The Good Daughter

by Alexandra Burt

  He picks up a contraption and holds it up in front of me. “This is a spirometer. The nurse will give you detailed instructions. Basically you keep the red ball suspended as long as you can. Every two hours, please.” His last comment is directed toward the nurse.

  The gurgling in my chest is uncomfortable and I try not to cough. The pain in my left side must be the fractured ribs. I wonder how I’ll be able to stay awake for two hours or wake up every two hours or use this contraption for two hours, or whatever he just said.

  “Before I forget . . .” Dr. Baker looks down at me. He is quiet for a while and I wonder if I missed a question. Then he lowers his voice. “Two detectives were here to talk to you. I won’t allow any questioning until we’ve done a few more tests.” He nods to the nurse and walks toward the door, then turns around and offers one more trifle of news. “Your husband will be here soon. In the meantime can we call anyone for you? Family? A friend? Anybody?”

  I shake my head no and immediately regret it. A mallet pounds against my skull from the inside. My head is a giant swollen bulb and the throbbing in my ear manages to distract me from my aching ribs. My lids have a life of their own. I’m nodding off but I have so many questions. I take a deep breath as if I’m preparing to jump off a diving board. It takes everything I have to sound out the words.

  “Where did this accident happen?” Why does he look so puzzled? Am I missing more than I’m aware of?

  “I’m sorry, but I can’t tell you much about the accident,” he says. He sounds subdued, as if he’s forcing himself to be composed in order to calm me. “All we know is that your car was found upstate at the bottom of a ravine.” Pause. “You have a lot of injuries. Some are from the accident. Can you remember what happened?”

  I reflect on his words, really think them over. Accident. Ravine. Nothing. Not a thing. There’s a large black hole where my memory used to be.

  “I can’t remember anything,” I say.

  His brows furrow. “You mean . . . the accident?”

  The accident. He talks about the accident as if I remember. I want to tell him to X-ray my head, and that he’ll find a dark shadow within my skull where my memory once was.

  I’m getting the hang of this. Before I say something, I concentrate, think of the question and repeat it in my head, take a deep breath, then I speak.

  “You don’t understand. I don’t remember the accident and I don’t remember anything before the accident.”

  “Do you remember wanting to harm yourself?”

  “Harm myself?” I would remember that, wouldn’t I? Why am I so forgetful?

  “Either that or you were shot.”

  Was I shot or did I harm myself? What kind of question is he asking me?

  I turn my head as far to the left as possible, catching a glimpse of the outstretched leg of a police officer sitting by the door, out in the hallway. I wonder what that’s all about.

  Dr. Baker looks over his shoulder and then faces me again. He steps closer and lowers his voice. “You don’t remember.” He states it matter-of-factly, no longer a question, but a realization.

  “I don’t know what I don’t know,” I say. That’s kind of funny, when I think about it. I giggle and his brows furrow again. I’m getting frustrated. We’re going in circles. It’s difficult to stay awake.

  Then he tells me about my voice. How it is “monotone” and that I have “a reduction in range and intensity of emotions,” and that my reactions are “flat and blunted.” I don’t understand what he’s telling me. Should I smile more, be more cheerful? I want to ask him but then I hear a word that puts it all to rest.

  “Amnesia,” he says. “We’re not sure about the cause yet. Retrograde, maybe posttraumatic. Maybe even trauma-related.”

  When you hear amnesia from a man in a white coat, it’s serious. Final. I forgot sounds casual—oh, I’m forgetful. I have amnesia, I’m not forgetful after all. What’s next? Is he going to ask me what year it is? Who the president is? If I remember my birth date?

  “Retrograde means you don’t recall events that happened just before the onset of the memory loss. Posttraumatic is a cognitive impairment and memory loss can stretch back hours or days, sometimes even longer. Eventually you’ll recall the distant past but you may never recover what happened just prior to your accident. Amnesia can’t be diagnosed with an X-ray, like a broken bone. We’ve done an MRI test and a CAT scan. Both tests came back inconclusive. Basically there’s no definitive proof of brain damage at this point, but absence of proof is not proof of absence. There could be microscopic damages, and the MRI and the CAT scan are just not sophisticated enough to detect those. Nerve fiber damage doesn’t show up on either test.”

