I tell myself I am ready to forget. That I am ready to start again.
“I want you to think of the first thing you remember from that Saturday, the Saturday from the bus,” Dr. Overton says.
I grasp for the moment I woke up the morning of the crash, before I met the boy.
“Just relax. You’re doing great,” Dr. Overton encourages in a soft, distracted voice.
“Picking up the cingulate cortex,” the nurse whispers.
“Posterior?” the doctor asks. “Are we getting a read on the hippocampus?” They quietly discuss whatever they’re seeing on the screen.
“Doing great, Addie,” Dr. Overton says again, and out of the corner of my eye, I see him nod at the nurse. I’m thinking about packing up my viola case and my mom dropping me at the bus stop the day all this started. And then the nurse wipes something cold on my arm and there’s the prick of a needle and everything slowly gets a little blurry.
Dr. Overton says, “I had a Zach once.”
I manage to glance sleepily at him, surprised.
“Her name was Nina. First girl I ever loved,” he says. And I relax again, realizing he’s just making small talk. I wish he wouldn’t talk about Zach, though. I wish he would talk about something that doesn’t matter.
“Shift a little left, Leslie,” he says, peering at the computer screen. Then he keeps talking to the nurse or me or maybe to himself. “I haven’t seen her since senior year of high school at least,” he says. There seems to be a tinge of sadness in his voice. But I’m feeling so foggy from the procedure that it’s hard to say.
“Every now and then, I’ll think I see her in the market or at the gym. It’s the oddest thing.” He chuckles, and the nurse laughs with him.
“Sometimes I’ll think about her, wonder if she looks the same. What she did after college, whether she ever thinks about me, wonders about me.” His voice gets fainter and fainter. “Where she is right now.” He pauses. “And what she’s done with her piece of my heart.”
BEFORE
December
In the car outside Overton, I’m shaking and terrified and beyond grateful Katy drove. Beyond grateful she’s doing this with me.
“Here,” she says, dropping an envelope in my lap after she cuts the engine. “For today.”
When I open it, I find a whole bunch of bills. After a moment of confusion, I understand what she’s doing and shake my head vehemently. “I can’t take this, Katy. No way.”
“Well, you can’t use all your savings and then get stuck in Lyndale. I’d have to go to New York by myself. That’s not happening.”
“It won’t. I’ll figure it out, but there’s no way I’m taking your money. Where did you even get all this?”
“Robbed a boy—I mean a bank,” she says, and I snort. “Fine. I pawned something my dad sent me. Some stupid pearl set that would work if I was the First Lady or something.”
“Katy!” I exclaim. “Why would you do that? A gift from your dad? You have to go get it back!”
“I don’t want it back. I want you happy. I want you in New York. And I don’t want shit that reminds me of how little my dad knows about me. I mean, it’s fine he doesn’t remember my exact birthday, but he’s, like, three decades off with my age.”
I point to her wrist. “You like the silver bracelet, though. You never take it off.”
She shrugs. “ ’Cause it’s cute, which means his new wife probably picked it out. I can pretend he knows me well enough to know it’s something I’d like. But a pearl set? Anyway, I might have enough money left over to get a new Stentor. I’ve had my violin for, like, four years.” She faces me now and says, “Just take it, okay? If you’re going to do this, if you absolutely have to, then I want to help.”
I eye her for several seconds, blinking to hold back tears, then throw my arms around her. “I’m paying you back.”
“No, you’re not,” she says.
“I am,” I argue as we both undo our seat belts.
“Forget it, okay?” Katy says, laughing at her own joke, but our laughter is strained and I wonder if her heart is pounding as hard as mine, her stomach turning as quickly, her mind racing as fast, as we climb out of the car and walk toward the clinic.
Minutes later, when the nurse comes to get me, I leave Katy in the waiting room, holding my phone and hers, since electronic devices are not allowed in the procedure rooms. Before I leave, my best friend gives me a look that is fearful and knowing and something else I can’t define: maybe regretful.
Why are we here?
Let’s get the hell out and go home.
But the nurse is waiting. She’s short and young, with a bright pink streak in her hair, and I follow her down the hall, clutching the pen and form I started filling out in the waiting room. She hands me a hospital gown and directs me to a changing room.
As I get undressed, I chant the same thing over and over in my mind: Don’t think, don’t think, don’t think.
If I did, I might run out of here. I might go find Katy in the waiting room, and I’d call her Katy instead of Beatrice, and she’d call me Addie instead of Kathleen, and we’d go to her house or mine and talk about music or Juilliard or NYU. I’d try to forget Zach by filling my mind with other things, other people, not by erasing him.
But what if that’s not good enough? What if I can’t get over this?
My chest still throbs from just the thought of him.
And yet, I can’t stop wondering if this is wrong. If this is stupid.
If I’ll regret this.
My heart is racing now, my palms are clammy with sweat, and panic is swelling inside me, rushing up. Don’t think, don’t think.
“Almost done in there, Kathleen?”
“One second,” I call back, but as the nurse’s footsteps retreat, I see the pen and clipboard with the form I should have handed her sitting on top of the clothes I just took off.
