"Yeah. Sometimes it's ridiculously slow."
Carrie's eyes shifted to the window. "Who are they?" She asked, stepping all the way into his room.
"I guess more additions to their family."
"No way." Carrie took a seat next to her brother on his bed. "There's more of them?"
"That's what it looks like."
"And the plot thickens. God, I wonder what they're going to be like."
"If they're anything like the first two…"
"This neighborhood might just implode," Carrie finished for him, making an exploding noise while expanding her hands out before grinning at her brother.
4
Dora - February 2020
"Tell me what you're thinking, Dora."
What was she thinking?
She unfolded her legs and sat up straighter on the sofa, leaning her right arm on the armrest. It was the same corner Dora always sat in during these daily sessions with her psychotherapist, Claudia Lipstein. Poised and chic Claudia. Today, Claudia wore black wide-leg dress pants with a white crisp collar button-down top and a black blazer that looked like it came from Ann Taylor. These sorts of details that popped into Dora's head always surprised her. Where did all this information about clothing and makeup brands come from? Unconsciously, her hand floated up to her left ear, where she'd received plastic surgery from the dog attack. What was she thinking? She was thinking that she wasn't ready to be discharged from The Source. She wasn't ready to go home to a place where she'd been a kid the last time she remembered walking out the door.
"Dora?" Claudia smiled gently.
Dora cleared her throat. "I'm not sure I can do this."
Claudia nodded. "We're always here for you. If life at home becomes too much, too overwhelming, you can come back. But the next step is to return to the life you've made for yourself and slowly get to know this other part of you. I think we'll learn a lot more about Dora and how she came to be." Claudia smiled again. “The first step is always the hardest.”
Dora felt woefully dependent on Claudia Lipstein. She'd become attached to her patience, the way Claudia listened like she had all the time in the world. The calm way she explained things without judgment and helped Dora sort through the mess in her head. The utter and stark terror of her condition––a rare condition.
"You are experiencing something called dissociative fugue, a form of amnesia," Claudia had explained to her four weeks ago. The fact that she did not remember changing her name to Dora, or anything about Dora's life, suggested that there might be something more going on––a possible identity alteration. The Source had been a refuge while Dora worked on piecing together the mystery of her existence.
That first time she removed her hospital gown to shower, she'd stared at the stranger's body in the mirror. Deflated shrunken breasts, flat hard abs with matching parallel lines of muscle running down each side, a shorn vagina, the lips a bit droopy, and long tight muscular legs. Her face, chiseled and mature, a slight puffiness under the eyes. The big dark eyes were the same, and the aquiline nose, but the soft roundness of her cheeks was gone. She'd run her hand over her hair, the foreign sleekness of it. And then she'd cried, gripping the rim of the sink, arms shaking.
At first it was all too much, learning about Dora. Dora had a wife, Erica, who was away in Paris, and three children: two girls and a boy. Apparently, Dora's son Jesse liked to wear dresses. “He's gender fluid,” the woman called Cuppa explained to her when she was still at Cedars. In her panic to help, Cuppa had vomited out Dora's life in a torrent of information that Serene could not process. Serene had finally interrupted the frantic woman, who gripped her hand, talking without seeming to take a breath, and asked her to call Aarav. She had needed to talk to someone she knew. Someone levelheaded.
Serene’s request stopped Cuppa mid-sentence. “Aarav?” She'd echoed. “Oh, my poor dear, Aarav is gone. Passed away from cancer over twenty years ago. Shall I call Ramani?”
Tears stung her eyes at the shock of Cuppa's news and then the wailing came as if from a distance. It took Serene some moments to realize that the noise was coming from her.
There were nurses.
A needle inserted into her arm.
Cuppa told to leave.
Cuppa arguing that she was family.
The Valium had carried Serene away into a dreamless sleep.
For quite a while, Serene insisted that she didn't want to see any of the people who were part of Dora's life. Not middle-aged frantic Cuppa. Not Dora's two daughters or the son going through a phase, and especially not the lesbian wife.
Three weeks ago, she'd agreed to a visit with the wife.
Erica was an athletic-looking woman with a lean, muscular build, hair clipped to just a shadow of itself. She'd worn a black tracksuit and moved with quiet composure. When she sat next to Serene and tried to take her hand, Serene leaned away, drawing her hand toward her lap and clasping it with the other. Erica had taken the cue and kept herself to herself the rest of their time together. She'd answered Serene's questions patiently, her voice soft and melodic, showing none of the signs of panic that Cuppa displayed. But her dark eyes were not able to hide the hurt that Serene remembered nothing of their marriage, nothing of Erica as her wife. That first visit wasn't long. It hadn't even been an hour. On Erica's second visit, she'd told Serene that her children missed her. Jesse, her son, was a bit of mama's boy and asked about her every day, if she was feeling better, when she might come home. Erica had paused, waiting to see what she might say to this small confession. Serene had only shrugged.
Some days after Erica's second visit, she asked her therapist if she ought to
