Amnesia

by Andrew Neiderman

  “That’s ridiculous. Don’t measure it against anything,” she said with a definite tone of command. “Measure it for what it is, Aaron and be happy.”

  “I’m very happy,” he said. “I love you, Megan.”

  He meant it, he thought.

  Why was that so strange?

  . . . eleven

  word of Megan’s pregnancy spread so quickly through the small community, Aaron had to wonder if it hadn’t been a headline story on all of Driftwood’s local radio stations. He actually asked her that at dinner one night after the phone had rung and another one of the people they had met offered congratulations and best wishes. This time it was Adya from the car dealership.Every time someone called or spoke to Megan about her pregnancy, she seemed to turn into a younger, more excited woman who was having her first child. He attributed it to his overworking imagination these days, but she looked as if she was actually glowing. Her eyes were positively luminous, her complexion even more radiant. She seemed to float about the house, and whenever she spoke, her voice was as merry as a Christmas carol, full of holiday happiness, joy to the world, a new baby is coming.

  When he remarked about it, she said she mentioned his remarks to her obstetrician, Dr. PatriciaCrawford, who told her to explain to him that women are actually in their most healthy state when they’re pregnant. She did so at dinner that night.

  “Despite the morning sickness or when that ends,” she emphasized.

  “You didn’t seem to have any,” he said. “I guess that’s why your announcement was so surprising.”

  “Some women are luckier than others when it comes to those symptoms, Aaron. I didn’t suffer much with Sophie, either. Can you remember any of that?” she inquired, her gaze more intense than usual. She was reading his face as an air traffic controller would read the radar screen.

  He sat there, trying hard to remember. Finally he nodded.

  “What?” she asked quickly.

  “I can recall being in the hospital lobby. I brought something to read, a novel I thought I’d probably finish before you gave birth.”

  “Yes,” she said, her voice full of encouragement. “That’s right. Go on.”

  “I hadn’t been there an hour and had just gotten a cup of coffee when the nurse came to me and said, ‘You’ve got a little girl.’” His eyes brightened with the recitation. “I remember it all! I really do, Megan.”

  “Oh, good, Aaron. This is so great.”

  He felt like a cripple taking his first good step after intense therapy. He was eager to go on and on, go as far as he was able.

  “She was there so soon, I thought she had mistaken me for someone else, one of the other expectant fathers. Yes, I remember asking, ‘Are you sure?’ Andshe gave me this funny look and said, ‘I think I know the difference between boys and girls, Mr. Clifford.’”

  Aaron laughed. He looked at Sophie, who was almost a mirror image of Megan, both with this happy little smile on their lips. Sophie almost looked as if she understood everything. He had to wonder how much Megan had explained, if anything.

  “I remember the exact dialogue, Megan. I do! Every single word!”

  “It was such a dramatic moment for you, Aaron. It’s the sort of memory that lasts forever,” she said, “a happy memory, one you don’t want to block out.”

  “Yes.”

  “I’m not surprised it’s one of the first things to come back so vividly for you.”

  He nodded. “I suppose so. Anyway,” he continued, now impatient with any interruptions, “I told her I didn’t mean that it was a girl. I meant that it was so soon, especially since Sophie was your first.”

  He laughed again.

  Megan’s face seemed to freeze, the warmth and the glow fading.

  “What?” he asked.

  She glanced at Sophie and shook her head.

  “Not your first? I don’t understand.”

  “Later, Aaron,” she said.

  It seemed to take the air from his lungs. He felt a tightening in his chest and a wave of heat rise from his stomach, over his heart, and into his throat. He was so anxious and nervous he didn’t think he could be patient. What did she mean? What new horrible revelation awaited him?

  Megan moved Sophie along so she would finish her meal, and then she suggested he go help her with her reading while she cleaned up after dinner. He sat in the living room, helping her, but keeping one eye on the door, waiting for Megan. She took Sophie up to prepare for bed nearly a half hour later.

