In Medias Res

by Yolanda Wallace

She looked at me over her shoulder as she turned left on United Street. “Now that is an answer.”

  The traffic on United wasn’t as heavy as that on Duval. With fewer obstacles to dodge, Marcy covered the ten blocks in about ten seconds. She left the pedi-cab at the curb while she walked me to my door.

  “What are you doing tomorrow?” she asked.

  “Grocery shopping. My cupboards are bare.”

  “What about after that?”

  I unlocked the deadbolt and stepped inside to shut off the alarm. “I haven’t planned that far ahead yet.” Standing in the half-open doorway, I held one hand on the knob. I was hoping she’d get the hint without making me appear rude by asking her to leave.

  “Would you like to have dinner?” she asked. “Maybe go dancing? Or better yet, we could get up early, catch a cat, and go snorkeling. The water’s crystal clear and the coral’s beautiful.”

  Confused by her terminology, I assumed cat meant catamaran, not Morris or Garfield or one of their six-toed stray cousins I’d seen running around. “I shouldn’t.”

  “Why?” She shoved her hands in the back pockets of her cutoffs. “Do you have something against snorkeling?”

  “No, but I don’t want to lead you on.” She seemed so excited about the prospect of being with me that I had to put a stop to it.

  “I think I’m the one who’s doing the leading here, don’t you?” She didn’t wait for me to answer the question. “I know you’re married, Sydney. Even though I’m attracted to you, I can respect that. The fact that you’re straight and married and I’m gay and unattached doesn’t stop us from being friends, does it?”

  Finally, another easy question. “No, it doesn’t. It might even make it easier.”

  She grinned as if I’d said something amusing, profound, or incredibly naïve. “Then I’ll see you in the morning?”

  Her enthusiasm broke down my defenses. “What time?”

  Her face brightened. “I’ll pick you up here at seven thirty.”

  I grimaced. “That early?”

  “If you want to beat the crowd, it’s a necessary evil, I’m afraid. We have to drive to the Seaport to charter a catamaran—if they’re not all taken—then follow that up with a forty-minute boat ride to the reef. But once we get there, we can take as long as we want.”

  “Then seven thirty it is.” I tightened my grip on the doorknob. “I’d better get to bed and you’d better get back to work.”

  “I have a confession to make.” She leaned toward me and motioned for me to follow suit. When I did, she said in a conspiratorial whisper, “Today’s my day off.”

  “So the cab ride was—”

  “An opportunity to spend some time with you.” She smiled sheepishly. “Are we still on for tomorrow?”

  “Only if you promise to be honest with me from now on. If we’re to be friends, I’d like to believe that I can trust you.”

  “You can.”

  “Prove it to me.”

  “How?”

  “Answer a question for me.”

  “Anything. What do you want to know?”

  “What do you want from me?”

  She didn’t hesitate. “Everything you have to give.”

  Chapter Six

  When Marcy left, I didn’t go to bed like I’d said I would. I went to work. She might have had the night off, but I didn’t.

  A thick medical encyclopedia lay on the banquette in the kitchen. I used it to perform a quick bit of self-diagnosis.

  There were seven types of amnesia to choose from.

  Anteretrograde amnesia was marked by the inability to remember ongoing events after the incidence of trauma or the onset of the disease that caused the condition.

  Because I remembered everything that had happened since I found myself running through O’Hare, I ruled that out.

  Korsakoff’s syndrome was memory loss caused by chronic alcoholism.

  I wasn’t craving a bottle of vodka or shaking uncontrollably from the DT’s so I ruled that one out, too.

  Lacunar amnesia was the inability to remember a specific event.

  Close, but no cigar—unless my entire life counted as a specific event.

  Posthypnotic amnesia seemed like a bit of a stretch. Unless someone had drugged me, I didn’t see myself being able to relax enough to fall for the dangling watch on a chain and the old “You are getting very sleepy.” I was too much of a type-A personality for that.

  That left three possibilities.

