her legs to her chest. She wished she could ball up tiny enough to be invisible. She pressed her forehead to her knees. Tightened her arms around her thighs and calves. Wished herself unseen.
There were more murmurs and mutterings, but then the room went quiet save for distant beeps and shufflings and intercom messages filtering in from the hallway. She peeked over her shoulder. Her mother’s chair was still there, vacant now. She’d gone off to commune with her church friends. Maggie wondered how Ivy would spin the situation, how she would sculpt and mold it for maximum sainthood and minimum embarrassment.
Maggie examined her hands, her fingers. Her nails were filthy and ragged. Her knuckles and the heels of her palms were all scraped up. She imagined herself trying to claw her way out of a dark, closed box. Or the dirt walls of a basement. She imagined herself handcuffed to a rusty old radiator or tied to a chair, a gag over her mouth. She tried on those images like dresses, checking to see if any fit, if any clung to the curves of her brain and the angles of reality.
The police had released the man who’d chased her. He’d convinced them she’d been living with him. What had he done to her? Why had she been running from him? She remembered the terror of those moments, when she’d crashed into awareness and onto the hood of some guy’s car.
Would the man who’d chased her come here?
She gasped as the door opened and Jamie peeked in. “I know you said you wanted to sleep, but there’s a friend here to see you. I thought it might cheer you up?”
Behind her, out in the hallway, stood Reina, petite with her brown hair in a pixie cut, hugging herself as if she was cold. Next to her was a redheaded guy Maggie recognized from pictures that had hung in their dorm room. Reina’s boyfriend, Dan. The two of them had gone to high school together in Lowell, and Reina had frequently driven up to visit him at Dartmouth. Dan from Dartmouth, that was how Maggie had referred to him all year. She didn’t like the way he was staring at her now. He turned to whisper something in Reina’s ear. She raised her head and saw Maggie watching them.
“Okay,” Maggie said to Jamie. “It’s fine.” It would be awkward to send them away now. It might cause a scene. They might talk and tell people that Maggie had been rude or weird. She didn’t have the energy to deal with that.
Jamie ushered Reina and Dan into the room. Both of them were looking at her like Dr. Mehta had, as if she were about to detonate. “Hey,” Reina said in a hushed voice. Like her mother’s had, Reina’s eyes were sparkling with tears. “How are you?”
“Fine,” said Maggie. She pulled the thin blanket at the foot of her bed up over her body while Dan hovered near the doorway. “Hi, Dan.”
He grinned. “You remember me now?” He came forward as if Maggie had issued an invitation to sit on her lap, but he paused when Reina clutched at his arm. He gave her a questioning look.
“He called me three nights ago,” Reina said. “He claimed he’d seen you in Provincetown.” She rolled her eyes. “But he was drunk off his ass, so I didn’t believe him.”
“So I went back the next day and took a picture of you, to prove it to her,” he said, clearly pleased with himself. He had his phone out, and he turned its screen to show Maggie.
It was indeed a picture of her, in what looked like the patio of a restaurant. Standing next to a bar, holding a basin full of dishes, circles under her eyes, looking guarded and scraggly and lost. The black-haired guy who’d been facedown in the parking lot—he was next to her in the picture, scowling.
Maggie stared, nausea bubbling inside her once again. “That’s in Provincetown? Two days ago?”
Dan nodded. “That guy—Esteban. He chased me down the street right after I took that. But when he caught up with me, he gave me a chance to explain, and I told him about you and how you’d been missing for months. He didn’t seem all that surprised, actually. He agreed to help me get you back. He didn’t think you’d just go with me if we told you all that.”
“We said we’d meet him at the Moby Dick,” said Reina. “We were ready to do a whole intervention. But either you were early or we were late, because by the time we got there, they were taking you away in an ambulance and him away in a police car.”
“Because he was chasing me. I was trying to get away from him.”
“Yeah, he said you freaked out,” said Dan.
“Who is he?”
“To hear him tell it, he’s the guy who’s kept you safe for the last three weeks.”
“Three weeks,” said Maggie. “But I’ve been gone since mid-May.”
“He said you just showed up about three weeks ago,” Reina said. “You wouldn’t say where you’d come from. He doesn’t know how you got there. We hoped you might be able to explain what happened.”
A noise came out of Maggie, part groan and part bitter laugh. “What the hell is happening to me?”
“You’re okay,” said Reina. “I’m so glad you’re okay. I was so worried about you.”