  He turned the television on, but became disgusted with the choices and turned it off. He tried to read, but his eyes continually slipped off the pages. He realized that until he spoke with Megan and learned what she was trying to tell him at dinner, he couldn’t concentrate on anything.

  He stared down at the floor and waited, listening to Megan’s and Sophie’s footsteps above and their muffled voices, to the sound of the bathwater, their laughter, and then the silence which set his heart racing in anticipation.

  “Come say good night to Sophie, Aaron,” Megan called down to him.

  He shot up from his chair as if he were on springs and hurried up the stairs.

  Sophie was in bed, the blanket nearly to her chin, waiting for him.

  “Hey, Sudsy,” he said, approaching.

  He could see she was tired, fighting to keep her eyelids open just for him. He kissed her on the cheek, and then he kissed the tip of her nose and she smiled.

  “Kisses roll up, kisses roll down. Kisses keep love all around,” she recited.

  “Yes,” he said. He remembered that. He could hear himself reciting it, and he could hear the giggle, however, it was Megan who was giggling, looking up at him in bedand teasing him, kissing him on the tip of his nose. As he stared down at Sophie, whose eyes slowly closed, he envisioned Megan, but her face seemed to fade in and out and sometimes . . . it was a different face looking up at him, smiling, teasing him with the verse: Kisses roll up; kisses roll down. Kisses keep love all around.

  “Is she asleep, Aaron?”

  “What?”

  “You’ve been standing there for nearly ten minutes. I haven’t heard a word from either of you,” Megan said from the doorway.

  “Oh.” He looked at Sophie and nodded. “She’s asleep.”

  “Come downstairs,” Megan said.

  He followed her into the living room, where she sat on the sofa.

  “What else have I forgotten?” he immediately asked. He held his breath while she raised her gaze from the floor and looked up at him.

  “We lost our firstborn, Aaron. She was born with a defective heart valve and died five days later.”

  “A girl, then?”

  “Yes,” she replied.

  He stared.

  “Her name was Tammy, wasn’t it?” he asked her.

  “Yes, Aaron.”

  “And that night I told you I saw a little girl, bloodied, and called out Tammy?”

  She shook her head.

  “Why didn’t you tell me about her then?”

  “It didn’t fit, Aaron. She didn’t live more than five days, and the blood made no sense.”

  “But still—”

  “I didn’t want to do anything until I spoke with Dr. Longstreet about it,” she said quickly. “The doctor said confusion of memories was a common symptom of your problem, and I shouldn’t worry about it, but for now, she said, let’s let him find his way back to these more tragic remembrances on his own. She told you the same thing, didn’t she?”

  “Yes.”

  “She was afraid of too much emotional trauma, too quickly. That’s why I was holding my breath at dinner when you started to remember being in the waiting room. I thought for sure it was going to lead to the earlier, painful memories.”

  “I see,” he said. He sat. “I had been hearing the name Tammy in my mind more and more. However, I don’t think I’ve heard it for the last week or so, and I didn’t put it together with anyone or anything. Then it seemed to stop completely.
You’d think it would have been the other way around. As I recuperate, the memories get stronger, especially one about your own child.” He looked up at her. “Right?”

  She shook her head. “There is so much they don’t know about the behavior of the human brain, memory, all of that, Aaron. Even someone who is much in the forefront of the research as Dr. Longstreet doesn’t have anywhere near all the answers. She did say painful memories are more readily suppressed. The brain does that as a mechanism of defense.”

  “Defense?”

  “Too much hardship, too much tragedy is like taking on too much water in a boat. It will sink you,Aaron. Sorry for the seafaring simile and image, but it’s what comes to mind, how I still think. Years haven’t changed much of that, I suppose,” she said, smiling, “which shows you how powerful memories can be.”

  “Yes,” he said. He was silent for a few moments and then asked, “Where is Tammy buried?”

  “We put her in your family plot at Wildwood Cemetery.”

  “Where is that?”

  “Ten miles northwest of Goshen, New York.”

  “I’d like to go there,” he said.

