Her heart pounded hard. Not like it used to after she’d had a good run. This was more like she was running from the devil looming inches behind her.
She pressed her shaking fingers to her sweaty forehead. Even though she knew it wasn’t actually the scar that ached, she explored the ridge of tissue as though it did.
She forced herself to breathe deeply. Evenly. Waiting for the feeling of dread, of doom, to abate and for her churning stomach to calm.
The last time this happened, when she’d been in the common room working a puzzle with Mr. Grabinski during the evening news, it had taken twenty minutes and Dr. Granger had stuck a needle in her arm and ordered bed rest for a day. Only later, when Lisa was calmer, was she able to convince the doctor that she’d recognized the man in the news story.
She exhaled shakily, bending forward until her head touched her raised knees.
She was making progress, she supposed, when seventeen minutes later, she collapsed onto her pillows again, her racing heart finally slowing.
Then realization hit.
She’d been a runner. She could remember standing on a platform with other girls. The track team. The Laurel Grove Middle School Marauders girls’ track team. The name of the school was quite clear in her mind. Why wasn’t it clear as being her own name, too?
Laurel. She whispered the name into the dark. It felt as meaningless as the name Lisa had when she’d chosen it two months ago.
Not true. The nurses called you Lisa first.
“Better than Jane Doe,” one of them—Selena—had told her cheerfully as she’d fastened a delicate gold chain with a tiny L around her neck. She’d held up a mirror so that Lisa could see herself.
She’d still had stitches in her forehead, courtesy of the plastic surgery to minimize the facial scar. The stitches had looked like a tiny zipper running straight down between her eyebrows.
The gold chain was a far preferable sight.
The emergency room staff had saved the necklace for her. Everything else she’d possessed—comprised only of the clothes on her broken body—had been cut off her by the team keeping her alive those first hours after she’d been extricated from the mangle of metal that had once been a car.
Against everyone’s advice, she’d insisted on seeing the pictures from the accident.
A three-car pileup near the northern border of Washington State. Not even the blinding snowstorm had been enough to douse the inferno that had turned the vehicles into hideous twists of metal and ash.
Lisa’s had been in the center of the mess.
Fresh Pine Rehabilitation had a computer in the common room. She might not be able to remember her name, but she’d remembered how to search the internet. Four and a half months after the accident that had changed her life, Lisa had finally read the full account of the crash.
A middle-aged salesman on his way from Vancouver had been in the first car. He’d fallen asleep at the wheel, veered into her lane, hitting her head-on. Then the third vehicle—an old pickup truck that predated airbags and was driven by a local farmer—had smashed into Lisa from behind, unable to stop because of the icy road.
She’d survived only because she’d been thrown clear by way of her car’s side window. And for the first several days, even that had been questionable.
The news stories she’d found spoke about her “walking away” from the accident. But of course, she hadn’t walked anywhere. Not at first.
No matter how many accounts she’d read, none of the facts extended to the details of her condition. Everything else—the fact that the car and everything in it had been destroyed by fire—had been detailed time and time again. But none had mentioned the small problem when, having emerged from her coma-cocoon three months later, Lisa could walk and talk, dress herself and function in all the usual ways but she couldn’t recognize her own face in the mirror.
She didn’t know where she came from. Didn’t know who she came from.
She didn’t know where she belonged and was desperately afraid she’d belonged...nowhere.
There were tears on her face.
Stop dwelling.
She sniffed hard. “Right,” she answered the voice in her head. She swiped away the tears with the corner of her sheet and then pushed out of bed.
Despite the fact that Fresh Pine served individuals without healthcare insurance or other financial means, all of the rooms were private. They were small, yes. But each possessed a comfortable bed, a side chair for visitors—until today, Lisa had never had any—and its own bathroom with a shower stall.
She’d gotten used to the shower, though somewhere in her mind she knew she really preferred a deep bath with bubbles up to her chin.
Of course, that might just be a fantasy that she’d adopted as a memory. How was she to know when she didn’t even know her own name?
She blinked under the bright light when she flicked on the bathroom light and squinted at her reflection in the mirror over the plain white sink.
“Laurel.” The name bounced against the white tiles. Her eyes were light blue and they peered into themselves as if she could see into the blankness inside her mind.
The effort was no more successful now than it had been any other time when she’d stood just like this, trying to divine the secrets trapped in her brain.
The various experts who’d examined and poked and prodded her over the last two months were all agreed. The trauma of her accident followed by months of coma was at the root of her amnesia. Since the moment she’d regained consciousness in a hospital bed surrounded by strangers, she could remember everything that occurred.
In that regard, her memory was perfectly intact.
She remembered the scrambled eggs she’d had for breakfast that morning. The bagel from yesterday. She knew that Mrs. Grabinski visited Mr. Grabinski every day at exactly 4:00 p.m. and that she brought a new puzzle for them to work