And despite the mantra echoing in my mind, I think, What if I hate myself for this afterward?
The nurse is back again, hovering outside, but I pull my jeans out of the pile of clothes, letting the rest drop. And I don’t put them on, because I don’t think I’m strong enough to live with this pain, because forgetting is still the easiest way to move forward.
But I turn my jeans inside out and start to write, scribbling as fast as I can.
I write all I have time to. All I can think of to say to the girl I wish I was, a girl who I hope will be a little braver than I am.
“Dr. Overton is ready whenever you are,” the nurse calls, and then I am picking up my clothes again and opening the door and I am handing the nurse my form. “You’re going to be okay,” she promises me, and smiles in a way I don’t want to forget. Another woman takes a scan of my brain, a baseline scan, she calls it. And then my nurse with the pink-streaked hair is back, leading me to a room where a doctor in his sixties shakes my hand and explains what’s going to happen. The sedative, the side effects.
“How does it work again?” I ask in a moment of panic, stalling. I expect Dr. Overton to be annoyed, but he clearly never tires of talking about his life’s work.
“Well, every time any of us remembers something, we don’t just pull it out of the box and then put it back. We’re actually reforming the memory of that thing. It’s like every time you open a document on your computer and make changes—you save it anew. You write over the file every time you access it. Same with memory—anytime you access a memory, you write over it and then re-save it. We call it reconsolidation. And I think that’s why sometimes it feels like we’re reliving things that we remember. We are constantly re-creating or re-saving memories in our mind.” I nod and think of every memory of Zach, of how it feels too real and too much. “So what we do is we ask you to start off thinking of what you want to forget. You access it so we can locate the neural connections involved, and then we interrupt the reconsolidation process; we interrupt the process so the memory doesn’t save. Does that make sense?”
&nbs
p; I nod again as I lie in the bed, gripping the sides to stop myself from running out. I think of Katy in the waiting room, my mother at work, my father somewhere far away.
And Zach.
Before I forget him.
His hair, his smile, his scent, his laugh, his movies.
“Let’s start with the day you met him. Do you remember that?”
I think of the heat the day I rode over to At Home Movies, pushing the door open, a boy with twinkling eyes springing out from behind the counter.
Zach, the boy I love.
The doctor and nurse discuss what they’re seeing on the screen, throwing out words that are completely foreign to me.
“We’ve got it,” the nurse says finally, pushing something into my arm. “Relax now, Kathleen. We’ll take it from here.”
Don’t think, don’t think, don’t think.
As the sedative starts to kick in, it becomes easier not to.
BEFORE
December
“You’re probably starting to feel quite foggy by now, a little sleepy, which is perfectly normal,” the doctor says. “Try to relax.”
“She’s so restless,” a woman says now, the nurse, I think. The fog makes it hard to tell.
“Here,” she says, and takes my hand, squeezes.
It helps. It stills the tremor coursing through me, vibrating like a plucked string.
I can still feel the warmth of her grip as I fall into a cloudy, quiet state. And as I feel things starting to disappear, see things starting to dull in the window of my mind, I panic. The cars go first. Round-faced vehicles with headlights shaped like bulging eyes, on a street I recognize vaguely. The grass goes next. Tables, then people. Random strangers in different parts of different scenes.
It’s when the sound goes with them that I start to panic.
What am I doing?
I try to squeeze the woman’s hand, to tell her to stop it. I don’t want to forget.
I don’t want to forget.
Not even how it felt.
Not even how it hurt.
Not yet.
Because it mattered and it made me different and maybe I was wrong. Maybe I can handle it.
I can handle it.
But my hands don’t seem to move, don’t seem to convey any sort of message to the nurse, and the people and things and memories keep vanishing.
So I search for something I can hold on to. A sturdy, firmly planted pillar in the middle of a tornado.
A piece of music. Bach.
I’ve always hidden things in my music. I don’t know if it will be enough.
Still, I grab on to it. I don’t let go.
AFTER
January
As I’m falling under, I start to panic.
At that feeling of things disappearing, the edges growing dim, the spot left vacant by things I can’t hold on to.
“Just relax,” a murky voice says to me, and I tell myself to.
It’s okay.
You’re going to forget.
You’re about to start over.
But I still can’t stop the storm in my chest, the feeling in my body saying that something isn’t right.
I try to form words, but I can’t. To ask for a minute or five.
I was glad there wasn’t enough time before, but now I want it.
Now I need it.
My mind begins to blur with images, spinning. The accident.
Spinning.
Goth Guy.
The hospital bed.
Spinning.
The theater.
Zach on the bench next to me, sharing my jacket.
Rory’s gravestone.
Spinning.
These are the things that happened to me.
These are some of the things I did.
I think of “Air on the G String.” This is the piece that reminded me.
I don’t want to lose it.
I don’t want to lose any of it.
But what if I am not strong enough? To take the pain of having just fragments, of knowing that I’ll never truly have all the pieces of my life? What if I am not strong enough even to make out words now, in this fog? To tell Dr. Overton that I don’t want to forget?
