Inside, the building was cool and had a slightly metallic smell, not like the wet heat outside that had hit us the moment we were off the plane. Back home, it was still early spring—damp and green, with clumps of snow melting and plants sprouting everywhere. Here, the air was hot and heavy, and the sun so bright I felt an instant headache the moment I walked outside the airport. I had never been to Florida before.
I wanted to believe it was just the heat, the humidity, that made me feel light-headed. My fingers were tingling and my mouth was dry and felt pasty. Once at the shelter, we were again taken to a nondescript office, almost like at the police station, and asked to sit in green vinyl chairs and wait.
Mom and Dad were silent until I turned to Mom and confessed, “I don’t feel good.” Then she jumped into action.
“What’s wrong? You feel sick, like, to your stomach?” She put her hand on my forehead, my neck.
I shook my head. “I just feel funny, a headache, sort of, but . . .” I put my hand to my stomach. I couldn’t put the feeling into words. Fear? Nausea?
“It’s probably a migraine, you know I get them all the time.” Mom opened her purse and I could see the file from the detective tucked in there. The sight of it made bile rise up my throat. What were we doing here? What was about to happen?
Mom took a small brown prescription bottle out of her bag and opened it.
“Don’t give her one of those,” Dad murmured, shaking his head. I thought about his Scotch bottle, in the den on the drinks cart. The first thing he did every night when he got home was put down his briefcase and pour himself a drink.
“Just a half.” Mom tipped a broken white pill from the bottle and handed it to me. I swallowed it, dry, just as there was a quick knock on the door behind us. We all turned, startled, expecting to look up and see her—Sarah in her cheer uniform, her thick blond hair braided in a side pony, squinting at us with that look on her face: What are you doing here? as if we were an embarrassment to her.
But it wasn’t Sarah; it was a tall woman in a gray dress, holding yet another file in her hands. She sat at the desk across from us and introduced herself. “You must be the Morris family. I wanted to review a few things. . . .” She opened the file.
Mom seemed to vibrate, crossing and uncrossing her legs, adjusting her purse, first on one side, then the floor, then the back of the chair. She had been waiting almost four years, now this delay? This conversation? Couldn’t we just see her, talk later?
“Sarah has what we believe is a type of amnesia called retrograde amnesia,” the woman explained. “Her memory loss could also be from a TBI—a traumatic brain injury—or simple lack of nutrition. We have not had a chance to run an MRI on her here, but I recommend that you do that, as soon as you get her home. . . . It could give you some answers.” She passed Mom a few papers from her file.
Lack of nutrition. Brain injury. The words washed over me and my stomach lurched. I could feel the scratchy trail of the pill down my dry throat. I swallowed hard, willing it to work, to make me feel better somehow.
“Can we just see her now?” Mom asked. I glanced over at her and noticed that her hair was all flattened in back, still messed up from sleeping on the plane, but the pills seemed to have worn off. She was rubbing her hands together and leaning forward in her seat as if she were about to bite this nice woman on the face. “Please.”
“Of course, I know how anxious you are,” the woman replied, and I could see Mom’s blood start to boil. There was no way this woman could have any idea how anxious we were. None. “I just wanted you to be prepared, so that you aren’t too disappointed. What I’m trying to say is, Sarah may not recognize you. She knows her name, but she’s . . .” Here she trailed off, shaking her head in a sad way.
“Please, can we just see her, we’ve come all this way.” Dad finally spoke, surprising us all.
The woman put her hands on the desk and stood up, nodding to the men by the door. We were led down the hallway, taking every measured step. I saw Mom clasp Dad’s hand without a word. We stopped outside a closed door, and, with a quick knock, one of the men swung it open. And just like that, a room appeared, a sunny room with a cot in one corner and a sink and a little desk, a room for a child. And on the simple pink bedspread sat a teenager, all angles and straight dirty-blond hair that fell to her shoulders. She wore a white tank top and a pair of jeans, cheap plastic flip-flops.
The girl looked up. She was so thin, sitting like a little girl, but her skin and expression showed that she was older. Was she nineteen, or was she thirty? It was hard to tell: her face was pale and drawn, skin pulled tight over bones. She looked like Sarah, but in disguise.
Her eyes skipped over me. “Mom?” she said quietly.
I tried to hear, in that one word, if she sounded like Sarah, and then realized, with an awful jolt, that I no longer remembered what Sarah sounded like. What she had sounded like. Before.