  Transient global amnesia, spontaneous memory loss that could last from minutes to several hours, seemed like the likeliest suspect—until I read the part about it being usually seen in middle-aged to elderly people. I didn’t fit in either of those categories. Not yet, anyway.

  Retrograde amnesia was the inability to remember events that occurred prior to the onset of amnesia.

  “Sufferers do not lose all their memories,” I read. “Usually, the memory loss is worst for events just before the injury. Events from long ago are more likely to be safe.”

  That could explain why I remembered being eight but not eighteen.

  Based on what I read, if I had amnesia of the retrograde variety, I wouldn’t ever remember what had caused my memory loss or the events leading up to it. Caused by brain injury or disease, retrograde amnesia didn’t seem likely, though. My head was still attached to my shoulders and I felt fine physically. A little full from dinner, but otherwise fine.

  That left emotional/hysterical amnesia, memory loss caused by psychological trauma. I latched on to that one. It seemed to fit and, more importantly, it was described as being “usually temporary.” I liked that part best of all.

  I dressed for bed but went into the living room. The home movies in the bookcase were sorted by date. I didn’t pull out the earliest one. Those memories were coming back on their own. Instead, I skipped to the ones that covered the periods that were still missing from my mind: high school and beyond.

  I took a tape titled “Senior Prom, April 1996” off the shelf and slid it into the VCR side of the DVD/VCR combo while I tuned the TV to channel three. I grabbed the VCR remote off the coffee table and sat on the couch. A sticky linoleum floor and a tub of hot buttered popcorn would have made for the perfect movie-going experience. I had neither. What I had was a date with my newfound friend: the unknown.

  Shaky images filled the TV screen.

  Patrick had manned the camera. As he sneaked up the stairs of our parents’ house, he provided whispered narration like a nature photographer trying not to spook his subject.

  At the top of the stairs, he turned the camera on himself. The low angle made him look ten feet tall. Since he was only five feet nine, he would have liked that. He had made the video when he was a nineteen-year-old sophomore at the University of Illinois. I’d followed him there a year later. He had majored in sports medicine; I had chosen pre-law. Currently, he was a member of the Chicago Bears’ medical staff. I was a mystery wrapped inside an enigma—or however the saying goes.

  How did I know all that? The images on the screen brought it back to me.

  My life was finally coming into focus. Eager for more of the same, I moved closer to the TV set like a kid watching Saturday morning cartoons over a bowl of sugar-laden cereal.

  “We’re here to observe the mating—sorry, Mom and Dad—I mean dating habits of one Sydney Paulsen,” Patrick said into the camera, sounding like the late Steve Irwin doing his typically manic voiceover on an old episode of Crocodile Hunter. “Today we will be witnessing a ritual known as prom night. Observe.”

  Turning the camera around again, Patrick continued down the hall. He stopped in front of a door that looked vaguely familiar. The Keep Out sign on the outside of the door had been amended to include the coda, “Patrick, this means YOU!!”

  I remembered making the sign while Patrick and I were both in high school. When he went away to college, I hadn’t bothered to take it down. It seemed he was around more when he didn’t live at home than whe
n he did.

  Music and laughter seeped out of the closed door. Patrick opened the door, catching me and Jennifer in flagrante delicto—dancing deliriously in our pastel prom dresses to the dated strains of Los Del Rio. The duo’s infectious song wouldn’t sweep the U.S. until that summer, but I had gotten hooked on it during a family vacation to Mexico the year before.

  I cringed at the sight of myself in big hair and yards of taffeta. I looked like a reject from a bad eighties music video. It was the nineties. Why hadn’t I gotten the Rachel? If I had, the images of the old me dancing the Macarena wouldn’t have been nearly as damaging to my psyche—or was that my ego?

  Jennifer and I were halfway through our performance before we realized Patrick was in the room.

  Hearing his devious laughter, Jen wheeled and fired her hairbrush at his head. He ducked, but not fast enough. The brush caught him squarely between the eyes and he went down, yelping in pain. The camera clattered to the floor but kept recording, capturing the sight of Patrick rolling around on the floor as if the bruise on his forehead was life threatening.

