A Forever Christmas(11)

The answer stopped Alma in her tracks. “Doesn’t know her name?” she repeated, puzzled. “What do you mean, she doesn’t know her name?”

“Just what I said,” Gabe told her. He didn’t turn around, but continued to follow Dan once they were inside the clinic. “She said she didn’t know her name. Looked a little panicked when she said it, too.”

Dan led them straight to the only examination room that was attached to another small room in the rear of the building. The latter doubled as a makeshift overnight recovery room where people who Dan performed minor surgeries on stayed the night to recuperate.

In New York, where he’d done his residency, Dan had been a very promising up-and-coming surgeon. But because of a promise he’d made to his late younger brother, also a surgeon, he’d come out to Forever to take his place. His brother had firmly believed in “giving back.” After a while, Dan began to understand what his brother had meant. And so, what was supposed to have been just a short-term mission turned into his life’s work.

Dan was surprised to discover that he’d never felt better about himself than he had this past year.

“You think she’s telling the truth?” Alma asked her brother skeptically. She looked down at the unconscious woman as Gabe placed her on the exam table, per Dan’s instructions.

It was Dan, not Gabe, who answered.

“Very possibly,” the doctor allowed. “She took a pretty good blow to the head,” he judged, sizing up the head wound on her forehead just above her right eye. “That can really shake a person up.”

“But she’s going to snap out of it, right?” Gabe asked. “It’ll all come back to her, won’t it? I mean, she’ll remember her name and why she wound up tottering on that ledge the way she did. Right?”

Dan raised his shoulders in a wide shrug. “I don’t know,” he said honestly. “Maybe. Maybe not. I’ve heard of some amnesia cases going on for years, with the patient not any closer to getting any answers than they’d been at the very beginning. With other patients, it’s only a matter of a few hours. There’s really no telling how long it could actually take.”

Years?

The single word echoed in his head as Gabe looked at the still, unconscious face. The very idea sent a chill down his spine. He couldn’t picture enduring something like that himself. It was like a virtual prison sentence that extended to eternity.

Gabe turned to the doctor. “So what do we do?” he asked.

Dan could only give him the most general of terms. Everyone was different and healed at their own pace—if they healed at all.

“We go slow,” he counseled. “Give her some space and make sure that she doesn’t feel pressured, just secure. Sometimes, the harder you try, the less progress you actually make.” Shrugging out of his coat and switching to a clean lab jacket, Dan paused to wash his hands. “Now, if you two don’t mind, I need you to leave me alone with my patient so I can attend to her wounds.”

As Gabe reluctantly began to leave, Dan raised his voice and called after him. “Stick around, though. After I get done, I think it would be a good idea to take this woman to the hospital in Pine Ridge and get a CT scan of her head to make sure that everything’s all right.” Drying his hands, he looked from one deputy to the other. “I’ll need one of you to drive her over there.”

Gabe surprised Alma by speaking up first. “I’ll do it.

“Who do you think she is?” Gabe asked her once they were in the waiting room. For now, the room appeared to be empty.

“I haven’t the faintest idea,” Alma told him. “We could try going through the county’s recent missing-persons files posted on the internet. If there’s no match for her, I can widen the search. With any luck, she’ll probably get her memory back before then.”

“What makes you say that?” he asked, curious.

“Well, I’d say that having a car blow up a couple of seconds after you escape out of it can be pretty traumatizing. That kind of thing can cause temporary amnesia because the person isn’t able to deal with it right when it happened. It’s the brain’s way of protecting you,” she added by way of an explanation. Alma abruptly stopped talking when she saw the quizzical way her brother was staring at her. “What?”

Gabe shook his head, clearly impressed. “I never realized you knew so much.”