  “We will. Let’s wait for the doctor to tell us when,” she added.

  “Why does the doctor have to tell us when to go to a cemetery?” he asked, shrugging.

  “Same reason as before. . . . We’re sort of rationing the bad memories, Aaron.”

  “Then there are more?”

  “You’re thirty-four years old, Aaron. Like anyone, you have good and bad things to remember, especially with your tragic youth, losing your entire immediate family, living with your dreadful aunt. Remember the incident concerning that small scar above your eyebrow? That wasn’t pleasant and there must have been dozens more for you living in that house.”

  “Right,” he said, nodding.

  She smiled.

  “But now that we’re here, all that is behind us, Aaron.”

  “Maybe I really would be better off not remembering things,” he muttered to himself.

  She stared at him, and he looked back at her and nodded.

  “Maybe I’m a fool to keep trying. This whole thing could be a blessing, huh? I mean, how many people can erase their past, wipe away the negatives, and start fresh like we’re starting? I’ve got a good mind not to ever go back to Dr. Longstreet.”

  She laughed. “Don’t go overboard, Aaron. Oops,” she said, covering her mouth and smiling, “those damn fisherman terms just keep sneaking in on me.”

  He smiled.

  She was looking radiant again, her eyes so soft, so appealing, teasing him. She moved her lips, the dimple in her left cheek clicking in and out.

  “Maybe we oughta go upstairs and use my rod and reel?” he suggested.

  She giggled. “Why Aaron Clifford, since when did you get so licentious?”

  He shrugged.

  “I don’t know. You’ll have to tell me.”

  They both laughed at that. Then they went upstairs and made such passionate love that both of them were wet with the heated sweat. Nevertheless, he held on to her, reveling in their moist skins, enjoying the taste of her shoulders, her neck, her breasts, her lips, and inhaling the scent of her rich, thick hair as though he was smelling the most fragrant of flowers.

  “If I wasn’t already pregnant,” she said, “I’d bet anything that would have done it. You were an animal,” she told him.

  “Sorry.”

  “Sorry? I loved it,” she said, kissing him on the tip of his nose.

  “Kisses roll up, kisses roll down . . .”

  They both laughed.

  “Not so loud,” she said. “You’ll wake Sophie.”

  “Right.”

  He felt drunk and had to smother another giggle. He braced himself on his hands and pushed himself up and over her, so he could look down at her lovely face. She stared up at him, her lips relaxing into a gentle smile.

  “What?” she said when his eyebrows lifted.

  Funny, he thought. She doesn’t have a dimple now. How can that be? She had such a pronounced dimple when she looked at me downstairs. How can that be?

  He touched her cheek with the tip of his forefinger.

  “What is it, Aaron?”

  “I thought you had a dimple there,” he said.

  “Sophie’s the one with the dimple, Aaron.”

  “Right,” he said. He started to think about it when she reached up to grasp him behind his neck and pull his lips down to hers.

  The kiss was long, her tongue jetting into his mouth and filling him with an electric excitement that seemed to rattle his very spine.

  Then she pulled back, her eyes radiating with fury.

  “What?”

  “Stop trying to make sense out of everything,” she warned. “Just enjoy your life, Aaron. You’ve been given a second chance. You just had to read between the lines of the things Dr. Longstreet told us to realizemost people end up in mental clinics or in cemeteries after what happened to you.”

  “Yes,” he said. “You’re right.” He closed his eyes and lowered himself into her again, wrapping her sex around him like a suit of armor to keep out the memories of what Shakespeare’s Hamlet called “The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune.”

  Megan’s right. Who needs that? he thought.

  For Aaron, acceptance seemed to be the key ingredient to the creation of deep happiness. Combined with a deliberate new resistance to dark and troubling thoughts, bending with and not battling the wind not only made him happier, it made him stronger. If this is the direction my life has taken, he thought, so be it. He embraced it.There were no longer shadows around his eyes. He ate better, gained weight, and had terrific energy. He didn’t permit himself to sleep a minute more than was necessary. The moment his eyes opened, he was ready to grasp the day, to dive headfirst into his work, and the work did flow. Ideas seemed to be born one after another, one concept merging with another, leading to another until he had such a rush of images, he couldn’t physically keep up.