  “What’s going on up there?” my father called from downstairs.

  “Nothing, Dad!” I shouted back.

  “Stop whining, Pat,” Jennifer chided, dragging him into the room by his feet. The back of his head banged on the threshold and he howled anew. I stepped over him and closed the door. Jennifer bent and picked up the camera. Her face filled the frame. “Show’s over.”

  The screen went black. When the video picked up again, the venue had changed from my bedroom to the living room. The camera panned from my mother performing a quick patch job on my hem to my father watching a Bulls game on TV to Patrick sitting forlornly on the couch with one ice pack on the front of his head and another on the back.

  “How’s the boo-boo, Pat?” Jennifer asked from behind the camera.

  He flipped her the bird, causing the ice pack on the back of his head to spill open and dribble ice down the back of his Madras shirt. The camera followed his hasty retreat to the bathroom.

  Jennifer guffawed. “This just isn’t your day, is it, Patty boy?”

  He flipped her off again and slammed the door.

  “Oh, you two,” my mother said when Jennifer returned to the living room. “You know you have feelings for each other. Why don’t you just admit it?”

  “Yeah, Jen,” the younger me said, stifling a giggle. “Why don’t you?”

  My smile intimated that Jennifer and I had discussed the subject in great detail. I couldn’t remember the outcome of those conversations. Did she have a crush on my brother or he on her?

  Whatever the outcome of those conversations had been, it didn’t matter anyway. Patrick was married to the former Kristin Connelly from St. Louis. I liked her—even though she was a Cardinals fan—and I adored their two beautiful boys, my nephews Kris, nine, and Kevin, four.

  It was funny. Funny strange, not funny ha ha. I was starting to remember everyone in my life except for the two that meant the most to me—my husband and my best friend. My memories of my family were crystal clear, but the ones of Jack and Jennifer were fuzzy at best.

  On the tape, the doorbell rang, extricating Jennifer from an awkward situation and sending my mother into a tizzy. After glancing in the mirror to see how her hair looked, my mother rushed around the room straightening this and tidying that. She took the camera from Jennifer and handed it to my father. “Sid, take this.” She knocked on the bathroom door. “Patrick, come out of there. It’s time.”

  My father reluctantly gave up his basketball game. Just as reluctantly, my brother came out of the bathroom. My mother, acting as movie director, positioned me and Jennifer by the stairs and stopped to check on her hair again. I half-expected her to yell “Action!” before she opened the door.

  Two teenage boys—one white, one black, both nervous—stood on the porch.

  “David, Marcus,” my mother said, greeting them effusively. “It’s so good to see you. Come in! Come in!”

  David was David DiNunzio, the captain of the swim team and the first boy I ever slept with. We dated for a year and a half. We broke up a couple of weeks before graduation. He wanted to be free when he got to college because, as he put it, “The poon there was growing on trees.”

  It looked like Jennifer and her high school sweetheart had remained an item—unless she had (has) a thing for guys named Marcus. The high school version had been quite a catch. Smart, funny, and male model–gorgeous, all the girls had lusted after him. In 1996, though, interracial dating wasn’t as accepted as it would come to be. Most parents in my peer group had gently discouraged their kids from crossing the color line. None of them wanted to be the ones other families whispered about in church or gossiped about on the street.

  Someone apparently forgot to tell Jennifer—and Marcus. Locking eyes, they smiled at each other as if they were the only two people in the room.

  I watched the pinning of corsages and the mandatory photo session. There were a few shots of the game, too, as Dad, distracted by crowd noise coming from the TV, turned to see what the Bulls were up to. The video ended after David, Jennifer, Marcus, and I climbed into the back of our rented limo and rode away.

  As I (vaguely) remembered it, the prom had been just okay. Nothing to write home about. After making the rounds and having our pictures taken for our parents’ sake, if not our own, David and I had ditched it for the main event—the senior party in Bryan Woods. That had been something just short of a Roman orgy. The next day, empty beer bottles and filled condoms had littered the ground.

