He put his right indicator on.
We drove back toward the medical center and past it, four blocks, and he pulled into an underground garage at a building called Fennimore Court.
He said, while we were still in the car with the engine off: I bought a place near the hospital a few months ago. For when her treatments are bad.
I said nothing. The amnesiac sister has no opinions.
He unlocked the door on the ninth floor and I walked into an apartment I had never seen, in a building I had never heard of, that my husband owned.
Two pairs of slippers by the rug. One navy, one pink, size six, which is not my size.
Two toothbrushes in a cup in the bathroom.
A kitchen with food in it — real food, a stocked kitchen, oat milk and the bitter marmalade he likes and a pack of the ginger chews that people take for nausea. My husband has not bought groceries at our house in three years. He has genuinely never known where we keep the flour.
There was a blanket folded over the arm of the sofa the way you fold a blanket when you live somewhere.
There was a laundry basket in the hall with a load in it, half his and half hers.
There was a repeat prescription with her name on it magneted to the fridge, and beside it a takeaway menu with a dish circled in pen, and the pen was his pen, the fine one he is precious about.
And on the shelf by the door there was a bowl with keys in it. Two sets. Both his.
I stood in the middle of that room with a cracked rib and a dressing over my eyebrow and I understood that I was not looking at an affair.
An affair is a hotel. An affair is a phone face-down.
This was a household.
He put my bag down and said he’d stay on the sofa, and I said, in the mild interested voice of a woman meeting her brother’s home for the first time, that it was a lovely apartment.
And then I went into the second bedroom and shut the door and sat on the end of the bed for about an hour.
On the third night, I found the envelope.
It was in the drawer of the hall console under a phone charger and a parking permit. Wexford Savings, addressed to Fennimore Court, unopened, thick.
I did not open it. I photographed the front of it, put it back exactly as it was, and went to bed.
I have never been so awake in my life.
Because there was one thing I had not been able to make fit for three days, and looking at that envelope it finally moved.
Everybody had told me I’d been in an accident on the Vesper Road overpass at four in the afternoon on a Tuesday.
And I could not remember one single second of that Tuesday.
Not the crash — nobody remembers the crash. I could not remember waking up. I could not remember breakfast. I could not remember why I would have been anywhere near Vesper Road, which is nowhere near my office, nowhere near our house, and nowhere near anything I have ever had a reason to drive to.
I had been faking amnesia for four days.
And the whole time, there had been a real hole, and I had been too busy performing to look into it.
PART 3
Retrograde amnesia around a head injury is completely ordinary. My neurologist explained it to me twice and did not find any of it dramatic. The brain does not file the last stretch before an impact. Sometimes it’s minutes. Sometimes it’s most of a day. It often does not come back.
Mine was about eleven hours. Waking up on the Tuesday to the crash.
She told me, kindly, that people find the gap distressing out of proportion to its size, and that I should not go hunting in it, and that if it came back it would come back on its own.
I did not tell her that I had spent four days pretending the gap was my whole life. I have never been able to work out whether that was shame or strategy and I suspect it was both.
But I did the arithmetic on that ward at two in the morning, and it is very simple arithmetic.
Whatever I was doing on that Tuesday, I was doing it alone, at four in the afternoon, on a road I have no business being on.
And when I woke up unable to account for it, the first thing my husband did was tell me I was somebody else.
So on the sixth day I called a taxi while Desmond was at the hospital, and I went to the impound lot on Kell Street with my registration and my driver’s license and forty-one dollars in cash.
