Lies She Told(67)

“It’s the forgetting,” I say, still scratching at the injection site like a cocaine addict. “I am doing things that I can’t remember. I need these needles out. I need you to take them out today.”

She rolls her stool from beneath a desk and sits down, placing the laptop on her thighs. “What, specifically, have you forgotten?”

Frustrated tears fill my eyes. How can I explain this? Saying that I killed my husband’s gay lover and forgot doing it sounds insane. She might have me committed rather than remove the implants.

She stares at me from above her monitor. Waiting.

“The other day, a friend said he saw me at a gun range. I can’t remember going in the past year.”

Computer keys clatter. “Maybe he was mistaken? Did he talk to you at the range?”

My throat tightens. I shake my head.

“Did you check if you had signed in there, or did anyone else see you there?”

I have to come up with something that has proof. My gun is not in the apartment. That’s a demonstrable fact. “I can’t find my handgun either. I’m always very careful with it. I keep it in a lockbox on a high shelf in my closet. But it’s not there.”

“So you think that you misplaced it?” Dr. Frankel’s mouth rests in the same sympathetic pose as always, but I detect a spark of amusement in her eyes. She thinks I am freaking out over a general distractedness—the kind that anyone might experience when also battling headaches and low-grade nausea, working on a tight deadline, and juggling fertility clinic visits.

“You don’t understand. I have no idea where it is. None at all.”

“Hormones do impact memory, and I can understand it being disconcerting. When I was pregnant, I’d have my keys in my hand one minute and wouldn’t remember for the life of me where I put them the next. I thought I was going nuts. My husband thought I was bonkers.”

She smiles. I want to slap that practiced empathy off her face. I want to shake her until she understands that I am not talking about keys or leaving out a carton of milk or misremembering where I left the car in the mall parking lot.

“I’m not talking about little things.” My voice rises in pitch and trembles, an opera singer sustaining a shrill high note. “I’d never leave a gun lying around.”

“Maybe you hid it in a new spot that you thought was safer, and then it slipped your mind.”

I want to scream. “It’s not only the gun. I’ve learned things—important facts about people that I care about—that I can’t remember knowing at all. I may have done things—life-changing things—that I can’t remember doing. I’m not forgetting details; I’m forgetting days.”

Dr. Frankel’s curls shake as her head turns from side to side. She shuts her laptop with a decisive clap. “Hormones impact short-term memory, Liza. Small things. Forgetting major events or a day’s worth of activities are not side effects that could be caused by any hormonal imbalance from this medication. What you’re talking about would be evidence of a psychotic break or brain trauma from an accident.” Her eyes narrow. “Or excessive alcohol consumption.”

Dr. Frankel’s arched eyebrows raise. “Have you been drinking on this medication?”

“Not really.”

She looks disbelieving. In her mind, my rushing here in a frantic state is probably a classic symptom of substance abuse. I run a mental tally of the alcoholic beverages that I’ve consumed in the past week: a few glasses of wine with Christine, a half bottle on the plane with Trevor, a cocktail the Sunday evening of the conference. Health questionnaires put five or more drinks per week as the highest answer on the multiple choice asking how often you imbibe. Circling it is a sign of a problem.

“I had a writers’ conference recently that involved a bit more wine than is usual for me. But the forgetting was happening before.”

My doctor’s brow furrows. “You never mentioned memory loss as a problem before.”

“I didn’t realize that I was losing time until recently.” The words fight their way from my closing throat. “But some of the things that I’ve forgotten happened more than a month ago. I’m only now realizing that I might have done them, that I could have done them.”

Tears spill from my lower lid. “Please.” My voice breaks. “I need the hormones out.”

Dr. Frankel frowns at me for the first time ever—that I can remember. She stands and walks over to me. “Lay back.”

I do as I’m told. A small penlight shines in her palm. She instructs me to open my eyes wide. Her face hovers above mine as she flashes the beam in my pupils. “You’re retinas are responsive,” she says, waving her fingers for me to sit back up.

“What does that mean?”

“Nothing seems wrong with your brain.” She resumes her seat on the rolling stool. “I can schedule a CAT scan if you’d feel better about it.”

“Please just remove the needles. The hormones have to be causing this.” Tears overwhelm my words. “I just . . . I need to know what I’ve done. I can’t function. I—”

“Liza.” Dr. Frankel says my name like a slap. “You need this study to help you get pregnant, and it needs your results. What we learn from this drug—how it shrinks uterine scar tissue and aids implantation—promises not only to help you carry a healthy baby to term but also to help other women suffering like you to conceive in the future. Dropping out now would compromise the study results. It might keep the drug from getting to market.”