  I remain silent, not sure if I should ask anything else, not sure if I even understood him at all. All I grasp is that he can’t tell me anything definitive, so what’s the point?

  “There’s the possibility that you suffer from dissociative amnesia. Trauma would cause you to block out certain information associated with the event. There’s no test for that, either. You’d have to see a psychiatrist or a psychologist. But we’re getting ahead of ourselves. The neurologist will order some more tests. Like I said, time will tell.”

  I take a deep breath. He’s relaying medical facts to me but I just can’t shake the feeling that there’s something he is not telling me.

  “They found me where again?”

  “In a ravine, in Dover, upstate. You were transferred here from Dover Medical Center.”

  Dover? Dover. Nothing. I’m blank.

  “I’ve never been to Dover.”

  “That’s where they found you—you just don’t remember.” He slips the pen back in his coat pocket. “You were lucky,” he adds. He holds up his index finger and thumb, indicating the extent of the luck I had. “The bullet was this far from doing serious damage. Really lucky. Remember that.”

  Bullet. I was shot or I harmed myself. Lucky. That depends on whom you ask, I think to myself. Remember that. How funny. My hand moves up to my ear, almost like a reflex. “You said there’s damage to my ear. What happened to it?”

  He pauses ever so slightly. “Gone. Completely gone. The area was infected and we had to make a decision.” He watches me intently. “It could have been worse. Like I said, you were lucky.”

  “That’s some luck,” I say, but when I think about my ear, I don’t really care.

  “There’s reconstructive surgery.”

  “What’s there now? I mean, is there a hole?”

  “There’s a small opening draining fluids, other than that, there’s a flap of skin stretched over the wound.”

  An opening that drains fluids. I’m oddly untouched by the fact that a flap of skin is stretched over a hole in my head where my ear used to be. I have amnesia. I forgot to lock my car. I lost my umbrella. My ear is gone. It’s all the same: insignificant.

  “And you call that lucky?”

  “You’re alive, that’s what counts.”

  There’s that buzzing sound again and then his voice goes from loud to muffled, as if someone’s turned a volume dial.

  “What about my ear?”

  He looks at me, perplexed.

  “I remember you told me it was gone.” Completely gone were the words he used. “I mean my hearing, what about my hearing? Everything sounds muffled.”

  “We did an electrophysiological hearing test while you were unconscious.” He grabs my file from the nightstand and opens it. He flips through the pages. “You’ve lost some audio capacity, but nothing major. We’ll order more tests, depending on the next CAT scan. We just have to wait it out.”

  I look at the police officer’s leg outside my door, and I wonder if he’s protecting me or if he’s protecting someone from me.

  “I remembered something.” The words come spilling out and take on a life of their own. “I need
to know if what I see . . . I . . . I think I remember bits and pieces, but it’s not like a memory, it’s more like fragments.” It’s like flipping through a photo album not knowing if it’s mine or someone else’s life. Blood. So much blood.

  “You may not be able to remember minute by minute, but you’ll be able to generally connect the dots at some point. It’s a Humpty Dumpty kind of a situation; maybe you won’t be able to put it all back together.”

  “I’m very tired,” I say and feel relieved. All the king’s horses and all the king’s men. Wild horses. I make a decision. The blood was just an illusion. A figment.

  “Let the nurse know if there’s anybody you want us to call. Don’t forget the spirometer—every two hours . . .”

  He points at something behind me. “Behind you is a PCA pump. It delivers small amounts of pain medication. If you need more”—he puts a small box with a red button in my hand—“just push the red button and you’ll get one additional dose of morphine. The safety feature only allows for a maximum amount during a certain timed interval. Any questions?”

  I have learned my lesson from earlier and barely shake my head.