  I didn’t remember Jennifer and Marcus being there, but that didn’t mean anything. They could have been there and I’d forgotten that, too. With no videotape evidence to prompt me, I couldn’t be certain.

  I rewound the tape, put it back in its box, and returned it to the shelf.

  The next video was “Sydney’s High School Graduation.” Not in the mood for pomp and circumstance, I watched it on fast forward. I slowed only to watch my fellow graduates and me toss our mortarboards in the air and promise to remain best friends for life. (That sounded familiar.) Some of us had kept that promise. Most, including me, had not. I didn’t know where half those people were—or who they had become. I had lost track of them years before I had lost track of myself.

  There were many more tapes to choose from—videos chronicling every major moment in my life over the past twenty-five years. My college years were next. With my brain on overload, I didn’t think I could handle another blast from the past. Besides, I already remembered college’s high points—attending my first keg party, pledging a sorority—and a few of the low ones—tossing my cookies at that keg party and walking in on one of my sorority sisters blowing the guy that I’d told her I had a crush on.

  If sleep were the poor man’s medicine, perhaps all I needed was an eight-hour dose to cure my malady. My heart, filled with trepidation, wouldn’t allow me to be that optimistic. Something told me that I’d be back in front of the TV screen in a few hours analyzing more stolen moments from my past.

  I wanted to skip straight to my wedding video, but I was afraid to. Afraid not that I would derail the recovery process by proceeding out of chronological order, but afraid that I wouldn’t be able to connect to those memories as easily as I had the others—and afraid that I would. After all, there had to be a reason why I was subconsciously blocking Jack and Jennifer out of my mind—and that reason couldn’t be good.

  Had they betrayed me by sleeping together? Or had I betrayed them?

  I wasn’t in a rush to find out.

  Chapter Seven

  The alarm clock woke me out of a sound sleep.

  Disoriented, I hit the snooze button and tried to get my bearings. Nothing looked right. Blue walls? The walls in my apartment were— Shit, what color were the walls in my apartment?

  Pulling the covers up to my chin, I let out a whimper of fear.

  The sound of roosters crowing in the distance brought me back.
Key West was overrun by stray chickens. A volunteer group, The Rooster Rescue Team, had been formed to take in the birds that had been orphaned or injured. City officials had hired a chicken catcher to round up the rest, but he had quickly left his post when he realized the job was too big for one person to handle.

  I was facing a similarly monumental task.

  I had gone to sleep hoping everything would be fine when I woke up. It wasn’t. I could remember the night before but not the week before. I could remember twenty years before but not two years before. Then again, that wasn’t entirely true. I could remember some recent events in my life and most of the old ones.

  What I couldn’t remember was anything that had to do with Jack or Jennifer, lending credence to my theory that whatever was wrong with me had to do with one—or both—of them. Since they took up so much of my life, that explained why so much of my life was missing.

  I covered my face with my hands and took a deep breath, the no-frills version of breathing into a paper bag. The anxiety soon passed. Frustration took its place. I’d thought that I’d had a breakthrough the night before, only to wake up the next day to more of the same—and the fear that it would always be that way.

  I pounded the bed with my fists.

  “What did I do to deserve this? Why is this happening to me?” I cried, doing a fairly good impersonation of a petulant child.

  It took me nearly twenty minutes to drag myself out of the pool of self-pity I was drowning in. When Marcy rang the doorbell, I was still in my robe and my eyes were puffy from crying.

  Marcy’s welcoming smile quickly deteriorated into a frown. She was probably wondering what she had gotten herself into. I couldn’t blame her if she were also trying to figure a way to get herself out of it.

  “Is this a bad time?” she asked.

  “Yes, but come in anyway.”

  She came inside and closed the door behind her. “What’s wrong?” she asked, touching my arm.

  I pulled away from her. “If I get into it, I’ll go off again.”