Have You Seen Me?(3)

And then it hits me that I have no sense of that, either—where I was before I arrived or where my home is. There’s a thick, dark curtain between this moment and everything that came before it.

Damien says something else, but I can barely hear him. The outer rings of my vision shrink so that he now looks tiny, like he’s at the end of a peephole. A wave of nausea swells inside me.

I sense myself start to slump in the chair and before I can straighten up, I keel over onto the floor.





3


A loud hum fills my head, and I hear beeping, too.

Then a woman’s voice, talking into a phone or radio. “The patient is currently conscious, but not alert,” she says. “Twelve-lead ECG is unremarkable.” There are other snippets: “BP:120/80 . . . pulse 100. Blood sugar is 120. . . . No HX or seizures, unknown medications.”

I force my eyes open to see that I’m in an ambulance on a gurney with my coat and shirt open and little white discs stuck to my chest. I don’t hear a siren, but the lights must be flashing, because I can see their red reflection dancing on the inside walls of the vehicle.

It comes back in a rush. Damien’s office. Not remembering. The dizziness. Blacking out.

Panic bubbles up inside me and then geysers, shooting to the very end of my fingers and toes. I twist my head to the left as far as I’m able to. A dark-haired woman sits next to me on a jump seat, dressed in black pants and a white shirt. Her eyes flick between several monitors on the inside wall of the ambulance.

She catches me looking at her and smiles.

“How you feeling, hon? Any better?”

“A little,” I tell her, but really, I don’t have a clue, not having a baseline to judge it against. “Can you tell me what happened to me?”

“You passed out, and your colleague was having trouble fully reviving you. I did a quick test for hypoglycemia and it came up negative. Do you have any history of that?”

I have a vague memory of my finger being pricked with a needle, back in Damien’s office. I was on the floor, my arms and legs too limp to move.

“Um, not that I’m aware of.”

“Any history of fainting?”

“No. I mean, I don’t think so.”

“It’s possible you’re just dehydrated. Your vitals are normal, at least.”

I lift my arm and notice that there’s an IV needle inserted into my vein.

“It’s just saline, to get you hydrated,” she says. “Be careful not to dislodge it.”

“Okay,” I say, grateful to have someone telling me what to do.

“The person who was with you said you were having trouble with your recall this morning. Can you tell me your name?”

“Ally. Ally Linden.”

“And how old are you, Ally?”

“Thirty-four.” I feel a flood of relief that the number spilled from my lips without me even having to think about it.

“Good. Can you tell me where you live—the actual address?”

“I—” This time I fail miserably. I have no idea what my address is. I rake through my mind, desperate for images—of me turning a key, entering an apartment. Nothing.

“That’s okay, just try to stay calm for now,” the paramedic says, her voice gentle.

“Why can’t I remember?” I plead. “Is something wrong with my head?”

“Don’t worry, we’ll get you to the hospital and they’ll figure it all out. And the colleague who helped you said his office would let the hospital know how to reach your husband.”

The bag of saline jostles as we hit a pothole and I realize I’m shaking, softly at first and then so hard my legs are bouncing.

I don’t remember being married. And I don’t have a single clue as to who my husband might be.





4


If I think too hard about where I am right now, I almost lose it. I have to fight the urge to jump off the bed and take off like a bat out of hell.

I’m in the ER, but not the regular part, where you go for a kidney stone or broken collarbone. I’m in a private room in this section completely removed from the fray. It’s the psych unit. The place for patients who are manic or paranoid or hallucinating out of their minds or dangerous to themselves or others. God, how have I ended up here?

This isn’t where I started the process, though. As soon as the ambulance arrived at the hospital, I was wheeled into the main emergency room. They drew blood and had me give a urine sample, clearly checking for drugs. They also examined my vision, reflexes, and coordination to rule out the possibility of a concussion.

Please let it be as simple as that, I’d prayed. Though there was no obvious bruising, I did have a throbbing headache. As I lay on a bed in a curtained-off area, I tried to summon a muscle memory of my skull smacking against a pointy edge of a cabinet or coffee table. But a coffee table where? I still couldn’t recall a thing about my current life beyond my name and age.

In the end there was nothing to suggest a concussion.

Over time, nurses and physician’s assistants came and went, whisking the faded curtain back and forth with a snap, and I waited, enveloped by sounds of beeping and pinging and gurneys rolling by, my panic ballooning with each passing minute.

“The paramedic said that the hospital was trying to reach someone on my behalf,” I told a nurse at one point. It was too distressing to even say the word husband out loud. “Do you know if they did?”