“She’s been obsessing about it the whole summer,” said Dan.
“I felt so guilty,” Reina said. “I should have done more. You were acting so weird.”
“What are you talking about?” asked Maggie. “When?”
“Before you took off. You were stressed about finals, and then that jackass decided it would be the perfect week to break up with you—”
“Wes,” Maggie whispered. This, she remembered. They’d met in Romanesque and Gothic Art class last semester. She’d instantly spotted him, dark hair flopping over his forehead, intense blue e
yes. They’d started going out in February, and she’d been convinced she was in love.
Then so many things had gone wrong. All her fault. And he’d broken up with her just before finals started. She’d been hurt, but… “I was okay,” she said. “I was fine.”
Reina shrugged. “You seemed like it until the day before your last final. After that…it was weird, Maggie. You said you didn’t want to go home, that everything was ruined. You were like this zombie girl, barely responding when I spoke to you. I was surprised you even made it to that final. You were like a different person.”
“Did she call herself Layla?” asked Dan.
“Don’t make fun of me,” said Maggie. “That’s shitty.”
“I’m not making fun of you! You told me your name was Layla when I first saw you in Provincetown. You were waiting tables at the restaurant in the picture.”
“Esteban said he knew it wasn’t your real name,” Reina explained. “He was pretty sure you stole it from that Eric Clapton song.”
“I swear, I don’t remember any of this,” Maggie said. She couldn’t quite catch her breath, and terror nibbled at the edges of her, raising goose bumps. “How do you know he’s not lying?”
“I believe him,” said Dan. “I told the cops as much.”
“They called the owner of the restaurant where you guys worked,” Reina said. “He vouched for Esteban, too. So did one of the waitresses. They both swore up and down that you were there of your own free will and that Esteban had only been looking out for you. And when we showed the police our texts about you and how Esteban was trying to get you back to your family, that was enough for them. They couldn’t hold him.”
Maggie’s heels rubbed back and forth against the sheets, and she watched the movement, letting it hypnotize her. “I’m a nothing,” she mumbled. “I feel sick.”
Reina frowned. “Do you want me to call the nurse?”
She nodded, if only to make them leave. “I’m going to be sick.” She grabbed the call button and pressed it.
Reina and Dan left a minute later, wishing her well, Reina saying they could get together once she was back home at her mom’s. She mentioned registering for fall semester classes, which caused Maggie to lunge for the clean basin at her bedside. She hunched over it as her friends left, certain she was going to puke again. Several dry heaves later, she fell back onto her bed. Her breath came in desperate squeaks, and tears slipped from her eyes, running into her hair.
“Knock, knock,” said a jaunty voice from the doorway. A woman stood there, with wiry, corkscrew-curly hair and a heart-shaped face. “Maggie?”
“Are you the nurse?”
The woman entered the room. “I’m Lori Schwartz. I’m the on-call psychiatrist, and Dr. Mehta let me know that you might need a little support tonight.”
“I’m fine,” Maggie said, putting the basin back on the table next to her bed.
“I took a peek at your chart,” Lori said. “It must be so scary, not knowing where you’ve been or what happened.”
“I hit my head. They said that could interfere with memory.”
“It wouldn’t quite explain what you’re experiencing, though. Especially because your scans were completely unremarkable.” Lori moved a little closer. She wasn’t wearing a lab coat, just navy slacks and a floral shell with a light cardigan. Her ID badge hung from a lanyard around her neck. “Besides, a mild concussion might make sense if we were talking about a few hours of amnesia. But months?” She shook her head, making her curls jiggle around her face. “There’s another reason.”
“Maybe I was drugged,” said Maggie. “I know they said that guy didn’t kidnap me, but—”
“I heard about that. Dr. Mehta put a note in your chart after getting updated by the Wellfleet Police Department. Lots to figure out there. But if drugs were the culprit, I’d expect you to have some hazy recollections at least.”
“I’m not lying,” Maggie snapped.
Lori’s eyes went wide. “Why would you say that?”
“Because it’s obviously what everyone thinks. You don’t believe the concussion explains it. You don’t believe me when I say that guy might have drugged me—”
“But you just said that’s what everyone thinks,” Lori said. “Who are we talking about?”
“My mom,” she whispered.
“Ah.” Lori leaned forward. “Is there any reason why you’d lie to her?”
Maggie felt like an amber-eyed animal trapped in the beam of oncoming headlights. “No.”
“I think we should talk about what you were dealing with. Before you walked away from your life.”