  He was a dynamo, arriving in his offices by eightthirty and not lifting his head until one, sometimes one-thirty, and only if and when Megan called. There were even days when he worked right through lunch, and it was simply because of a rumble in his stomach that he paused. He’d look at the clock, amazed at how much time had gone by. He truly felt as if he wasshooting through space, as if he had changed form and become a particle of energy, driven and now underway on its own, unstoppable.

  What about the intensity of his efforts and its effect on his medical problem? he vaguely wondered. Shouldn’t I slow down? Shouldn’t I worry about overdoing it? When he asked Dr. Longstreet about it, she laughed and shook her head.

  “Your body will tell you when you’re overworking it, Mr. Clifford,” she said. “What’s remarkable about the synergetic relationship between our minds and our bodies is when we’re enjoying ourselves, enjoying our work, it proves to be much less of a strain, much less of an effort, and takes much, much less of a toll. In fact, hard work can, as old timers avow, be good for you, too.

  “Just keep up your medication,” she advised. “You can wait a week or so longer now before coming back to see me, unless you have a problem, which I must say, I don’t expect.”

  “Great,” he said and glanced at Megan, who was beaming.

  “You two have other things to occupy your time and energy now anyway,” Dr. Longstreet said.

  They smiled. It was truly a happy time.

  Between the coming new baby and his excitement about his work, Aaron didn’t even notice an occasional gray sky. Life was good here. He really could almost forget his mental problems. In any case he liked to keep it from the forefront of his thinking as long as he could and whenever he could.

  One day, when he pulled up to his office, thinkingabout all the positive new things in his life, he didn’t even notice the man in his doorway until he had gotten out of his car. The man stepped forward, agitated. Aaron knew immediately who he was. He had see
n him again and again on the street, always seemingly looking his way, watching him.

  “What do you want?” he asked him when the man stood there, blocking his path, but not speaking.

  “Listen to me,” he said. “Stop taking the pills.” He smiled. “I did and they don’t know.”

  He seized Aaron’s upper arm, squeezed it, smiled, and walked off. It shook Aaron up for a few moments. He called Megan as soon as he entered the office and told her about him.

  “Don’t worry about him, Aaron.”

  “But . . . why has he been following, watching me?”

  “Who knows? I’ll have Mrs. Masters speak to Dr. Longstreet. Don’t worry about it. Please. Just concentrate on your work.” Her tone changed to a happy one. “I’ve heard good feedback already.”

  Harlan Noel was excited by Aaron’s first drawings and listened attentively to Aaron’s ideas. He didn’t object to a single thing. Afternoons, he and Aaron went out to the site and watched the utilities being installed. They paced out the property and began to envision it as Aaron was designing it.

  “You know,” Aaron told him one afternoon, “I really value the way you’ve taken to my concepts, but what about the other investors? Don’t you have any feedback from any of them, any criticism, other suggestions?”

  Harlan smiled and looked toward the mountains.

  “Well,” he said, “I know I’ve implied that there are a number of investors, but I have a confession to make. There’s really only one other investor besides myself.”

  “Oh? And who would that be?”

  “Mrs. Masters,” he said. “She’s a silent partner under her own corporate entity.”

  “I see,” Aaron said. He was troubled by the revelation, but he seemed to anticipate it, know it, and he wasn’t sure why. “She’s got a finger in many pots here, apparently.”

  “Yes, but she’s great, a woman with lots of vision, Aaron. She loves your work. She doesn’t want to change a line on one of your drawings, a block of cement, a stick of wood, anything you’ve suggested. And I’ll tell you something else, another big secret at the moment,” Harlan continued. “She’s already won a major department store for our anchor in the mall. That woman knows how to network. She has friends in all sorts of high places. I’m surprised and amazed by her and what she can accomplish every time I meet with her.”