  I watch him leave the room and immediately a nurse enters and I concentrate on her explaining the yellow contraption to me. I’m supposed to breathe into the tubing until a ball moves up, and I have to breathe continuously to try to keep the ball suspended as long as possible.

  I have amnesia. My ear is gone. I feel . . . I feel as if I’m not connecting like I should. I should yell and scream, raise bloody hell, but Dr. Baker’s explanations of my lack of emotions, “blunted affect” he called it, seems logical. Logic I can handle; it’s the emotions that remain elusive.

  There’s something they’re not telling me. Maybe because they don’t subject injured people—especially those who’ve been shot, who lost an ear, who were that close—to any additional bad news. That must be it. Maybe the police will tell me, or Jack, once he gets here. They already told me I’ve been robbed of hours of my life, how much worse can it get?

  I hold the spirometer in my right hand. I blow into the tube and allow my mind to go blank while I watch the red ball go up. It lingers for whatever amount of time I manage to keep it suspended. I pinch my eyes shut to will the ball to maintain its suspension. Suddenly bits and pieces of images come into focus as if they are captured on the back of my eyelids. My mind explodes. It disintegrates, breaks into tiny particles.

  Mia isn’t with Jack. She’s gone.

  The realization occurs so abruptly and is so powerful that the wires connected to my chest seem to tremble and the machines behind me pick up on it. The beeps speed up like the hooves of a horse, walking, then trotting, then breaking into a full-blown gallop. Mia’s disappearance is a fact, yet it is disconnected from whatever consequences it entails—there’s a part I can’t connect with. An empty crib. Missing clothes, her missing bottles and diapers, everything was gone. I looked for her and couldn’t find her. I went to the police and then there’s a dark hole.

  Like a jigsaw puzzle, I study the pieces, connect them, tear them apart, and start all over again. I remember going to the police precinct but after that it gets blurry—hazy, like a childhood memory. My mind plays a game of “telephone,” thoughts relaying messages, then retelling them skewed. Easily misinterpreted, embellished, unreliable.

  Every time I watch the spirometer ball move upward, more images form: a bathroom stall, a mop, a stairwell, pigeons, the smell of fresh paint. Then a picture fades in, as if someone has turned up a light dimmer: fragments of celestial bodies; a sun, a moon, and stars. So many stars.

  Why was I in Dover? Where is my daughter and why is no one talking about her?

  As I lie in the hospital bed, I am aware of time passing, a fleeting glimpse of light outside, day turning into night, and back into day. I long for . . . a tidbit of my childhood, a morsel of memory, of how my mother cared for me when I was sick, in bed with the flu or some childhood disease, like measles or chicken pox. But then I recall having been a robust child, a child who was hardy and resistant to viruses, to strep throats and pink eyes.

  I don’t know what to tell Jack once he shows up. He will question me. Jack will ask me about the day Mia disappeared. About the morning I found her crib empty. Amnesia is just another shortcoming on a long list of my other countless inadequacies. Shortfall after shortfall.

  I must be insane, for the only explanation I can come up with is of my daughter and my ear, together in the same place. And above them, floating suspended like a mobile, the sun, the moon, and the stars. Bright as bright can be, surrounded by darkness. A chaotic universe illuminated by heavenly bodies.

  I rest my hands on my lap. My body stills, comes to a halt. I was in an accident. I was shot or tried to harm myself. My ear is gone. There’s a hole that’s draining fluids.

  I don’t care about any of that. Mia’s gone. I can’t even bear the thought of her. I want the pain to stop yet her image remains. I raise my finger to push the red PCA button, longing for the lulled state the medicine provides. I hesitate, then I put the box down. I have to think, start somewhere. The empty crib. The dots. I have to connect the dots.

  Photo by author

  Alexandra Burt is a freelance translator and the international bestselling author of Remember Mia. Born in Europe, she moved to Texas more than twenty years ago. While pursuing literary translations, she decided to tell her own stories. After years of writing classes and gluttonous reading, her short fiction appeared in fiction journals and literary reviews. She lives in Texas with her husband and daughter. Visit her online at alexandraburt.com.

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