“Because you think I’m only pretending to not remember?”
“I guess that’s a possibility. And if that’s true, I want to understand what happened to make you feel like you needed to go out of your way to tell this story. But also, I want to know if something happened that your mind needed to forget. Because that’s another possibility.”
Maggie thought back. She remembered walking toward her car in the student lot. She remembered hitting the button to unlock. Sliding into the seat, breathing in the hot air, turning on the AC. Checking the gas gauge, thinking she needed to fill up on the drive home. And that was it…until she found herself running through a completely different parking lot, riven with terror, over a hundred and fifty miles away. “There’s literally nothing there. I sort of…blacked out? But my roommate told me I was going by another name and waiting tables in a restaurant. They showed me a picture, and there I was. So suddenly I became this other person?”
Lori didn’t look surprised. “It’s more complicated than that, but it’s also one of the possibilities here. We have more evaluation to do in order to confirm it.”
She knew Lori was a psychiatrist and knew the last thing she should do was talk to one, but she needed to know as much as she needed to breathe. “Can you help me get my memory back so I can figure out what happened to me?”
“It depends on what caused you to lose it in the first place.”
“Can you give me any actual answers? Something other than ‘possibly’ and ‘it depends’? God, you’re all alike.”
“Who?”
Maggie rolled her eyes and kept her gaze rooted on her feet, shifting beneath the sheet and blanket. “Real doctors can do a blood test. A scan. An X-ray. They can tell you what’s going on. All you do is sound smart without ever actually saying anything.”
“You want a definitive answer.”
“Duh?”
“Have you ever heard of dissociative fugue?”
“Isn’t fugue a music term? Like a kind of music?”
“One definition of fugue is music related. But the other is psychological. Sometimes, a person just kind of forgets who they are, and they walk away from their life. Sometimes, they even adopt a new identity. A new name.”
“That’s actually a thing?”
Lori smiled. “Not a common thing, but yeah, definitely a thing.”
“Why does it happen? Why would it happen to me?”
“I’m not saying it did, but I was hoping we could figure that out together. May I?” She gestured at the chair where Ivy had sat only an hour or so ago.
Maggie looked away, toward the window. “Go ahead.”
“Maggie, I know this must be confusing. And frightening. Understanding will help, I think. You must feel so out of control.”
“I’m fine,” she whispered.
“You’ve said that twice now, and honestly, you’re not convincing me.” Her expression was kind when Maggie whipped around to glare at her. “Maggie, it wouldn’t be normal to be fine after what happened to you today. It wouldn’t be normal to feel fine after finding out that you’ve been missing for two months and have no idea where you’ve been. It would be normal to be completely freaked out.”
“I’m just tir
ed.”
“That’s fair. But I can tell you’re also wondering. And you’re worried.”
“I’m pregnant,” she whimpered.
“I know.”
Maggie squeezed her eyes shut, her mouth shut, her knees together. Everything, closed up tight. But it didn’t make her feel safer. She knew it was only a matter of time until she was pried open again.
Lori cleared her throat. “Do you know how it happened?”
Maggie shook her head.
“We’ll work on figuring that out,” said Lori. “And as we do, you can decide what to do about the pregnancy. But, Maggie, there’s something you have to know about fugue, if that’s what’s going on here. It’s going to be an important part of getting better and making sure it doesn’t happen to you again.”
“It could happen again?”
“It’s possible,” said Lori. “But it’s unlikely if you’re willing to take a good look at how it happened in the first place.”
“I don’t know how it happened!”
“With your permission, I can help. This type of event…it’s often caused by some type of severe stress or trauma.” Lori’s gaze was unwavering. Unapologetic. Gentle and merciless at the same time. Her gaze was a scalpel, Maggie realized, cutting right into her mind.
She turned over to face the window. “I didn’t go through a trauma,” she said. “I was under some stress, and my boyfriend broke up with me, but it wasn’t a trauma. I’m not crazy.”
“Experiencing a trauma doesn’t make a person crazy, Maggie. It means they’ve suffered an injury, one that needs some treatment to ensure recovery.”
“Whatever.”
“I think you might have suffered an injury, Maggie. I think it might be what drove you away from your life in May. If you’ll work with me, I can—”
“Get out.” She was curled into a ball again, shaking and doing her best not to cry. “Get out.”
“I’ll be on my way,” said Lori. “I can see that you’re tired. Would you like me to prescribe something to help you sleep tonight?”
“Yes,” she murmured. “Please.”
