Tabula Rasa(27)

Then he drifted up the stairs. Moments later, I heard his door click shut.

I’d tried to sneak into his office early on, but he kept the door locked at all times when he wasn’t in there. And I wasn’t foolish enough to think it would be any different tonight. There were a few other doors in the house he kept locked all the time as well. But he pretended as if those doors didn’t exist, and I wasn’t dumb enough to let him know I was aware that they did.

I sat on the sofa and looked around, at a loss for what to do. It was only nine o’clock and felt way too early for sleep. The cat sat on a chair opposite from me, glaring, plotting.

I went back up to my room and took the envelope from under the mattress. There was no way I would be able to sleep with my life lying a few inches underneath me. I came back downstairs with it and dumped the contents out on the coffee table.

The DVD was in a clear plastic freezer bag and just said “Cache” on it. I set it aside for the moment and turned to the information Shannon had somehow acquired about me.

“Elodie Rosen. Age: 28. Graduate student of Botany at University of Washington.”

Washington state was on the other side of the country. Did Trevor live and work there? Had he taken me all the way across the country, or had I gone to where he was? Maybe spring break or something.

But why had nobody called? The story must have made national news if Shannon heard about it, unless he’d been traveling in the area. For business. Maybe I’d been wrapped up in my studies and had no close friends. But no family either? Didn’t my professors give a shit about me? Or did they think someone else would come forward?

I looked back to the list. It didn’t appear that I’d had a job. I’d mostly kept to myself. But according to Shannon’s search, I didn’t have student loans, either. Had I inherited a lot of money? Surely I had to have money. And nobody was speaking up for me?

People really didn’t like to get involved in things. It was just like what Shannon said. I could have screamed my head off, and that kid at the motel might have pretended he couldn’t hear me—anything to not get involved. What was wrong with people?

I scanned further down the paper. “Fluent in French. Spent several semesters in Paris as an undergrad.” Maybe someone in France gave a shit about me.

I glanced back at the DVD and slid it out of the plastic. I put it in the player and settled back on the sofa. It was a French film. It must have been a version of the film made specifically for a French audience because there were no subtitles or dubbing.

But I understood all the dialogue.

I wasn’t sure if Shannon had chosen a creepy foreboding movie on purpose or if it was just difficult to find a French film that didn’t fit that mold, but I nearly leaped off the sofa when Shannon came down the stairs during an intense scene. It didn’t help that he moved as stealthily as the cat did.

He went to the kitchen for a glass of milk and then came back out into the living area. He wore pale gray pajama pants that showcased his tan and no shirt. The white cat jumped down off the chair and took the opportunity to weave in and out of his legs, leaving her scent on him. She stared at me pointedly while she did it. As if I were going to rush over there and fight for cuddle privileges with perhaps the least cuddly person in the world.

“Est-ce que tu t’es rendu à l’histoire du chien dans la scène du d?ner?”, Shannon said.

“Ne me gache pas tout.” Even though I knew I understood French, it still shocked me when I spoke it. Or did it shock me that Shannon spoke it? Maybe he’d just learned the one phrase. But his accent and enunciation were impeccable.

“Interesting,” he said. “Have you read all of the file yet?”

“Not yet. I wanted to watch the DVD, and then I got sucked in.”

He nodded. “It’s a good film. You should read the rest of the file. I think this confirms a theory I had.”

“And what theory was that?” I asked, trying not to look too eager.

“You’ve clearly got retrograde amnesia, but your skills and general knowledge seem to be intact, just not specific autobiographical memories. That’s generally how it works. So you’ll find you know things but you won’t know how you know them. Like with the French.”

“Do you think I’ll ever get my memories back?”

Shannon shrugged. “I’m not a doctor. But I did a lot of research on the condition when I was collecting information. Realistically, probably not. If you’ve gone this long with memory loss this severe, you’re probably stuck with it. Anything’s possible, but this isn’t a movie.”

A part of me had been living in fear of memory recall. I’m not sure why. I’d also equally been harboring the fear that my memories wouldn’t come back but someone else would show up claiming to be a husband or a friend or a relative and feed me bullshit stories that weren’t real, or else feed me real stories that still smelled like bullshit. I worried that over time I would hear stories about myself so much that I would start to believe them and start to imagine them. Maybe I would even reconstruct them in my mind and think they were true memories.

If there was little hope for recovery, I was glad Shannon had spared me the police and media circus. Surely someone real or fake would have shown up claiming to know all about me, and then it would just be Trevor all over again, only without the apocalyptic backdrop.