I try to form words, but it doesn’t feel like my lips are even moving.
“S…sss…s…”
Stop.
Spinning.
Stop.
Please, please stop.
Spinning.
The things I know about my life are just shards of broken glass, the aftermath, what I’ve been told and pieced together. They are just a shadow, a replica of what happened and how.
But I deserve to know them.
I deserve to keep them.
Stop, stop, stop.
I’m not strong enough.
I’ve never been strong enough.
I cave when things get hard. I prefer to live vicariously, to live other people’s stories because I am not brave enough to live my own.
That is who I am.
“S…sst…o…”
Spinning.
“Addie?” a voice says now. I still can’t tell whose it is.
Did they hear me?
Am I imagining it?
Am I strong enough?
“Stop,” I say.
Stop.
Finally—finally—they do.
AFTER
January
“Open your eyes. Wake up,” my dad whispers as I stir.
When I open them, my parents are on either side of me, and my mother wraps her arms around me.
“Did they do it?” I ask, my voice muffled, pressed into her shirt. “Did I lose everything?”
“No,” she says. “They stopped just as they were targeting the first memory, but you were already sedated, so they let you sleep it off.”
Dad blinks at me. “Your mother called just after it started. She asked me to come.”
“Oh,” I say, squinting at him. Then I look away because we never have anything to say to each other. Because he’s probably hurt that I didn’t tell him I was doing this, because I don’t want to face his disappointment right now.
But a few minutes later, when Dr. Overton gives us the okay to go home, Dad asks if he can drive me, even though I came with Mom.
Mom shrugs when I look at her. “Maybe I’ll go with Caleb to pick your car up from my office.”
In the car, I stare out the window, not saying a word. It started snowing while we were in the clinic, and it’s still falling in thick and heavy clumps. Sidewalks are already nearly completely white with it. It’s hypnotizing watching it fall, watching it restructure the world by hiding edges and rocks and stairs and roofs.
“I’m glad you didn’t go through with it.”
I make no sound, don’t turn to look at my father.
“I know you’ve had a lot to deal with the last few days, Addie. And I’m sorry for how everything turned out.”
I had thought that I wasn’t going to say anything to him, that I had as little to say to him as he had to say to me the past few years, but I suddenly break.
“How could you let me have the procedure the first time? You fought for Caleb to have a choice, but you didn’t do the same for me. Why? Why did you just give up on me? Even if I agreed to it, you had to know that it wasn’t really what I wanted. You didn’t even try.”
“I fought your mother on it for a long time.”
“Obviously, it wasn’t long enough. Obviously, you gave up.”
“I…I knew I wouldn’t be able to live with myself if she was right—if you did sink to a place so deep you couldn’t recover,” he says. So he agreed with her that I wasn’t strong enough, that I couldn’t deal with losing Rory. “I also somehow convinced myself that by walking away, by leaving, I was having no part in it. I wasn’t complicit in the lie.”
Tears are stinging my eyes now. “But you were! You lied to me for years and years.” I am a big sister. “Was” or “am”? What is the word for things you were
and no longer are but always will be?
“I know,” Dad says, and he seems on the verge of tears himself. “I realize that now. And not just for Rory, Addie, but for letting you believe you weren’t strong enough. By doing what we did…by me letting it happen, your mother and I were the first ones to tell you that. And eventually you told yourself that, too; you believed it. But it wasn’t—isn’t—true.”
He sighs now. “I’ve lived with depression all my life, Addie, and I don’t have the words to describe how difficult that life can be. It’s not just sadness. For me, at least. Some days it’s a combination of the worst things I’ve ever felt in my life—fear, sadness, apathy, loneliness, sorrow, restlessness, hopelessness. And some days it’s absolutely nothing—empty, turned out, like my brain doesn’t even turn on. I don’t know if you will live or would have lived the same life, but I couldn’t take seeing you at eleven, seeing you now, and wondering if I’ve passed that on to you—my inability to deal with pain.”
I look at him and glance away again, still fighting tears.
“But you are dealing with it,” I say quietly after a moment. “You lost Rory and you lost Mom and you haven’t given up. Why didn’t you think you’d given me that part of you, too?”
He pauses, then nods. He’s leaning forward in his seat, driving slowly on the slippery road.
“While you were asleep, I was talking to Dr. Overton and he was telling me how experiences reshape the brain. Whether it’s depression or joy or love, you can see how they physically reform someone’s mind. By taking away the first tragedy you ever went through, we also erased the way your mind was learning to face it. Sure, maybe you were learning too slowly for us, maybe you needed more help and counseling or medication, but your brain was rewiring to deal with that pain, and we prevented it. So when this thing with Zach happened, your first instinct, even without knowing it, was to remove the source, not to cope with it.
“Addie, letting you believe that you weren’t strong enough was one thing—and it was wrong—but the biggest lie is that there are things that aren’t survivable. That there are things not worth surviving. I never, ever want you to believe that. That you can’t keep going or that you can’t overcome the thing you’re facing.” He pauses. “I’m sorry that I had a hand in teaching you that.”
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